Truth, Justice, and all That Other (Gaming) Stuff

This weekend I picked up Green Ronin’s DC Adventures: Hero’s Handbook, which is the main book of their new DC Comics rpg. It utilizes the the latest iteration of Mutants & Masterminds' take on the d20 system--the version that’s going to be in Mutants & Masterminds 3e, which is suppose to be coming this fall.

My history with role-playing in the DC universe goes back to 1985 and Mayfair’s DC Heroes. That was the third superhero rpg we played--after Villains and Vigilantes, and the first edition of Marvel Super-Heroes. Mayfair’s system (later to be dubbed the Mayfair Exponential Game System and be acronymized as MEGS), was a little unusual and abstract, but it did allow a world to exist that went pretty seamlessly from street level to cosmic, and it used kind of cool, balanced “parallel mechanic” for physical, mental, and spiritual activities.

My group played a lot of DC Heroes in its second edition incarnation from 1989. Unlike, interestingly, our long-term Marvel game, we didn’t use “real” DC characters, but made up our own instead. In fact, I don’t know that those characters actually inhabited the DCU because I can’t recall if we ever interacted with any of the “big names.” I think we found it had a better character generation system that Marvel which, even in the advanced game, always seemed like it was an afterthought to the designers.

Anyway, back in the present day, I haven’t given DC Adventures a thorough reading, but right off the bat I notice a few changes. The ability scores have expanded beyond the D&D standards. There’s “stamina,” which is probable renamed “constitution,” but there’s also an agility in addition to “dexterity,” and “charisma” is missing, but “presence” appears. They don’t run the usual 3-18, but instead the score now seems to be the old bonus/penalty that was related to the score. This caused a moment of confusion when I paged through the book and saw Batman with a Dexterity of “7”--which is actually pretty high once I figured out what they were doing.

Some other changes seem inspired by other superhero rpgs. Powers seem a little more “effects based” than previously a la Champions, but I may be overstating this, because there doesn’t seem to be a huge change, here--maybe just in how they present it. “Fighting” is now an ability score--shades of Marvel Super-Heroes. In another MSHRPG call-back that made me smile, the determining of the damage condition from an attack is now decided by referencing a table which has color-coded columns of green, yellow, and red (and also blue) like the much-beloved Universal Table.

I haven’t reviewed the book enough to start the inevitable quibbling about the stats of famous characters, but overall it looks pretty good if you like Mutants & Masterminds, and makes me interested in seeing the third edition/

Professor Crowe & His Ugly Bird

Art by Daniel Kopalek

Professor Enoch Crowe and his familiar/partner-in-crime are wanted for the sell of unlicensed alchemicals, and fraud related to such, in the City and smaller municipalities in the Smaragdines and the South. The Professor (this title is an affectation--he holds no known degree) sells dubious nostrums from the back of his truck which he drives on a circuitous route mostly through rural areas, but sometimes visiting poorer neighborhoods of cities.

Crowe will typically have the following “cures” for sale, but will only be specifically hawking one at a time:

• Priapic Vigor - said to increase male sexual performance (allegedly made from extract of satyr musk, and other natural ingredients).
• Hirsutific Unction - said to cure baldness cure (from "essential oils" of de-odorized skunk-ape hide)
• Triodia’s Specific - An unguent (sometimes tonic) to cure venereal disease. (from alchemical purification of a species of lilly that grows in secret Ealerdish grottoes where nymphs are known to bathe).
• Panaceatic Lens Treatment - The patient sits under a head-sized dome of purplish crystal (actually colored glass) which he or she is told will “re-align their mental energies and vital forces to be in greater harmony with the universe.” Mostly, it does nothing, but Crowe can use it to given a suggestion (as per spell) to the patient.

Crowe can also produce some genuine minor magical potions, but only sells these to high-dollar costumers, and may just as like substitute a minor cursed potion, if he thinks he can get away with it, and might lose a sale otherwise.

Crowe’s partner or servant, is called by him “Dearest” or perhaps just “Bird,” but is known to everyone else as “Ugly Bird.” Ugly Bird is an harpy of a particular spiteful disposition--and this is in comparison to others of her kind who aren't paragons of compassion. She won’t generally be seen when Crowe is about his business of sales, but she is always watching, and never far from his side.

Prof. Enoch Crowe: MU4, HP12, spells commiserate with his level, and 1d10 real potions in his truck, besides his charlatan’s wears.

Ugly Bird: AC 7 [12], HP 17, 2 talons 1d4 each, Special: flight, unlike often presented, harpies in the world of the City have no “siren’s song” power.

200...and a Few You Might Have Missed

Welcome to my 200th post, 241 days since the inception of my blog.

Instead of looking back at my most popular posts, I'd like to re-offer some of my favorites that didn't find an audience the first time.  Since the readership is bigger now, maybe somebody we'll find some value in these "gently used" posts:

On January 15, Reel Adventure Seeds distilled four films in four different genres and one Warner Bros. cartoon down to their essense and recast them as fantasy gaming adventures.

Fantasy Pharmakon on February 12 maybe didn't grab people with its name, but it offered up some recreational pharmaceuticals from fantasy literature, suitable for game consumption.

Last but not least, March 16's Scum and Villainy presented a gallery of eclectic, urban rogues from the city of Terminus, in my world of Arn campiagn.

Thanks to all of you who've supported my efforts!  I hope you'll continue to enjoy 'em in the future.

Warlord Wednesday: This Sword for Hire

It's Wednesday again.  Time to re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"This Sword for Hire"

Warlord (vol. 1) #25 (September 1979)

Written and Pencilled by Mike Grell; Inked by Vince Colletta

Synopsis: In an oasis on the edge of the Great Desert, Mariah, Machiste, and Tara take a rest from their travels. Tara sits alone, and Mariah and Machiste speculate on how hard things must be for her--losing her son and having her husband run off. Mariah says she must hate Morgan, but Machiste doesn’t believe that she’s capable of hating him--any pain she feels is born of love.

“Barely a hundred leagues” to the south, Morgan is in combat against Atalus, a fellow mercenary. Morgan bests him with arms, then unarmed. Atalus doesn’t survive the last contest. After the fight, another mercenary, Chakal, demands to know why Morgan just doesn’t leave. He’s angry Morgan supplanted him as second in command. Morgan offers Chakal a chance to fight him, as well, but Commander Balfoosh shows up and breaks up the impending duel. He tells them they’ve got a job: Prince Kali has offered a “hundredweight of gold” for the capture of the thief, Ashir.

The thief’s trail takes them west and south, high into the Mountains of the Sun. A rock-slide set as a trap sends most of the band to their deaths; only Balfoosh, Morgan, and Chakal remain alive. They don’t have long to feel lucky, as they soon encounter a mohawk-sporting snow giant a “monster who stalks the mists in search of man meat”--which is just as scary as it sounds.

The giant smashes Balfoosh. Chakal cuts off one of its fingers, only to get knocked from his horse by a back-hand slap. While the giant’s distracted, Morgan leaps onto his shoulder and strikes. He drives his sword into the brute’s ear and straight through its skull.

The giant topples over, dead. Morgan is again the last left standing.

Morgan decides to continue after Ashir alone--there’s a reward to gain and he’s got nothing else better to do. He hasn’t gone far, when, through a moment’s inattention, he stumbles into a trap. A branch whips back and unhorses Morgan. A man in a brightly colored costume jumps from hiding to attack with a dagger.

Morgan isn't as helpless as he seems, and he greets Ashir the Rogue with a shield in the gut. He uses its leverage, and his foes momentum, to to flip him. Ashir only just manages to keep himself from falling over the cliffside. The thief asks for parlay, but when Morgan helps him up, he punches him, then challenges him to a swordfight. The two exchange quips as they cross blades. Morgan bests Ashir at both.

He tells the rogue he plans to take him back to Prince Kali, but asks what it was he stole from the prince. Ashir tells him it was a woman--and she wasn’t stolen--but now he wishes he hadn’t bothered, because she left when the gold ran out. He asks Morgan why he continued to pursue him after the others died. Morgan says he did it for the same reason Ashir steals--money.

Ashir doesn’t believe him. He agrees they're motivated by the same thing, but it isn’t money--it’s adventure, and action. Even if it’s a short life, Ashir asserts he will have no regrets. Morgan replies that he’s already got regrets. He climbs into the saddle, deciding not to take Ashir back.

Chakal, who didn’t die at the giant’s hand, has other ideas. He holds his bow on Morgan, arrowed nocked, and says he’ll take the prisoner. Ashir asks if Chakal is a friend. Morgan replies, “Nope. Just a corpse,” as he shoots Chakal dead with his pistol.

Ashir asks Morgan wear he’s headed. He tells him he could use a man like him, because not far from where they are there’s a hidden temple that houses a great jewel...

Elsewhere, in darkness, sinister eyes watch Morgan in a crystal ball, a talon-like hand resting atop it.

Things to Notice:

• This is the first appearance of Morgan's companion, Ashir.
• Most members of the mercenary band wear Turkic/Asiatic garb, but Balfoosh wears Greco-Roman garb.

Where It Comes From:
The hero spending some time as a mercenary is a common Sword & Sorcery plot line, demonstrated most notably in the life of Conan.

The character of Ashir seems inspired by roguish and swashbuckling characters played by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and (later) Errol Flynn.  He even looks facially a bit like Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood:

Though Ashir's name is Middle Eastern (it's a Hebrew first name, but also happens to be the name of an Assyrian god), his costume is late Medieval/Rennaissance European.  He wears, for example, parti-color hose.  These disparate elements perhaps suggest his influences drawn from the likes of Thief of Baghdad, but also more swashbuckling films like The Three Musketeers or Robin Hood.

Chakal is an approximation of the Turkish çakal, from whence we get our word jackal.  "Balfoosh" was apparently once a place around the Caspian Sea, but the name also might derive from the usual pronounciation of the name of the South Dakota city Belle Fourche ("belfoosh"), the geographic center of the United States, and destination of John Wayne's herd in The Cowboys (1972).

Note: In my review of last issue, I accidentally left out the epilogue! That showed Harrando, greatest thief of Skartaris (and Ashir's rival, as we find out this issue), sneaking into Castle Deimos and stealing the ring from the moldering corpse of Deimos, only to then be engulfed by strange, yellow tendrils.  Harrando also looked a lot like Douglas Fairbanks, too.

An Evening With the Nocturnals

Nocturnals is a series of comic book limiteds and one-shots written and drawn by Dan Brereton. Its main characters are a vigilante team of--well, monsters--who tangle with gangsters, supernatural menaces, and an evil corporation that serves as a front for Lovecraftian invaders. If it sounds like role-playing game fodder, Green Ronin beat you to it with a 2004 sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds. I also count the Nocturnals among the inspirations for my Strange New World of the City setting.

It all started with an eponymous limited series published by Malibu Comics’ Bravura imprint in 1995. It’s since been collected under the subtitle, Black Planet. It introduces the mythical Northern California town of Pacific City, and its resident extra-legal heroes, Doc Horror (a two-fisted scientist from an alternate dimension with a dark secret), and his gang. The group includes: Polychrome, a ghost; Firelion, an artificial, pyrokinetic samurai; babe from the Black Lagoon, Starfish; reptilian genetic chimera, Komodo; and undead gunslinger, Gunwitch. Also tagging along is Doc’s daughter, Evening, who likes to be called Halloween Girl, and carries creepy toys inhabited by spirits.

Their foes are the forces of the corporation Narn K and their mob allies. Narn K manufactures artificial humans and human-animal hybrids in its Monster Shop, but, more sinisterly, is a front for an invasion force. The alien Crim overran Doc Horror’s homeworld, the Black Planet, and only the Nocturnals stand in the way of them doing the same to Earth.

The adventures continue in another limited, The Dark Forever, in 2002. Halloween Girl gets her own stories in Witching Hour (1998), and the Troll Bridge one-shot in 2000. Gunwitch takes center stage in Outskirts of Doom, also in 2002. After a hiatus, the gang was back in Carnival of Beasts in 2008. Green Ronin’s Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion, isn’t just a gaming supplement, but a “bible” to the series’ characters and their world with material written by Brereton, himself.

Anyone who’s a fan of psychotronica, or just good comics, should probably spend an evening or two with getting to know the Nocturnals and the mean (and weird) streets of Pacific City.

Dungeon, American Style: The L.A. Lizard Underground

On January 29, 1934, The Los Angeles Times published a stunning report on an ancient, underground city beneath the streets of L.A. That’s enough for an American dungeon, but it gets even better. The city wasn’t alleged to have been built by Native Americans, pre-Columbian explorers, or even Atlantean survivors, but rather by Lizard People.

Cue Sleestak hissing here...

“Busy Los Angeles, although little realizing it in the hustle and bustle of modern existence, stands above a lost city of catacombs filled with incalculable treasure and imperishable records of a race of humans further advanced intellectually than the highest type of present day peoples, in the belief of G. Warren Shufelt, geophysicist mining engineer now engaged in an attempt to wrest from the lost city deep in the earth below Fort Moore Hill the secrets of the Lizard People of legendary fame in the medicine lodges of the American Indian.”
- Jean Bosquet, L.A. Times, 1934

It must be said, that Shufelt was a man with some unusual ideas even before the whole lost lizard city thing. He had designed and built an apparatus which he claimed could detect any substance by honing in on its vibrational character.. The device--which was a pendulum in a glass box, attached to a black box affixed with compasses--could not only be used to detect gold and valuable minerals, but could even track down a person using a hair sample.

Using this miraculous device, Shufelt was able to discover a subterranean complex beneath Los Angeles and running under Santa Monica Bay. When he mapped it out, the system of tunnels looked (to him) like a lizard.

In researching the mystery of the complex’s creation, Shufelt was told about a race of “Lizard People” by a Hopi Indian, Chief Little Green Leaf. Indian legends (according to Little Green Leaf) held that a “great catastrophe” had sent the Lizard folk underground 5000 years ago.

Like any good dungeon, this one’s got treasure. First off, the Lizard People kept all their knowledge on gold tablets 4 ft. long and 14 in. wide. On one of these was supposed to the “record of the origin of the human race.” They also had imperishable food supplies “of the herb variety” and a chemical solution which could cut through rock, that they had used to build the tunnels in the first place.

By the time the story broke in the L.A. Times, Shufelt and crew had been digging shafts to get into the city. Updates on the project appeared in newspapers. Then, abruptedly, the project was cancelled. By March 5, 1934, the shafts had been filled in and the contract cancelled.

Maybe, it came to an end because Shufelt was a nut, and his story a fantasy. Or maybe that’s what Enik and his boys want us think.

Roadside Distractions

When travelling beyond the City, across the roads and highways of the Strange New World, you never know what you might find...

Bring Me The Head...

A down-on-his-luck adventurer with a broke-down car is stranded at an abandoned roadside diner. He carries a strange bag, that turns out to hold the head of a Zingaran bandit hero stolen from his grave--a head that's still very much alive due to a spell cast by a bruja.  He plans to sell the head to a cabal of wealthy cultists for a substantial sum. The only problem is, he’s pursued by Zingaran revolutionaries who want it back, and Hell Syndicate thugs playing to collect on the soul-debt the bandit chief welched on.

Nightmare Town

Strange doings, in a small, isolated, desert town with a secretive sort of excavation--guarded by out of town thugs--on its outskirts. The locals are tight-lipped and scared, but what they do say is interesting.  They tell how the town has been taken over by the urbane, but menacing, Llewellyn Wail--the enormous, hairless, and almost-albino overseer of the dig--and his hired guns. They're looking for the meteor that crashed near the town about a hundred years back--in a place animals avoid, and old-timers call haunted. Townsfolk have seen weird burns on injured diggers, and heard them discuss the need for welding torches--maybe even magic ones.  Then there's the odd glow, and unnerving hum, coming from the excavation site that makes folks want to close their shutters and cover their windows at night.

A Burial Is Arranged

In a roadside oddities museum, the mummy of a Native medicine man puts out a psychic plea: "Return me to my ancestral grounds for burial and I'll show you the hidden riches of my people."  What the mummy doesn't know--and neither does anyone else--is that the road back now cuts through a stretch of badlands swallowed by a black dust elemental and crawling with zombies.

The Blood-Spattered Bride

A late-night sighting of a woman in a white dress on the side of the highway leads to the discovery of a ghost-town where a macabre wedding is in the offing.  The vampiric bride, and the rest of her undead wedding party, are waiting for the groom--and they're not too picky, as long as he's living.