Presidents Days Past (and Future)

It's Presidents Day once again! Check out these classic holiday  related posts:

Delve into the ahistory of the teen president Prez.

Take a look at a trio of sinister presidents who will never be honored.

The Otus Pantheon

Blame Chris Kutalik. He did a post Sunday about imagining a pantheon based on Erol Otus strange evocative illustrations in Deities & Demigods. This is what I came up with:

Click to check it out in its enlarged "glory." The domains provided are for 5th edition.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Last Fighter (part 2)

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Last Fighter (1979) (part 2)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Martin Lodewijk

With Ember in a cage hanging over the mouth of a mostly- buried, giant god-thing, the implicit threat is clear: Storm is to be the city's champion and fight for the throne of the Palace of Death. Or else.

A guide leads Storm from the city and on a several day's trek across the desert. They come to a mountain range and take a very narrow pass through it that looks like it was cut by intense hit. As they emerge on the other side, some sort of giant turtle monster approaches--only to get sliced in half by an energy beam. The guide says the gods punish large animals that try to approach. He leaves Storm at the Valley of Bones. Only champions are allowed to go further.

Storm follows the path across the bones and soon sees the "Palace of Death" before him:

Storm moves closer and finds the other champions waiting for him.

The old man says he's the Guardian of the Palace. Now that Storm has arrived they can begin. The Guardian will guide them through the traps and perils to the place where the last champion died the previous year. From there, he will observe their progress and be able to report the knowledge gained in their respective demises to the champions the following year. Storm asks how long has this gone on, and the Guardian tells him it has been thousands of years. The current guardian is the 615th.

He leads the champions single file along an invisible but torturous path to the "palace." One champion decides to walk directly there; he's disintegrated for his impatience. The rest make it to the ship. Once inside, they pass through a series of traps: portals that grow hot if you don't pass through quickly enough, hypnotic-patterned walls, checkerboard floors that have to be tread on in a certain pattern, and more. They lose two more champions reaching the point that marks the extent of the Guardian's knowledge.

The first champion sent into the next room falls through a trapdoor into lava. Storm is next up; the Guardian counted the steps and tells Storm when to jump. Asverze [Skarla in the Titan Books version], the only female champion, is sent first into the next room. She finds herself facing a duplicate.

Storm realizes the ship's computer is generating a hologram to match her moves, He rushes into the room over the Guardian's protests to add another element to the equation. Forced to fight shifting opponents, the duplicates' movements get slower and they eventually disappear.

From that point on, Storm leads the way using his new understanding of the palace to guide them. The Guardian decries this all as blasphemy, but nobody listens. Passing through the traps, they find an escalator with skeletons of ancient crew scattered about. They take the escalator to the control room--and the "throne" of the Palace.

TO BE CONTINUED

Three Worlds: A Strange Stars OSR Excerpt

From the pages of the upcoming Strange Stars OSR, here are three worlds detailed in Stars Without Number style:

BOREAS
Tags  Seagoing Cities, Zombies
Enemies  Animated bioroid beast, Vrzemko Koprdazak xenophobic local kommissar, Zyta Hrenj paranoid ranger
Friends  Scientist Jarka Lissik seeking communication with the Cold Minds, Local trader Balok Zek
Complications Transport breakdown out on the ice, Dead from a sunken warship animated by the Cold Minds
Things Container of weaponized microorganisms; Exclusive trade contract with the uldra
Places Ranger station beneath the ice, The subsurface levels of a trading settlement

GOGMAGOG

Tags  Desert World, Local Specialty

Enemies Crazy bot-breaker Haxo Ysgar; Robber gang

Friends Merc Faizura Deyr working for the bot-breakers, Free trader supplying bot-breakers

Complications.Von Neumann machine swarm, A malfunctioning giant robot 

Things Hidden entrance to the mysterious planetary substructure, A forgotten, ancient giant bot

Places A shanty town; A junkyard

PHOBETOR
Tags  Local Tech, Flying City, Badlands World
Enemies Industrial spy disguised as a technician, Dark dream-dealer Arden-Decima
Friends Customer interface specialist Soren-Tertia, Short-duration reverie designer Alex-Quintus
Complications A loosed frumious bandersnatch, Wealthy BASE-jumpers wingsuit-flying to the planet’s surface
Things An experimental dream drug product, A captured art-monster, weaponized dream-tech
Places The sky city of Eidolon, An ancient underground vault

In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

I'd initially planned to not to get any new art for the Strange Stars OSR book, instead reusing the great stuff that had been done for the Fate book, but when Jason Sholtis expressed interest in doing a piece, I had to take him up on it.

This illustration will likely head (appropriately) the monster/NPCs chapter. Currently, that chapters contents include stats for Algosian torture cultists, Caliban cannibals, Hyehoon Eden Seeker terrorists, Eratoan assassins, and of course, three colors of ssraad--among others.

Strange Stars W,X, and Y

Over at the Fate SF blog, John Till (author of Strange Stars Fate) is in the final lap of his "Strange Stars A-Z." This week, he's covered:

W for "Woon Academies"
X for the nongendered pronouns "Xe-Xem-Xir"
and Y for a "Yantran Holiday"

Check these out--and the older entries!

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Last Fighter

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Last Fighter (1979)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Martin Lodewijk

In the desert foothills of the Bahamas (the ocean waters had again seeped underground, or either last volume’s flood was very localized), Stom wrestles a deer-like creature to the ground, then he and Ember (Carrots in the last story) cook it over a fire. Storm again tells her about Jupiter’s Red Spot and his journey to the future. His story is met with incredulity by a man who has somehow managed to sneak up on them, riding what looks like a giant, crawling shrimp.

He them to join his troupe; he thinks Storm could be a star attraction. Storm and Ember decline. To persuade the, he opens a wicker basket and releases two bat-insect creatures--flix. Storm jumps the man and puts him in a headlock, but it’s too late:

Storm, too, is fitted with a flix, and the man (Tchell) leads them to meet Master Cush¹ and his Travelling Show of “monsters, marvels, minstrels, and magic.” Cush is immediately impressed with Ember, thinking she’d bring a high price in the East, but when she tells him what she thinks of that idea, he realizes he’ll have to reconsider: Maybe she could be a gladiator?

Cush sees Storm's potential as a fighter. He gives him a tryout against Barledoon², an imposing mohawked gladiator.  Storm surprises Barledoon with his agility and martial arts and knocks the big man down. Cush doesn't know what to make of all this; it looks like acrobatics more than fighting. He calls for swords. Barledoon gets the better of Storm here. Cush tasks Barledoon with turning the acrobat into a fighter.

Over the next few weeks, Barledoon trains Storm in swordsmanship. Whenever he’s not training, he still has the flix on him, and he’s told the telepathic creatures can even sense thoughts of escape! Soon, they seen the walled city of Soamandrakisal³ where they are to perform. The crowds turn out to watch as the troupe parades into town.

That night, Barledoon is chosen to fight the champion of the city in the arena. He seems fatalistic about it, which Storm doesn’t understand, given that Soamandrakisal’s champion looks like a complete amateur. Barledoon takes a drink offered him with Master Cush’s compliments, then enters the arena. Barledoon’s movements are sluggish, and he’s quickly killed.

Storm can’t believe it. Tchell reveals that Barledoon was drugged so he would lose to the city’s champion, so Cush could stay in the good graces of the city’s leaders. Barledoon knew he was going to his death. Storm is so incensed, he knocks the champion down even as Cush is praising the man to the crowd. Storm misses Cush saying the champion will “travel to the Valley of Bones and bring back the power of the Palace of Death.”

Cush tries to stop Storm, but to no avail. The champion gets a drop kick out of the Captain Kirk handbook and is knocked out. The crowd starts to turn ugly. Cush, thinking quickly, tells them that his traveling show acquired Storm and trained him for this moment—to be a worthy champion for Soamandrakisal. The town leaders buy it, and Storm (under threat of Ember’s life) is the new champion. Though he’s given a place of honor the rest of the show, all he thinks about escape.

That night, Cush exhorts his troupe to pack up quickly so they can get out of town before things go bad. They aren't fast enough:

The town father and his retinue of soldiers want to know what will motivate their reluctant champion to complete his task and return to Soamandrakisal with the powers of the Palace of Death. Cush assures him he has a way.

The next morning, the man lays out Storm’s mission—and its potential deadliness to him: He must be Soamandrakisal’s champion and fight against the champions of all the other cities to achieve the throne of the Palace of Death, and Soamandrakisal can rule the world. The man takes Storm on a little walk to a temple:

TO BE CONTINUED

Notes:
1. "Keng" in the 1987 Titan Books English translation.
2. "Karn" in Titan Books.
3. "Kalthike" in Titan Books.

Trigadasleng

So The 100 is back for its third season, again to put CW teens through the ringer in a brutal post-apocalypse (which is really fun to watch, if you haven't seen it). Trigadasleng, the sort of pidgin-sounding language of "the Grounders" (the primitive survivors on Earth that our space station bred protagonists must contend with) is pretty well developed, it turns out.  It was developed by David J. Petersen, the same guy who did Dothraki and Valyrian for Game of Thrones.

Check out this overview of Trigadasleng and this fan made full dictionary. Could be useful for your own post-apocalyptic setting. Gamma World-ese (at least as portrayed in the monster naming) isn't too conceptually different.

Return of Prophet

The far future space opera saga of Prophet, which has been on hiatus since issue 45 (the last of the previous run) in 2014, returned this past week with Prophet: Earth War #1. I've mentioned Prophet here before on several occasions and wrote at least one post about it.

Here's short synopsis: John Prophet (the Extreme Comics character from the 90s) awakens from cryosleep on an Earth dominated by strange alien species in the far future. He must trek across this exotic landscape to find the ancient tower where he can complete his mission. There, he sends a signal to revive the Earth Empire from it's slumber. That signal awakens the Empire's most implacable foe, too--who just happens to be another John Prophet. Each side begins to marshall it's forces, and the conflict seems like to reach its conclusion in Earth War.

You can get the first issue in digital here, but they'll be a trade eventually. I highly recommend it.

The City Oroboro

The city Oroboro is a great ring larger than any other city, larger than many worlds.

Philippe Druillet

Everything strange and everything precious is fated to pass through it--and also a great many things that are neither. It is (Ill-)Fortune’s Wheel, the Nexus of All Tales.

Moebius

The city encircles the double-ended Tower, where the Sandmen priests  say the Goddess sleeps and dreams the multiverse. Just beyond the oneiric event horizon, Oroboro is stable (mostly) and rational (sometimes) and permanent--so long as the Goddess sleeps.

Julio Ribera

Some cynics say there is no Goddess and the Tower is empty. To preserve their power, the Sandmen hide the truth: the Architect of All has abandoned creation and is likely to be found in a brothel or ginhouse in Oroboro.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Deep World (part 3)

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Deep World (1978) (Part 3)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Saul Dunn

Surprised by the spider-bats, Carrots loses control of the cart and they crash. All that she and Storm can do is take cover until the swarm passes. At that point, they she Kiley apparently unconscious on the tracks as Ghast approaches.

All is not as it seems though, and Kiley turns to deliver a prodigious kick, derailing the handcart. He and Ghast go at it in a battle of near-superhuman strength. Kiley is winning, but then the tunnel starts to collapse above their heads. Kiley sends Carrots and Storm on to the underground treasure rooms. He stays behind to finish Ghast. Carrots doesn't want to leave him, but Storm pulls her on to keep her from getting herself killed in the cave in.

Inside the treasure room, they find strange machines and a wheel surrounded by symbols on the wall. Storm gets it spinning and an image appears:

Elevator doors open, though Carrots requires some coaxing before she'll step in. Suddenly, Ghast appears wielding Kiley's sword. Before he can attack, a little from one of the machines makes his sword disappear. Storm and Carrots escape into the lift.

Storm pushes a button on the controls. The elevator stops, and the doors open:

Besides the waters, there's an ancient power station. As our heroes are taking in these wonders, the old Mandroid emerges from the darkness. Before he can say why he brought them here, the elevator doors open again and the apparently unstoppable Ghast runs out. The Mandroid blasts him:

Ghast falls against the wall and knocks some rocks lose, unleashing a swarm of hungry, oversized rats. Mandroid tells Storm and Carrots to make for the water and safety. Ghast stumbles after them, covered by rats. For some reason, the Mandroid uses his power ("a laser") to save Ghast.

Leaving him there, the Mandroid leads our heroes back to the treasure room. He begins to fill them in on Earth's history. The immense cavern does indeed contain the waters of the Atlantic. Mankind built an immense wall around the circumference of the earth to contain the oceans and use them to generate power.

Mining for energy researches undermined the walls, causing them to fail, and in their failure, they opened up fissures into the earth. The oceans mostly drained away. Only a few humans were left alive, but other beings came to earth from other worlds.

Mandroid explains that the dynamos here have enough power to restore the oceans. As he explains, Ghast awakens and animated by discussion of "power" runs in and starts pressing buttons--with predictable catastrophic results. Storm, Carrots, and the Mandroid make a run for it as the waters begin to churn:

Ghast follows them to the elevator, but the Mandroid blasts him and leaves him behind. The waters burst through the ground and flood Ghast's city while our heroes watch from the top of the great wall. Soon, the water will top the wall. Storm and Carrots have to get prepared. As to the Mandroid:

Before he goes, he hologram magics our heroes up a raft--somehow:

Polychrome

Our 5e Land of Azurth campaign continued last night, with the PCs at sea in an automata-rowed vessel on their way to the city of Polychrome in the Motley Isles. Their goal was to find the probably-not-kidnapped Gwendolin Goode. Only a few hours away from their destination, they respond to a flag of distress from an unusual barge:

There are only 4 green-haired women on board the ship, claiming to be future wives on their way to a future husband, a potentate of Zoob. The party is suspicious, and these suspicions turn out to be well-founded as the women are revealed as harpies. A battle ensues, and all the harpies lose their lives. The party cuts off their heads in the hope that this proof of their bloody-handedness will prove their bona fides to the pirates in Polychrome.

After haggling with the harbormaster over docking fees, they make their way to a tavern called the Pale Whale. It turns out that buying a round of drinks for everyone is more impressive than brandishing harpy heads. The barmaid tells them the first mate of the Vixen (Black Iris's ship) happens to be there in the bar.

Art by Yuriy

Kully strikes up a conversation with the half-drunken Hara (Rabbit Folk) named Rarebit Finn. Rarebit reveals he was jealous of the relationship between his captain and "the young land lubber," and angry that she seemed to be influencing the captain to turn from piracy. In anger, he dangled "tales of a trinket" in front of them, so they went out to look for this treasure on the Candy Isle, one of the infamous islands in the Chain of Fools.

Kully is less successful in getting Finn to join them, but the inebriated sea-dog promises to think about it and give answer in the morning. The party goes back to inform Cog and beginning preparing the ship for the journey the soon expect to embark on.

Select Contents of a Wizard's Spice Cabinet

Here's a excerpt from Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak: unusual items found in the wizard's kitchen:

Demonlander ground hellpepper in a smoked glass, stoppered vial. The hottest pepper in the known realms. It has a burnt smell, and even sniffing it will slightly irritate the nose.

Slow thyme sprigs in a lidded wooden vial. Slows (as spell) the person consumes it briefly to enhance the pleasure of a meal. In high doses (like all the sprigs in the container) it can keep a dying person from passing from the mortal plane for 2-12 rounds.

Troglopolitan memory bulbs in a wooden box. Pale yellow fungal bulbs from Subazurth. For most they have a light flavor of nostalgia and evoke a memory of home; for a few, they have the slight, hops-like bitterness of mild regret and bring to mind a thing left long undone.

Baroque Space: Brethren of the Belt

The Brethren of the Belt is the somewhat lofty name the pirates of the asteroids use to describe their outcast society. It suggests a certain honor among these thieves, and those who claim the rights of brotherhood must also adhere to a certain code of conduct: No member may  rob or cheat another, loot must be apportioned by established rules, and no captain may command without being elected by the crew.

Though these buccaneers may range the whole of the known cosmos, they most commonly lying in wait amid the strewn rubble of an ancient world betwixt Mars and Jupiter, destroyed for its iniquity. They harry trade between Earth and Mars and hunt treasure craft going the domain of the King of Jupiter to the inner planets. Their base is the planetoid of Ceres, a barren rock where pirate law is the only law, riddled with crooked tunnels lined with alehouses, inns, and brothels.

At Last! Strange Stars Fate Softcover Available

After a couple of proofs and some corrections (included in the updated pdf) Strange Stars Fate by John Till is finally available at rpgnow/drivethrurpg. Reserve your copy today!

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Deep World (part 2)

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Deep World (1978) (Part 2)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Saul Dunn

After passing the red-haired woman, Storm is taken to the upper levels of the prison where strangely Ghast appears to have his throne room. He allows Storm to test his strength against him; Storm is no match.

Ghast has no idea what an ocean is and quickly tires of Storm asking about it. He crushes Storm's space helmet in his bare hands to show how little he's concerned with Storm's questions. He's got questions of his own:

Ghast is not pleased with that response and Storm ends up in the lowest level of the dungeon with no food or water--but he does have the red-head he saw before as a companion. She's mistrustful, thinking he might be a spy for Ghast, and doesn't believe his story about oceans and other worlds, either. Her name is Carrots, and she comes from the lands beyond the Wall that Ghast is so eager to know about. Eventually, she decides to trust him so they can both escape.

They don't have to wait long for a chance. A thin, reed whistle sounds from outside and Carrots responds with a whistle. She says it's "Kiley."

That night, Kiley pulls the bars out of the window with a rope and Carrots and Storm escape, though Ghast's men aren't far behind. Kiley stays behind to hold them off, sending the other two on to "the Dive": a tavern where others of Carrots people are waiting.

Storm is greeted with mistrust, but Kiley arrives and tells them he has gotten reports of a machine (Storm's spacecraft) and knows Storm is the man that arrived in it. Carrots is still skeptical the machine can fly, but they agree to accept his help against Ghast.

The escape route for Carrots, Kiley, and Storm is via an underground river. They swim to room that acts as an airlock. Storm is surprised to learn that they have electricity; Kiley explains that they are more advanced than Ghast's city. He leads them to a waiting craft:

Unfortunately, Ghast and his men have found the dive and the trapdoor. They make it to the railway, but most of Ghast's men perish in the explosion caused by the control panel Kiley boobytrapped. Ghast survives, though, and finds a hand cart to continue the pursuit. Then:

Spider-bats!

TO BE CONTINUED

SWN World Tags in Strange Stars

Stars Without Number has an interesting way of presenting world information by use of  "tags." Many of these takes are familiar science fiction tropes/elements and work fine in Strange Stars, but some are more specific to the Stars Without Number setting and are based on different assumptions. Here's a list of those that don't really work with Strange Stars and in some cases how they can be tweaked to fit:

Alien Ruins: These could be alien, but are just likely to be ancient ruins from the time of the Archaic Oikumene or before.

Altered Humanity: Much less notable in Strange Stars than in the standard standard SWN, but it is still usable for more extreme cases.

Eugenic Cults: The rough equivalent of these can be found in the Strange Stars, but given the commonness of genetic modification, the “eugenics” element is less important than the “cult” part.

Exchange Consult: This organization doesn’t really have an equivalent.

Forbidden Tech: Much of the technology considered forbidden in the standard setting of SWN is common in the Strange Stars, so the use of this tag would be limited.

Perimeter Agency: In Strange Stars, the equivalent of this group might be Luddite or anti-technology fanatics/cultists.

Preceptor Archive: These would be replaced with troves of data or technology from earlier time periods, mostly the Archaic Oikumene, but possibly the Radiant Polity. The Library of Atoz-Theln would have the suitably modified version of this tag.

Pretech Cultists: Like the eugenic cultists above, the focus should be on the odd use of a technology rather than its mere existence.

Primitive Aliens: Probably just “primitives” of a nonbaseline or exotic biotype, rather than actual xenosophonts.

Unbraked AI: This would instead be a “Tyranny” that just happened to have an infosophont tyrant.

Xenophiles/Xenophobes: Again, read “alien” simply as an “exotic clade.”

Grit & Vigor

I sometimes think John M, Stater is the hardest working man in DIY gaming (and that's saying something). He turns out game after solid game--not just adventures or settings but--games. And those are just the ones in print. His latest is Grit & Vigor, which is a pulp adventure adaptation of his Blood & Treasure (read Chris's review here) which is either a distillation of 3e-ish D&D to an old school level of complexity or a rebuild of old school D&D with some modern features, depending on how you look it at.

Unlike post pulp games which plant their flag squarely in the Depression era 1930s, Grit & Vigor seems a bit more informed by the early pulp and the end dime novel era that prefigured it: something like 1890-1920s. This is not to same G&V doesn't cover the classic pulp era--it does--but most of its illustration and sample NPCs harken this this early era. (For a good retrospective of the pulps of this time, you could do worse--and likely no better--than Robert Sampson's multi-volume Yesterday's Heroes.) Stater mentions expanses later covering some of periods the stories in those pulps take place including the Golden Age of Piracy and the Furture--and given his track record, I expect he'll deliver.

All the usual bases of classes are cover for the era, though magical (or occult ones) are left to an appendix so you can tailor the level of fantastic you want in your game. Feats providing for the larger than life nature of the pulp heroes are likewise a part of the game. There's even a section on Wonder Dogs! NPCs include Nellie Bly, Sherlock Holmes, Bertie Wooster, and Aleister Crowley.

So if pulp or adventure gaming interests you particularly with a familiar D&D-ish backbone, Grit & Vigor is well worth checking out.

Project(s) Update, Or I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends

Art by Jeff Call

I haven't done a general update in a while, so here's what Armchair Planet (i.e. me) has cooking with the Hydra Co-op:

• John Till's Strange Stars Fate pdf just got updated with some minor corrections. I am waiting to check the proof of the updates to the soft cover before releasing that.
• Work continues on Strange Stars OSR with several Hydra hands (heads?) pitching in to help: Chris Kutalik pitched in with Orbital Habitat Generation rules and Robert Parker is working on improving what I've done with hyperspace nodes. They're making me look like a slacker, but I'm working, I promise!
• Jason Sholtis is taking a break from work on his Operation Unfathomable to do a playtest of the mostly complete draft of the adventure Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak on Google+, and Jeff Call is hard at work on the art.
• Though Strange Stars is getting priority, I'm also working on The Cloud Castle of Azurth for which Joel Priddy is turning out some great interior art.

A lot of cool stuff to come in 2016.

Limbo: The Sargasso of Space

Any hyperspatial fissure can be a hazard to interstellar navigation, but a large, stable one like the irruption zone known as Limbo is to be avoided at all costs. Those vessels unlucky enough to have been caught in Limbo but lucky enough to escape report a strange world trapped within the borders of distorted, kaleidoscopic spacetime.

First and foremost, there is a graveyard of ships, some still inhabited, some partially cannibalized by the survivors of other vessels. Mutual distrust is the general rule, as resources are limited, but also because the bleed of reality warping hyperspace has deleterious effects on the human mind, leading to paranoia and often insanity. This may or may not explain the general xenophobia of the non-marooned races that make Limbo home.

by Tony DiTerlizzi

There are multiple species of the froglike humanoid Slaad existing in state of mutual hostility with each other and apparently every other sapient being. The Red are near bestial, the Blue are barbaric and more organized, while the somewhat more intelligent Green are merely narcissistic and sociopathic. All known Slaad are all the more unpleasant due to their parasitic or infectious means of reproduction. Both the Blue and the Green have human slaves indoctrinated to believe being used in such a way allows they themselves to be reborn as more evolved Slaad.

There is rumored to be a fourth Slaad race--the Gray or Elder Slaad--that created the others in a rash attempt at eugenics, but credible reports of encounters exist. The Slaad place almost religious significance on an asteroid they call "the Spawning Stone" that is purported to contain their ancient genetic laboratory-temple and the cloning vats from which all Slaad species were born. 

The so-called mad monks of Githzerai are sallow-skinned ascetics with settlements on various asteroids and dwarf planetoids. They are not hospitable, but neither are they as murderous as the Slaad. The Githzerai have protected themselves against "hyperspace madness" to some degree by mediation, physical discipline, and psychic links between abbots and their subordinates. Still they often swing between periods of religious ecstasy and intense emotion or dream-like dissociation. They believe such openess to the divine Chaos of hyperspace will allow their intellects to complete a cycle of rebirth.

This is a follow-up to this post.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Deep World

I finally broke down and ordered the Don Lawrence Storm hardcovers I had been eyeing for some times, so it seems like a good time to start a  retrospective of the long-running science fantasy series:

Storm: The Deep World (1978)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Saul Dunn

From a satellite in orbit around the planet Jupiter, a manned-mission to closely observe the Great Red Spot is about to be launched. The UN emissaries bid the astronaut Storm (that's the only name we're given) good luck before he enters his ship: the aptly named "Storm Probe."

Storm's ship gets a bit to close to the Spot and is drawn in by its hurricane winds. Storm blacks out from the G forces. Mission control is unable to save him. In fact, his ship seems to disappear into the Spot. Storm is lost.

When Storm wakes up, his ship is still in Jupiter's atmosphere, but there is no Great Spot--and no satellite! Believing they gave him up for dead, he sets a course for earth and puts himself in suspended animation. The trip takes a year, and when he arrive the Earth has changed.

When, Storm comes out of suspended animation, he finds the Florida he thought he landed in to be frozen and airless. He dons his spacesuit and goes outside to investigate. He finds a house mostly covered by snow and at where he believes the coast should be, a cliff edge:

Storm climbs down into the valley. He finds the air is better there, but he gets an unfriendly welcome from sword-wielding warriors. He manages to kill one of them, but ultimately the other knock him out and steal his spacesuit.

The warriors take the loot to their king, Ghast. Ghast realizes the clothes are dwarfed in value by the strange man who wore them. The man who could tell him what these things mean and how they work. He orders him minions to go back out and get him! They do so, taking an iguana--one of the city's giant guardians:

They find Storm, now dressed and outfitted with the stuff from the man he killed, and capture him, thanks to the iguana beast's tongue. They take Storm into their ancient-seeming city to a prison where he see's a face looking out from him from a cell in passing:

TO BE CONTINUED

A Star Warriors Summary

Along with a new text block for the noble Star Knights and the nefarious Dark Star Warriors, here's a list of the posts I've done regarding this mini-setting so far:

The Azuran System - A map and brief gazetteer of where the action takes place.
STAR WARRIORS! - the introduction to the Star Warriors Universe.
The Bad Guys in the setting.

The Grim Frontier

After seeing The Revenant this weekend in all its visceral frontier glory, a setting idea occurred to me: Take the resource management of the dungeon and combine it with survivalist horror in an American-ish (though ahistorical) frontier setting: The Grim Frontier.

The bullet points:

Elements: Potentially easy death, resource management, and some horror elements beloved by many old school gamers; an evocation for modern audience of the strangeness or alienness of new environments through use of Roadside Picnic-esque zones elements (like my random tables for those); possible implication of post-apocalypticness of the level of The Gunslinger. The wilderness as an area of unsettled reality like the Weird of the Hill Cantons or the West in Felix Gilman's Half-Made World. Ancient mounds, giant skeletons or mummified dwarfs borrowed from the real folklore of the West; vaguely late 18th to first few decades of the 19th level of technology, probably with low magic.

Differs from: The Weird Frontier (more emphasis on horror and resource management, perhaps, hence the "grim"); Fantasy Western (earlier time period than the classic Western); Fantasy American Frontier (not specifically the American continent with the attending ethnic groups, political, and religious struggles).

Inspirations:
Film: Black Robe, The Revenant, Man in the Wilderness, Aquirre: The Wrath of God, Ravenous.
Comics: Manifest Destiny, Pilgrim.
Books: The Gunslinger, Roadside Picnic, Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City.