In the Loop

I caught Looper this weekend. It’s a time travel flick from Rian Johnson.  It reminds me the most of things like 12 Monkeys (and by extension  La jetée). While it’s not as interesting or innovative as Johnson’s high school hardboiled detective story, Brick, Looper has it’s own unique angle with its evocation of the dystopian future where criminals use time travel just for hits.

Closer to home, in a nearby but shadowy corner of the blogosphere, Jack Shear has released the second volume of Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque (which he subtitles Expert Grotesques and Dungeonesques). Like the first, this volume compiles some excellent posts from Jack’s blog and some new material. He has some neat stuff from his own setting The Worlds Between and also some tools to help evoke the gothic touch in any setting.  Check out the pdf for free and get your hardcopy on Lulu.

Monster Party!

As Halloween approaches, I'm thinking about again doing some monster meditations posts.  Since it has been a year since I did one of those, I thought they might be worth revisiting the past installments:

In 2010:
Famous Monsters: Frankenstein: A monster named Adam in all his glory.
Famous Monsters: The Mummy: An ancient monster gets unwrapped.
Gill -Man vs. the Wolf-Man: The more bestial Universal monsters go toe to toe.

In 2011, I just did one:

Two-Fisted Monsters: takes a look at pulpy portrayals, lighter on the horror.

Battle in the Skies!

In last night's thrilling installment of our WaRP Weird Adventures campaign, Boris, Diabolico, and Cornelius Doyle engaged the enemy more directly than they had before.  When setting the surface of Greasy Lake ablaze (with a flare gun!) failed to scare up anything, the gang went to meet with Hew Hazzard at Zephyrus Aerocraft to tell him one of his engineers was working with a dangerous group involved with the so-called Machineries of Night.

Hazzard had heard of those.  It seems a group of adventures had fought them years ago to save Hardluck from being subsumed into the Machine.  He was shocked to find out his trusted employee Silas Atwill might be working with them (or it?). 

They went to confront Atwill and found him trying to make an escape out the window. One of the flying automata seemed to be coming to get him. The cloaked and masked being he called "the Master" was with it!  When the gang stopped Atwill's escape, the Master just disintegrated him with a a blast from a weird rod.

The automata and the Master flew off. Hazzard and the gang gave chase in an experimental autogyro-bladed airship.  What followed was a pitch battle with two other automata in midair.  Bullets were flying and the automata were trying to destroy the rotors and bring the craft down.

Ultimately, the gang destroyed both automata (with a lot of shots fired) and Hazzard was able to land the damaged craft safely. 

The mysterious Master, however, got away.

Warlord Wednesday

Computer issues have delayed my review of Warlord #104.  How's the issue's splash page as a teaser, though:

Also, for the rpg interested among you (which I assume is most of you), take a peep at these Warlord stats in the old Marvel Superheroes FASERIP system. For another view, this site has his stats in Mayfair's DC Heroes system.

Back next week!

Night Nurse

In the City, the wail of an approaching ambulance may not be good news if you’re a badly wounded adventurer. Could be the ambulance is coming to rush you into the hands of the Night Nurses, and very soon, their not so tender ministrations will bear you from this world.

They have other names: the Sisters Without Mercy, the Ladies of the Morgue. Whatever they're called, the Night Nurses are thought to be ancient death goddesses, something like the valkyries from the old sagas of the Northmen. These eikones have adapted to the modern world. They look like pretty, young nurses--except they're pale as a “Jane Doe” at the City morgue, with uniforms bloodied and soiled like they just got off a bad shift in battlefield surgery.  They arrive out of the night (always the night) and the take away the dying.  Those they whisk away turn up later in some hospital morgue and nobody knows how they got their.  The bodies are always worse off than when they disappeared.  They looked like they've been picked over by carrion birds.

No one knows how they choose who they take. They only come for those dying as a result of violence, and they have a predilection for larger-than-life types: no working-stiffs shivved in a bar fight, or battering husbands brained with a leg of lamb.  How they decide who to come for out of several that fit the bill dying at the same time, no one knows.

Night Nurse
#App.:2-8 AC:0 HD: 8 Attacks; 2 (hands/fingernails/teeth 1-8) Special Abilities: travel etherically and astrally, only fully materializing when they are ready to take a body; not truly living, so possessing of inherent invulnerabilities)  

And for WaRP:
Attack: 3 dice, 2x damge; Defense: 4 dice. HP: 35 Traits: Eikone (4 dice) --more an idea wearing flesh than a physical being. Can travel incorporeally (uncanny appearance); Taker of Souls (4 dice) -- Drawn to the near dead, can draw the spirit of a person from their body 1/day (accompanied by the chill of death).

Hell's Hoods: Sin's Queen

The Phlegethon is a river of blood, formed from the runoff from infernal slaughterhouses and soul-rendering plants. Where it snakes through the city of Dis, one finds dens of depravity and vice run by the crime family that bears its name.  Belial is the boss here, and despite what you may have heard, Belial is a woman.

Or least, Belial is now.  Like all hell lords (ladies), Belial can take many forms. These days, Belial appears as a beautiful, dark-eyed woman, usually dressed in black. Her shadow is a deep red and tangible, like velvet.

The Phlegethon family runs brothels catering to unusual, often violent tastes, torture clubs, and brutal fight club gambling houses. Phlegethon’s entertainments draw hell denizens--both devil and damned--as well as visiting debauchees from all over the multiverse.

Combat: Belial uses a cat o’ nine tails when when she wishes to draw out the encounter.  She bleeds her foe tauntingly before the final kill. She carries a silver-plated infernal pocket pistol for those occasions when she can’t be bothered. It fires bullets specially crafted from truly depraved souls that cause lingering pain and disturbing nightmares even after they’re removed unless a their curse is removed.

Diabolical Abilities: Belial can know a mortal’s secret sins or secret desires of a carnal or violent nature at a glance. Her breath can cause an intoxicated delirium. Her slightest touch can cause intense pain or pleasure.

Pacts: Belial may be summoned with a drop of blood shed by a willing victim in either fear or ecstasy, caught in a silver chalice, and then boiled away over a small flame. Belial can reveal secret sins or desires of anyone (for a price) or provide instruction in techniques to prolong pain or pleasure.

The Winner is

The time has come to announce the winners of the Gimme Your Weird Adventures adventure seed contest. First, off let me start with the usual "it was a really hard decision."  Cliched maybe, but in this case it was, as there were a lot of good entries and comparing such a disparate group was hard.  Many of the entries are likely to make it into the Companion.

Next, I want to give recognize some notable disqualifications.  Two guys did awesome work, but did follow the contest rules, exactly.  B. Portly, Esq. gave a delightfully weird criminal gang in his "The Doors of Deception, or A Drug Quest of Unknown Zamora," but it was really a description of the gang and not an adventure seed.  Gustie LaRu's "The Hell Haunted Roads of Peril County" was likewise great stuff, but was more a locale and random encounters. Don't feel too bad, guys: Both of these will absolutely be used in the book in some form.

One of the best entries was done by my friend and sometimes collaborator, Jim Shelley.  His "The Monster Men of Bludd Manor" was pitch perfect in about every way, but given that Jim did layouts and whatnot on the original Weird Adventures and will most likely have a hand in the Companion, I thought handing him a prize might be a bit of a conflict of interests.  Still, he deserves recognition, and Bludd Manor will appear in the book.

Now to the winners, selected in haphazard conclave between myself and three of the players in my face-to-face Weird Adventures game:

Matthew Schmeer's "Flesh-eating Golems of the Pigeon King" is so off-kilter it took me a while to decide whether it works in the setting or not, but it drew comment and praise from our panel.  It's original--and that's a good thing.

Jack Shear's "Big Trouble in Yiantown" hit all the right pulp notes and pulled in some knowledge of the Weird Adventures setting--plus it struck the panel as being a lot of fun to play.

Congratulations, Jack and Matthew! Email me with your prize preference: gift card or Weird Adventures hard cover.

While I'm not going to name everybody that turned in a great adventure, I want to recognize a couple of standouts that made the final round of selections. Jeremy Duncan's "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!" teased with a tale of a radio evangelist gone reality-shakingly wrong. John Arendt's "Two Dames and A Diamond" was a a noirish yarn like Black Mask meets Weird Tales.  Steve Sigety's "Murder by Radio" was a compact murder mystery served up with a twist of fantasy.

To all I've mentioned, and those I haven't, thanks for your entries.  Many more than those mentioned here will be hearing from me about including your submission in the Weird Adventures Companion.