Warlord Wednesday: Duel of the Titans

Here's another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Duel of the Titans"
Warlord (vol. 1) #4 (December 1976-January 1977)

Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell

Synopsis: In the palace of Thera, Deimos gloats over his captive, Tara.  A guard rushes in to warn him of an attack--which a cannonball through crashing through the wall emphasizes.  Morgan and his army have arrived. 

Using siege equipment Morgan taught them how to build, his army is overruning the Theran forces.  Deimos is pleased, however, as he's counted on Tara being bait to draw Morgan to him.  Using the mysterious scrolls of blood he conjures up a giant, demonic creature.  When the creature begins to turn the tide of battle, Machiste suggests retreat.  Morgan instead climbs a seige tower to shoot Deimos, but the villain is using Tara as a shield, so he shoots the strange device from which the demon materialized.  The demon dissipates as the device shatters.  Morgan uses the self-destruct device from his plane, set off by a shot from his pistol, to blow open Thera's gates.  Morgan's army takes the city, and Morgan cuts through all who oppose him to get to Deimos. 

He finds his nemesis attempting to flee with Tara still captive.  Desperate, Deimos challenges Morgan to a duel for his freedom.  Over Tara's objections, Morgan agrees.  Morgan has them fight in darkness, and Deimos draws first blood, but Morgan's fury carries the day, and he kills Deimos with one blow.  The tyrant slain, Tara and Morgan plan to return to Shamballah, but Morgan urges his army to continue the fight for freedom.  Ignored by the victors, the tome known as the scrolls of blood lies next to Deimos' body.  Its cover reveals it to be the technical manual for a solid hologram projector.

Things to Notice:

• The deity Deimos served as high priest was the sun god.
• Deimos has apparently read Dante's Divine Comedy, or either he (and Dante) have actually been to the gates of hell.
• Despite the Skartarians having weapons suggestive of at least a Medieval European level of technology, they've never invented siege equipment dating from several centuries BCE in the outer world.
• Again Morgan foils Deimos' plans with a well-placed bullet through a technological device.

Where It Comes From:

This issue's title likely comes from the American title of a 1961 sword and sandal film (Italian title: Romolo e Remo) directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott. Corbucci is better known for his Spaghetti Westerns, with Django (1966) probably being the most famous. Reeves is best known as Hercules in Italian sword and sandal films, while Scott played Tarzan in five films and three episodes of an aborted TV series.

Deimos' quote ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here") is a common translation of the Italian phrase "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate," which is the inscription over the gates of Hell in the Inferno section of Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century epic poem, The Divine Comedy.

Deimos' use of the scrolls of blood demonstrates Clarke's Third Law: "a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Apparent magic actually turning out to be ancient technology is a common pulp fiction trope.

Post-Game Report: After the Wave

Uncertainty in the wake of a tsunami. The vague feeling persists that the party has missed something (and they have). When in doubt, seek out Magical Orders for answers. Renin’s prophetic dream is better appreciated post-disaster. Riches fallen from the sky are on everyone’s mind—but how to get to them? A ship is needed, but in a devastated port, none are available. Old enemies in the criminal underworld are approached, and agreements struck, but sea transport isn’t one of them. A detour to haggle with a magic-monger proves fruitful. On the other hand, smuggler kingpins are busy men and difficult to contact through strangely-accented intermediaries. A chance encounter offers a ship for hire within the week, and reveals the troubling history of the destination.

Sunday's installment of our Warriors & Warlocks campaign, freely adapted from Paizo's The Second Darkness, featured the usual cast: Zarac the acquisitive veteran, Renin the psionicist with the troubling dream, and Brother Gannon the thief in monk's clothes.  Apearances were made by the half-elf mage Samyrantha Bel-Tanis, their friend in the Esoteric Order of the Cryptograhers, and their enemy, crime boss Clegg Haddo, who's now their business partner in the gambling house they "inherited."  The party's new employer was introduced: merchant speculator Tavrem Kalus.

This session revealed one of the problems inherent in the the whole "adventure path" thing. The player's missed out on a major story reveal at the end of the first module, which was no big deal there--advice was even give on how to handle that--but module two begins with assumption that the player's got all the pertinent information from the last one, and offers no alternatives. It wasn't terribly difficult to work around--after all, the total of modules I've gamemastered in my whole career being somewhere short of ten, I'm used to making stuff up--but it seems an oversight.

So left in the limbo between the official end of the last module, and the vague beginnings of this one, the player's got a little time in the "sandbox" of the city of Raedelsport, which I worried might bore them, but apparently didn't.

Despite the over a month gap since we last gamed, the player's are actually beginning to remember stuff about the city's locations and personalities (or at least getting better at remembering where to find them in their notes). Everyone seems to be having a good time, though the two more novice players (one of them just started playing with this campaign) are a little tentative at times.

And we've finally arrived at a system to ensure the economic burden of the traditional game pizza order is shared fair and equitably by habitual cash carriers and non-carriers alike, so there's that.

Hateful Glare: The Beholder Examined

"Well, it was as I was sayin', sirs. Me and Ninefinger Nev had been hired to help this crew--out-of-towners, but experienced-like--for this smallish delve. Easy break and grab, it seemed.

And so it were. At first.

Their lockpicker was at work on a couple of Thystaran strongboxes, when a scout--Northern feller, Hrarn, was it?--comes back from checking down-tunnel a peice, pale as a corpse. 'Fore he can get a word out, it comes floatin' in. Never seen one before, but I heard plenty, and knew it for what it was soon as I saw it.

It comes in slow, unhurried-like--floaty--like its riding a gentle breeze, only of course there ain't no breeze and never would you get one big enough to move a monstrosity like that, anyhow. It's eyestalks are moving all about like its lost something and can't find it, and its one big eye is jerkin' and twitchin'. By the gods, sirs, it looked like it was nervous! Or maybe, paranoid might be more the like.

Anyways, it floats in bold as you please--unconcerned--paying us no nevermind, really. And its lips are moving like its talkin' to itself! Mumblin'. Couldn't make out no words, but it was like it was off in its own world.

Then, the captain calls for the mage, and that sound seems to snap the beast to. Its big eye focuses and the little ones quit squirmin'. The thing starts laughin'--gigglin'-like--high-pitched and crazy.  Then there's witch-fire 'round the eyestalks, and a cracklin' sound, and I dove for cover behind those strongboxes. And not a moment too soon.

I had my head covered, so I saw no more, but the screamin' started right quick..."

- Transcript of interview with Hout Gedry, conducted by Tuvo brek Amblesh, Magister of the Library of Tharkad-Keln.

"Exterminate, annihilate, DESTROY!!!"
- Doctor Who, "The Power of the Daleks" (1966)

By the standards of most intelligent beings, the creatures known as beholders are insane. They hold a hatred beyond reason of all non-beholder life, and spend their time either in gleeful murder and destruction, or in deep reverie, fantasizing about future horrors they might commit. A multiverse cleansed of every other living thing is their fondest wish.

Other beholders are not free from their violent proclivities, either. They hold strict and capricious ideas of racial and intellectual purity, which may lead them to turn on each either with little provocation. This leads to perhaps justifiable paranoia that any other beholder they may encounter is a would-be assassin. Only occasionally will a beholder emerge with the force of personality, intellect, and brute strength necessary to gain the temporary loyalty of others of its kind.

Beholders worship no deities. They refuse to acknowledge any power greater than themselves. The destruction of a vulnerable godling is one of the few tasks that have brought beholders together in the past. When confronted by higher order beings they may either become sullen and passive aggressive, or unreasoningly violent, and effectively suicidal.

Discussion of the biology of these beings is largely fruitless as their physiologies don't conform to terrene physical requirements. They don't appear to have organs in the usual sense, and sages believe that their substance my extend partially into other dimensions. Some have made the case that their peculiar mental processes may be a result of this.

Beholders have never been seen to reproduce. Some scholars hold that they propagate by budding, though admittedly with no evidence for this assertion other that some vague notion that their inner workings resemble animalcules writ large. Others theorize that they do not reproduce at all, and so there are only a finite number of beholders in existence.

If true, that perhaps provides a sort of twisted reason for their behavior. Unable to countenance lesser beings going on when their great race fails, they strive to bring an end to everything.

Saturday Morning Sorcery

For myself, and I suspect many others of my generation, a interest in fantasy was formed long before discovering Howard, Tolkien, or Leiber. Comic books played a part, but a lot of it was born in the ritual of Saturday morning cartoons. Before the rise of anime, before cartoons were slick, 30 minute commercials (even the toy tie-ins), there were a number of cheaply animated, sketchly plotted works of fantasy that captured our imaginations.

The first and maybe of the best of these was Thundarr the Barbarian. Airing originally on ABC from October 1980 to September 1982, Thundarr told the story of the titular barbarian in his battle against evil in a world 3000 years post-cataclysm--"a world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery"--as the narrator told us. Thundarr relies on his strength, his almost insane recklessness, and his lightsaber-esque sunsword to combat bizaare Jack Kirby designed wizards with nonsensical plans of pure evil. He also hung out with a sorceress, Ariel, and the humanoid, Ookla the Mok. Thundarr gets a lot of love of on the internet, and justifiably so. It's like Kamandi plus Conan with all the slow parts taken out for short child-like attention spans.

In 1981, Filmation brought Blackstar to CBS. Blackstar had a sort of sword and planet thing going. It was the story of astronaut John Blackstar who gets sucked through a black hole and spit out into "an ancient alien universe." Stranded on the apparently rather sparsely populated planet Sagar. He pulls on a fur skirt, jumps astride a winged, dragon horse, and swings the crystalline starsword in the fight for freedom. Fighting for freedom against the Overlord turns out mostly to entail hanging with the comic relief Trobbits--who are best described as part Seven Dwarfs and part Keebler Elves--and waiting for danger to find him. The cheap animation on Blackstar made Thundarr look like a Disney feature film, and the plots were thinner, if that's possible, but the exotic creatures and situations did have an appeal if you were 8 years old, which I was. Still, Blackstar only lasted one season.

Filmation struck again with a similar concept, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in 1983. Masters of the Universe was, of course, a pre-existing toy line, but Filmation made some changes or additions for their animated version--which included adding a secret identity and making it generally more superheroish than the Donald Glut penned mini-comics that had originally described a more barbaric (dare I say, Thundarrish?) world. I was ambivalent about the changes as a kid, and my resentment has only grown over the years due to the relatively greater popularity of the cartoon with its pink-vested Prince Adam and comic relief Orko.

That same year--the same month, in fact--CBS gave us Dungeons & Dragons. TSR and Marvel Productions conspired to bring this to the small screen. It featured a group of kids transported to a fantasyland by one hell of a roller coaster ride (I assume their parents sued the amusement park). They promptly gained the accouterments and abilities of various D&D classes, a cryptic Yoda-esque mentor, and an evil nemesis. Tiamat appeared quite a lot, too, which was cool. I would suspect the cartoon helped get kids into gaming, but I've never met anyone that identified it as their gateway into the hobby, so I can't be sure. I know it influenced some of the adventures and early characters of my friends and myself, though.

There's kind of a lull in fantasy cartoons for the next few years until Visionaries, which was a toy tie-in and was in the era when that really began to matter. It was syndicated (like He-Man had been) and came on Sunday mornings not Saturdays in my market. Visionaries had an interesting backstory, though. It took place on an advanced world, where the age of magic suddenly returned and technology failed. As one would expect in such a situation, people immediately get divied up into heroic and villainous knights and start acting into a pseudo-Arthurian manner.

The era's last flourish was in 1991 with Pirates of Darkwater. Too old for Saturday Morning kids TV (well, at least until college restored that ritual), I missed out on it when it originally aired, but have since come to appreciate it. The story was a seafaring, fantasy adventure on an alien world. A young prince sets out to save his kingdom from an intelligent (and evil) liquid ("Dark Water") which was trying to tke over the planet. Pirates was clever in its use of alien exclaimations (and possibly expletives) mixed into its dialogue. It's really too bad it hasn't had a DVD release.

In the age before there were whole channels devoted to kids' programming, and before network Saturday mornings were given over to tweener programming and kid reality shows, gems like these--even the ones of lesser value--were things to be treasured. I can't claim they were of higher quality than what has come after--indeed, in many cases I'd agree they come up short in that regard--but there was a crazy inventiveness to some that slicker productions seem to have lost.

Fantasy Treks

In the vein of my previous post on movie inspired adventure seeds, I thought I'd turn to the small screen, and see what sort of fantasy rpg adventure fodder might be found in episodes of Star Trek The Original Series.


SPOILERS follow if you haven't seen the forty year-old TV series...

"The Cage"
The Plot: The Enterprise crew follow a distress signal to Talos IV, but find that they've been duped by telepathic aliens who take Captain Pike captive.
The Adventure: Make the distress call a village seeking aid, replace the Talosians with Mind-Flayers, and put the whole thing in a dungeon. Easy.

"Shore Leave"
The Plot: Captain Kirk orders shore leave for the Enterprise crew on a seemingly uninhabited planet. The landing parties begin to see strange sights drawn from their thoughts--including a White Rabbit, samurai, Don Juan, and people from their past.
The Adventure: An island that's basically a thought-responsive amusement park for a long vanished race, is exactly the sort of thing Gary Gygax would've put in an adventure.

"Mirror, Mirror"
The Plot: A transporter accident sends Kirk and companions to a parallel universe, where the Federation is a barbaric empire, and everyone has an "evil" counterpart.
The Adventure: Evil duplicates of the party (or maybe good ones?) running around sullying their good (bad) names, or competing with them would add an interesting wrinkle to any campaign.

"I, Mudd"
The Plot: The Enterprise is commandeered by an impostor crewman who takes it to an uncharted planet. There the crew find the con man, Harry Mudd, who has set himself up as the king of the planet of androids.
The Adventure: A lost city full of androids (or magical simulacra, if you like) who desperately want to serve--and protect adventurers from their dangerous lifestyle--certainly has humorous possibilities.

"The Way to Eden"
The Plot: The Enterprise is hijacked by a criminal scientist and his space hippie followers who are looking for a paradise planet.
The Adventure: Well...uh...hippies...umm--elves, maybe? Yeah, I got nothing here. Sorry.

Warlord Wednesday: War Gods of Skartaris

Continuing my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"War Gods of Skartaris"
Warlord (vol. 1) #3 (October-November 1976)

Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell

Synopsis: Morgan and his band of former gladiators liberate a village from the soldiers of Thera, and Morgan offers the somewhat dubious villagers the opportunity to join his cause. Morgan and Machiste disagree on the goals of their enterprise--Machiste wants gold, and the fewer to share it with, the better. He reminds Morgan that despite all his talk of freedom, he's really out to get Tara back. Morgan reiterates his desire to bring freedom to Skartaris, but admits that he's come to love the thrill of battle.

The two are pulled out of conversation when Morgan sights a unicorn and wants to capture it. He makes a bet with Machiste he'll catch it and gives chase. Focused on his prize, he's ambushed by a group of lizardmen, and knocked unconscious.

Morgan awakens in the ruins of an ancient city.  He's a tied sacrifice to the god of the lizardmen--which ironically turns out to be his crashed SR-71 Blackbird. Morgan fights, but is only saved by the appearance of the lizardmen's old god--a giant snake-like creature. The snake eats the lizardman priest, and turns its attention to Morgan, who's saved by timely arrival of Machiste, who cuts him free. While Machiste battles the snake creature, Morgan pulls his survival kit from his plane with its .44 Magnum and spare ammo. The creature proves impervious to bullets, but not to the ejector seat from the plane shooting through its skull. Morgan and Machiste briefly explore the ruins, wondering at who might have built them. They leave to resume their quest but we see what they barely missed--a console with a screen showing a map of what appears to be a somewhat altered outer earth with a continent in the middle of what is now the Atlantic Ocean.

Things to Notice:

• Morgan has donned his trademark winged helmet for the first time.
• There's a long recap this issue, due no doubt to the length of time since the last issue--since it was coming back after cancellation.  The "He's Back!" on the cover also alludes to this delay.
• A unicorn will cause trouble for Morgan in a future Warlord storyline (issues #72-73).

Where It Comes From:
The title of this issue may be inspired by the 1962 Italian historical drama War Gods of Babylon (Italian title: Le Sette Folgori di Assur, "The Seven Flames of Assur"), or by American International Pictures 1965 science fiction film, War Gods of the Deep. Given the influence sword and sandal films seem to have on the Warlord saga, I would suspect the former, if indeed the similar titles are anything more than coincidence.

The basic plot of the story relies on the "cargo cult" trope. Real world cargo cults have sprang up when tribal societies have interacted with more technologically advanced cultures--most famously in the Pacific in the World War II era.

Lizardmen are a fixture of pulp fiction and comic books. The use of lizardmen to represent human degeneration (as will be made explicit in issue 5) goes back at least to Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895) wherein Welsh stories of elves and fairies are shown to have their horrific origins in a degenerate, hidden race with reptilian characteristics. Robert E. Howard picked up this idea and used it in several stories, most famously in "Worms of the Earth." The appearance of the Skartarian lizardmen seems inspired by Steve Ditko's design for the Spider-Man villain, the Lizard.

Morgan quotes a sentiment he says he read "on a barracks' wall in Saigon":

“You have never lived until you've almost died! For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know.”

The quote is apparently anonymous, but often said to arise from the Vietnam War, and a context similar to the one Grell relates.  I have seen it attributed several times to Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech given in Paris on April 23, 1910, but the text of the entire speech available online doesn't seem to have the lines--particularly in the place I often see people insert them in supposed brief quotations from the speech. 

"Metaxa," the name the lizardmen give Morgan's plane, is the name of a Greek liquor invented in 1888, but perhaps Grell coined the name independently.

Grell's use of an "epilogue" in this issue, and subsequent ones, shows an evolution of his storytelling sophistication perhaps, or at least experimentation with style.  What they resemble most are the "tags" common to hour long TV drama where there's a brief scene after the primary plot is wrapped up.  Fans of the original Star Trek series will recall these as scenes with Kirk, McCoy, and Spock bantering on the bridge before the end credits, often emphasizing the "lesson" of the episode.

Any Colour You Like, They're All Slaad

Slaadi are batrachian ultraterrestrials (or Outsiders, in D&D-speak) devoted to pure chaos, immortalized in AD&D's Fiend Folio. They were the creation of science-fiction-writer-to-be Charles Stross who describes their creation as "an independent exploration of Lovecraftiana"--since he wouldn't actually discover Lovecraft until "a couple of years later."

To keep slaadi interesting, here are nine (maybe) little know facts (some of which are untrue. Probably) to inspire their next foray to your Prime Material Plane:

1. There are no slaadi--or at least there weren't. Perception of them is an artifact of sentient minds interacting with the absolute, unfiltered chaos of Limbo. Unfortunately, the substance of limbo is psychoactive and has likely began to spontaneously generate slaadi under the deformation of visitor expectation.

3. The skin of slaadi produce a susbtance (slaadslime) which if ingested by sentient beings expands their perception so that they may perceive the intersections of planar forces on the Prime Material Plane. Or, alternatively, it may just cause users to hallucinate that they can do so. Either way, slaadslime has a street value.

6. The minds of the insane or the intoxicated are portals by which the slaadi can enter the material plane.

II. Ssendam, the Anarch of Madness, was created in the mind of a poet--deranged by drugs and syphillis--on some alternate material plane. Ssendam slipped from the poet's delirium and emerged into actuality in the roiling chaos of Limbo. The other slaadi are but cells in the body of Ssendam.

5. Slaadi are all silopsist who believe everyone else in existence is merely a production of their admittedly addled minds, and react to these presumed hallucinations with varying degrees of irritation.

Eight. The sickle of Ygorl, Anarch of Entropy, was "lost" on the Prime Material Plane. It passes randomly from person to person, but its every use, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, works toward the heat death of the universe.
 
4.  Slaadi are the detritus of the gods' revision of the previous mulitverse.  Their chaotic nature is due to their substance being fundamentally incompatible with the operating parameters of the multiverse in which they find themselves. 
 
Slaad. Slaadi will exchange gold or magic items for things like yarn, boot-laces, or a cracked ceramic mug, which they often treat as possessing great value.  Alternatively, they may just kill the would-be trader.

C.  Enigmatic, but nonsensical graffiti found in odd places all over the prime material plane is actually part of slaadi incantation designed to absorb the plane into Limbo.

9. The word "fnord" is used frequently by slaadi, but no one seems to have been able to guess its meaning, and slaadi do not explain, if they even can.