Wednesday Comics: Gothic Romances

Storm will wait a week for a special holiday adjacent edition of Wednesday Comics. The Big Two produced a lot of standard romance titles from the late Golden Age until the mid-seventies, but they also tried to move away from the standard formula. Spurred on by a horde cheap paperbacks and likely Dark Shadows, they delved into Gothic Romance.

In 1971 at DC, the Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love took its place along side other eldritch property listing anthologies like the House of Secrets and the House of Mystery. In '72, it was joined by the Sinister House of Secret Love. In addition to having titles that sounds perhaps more boundary-pushing than its actual contents, both series share the same fate of having the romance angle jettisoned. The Sinister House of Secret Love became Secrets of Sinister House, while love also disappeared from the dark mansion leading to Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion, both with issue 5.

Stuff like this was always going on at the Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love

A trend had begun, though. Charlton began Haunted Romance in 1973, Atlas released the oneshot Gothic Romance in 1974, and Marvel's Curtis magazine line in 1975. None of these lasted very long.

DC at least has recently revived the title of one of theirs with the Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love series.

Most of the titles are unreprinted and uncollected. DC did put out a Showcase Presents volume of Secrets of Sinister House that also included the "secret love" days, but it is out of print now.

Spacehunters

Luis Royo

Watching the new season of The Expanse has led me to start thinking about a game I ran in GURPS perhaps decade ago. A "hard" science fiction thing using a lot of stuff from Transhuman Space put giving it more of a Cowboy Bebop spin: a little bit cyberpunk, a little bit 70s action film.

Howard Chaykin

If I ever ran a similar I again, besides using a system besides GURPS, I think I would draw more visually from '80s and 80's sci-fi, borrowing some elements from things like American Flagg! and 80s cyperpunk rpgs. The players' would still be ne'er-do-well, planet-hopping bounty hunters/troubleshooters but with a different skin.

Janet Aulisio

Strange Stars: A Recent Science Fiction Appendix N

A few weeks ago, Rob Barrett made a request in the comments of this post for "more recent SF" suitable for Strange Stars inspiration. In the section on galactic adventuring, I relied mostly on older, well-known and non-science fiction references because I want to convey the idea that the setting is easily accessible and usable for the sort of stuff people typically use science fiction games too do.

That doesn't mean science fiction from the past twenty years hasn't been an influence on the conception and development of Strange Stars. I mentioned a few of these in the intro of the setting book, but here are a few more:

Hannu Rajaniemi. The Quantum Thief; The Fractal Prince; The Causal Angel. This series is one of the biggest inspirations for Strange Stars, but its influence is diffuse. The interaction of information and physical life that pervades the series is very Strange Stars, as are the exotic societies of Earth, Mars, and the Oort Cloud.

Greg Egan. Diaspora. The conception of moravec, infosophont, and biologic groups was inspired by Diaspora, specifically, w

Alastair Reynolds. The Prefect; Chasm City. The Glitter Band is a great example of the varied polities of the League of Habitats or the Circus. The Ultras have some resemblance to the Star Folk, if not the same style. Chasm City in particular would make a pretty good Strange Stars adventure.

Karl Schroeder. Permanence. The primary inspiration for the metascape is the exoscape of Permanence.

Charles Stross. Glasshouse; Accelerando; the books in the Saturn's Children universe: Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood. The technology and economic considerations in Stross's novels underpin similar concepts in Strange Stars. If you want to really get a feel for how I envision fabbers, read Glasshouse. Neptune's Brood also has a very well-realized "water world."

Scott Westerfield. The Risen Empire (Succession Book 1). Though I haven't written a lot about military matters in Strange Stars material, the planetary assault and space battle in this book greatly informed what I think such things would look like among "modern" powers in the setting.

John C.Wright. The Golden Oecumene  trilogy and related stories. The technology of the Golden Oecumene with the trappings of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of man gets you a good representation of the Radiant Polity. The novella "The Far End of History: A Tale from the Last Days of the Seventh Mental Structure" is a great example of what sort of things went on in the Archaic Oikumene.

Strange Stars OSR Arrives--and a Special Deal!

Now you can explore the Strange Stars universe in Sine Nomine's Stars Without Number or similar OSR-derived science fiction games! The Strange Stars OSR supplement is now available in pdf.

The contents include:

• Tips for creatings characters and 19 clades--from Atozan librarians to armored thrax warriors--as player character options.
• A catalog of adversaries and threats from the monstrous ssraad to the more subtle agents of the Instrumentality.
• A gazeteer of known worlds and rules for creating random orbital habitats
• A sampling of factions big and small from across the known galaxy
• Advice on running adventures and campaigns in the Strange Stars with a random adventure seed generator

And here's a special deal for early adopters: Everyone buying the pdf will get a coupon for $3.55 off the cost of the soft cover when it's released.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: Pirates of Pandarve

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve (1983) 
(Dutch: De Piraten van Pandarve) (part 3)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

Storm and Rann travel back to find Ember. She  is gone, though they do find her bow. Rann is certain she is dead--there are many dangers in space, after all--but Storm can't convince himself.

They travel on to Vertiga Bas the Pirate Planet to see if they can find Rann's daughter. Around the planet there is a swarm of ships. Rann explains:

The two locate the ferryman. He operates a hot air balloon that transports people from "orbit" to the only landing zone allowed to visitors--for a price. Rann grumbles about the cost, but he pays it.

A Vertiga Bas official greets them when they arrive. He tells them the laws of the Theocrat hold no sway here; there is only one law. For a price, he explains: Do nothing wrong. This actually means: "don't get caught by the police doing anything that might be considered an offense." These who break the law of Vertiga Bas are branded with a yellow circle, and anyone who gets two yellow circles is ejected into "orbit" by a catapult, there to die of thirst and hunger.

Storm and Rann don't plan to stay long. They make their way to a bar to try to find information. Storm asks the barkeep if he knows of any ships that have arrived recently with slaves to sell. The barkeeper informs him that asking questions is "considered anti-social in Vertiga Bas." After Rann pays him, the man becomes more helpful: in the Market of a Thousand Jars there is a slave market and a new ship has just unloaded its wares.

Arriving at the market, Rann immediately sees his daughter:

The slave trader tries to get in Rann's way and gets punched for his trouble. That action earns Rann a yellow circle brand:

Rann's daugher goes up for auction. Rann bids 300 credits and wins, but he doesn't have the money on  him, but he assures the auctioneer he can get it. In view of his status as a newcomer, they give him one hour to come up with it, otherwise the girl will go on the block again.

Rann doesn't know how he can get the money in that short amount of time, but Storm has an idea.

TO BE CONTINUED

Dave Cockrum Drew A Campagin For You

I picked up a black and white retrospective called The Dave Cockrum Treasury (1996), and one of the most interesting things among a lot of great Cockrum art was a series images (several sort of montages) which the introduction says were pre-production drawings by Cockrum, inked by Rudy Nebres for an unnamed film that was never made. I'm sure the budgets given fantasy films in the era in which I expect they were drawn would not have been out to the task, but they do suggest a Sword & Sorcery world that could easily be kernel of a setting. All standard stuff, really, but arranged in a unique Cockrum style. I've scanned a few of them:

Chubby demon idol with temple dancers in hand--or is that an actual demon godling? A dragonheaded warrior woman, on the side of the bad guys, I assume. And who's that masked cabal meeting with those warriors? Are they wizards or perhaps priests?

Here we see two evil wizards (likely the big heavies) who seem in cahoots but not entirely friendly. The lady wizard has a spider motif as we see in one of the other images. I bet that ramheaded giant is a guard at one or the other of these wizards' castle.

A flying ship and an undead army rising. A assume those angry eyes belong to the wizard woman, but maybe not.

And here, the heroine battles a gillman in some sort of underwater passage. Above, what looks like the two wizards and the reptile woman crush an opposing force.

Of course, those are only the most obvious interpretations and possibly incorrect. It doesn't matter, you can be as radical as you want. 

The Pleasure Palace of the Libertine Sea King

An adventure idea:

The King of the Sea is renowned for his Hugh Hefnerish lifestyle, maintaining an infamous nautiloid-shaped folly and gardens for his revels. Sometimes, he surrounds it in a bubble of airy water so land-dwellers can join the fun.

Sometimes the Sea King gets busy with important matters (or in this particular case, drama with his sea witch of an ex-wife), his beautiful and mischievous concubines take matters into their own hands, and invite illicit lovers of their own...

So this would basically combine Jason Sholtis's Secret Partyhouse of the Hill Giant Playboy with Leiber's "When the Sea King's Away". Highlights include:

Groovy architecture:

Vindictive Sea Wtiches:

Art by Arthur Adams

Octopus Guardsmen:

And b-list undersea celebtriy revellers.

Banners & Logos

Sometimes it's a "good" distraction from getting the rpg writing I need to get done doing logos/headers/cover designs for other people. It's a different sort of work that doesn't feel like work at times.

I've been working on some banner's for my fellow Hydra member Humza K. He's got the first one I did up on his blog now. It is probably more Arabian Nights-y than ideal, but it looks nice. Here are two later options I did to be more adventure-y maybe:

A while back, my friend Tim Shorts asked me to take a crack and redoing his GM Games logo. A think after a couple of passes I came up with this, sort of riffing off what he had before. Yesterday, Tim got dice with that logo and they look great. It's satisfying to see a design I did show up on a physical object:

Cautious Exploration on the Planet of the Apes

"DANGER AT THE PASS" 

Player Characters:
Jeff Call as Brock Irving
Lester B. Portly as Eddy Woodward
Jason Sholtis as Francis La Cava

Nonplayer Characters:
Aurelius
Alfonso Arau as Lope


Synopsis: Irving, Woodward, and La Cava go off on a scouting mission and (thanks to random encounter rolls) find evidence that there is a dangerous predator on the loose.

Commentary: A low action session, but a lot of exploration. Left without a clear goal, the group explored westward into San Augustin Pass. They see evidence of some sort of burrowing monster. Theories as to its nature include land shark, sandworm, and (based on a sighting) some sort of bear thing.

In the end, they see mutants approaching (likely for revenge) who are led by a guy who looks like this:

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve (1983) 
(Dutch: De Piraten van Pandarve) (part 2)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

It turns out the hunter coming at Storm with a polearm isn't trying to attack him but instead carves into the whale and takes a small sphere out of its cranium. He gives it to Storm to eat. Reluctantly, Storm does. At first, he's in pain, but then his consciousness gets expanded and finally:

Despite the fact that Rann thinks Storm is a god, he refuses to take him back to rescue Ember, citing the fact he only saves one person a day. When Storm insists (violently), Rann karate chops him and ties him up. After Storm calms down, Rann explains that this tariev (the whale) means life for his family. He has to get it home first, but he will bring Storm back to the place where he found him after. Storm agrees to help.

They approach the asteroid Kyrte when Rann makes his home. When they seem smoke rising from where his home would be, Rann fears trouble and they cut free the tariev to hurry back, They find his home destroyed. A dying servant tells the two that the house was attacked by pirates from Vertiga Bas. The Lady Rann and some servants fled into a burning crypt, preferring death to capture, but Rann's daughter fell into pirate hands.

Rann prepares to follow his wife into death, but Storm argues they should try to resuce his daughter. Rann is skeptical, but agrees to try.

Meanwhile in the palace of the theocrat, his agents present him with what they found when they went to seek the anomaly. Though the anomaly was gone from the coordinates, they did find Ember. Not knowing their intentions and not speaking the language of Pandarve, Ember fights futilely with the Theocrat's men.

Marduk the Theocrat realizes she might be valuable in luring the anomaly to him:

TO BE CONTINUED

Azurth Indexing

It's mostly been play reports and con game related posts, but a few worldbuilding Azurth posts did occur in 2016, so this is as good as time as any to collate them:

Alchemical Dwarves: An unusual and alien species of Dwarf found in the Country of Sang.
Arthopods from Nowhere: There is a place that the inhabitants call Zrgztl, but you might as well call it Nowhere because it's here and not here all at the same time.
Motley Isles: The islands are known as a haven of pirates who value their freedom above all else, except perhaps the plunder they take from hapless ships.  Vessels that call the Motley Isles their home often fly a distinctive flag: a skull and crossbones emblazoned on a crazy-quilt pattern.
Paper Town: It is generally held that Paper Town (in some sense) occupies space in the Uncanny Valley in the west of the Country of Yanth, but the most reliable way to gain entry to the town is via a fictitious entry on any map...
Shooting Star Folk: A vagabond and rowdy bunch, who are generally not welcomed among the Stars and Planets that comprise polite society of the heavens. They are forever crashing into things, (Planets, Stars, each other) and despite the danger, consider it a great thrill to do so, burning bright and screaming to the void.
Velocipede Gangs: In the eastern plains of the Country of Yanth in the Land of Azurth, there are nomads with an unusual mode of travel.

The Hermetic Manse: Meet Your Ghastley Hosts

A side project I'm (slowly) working on an expansion of a locale in Jason Sholtis's Bewilderlands settings called the Manse Hermetic. Here was part of the brief:

A manor house dominates the only hill on a small island in the middle of the slow-moving Lazybones River, barely visible behind a perpetual bank of heavier-than-normal Bewilderlands haze. A noble family and all their servants, rendered into a hideous undeath millennia ago by a sorcerous curse, carry on as if nothing has happened. 

This brought to mind (intentionally, I'm sure) something like Castle Amber, so first off I decided to make up an eccentric noble family to inhabit the manor.  Here they are:

The Monsters Outside the Circle of the World

Art by Simon Roy

When posthuman intelligences began dismantling planets to build rudimentary Matrioshka brains, the apotheosis refusenik near-human remnant was cast out of their reservations to space habitat redoubts. Most of these continued in the relatively carefree people had lived on the now-recycled worlds, but in a few something went wrong. Sometimes very wrong.

The Weal (as the inhabitants now know it) is one of those places. After war and perhaps a period of utter barbarism, a roughly Medieval technology level society has emerged (amidst the half-functioning remnant of what came before) of androids (though they would think of themselves as "people," thank you): the artificial biologic beings once servants and playthings for the idle human rulers. Being an android has some advantages, not the least of which is the reality of resurrection, if you are attended to by the appropriate authority (i.e. super-user).

These post-human people have developed into tribes that carry some echo of their previous function: the clerics receive wisdom from the old god-machines, the fighters still hold as their sacred duty the protection of the Weal, and the wizards broker deals with spirits and command the various nanomachines and utility fogs gone quiescent or feral after their former masters forgot the eldritch codes to command them.

All these tribes or fraternities wind up battling monsters. Their is only so much space in the Weal, and the people need it. The lower, outer levels are the abodes of creatures once human (altered into strange forms by adaptive and cosmetic gememods gone wildly off model by natural selection unleashed), nanotech that will not be tamed, and in the outer, deepest levels there are posthuman sociopaths and grifters trying to break in.

The Weal is a dangerous place, but intrepid heroes can claw back the world from darkenss or die in the attempt.

Inspirations: Habitat, Starlost, Charles Stross's Saturn's Children universe, Numenera, Book of the Long Sun

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve (1983) 
(Dutch: De Piraten van Pandarve)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

We open on world called Pandarve:

Marduk, the Theocrat of Pandarve, has had his scientists and magicians hard at work at creating a device to bring someone called "the Anomaly" to him over a great distance. He places the last element needed into the device: a red sphere called the Egg of Pandarve.

An energy beam shoots out across unimaginable distances and arrives on Earth, striking Storm and causing him to disappear. Ember jumps into the beam after him and disappears as well.

Storm and Ember find themselves in orbit around a planet, falling slowly, yet someone able to breath. They have arrived near Pandarve at least, but this isn't exactly what the Theocrat wanted. His technicians are looking for them, but a rebel attack disrupts their power supply. The "Anomaly Detector" tells Marduk that the object of his search has arrived in the system at least.

Meanwhile, Ember and Storm encounter something surprising:

Staring down the maw of some sort of space whale, Storm and Ember push away from each other. the force carries each of them out of the creatures path but on opposite sides.

A harpoon strikes the creature. It writhes in agony, hitting Ember, knocking her out, and sending her drifting away. Storm manages to grab on to a fin as the beast is hauled in by the hunter:

The hunter reels the creature in closer, then fires another harpoon.

Storm realizes the only way he can reach Ember is with the hunter's ship. He shouts to the stranger, asking for his help. The man's language in unintelligble, but he does move toward Storm:

TO BE CONTINUED

Into House Perilous

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last night with the first session in an adaptation of X2: Castle Amber. While the PCs had been getting used to their being a new mayor in town and tying up loose ends from previous adventures, the Elf Ranger Shade had received a visit from her mother, Oona whom she hadn't seen in one time. Oona told her it was time for her to visit her family in their manse and fulfill her familial obligation to house Sylaire (obligations her mother had notably fled herself all those years ago) and perhaps set right what has gone wrong.

Art by Tony DiTerlizzi

Shade is reluctant to reveal all of this to her companions but ultimately, she does. They accompany her to the Aldwode on a night of the new moon to find the phantom House Perilous, the home of the Sylaire clan. To save her from the unwanted marriage they are sure is coming, they do a hasty marriage of dubious legality to the bard Kully. The party finds an iridescent salamander in a clearing and the creature tells them to walk widdershins around the area, then sleep the night with no light sources. They do as the the creature bids them, and they wake up in the foyer of the house.

art by Dana Guerrieri

In the salon, the rakish Jereth and his waxen pugilist offer them a wager. Against Shade's warning, Erkose takes him up on it, and knocks the creature out in under 2 rounds, winning them 500 gold. Jereth suggests to Shade that the grand matron, Carmilla, might wish to see her and "do a reading of the cards."

art by George Barr

In the study they encountered strange cat men who wanted only to sleep and warned the party off with hisses and curved daggers. In the banquet hall, the party declines to eat with the elegant, fancy-dressed phantom dinners. Waylon and Erekose did feed some roast beef to the cat men, to no visible effect.

In the Mirror Hall, half the party is blinded for an hour. They encountered a leprous looking servant (a thoul) who leaves them be when Shade invokes her mother's name. They avoided the other rooms in that wing and went into the indoor forest. Again, they mostly stayed clear of trouble, keeping to the path.

Erekose's greed was enticed by a chest ensconced beneath the gargoyles in the fountain, and he and Waylon contrived to get the chest without entering the water. The chest scraping across the bottom, however, roused the ameba lurking there, and it attacked. The party lit it up with blasty cantrips and drove it back. As the party peered at the riches in the chest, a feminine voice from behind them asked just what they were doing.

Sneak Attack on the Planet of the Apes

"THE MUTANT SHRINE" 

Player Characters:
Justin Davis as Conrad "Rip" Ripper
Billy Longino as Olsen Potter Graves
Lester B. Portly as Eddy Woodward
Jason Sholtis as Francis La Cava

Nonplayer Characters:
The memory of Jarrett Crader as Aurelius
Alfonso Arau as Lope
Wardude
Broh
assorted Kreeg

Synopsis: The astronauts launch a raid against a Kreeg religious shrine in a White Sands Missile Range museum and acquire a new weapon.

Commentary: Google maps makes getting a map of a real world location a whole lot easier than in the pre-internet days--if only they had a hexgrid overlay! The White Sands missile Range Museum is, of course, a real place. Through the magic of suspension of disbelief, it was buried by sand rather than eroded by the millennia and the mutants were able to dig it up.

LaCava (aided by Woodward) was able to steal another Kreeg vehicle: a walker that looked like a more Mad Max version of this:

With it's machine gun the gang turned the Kreeg church meeting into a lower budget version of the climatic gun battle in the Wild Bunch.

Modules in an On-Going Campaign

This is an adventure I've thought of using but would spend too much time changing it

In my gaming career, I haven't ran too many published adventures. When I was younger and had a lot of time, there didn't seem much point. These days, I can definitely see the appeal. I've run more since starting this blog than I did in all my gaming years prior, I think.

The problem is, either I'm too particular or my settings are such special snowflakes that it still takes a good bit of forethought and prep for me to be happy with them. In my Weird Adventures game, Castle Amber only wound up serving as inspiration to swipe a couple of rooms from for a sprawling, haunted estate. Jason Sholtis's Zogorion, Lord of the Hippogriffs was so freely adapted that the session served as the basis for Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak. I tend to alter them so much that I'm pretty picky about the fodder I start with, if only to minimize that tendency.

I wonder if other people have that problem? Do other folks with particular settings/campaigns just alter them to accomodate the "facts" of the published adventure or do adaptations like I do?

An NPC from the Land of Azurth

Art by Jeff Call

Cog was mentioned in my play reports previously.

Wednesday Comics: My Recent Collections Haul

Will take a breather here in the Storm series, before heading off to Pandarve to consider to comics collections I scored in my holiday gift haul.

I've been (slowly) picking out Fantagraphic's E.C. Seegar's Popeye collections, and I got the last two volumes I needed. Volume 4: Plunder Island includes the titular storyline, often considered to be the best of the series, which features the Sea Hag and introduces her goon henchman, including Alice. Volume 6 is the last one and features a return of the Sea Hag, among other things. Both collections are original size and up to Fantagraphics usual production standards. Popeye's Depression era adventure fantasy was an sinspiration for Weird Adventures.

The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu Omnibus was not technically a gift, but I picked it up during my holiday shopping, so it was kind of a gift to myself. This reprints material from Marvel's black and white The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazine. It features Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, and the Sons of Tiger, and the usual Marvel magazine topical articles. The stories feature art by the likes of Paul Gulacy, Rudy Nebres, and Jim Starlin.

Thirty-Three and A Third

by Lester B. Portly

Circus registry 331/3 (called by its operators Thirty-Three and A Third) is a Universal Standard Transport LS1517 series space hauler. The LS1517 series is often used as a pilot engine for a train of container pods with the primary motive power coming from a secondary drive at the end.

The series is an older design with a higher crew (or more sophisticated nonspohont mind) than new models and only one axis of container attachment, but it has better armaments (ostensibly "space debris protection") and a more powerful engine.

The above diagram will appear in Strange Stars OSR.

Colonial 5e Rogues

Continuing my look at adapting 5e/Adventures in Middle Earth for a low magic game set around the time of the American Revolution. The fighter types are fairly usable as is; the spellcasters need some adaptation. Now it's time to look at various roguish sorts:

Rogue
The base Rogue class in 5e works fine as does the thief & assassin archetypes. The Arcane Trickster has so nice features that could maybe form the basis of a "magical trickster" or charlatan (wherein the magic is feigned or pretended), but as currently constituted it's too magical. The Mastermind and the Swashbuckler archetypes from the Sword Coast Adventure's Guide work too, the the latter would be a bit of a relic. Rogues would also be the class of choice for "Thief-takers" working on the opposite side of the law.

Bards
Obviously musicians and performers have always existed, but the inspirational "powers" of this class seem better suited at a time of revolutions for rabble-rousers, speechifiers, and pamphleteers: your Samuel Adamses and Thomas Paines.. The Warden class of AiME seems to get closest to this range of types without the use of spells, so it's probably a good bardic substitute.

Strange Stars OSR Tease

Strange Stars OSR is getting close to release! To prove these words are true, here's the Gamemastering chapter. Some minor edits and typo-fixes aside, this is what it will be in the finished product.