It's Fun-Sized

Thanks to the largesse of Tim Shorts, I received the toy mini-comic sized adventure that is the Mini-Manor: Faces Without Screams in the mail last week. Small in size, perhaps, but not small in adventure. It's got face-stealing guys, naked goblins, and a merman berserker. If that list doesn't get you intrigued, you're probably just too jaded to be playing old school games altogether.

Check it out along with other fine GM Games products.

Other People's Weird Adventures

One of the cool things about getting Weird Adventures out there has been the opportunity to hear what other people are doing with it. Even more cool is getting the chance to be a player in someone else's game unfolding there version of the world. Lester B. Portly has been doing some playtesting of his pulp game Detectives & Daredevils on Google+, and I’ve been playing sometime trumpet player, sometime unlicensed private detective, Chick Marlowe. Lester has been taking us through a great interconnect set of crime stories involving Yianese drug-dealing tongs, alchemical drug formulas, and (possibly) jazz musician cultists.

Of course, watching somebody else play in your sandbox takes a little discipline. Even if you’re okay with them making changes (which I am), you've also got to resist the urge to jump in and “help out” when there’s a question about a setting detail that comes up. It’s been interesting to see how Lester has been making it his own. For instance, he tones down the fantasy/magic aspects of the setting a bit, though I think not as much as he initially thought he would. Still, his is a bit more “pulp world with more magic” compared to my “fantasy world in a pulp era.”

Anyway. I asked him a few questions about how he approached it. I don’t know if this will interest anyone but me, but here’s what he had to say:

What do you feel has been the hardest part of adapting the world for your own use? What amount of “weird” did I wanted my game to be. I wanted to be fairly accurate in capturing the flavour of the Weird Adventures book and I played around with the idea of cherry picking ideas, but settled on running the setting as written.

Because it is a distinct setting, I had to plug some minor details that were vague and hoped I wasn't screwing up stuff in the book that I missed. There were some things from fiction and history that I wanted to use that just wouldn't fit in.

What's been the most enjoyable part of doing so? I think that sticking with the setting as written has forced me to think outside the box. I enjoyed grafting on my own take to Weird Adventures.

Has your perception of the setting changed any in going from reading about and then playing in the setting vs. running it? The fantastic elements don't seem as problematic as I thought they would be. I wanted the weird elements to stick out. The bits that I have used worked fine without the game feeling like it was just standard fantasy in a hard-boiled drag.

Warlord Wednesday: Incantation to Eternal Night

Let's 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...

"Incantation to Eternal Night"

Warlord #123 (November 1987)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: In some extradimensional prison-realm, three formerly human, demonic entities sense their time to plunge Skartaris into eternal darkness is near. In their ghostly forms, they swirl around a crystal that holds their master, who only awaits their incantations to be reborn.

In Shamballah, Tara and Morgan are listening to the story of Kara and Jennifer’s story of their encounter with Azmyrkon. Suddenly, the eternal sun of Skartaris is eclipsed by the moon—a very rare event, and one that fills Tara with dread.

In the sewers beneath of the Shamballan slums, Redmond is waking up with a “I turn into a Sasquatch monster and kill stuff” hangover. His stolen pills are keeping him human shorter and shorter periods--and he’s more bestial now when he becomes the monster. He doesn’t even know what sort of animal he last ate.  Wait, what’s that in the pile of bones?

Redmond turns back into the monster, bursts up through the street, and goes on a rampage. News of the panic in the street reaches the palace. Morgan puts on his best gold mail muscle shirt and heads out to see what’s going on.

When Morgan gets to the poor part of town, he's accosted by a group of thugs. He makes short work of them, but while he’s in the midst of melee, Redmond sees him.

Redmond rants about taking him back to face a military tribunal for being a commie spy. Morgan realizes that the CIA agents travails in Skartaris have driven him from fanatic into complete insanity. Morgan begins to offer him help, but then Redmond transforms into the monster.

While Redmond and Morgan fight across the city, Tara and her soldiers defend the palace and the newly arrived refugees against the fear-maddened Shamballan mobs. In the nether-realm, the crystalline egg begins to hatch as the inhuman sorcerers continue their mystic chanting.

A volcano erupts near Shamballah. The shaking of the earth causes Morgan and Redmond to fall from a bridge. Lava flows beneath them. Morgan holds on with one hand, attempting to save both of them. The creature that was Redmond, however, can’t let go his savage hate. Morgan has no choice:

His enemy dead, Morgan crawls back up to the end of the bridge and looks out over a city in flames!

Things to Notice:

• And so, Redmond meets an ignoble end.
• Since when is there a volcano near Shamballah? 

Notes:
This issue brings Redmond's quest to an unceremonious and sort of anticlimatic end. The new villians are intriguing and more sword & sorcery than what we've seen in a while.

The Library

The Library of Atoz-Theln is the largest repository of knowledge in the known galaxy. It contains the noospheric archives of many worlds from the time of the Archaic Oikumene (and sometimes even more remote eras), and significant physical media from cultures both human and nonhuman. Built before the Great Collapse in the interior of a dwarf planet, it now lies within the lawless sector known as the Zuran Expanse. Despite its location, it remains an important center for scholarship.

The library is housed on several underground levels, all climate controlled for the particular media they hold. There are rest areas and tranquil spots to peruse information interspersed throughout, and rooms they were once spartan but serviceable quarters for travelers. Animated wall screens depict famous figures from the mythology and history related to the acquisition and preservation of knowledge from many worlds.

The library’s inhabitants and staff are tall, thin, humanoids with narrow skulls called Atozans. While their ancestors have been in the library since before the Great Collapse, their society experienced a dark age and backslid to savagery. Battles were fought between tribes occupying the popular culture mediascape and exobiology specimen sections. Dynastic histories from that time (meticulously carved into crystalline display screens) suggest there was once a bloody chieftain who rose from the recesses of the human evolution virtual displays.

Eventually, the Atozans clawed their way back to civilization and restored the library as best they could to its previous functioning. There are few of them left--only around 200--but their lives are extended by nanotechnology, and they long ago fabered small-scale cloning facilities. The ancient Library Mind never fully recovered its faculties, but the Atozans have managed to kludge a solution to the elaborate classification system used to organize the library's holdings. This encrypted, ceremonial language is known only to the Atozans and not shared with outsiders.

In the Cards

The Magi are a group of itinerant fortune tellers found throughout the Strange Stars but particularly in the Zuran Expanse. Viewed variously as mystics, cultists, or charlatans, and often treated with suspicion whatever the judgement, the Magi care about the opinions of other sophonts only to the degree it impacts their quest for enlightenment.

While baseline humanoid in appearance, Magi have a modified neural structure: The linkages within the reflexive system are enhanced, as is prefrontal-parietal interconnectivity. The result is enhanced intuitive and lateral thought processes and the ability to utilize controlled dreamlike states of consciousness. Another consequence of this restructuring (not fully appreciated when it was implemented millennia ago) is greatly enhanced precognition.

The Magi use these abilities (or tell customers they use them) for fortune-telling. Like all fortune-tellers before them, they’ve found that discerning what the client wants to hear and telling them that rather than giving vague impressions of the actual future is generally more likely to generate referrals and return business. Magi favor an elaborate cartomancy using a deck they call the Zener Tarot (suits of Circles, Crosses, Waves, Squares, and Stars), a series of questions (many wholly unrelated to the question at hand), and some physiologic biometric assessment of the client. Which parts of this protocol and necessary and which are just for show is a closely guarded secret.

Magi are also sometime gamblers. They enjoy almost any game of chance. They are often accused of cheating and find it prudent to leave the area quickly after any significant win.

What really concerns the Magi and drives their wandering isn’t the future, but the nature of reality. As an order (perhaps as a glitch in their neural arrangement) they are haunted by contemplation of the simulation hypothesis: they fear the world as they perceive it is only a computer simulation. Their hypercognitions and precognitions only fuel this ontological fear. The Magi search for either conclusive proof these fears--the final “tell” that will give away the game--or evidence of the transcendent uncomputability of universe, a concept they hold in awe and fear like unto a god.

Welcome to the Machine

“Moravec” is the term generally used among the Strange Stars to refer to self-replicating robot sophonts. They are differentiated from “bots” (manufactured robots, typically low or nonsapient) and von Neumanns (self-replicating robots, low or nonsapient). The appellation comes from the surname of a historical Old Earth scientist-prophet. It apparently came into use through the more flowery “Children of Moravec”--a line from a protest song sang during smartmob events by moravec revolutionaries who regarded the extant term “robot” as a slur. At least, that’s the history as remembered by some moravecs; it all occurred millennia ago, and more than one dark age (major and minor) lies between then and now.

A moravec mercenary from a promotional vid

Today, moravecs are as varied as humanity’s biologic descendants. Many are humanoid in form (or android or gynoid) and inhabit worlds less tolerant of biological life. Others have forms reminiscent of arthopods and crawl over asteroids or comets, sometimes with their intelligences distributed over an entire swarm. Still others have spaceship-sized bodies: The warrior-poets of Eridanus are one militant order in this last group.

A warrior-poet prepares for combat--and composition

Servants of the Zhmun

The zhmun inhabit a domed city on the small, austere world of Aygo, orbiting a yellow star in the Zuran Expanse. Their famed wealth comes from ancient treasure stores (the contents as much of value as art objects or archaeological finds as anything else) and by their control over the mining rights to three superterrestrial worlds in their home system. Enforcement of these rights and protection from interstellar marauders of the Expanse comes via their alliance with sophont, ship-sized moravecs that have patrolled the system since ancient times.

Zhmun are thought to be bioroids due to their unusual structure. They're invertebrates with ameboid characteristics, despite being multicellular. A zhmu uses the hydrostatic pressure of internal fluids and the ability to quickly alter the rigidity of its tissues to hold itself in a roughly humanoid shape. Zhmun who can’t achieve consistent humanoid appearance are second class citizens—“globs.”  Zhmun are asexual (though sometimes assume gendered titles) and reproduce by pinching off a bit of their substance and tossing it into comunnal vats of doughy proto-zhmu plasm. Zhmun are only allowed to contribute to vats in their living districts, which are rigidly segregated by status. While zhmun don’t need to sleep in the human sense, they do need to relax their hold over their form for a few hours every few standard days. They're also said to re-encode information from ancient brain scans from their sacred stores every week or so, but it is uncertain if this serves a ritual or biologic purpose.

Zhmun perform no manual labor, but insist that their needs be provided for by biologic entities, not robots. Higher status zhmun perform no work at all. They affect an air of nobility and assume lofty, nonsensical titles. They spend their days in artistic pursuits or idle pleasures, as befits their station.  Globs direct zhmu business interests and supervise their myriad of alien employees and servants in the name of a zhmu master. Menial tasks are performed by a slave clade of unknown origin, collectively called yoom. Yoom are low on the sophont-scale and are bred in a variety of function-based forms from brutish, thick-browed laborers and bodyguards to sleek, quadrupedal racers.

The zhmun’s paid employees arrive from the co-orbital planet, Erg. There, a rundown spaceport, mining camps, and shantytowns attract the desperate and down an out of known space. They watch the job listings, hoping to get a lucrative position with the zhmun, either serving them on Aygo, or working in their mining concerns on the neighboring planets. or (dare they hope?) representing zhmu interests on other worlds. While they wait, they pay rent to the zhmun on whatever shabby accommodations they can find, and go in debt buying food and entertainment in zhmu-owned businesses.