Warlord Wednesday: Queen's Requiem

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...

"Queen's Requiem"

Warlord #125 (January 1988)

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

Synopsis: The Shamballan survivors of the volcanic eruption numbly work to bury their dead. A cloaked figure arrives to add to their misery: the newly made Scavenger of Souls. Morgan rides up and catches him crouching over one of the dying. Morgan recognizes him and they scuffle. His barest touch on Morgan’s bare arm paralyzes it, allowing him to escape. Morgan realizes if he hadn’t pulled himself free, the touch would have killed him.

In the palace, Jennifer shares what’s she’s learned about recent events with Tara. The volcano eruption and the eclipse aren’t separate events, but harbingers of a doom that threatens the world. Jennifer has discovered an evil lurking in a cave beneath the volcano. Tara says she’ll go check it out. Jennifer suggests maybe she should wait for Morgan, but Tara sets her straight:

Jennifer gives her the magic talisman given to Morgan by V'Zarr Hagar-Zinn (is issue #114).

In that cave, the Scavenger has returned to his mistress and is regurgitating the souls he collected for her nourishment. Khnathaiti tells him her origin story: how she ruled over Mu, sucking souls, until all their greatest wizards teamed up and imprisoned her in the sarcophagus. The Scavenger isn’t paying a lot of attention as he’s watching Tara approach in the scrying pool, and drooling over her. Khnathaiti tells him he can have Tara’s body—as long as she gets Tara’s soul.

Elsewhere in Skartaris, Mariah, wandering in the wilderness, enters a cave to rest and winds up walking through to Siberia. She sees Soviet soldiers setting up a satellite dish. When a pteranodon flies past her through the cave and attacks. Mariah jumps out to help them. She repaid for her heroism by getting taken captive to be taken to the KGB.

Morgan, still feeling drained by the Scavenger’s attack collapses into bed. Shakira in cat form comes out of hiding to curl up beside him. While he sleeps, Tara enters the cave.

She encounters the last remaining lackey of Khnathaiti. A ring she’s wearing seems to drive him away, but then, the Scavenger appears. She strikes at him with her blade, but he is unaffected by mortal weapons:

Meanwhile, the dead rise in the Shamballan streets. They began shambling toward the volcano—and the cave.

Morgan wakes up. He feels a presence in the bedchamber--and he’s barely able to dodge the cloaked figure’s sword slash! Morgan pulls his own sword, but his only holding his own against his attacker. In a last ditch effort to avoid a descending blade, he flips the figure off a balcony—and see’s it’s Tara!

Things to Notice:

• Duursema has eveybody suddenly with exuberant Bon Jovi-esque hair.
• You would think Jennifer (as supreme Skartarian sorceress) might get more involved in fighting a magical menace.

Where It Comes From:
As she tells the Soviet soldiers in this issue, Mariah Romanova is indeed a citizen of the U.S.S.R. (and former national fencing champion!). It isn't something that has come up a lot since the seventies Grell issues. Morgan too emerged from Skartaris into Soviet territory (back in issue #52), though he didn't use a cave.

At this point in the history of the title, DC Comics editorial policy is that Skartaris is in a separate dimension accessible via the Poles, rather than an inner earth.

Mountain Lair Map

Remember back in the early days of the "War on Terror" when bin Laden was suppose to have a cool super-villain (or orc chieftain, what have you) lair beneath a mountain in a cave complex called Tora Bora ("Black Cave" in Pashto, which only adds to the mystique)? Turns out that wasn't true, but in the those days of fevered speculation, the Times of London produced this cool cross-section:

Obviously, you could put some sort of terrorist mastermind there, but it could also double as the sanctum of Cthulhu cultists or goblins, or whatever. Reality's loss is your game's gain!

Traveling the Strange Stars

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Archaic Oikumene is the hyperspace travel network. Though the means of the network's engineering—even much of the basic science science behind it—has been lost, current civilization is still able to make use of it to travel the stars faster than light. The rediscovery of a lost node is a major find, potentially introducing uncharted systems to interstellar civilization.

In the present era, the topology of the network appears to be much simpler than in ancient times. In most cases, nodes only connect to one or two neighboring nodes. The technology behind the nodes is at least partially psionic in nature. Specially trained psi-sensitives (or specially gengineered sniffer animals) can detect inactive nodes. Re-activating one requires brute-force hacking and psionically transmitted passcodes. Experts in hyperspace net architecture believe there is a quantum encrypted strata that at one time connected individual worlds—maybe even individual citizens. This higher end network is inaccessible in the current era.

Active nodes have exit and entrance gates fitted to them and terminal stations, located a safe distance away. Most of these structures date back centuries; a few even to the Oikumene. In civilized areas (particularly those once under the control of the Radiant Polity) tolls are often charged for network access and every ship passing through must have an identification transponder. So-called “black gates” exist, hidden in out-of-the- way systems that provide access without going through the public nodes. Military controlled gates sometimes exist, built near and accessing public nodes, but are given priority.

The conduits through the hyperspace are like latticework tubes of exotic matter. The distance between two points in normal space has very little to do with transit time through hyperspace. Instead, congestion and poorly understood conduit properties ("bandwidth") play a greater role. Terminal traffic control authorities try to manage congestion, but nodes deliver faster travel times to other destinations regardless—and this can vary over time.

While starmaps tend to represent the network as composed of simple lines between nodes, the internal workings of the network are considerably more complex. Most cultures rely on advanced computers to perform the rapid and complicated computations necessary for navigating hyperspace, though, some cultures have engineered biologic minds with intuitive abilities in these areas.

The poorly understood relationship between psi and hyperspace has led to more than a few fringe and paranoid memes, as well as legitimate scientific inquiry. So far, no theory is satisfactory. Psi-sensitive individuals tend to find hyperspace travel a bit uncomfortable. Many report the strange sensation of being watched.

Iron Men

I saw Iron Man 3 last night. It was enjoyable; along the level of Iron Man 2, I would say--so judge that how you will. It certainly took an interesting approach in that there was a lot of "iron" and a lot of "man," but seldom did the two come together in the usual way.

The Anthology Crawl

News of Andrew J. Offutt's passing on April 30 got me to thinking about the Sword & Sorcery anthology he edited (Swords Against Darkness) and fantasy anthologies in general. It seems to me you could use such an anthology (or anthology series) for inspiration and nonrandom "random placement" of encounters/things of interests in a hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl.

Simply pick an anthology. Read every story in it (even the duds--but skimming is ok) and pick some interesting element out of each, be it a monster, encounter, location, or item. Place these on your map in order, or arrange them to taste. You could even get more "madlibs" about it and predetermine what you were going to take from each story (an item, a place, an encounter), before you read (or re-read) the story, forcing you to stretch your creative a bit more to fit it in.

Warlord Wednesday: Scavenger of Souls

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...

"Scavenger of Souls"

Warlord #124 (December 1987)

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

Synopsis: Morgan goes running across the devastated and burning city of Shamballah to the palace and his mate, Tara. He finds her in the ruins, trying to rescue a girl stuck under a timber. Together Morgan and Tara free her but then find themselves surrounded by flames. Kara aka Power Girl swoops in to rescue them.

Meanwhile, Jennifer thinks something more than a natural disaster is going on. In her sanctum, she summons “benevolent elementals” to query them:

While our heroes fight the fires and advancing lava in Shamballah, the three inhuman sorcerers swarm around a golden, skull-adorned casket—the thing that was inside the crystal egg. Their Mistress has survived the crossing. “Let evil rejoice.”

To revitalize herself, she sucks up the energy of one of her lackeys. Then she tells them to go out and find more fools to serve her.

After hours of dealing with the disaster, Morgan and Tara return to their bed chamber. They’re still filled with a sense of foreboding—and they should be, because at that moment, two-bit Aquaman foe, the Scavenger is shooting his way past their guards and into the palace. He uses his scorpion ship to bust into the palace vault.

Morgan’s awakened from sleep. His keen plot senses detect that something’s afoot. He and Tara surprise the Scavenger mid-theft. Scavenger knocks out Tara and grazes Morgan’s shoulder with a shot. He thinks he’s free and clear to escape in his craft. He’s mistaken:

The ship crashes. Morgan beats the hell out of the Scavenger and would kill him, but Tara intervenes. Scavenger may have lost the battle, but he’s just the kind of scum the sorcereress Khnathaiti needs. She transports him to her lair and offers him a job.

The Scavenger isn’t impressed by her magic tricks or her offer. He’s a bit more impressed when she syphons the energy from another of her servants, and transforms herself from an old crone to a beautiful younger woman. Has she moves closer to him, the Scavenger asks if she’s going to “waste him.” The sorcereress replies: “No part of you is going to be wasted, Scavenger. It shall all be…used.”

While the sorceress does her evil work, Jennifer and Kara are making their good-byes. The elementals told Jennifer that Kara was needed back on earth. Reluctantly, Kara leaves to return to the DCU proper.

Meanwhile, Khnathaiti’s work is done:

Things to Notice:

• Morgan thinks (for some reason) that Skartaris doesn't need superheroes.
•  Khnathaiti is even worse on henchmen than the usual evil mastermind.

Where It Comes From:
The Scavenger (Peter Mortimer) first appeared in Aquaman #37 (February 1968). He was always looking for an ancient alien device called the "Time Deccelerator." Apparently, he eventually found it and that's what ultimately landed him in Skartaris, where he shows up in issue #118. He went from a couple of other changes and retcons beyond the one here before getting killed in Hawkman #15 (1994).

Kara does indeed return to Earth, and next appears a few months later in Infinity, Inc. #50.

Queen of Diamonds

Like a jewel on the Rim of known space, the Fortuna system and its casino stations beckon. It’s one of the most glamorous destinations in the Strange Stars: Where else can fortunes be won (or lost) on a roll of the dice in view of a planet made of diamond?

The casinos, bordellos, and other pleasure stations are mostly found at lagrange points in the orbit of the gas giant, Fortuna IV. While the gambling houses are independently owned, they all rely on the keen Minds of the Gaming Comission. This ai collaborative ensures no one cheats and monitors all gambling aspects of casino operation as a service to the owners. No one knows the location of the Comissions’ primary minds, but it’s rumored to be deep within the atmosphere of Fortuna IV.

The most famous of the Fortunan casinos is the Wheel--a station designed to look like an Old Earth roulette wheel. It's rumored to be owned by Alys Eldorose, a famous gambler in her own right. Some say Alys was one of the original colonizers, whose mind sailed out on a lightship at 10% of the speed of light back in the Age of Human Expansion. If so, she would be thousands of years old. Alys is never known to have responded to these rumors, one way or the other.

Alys also owns the diamond planet, Solitaire (Fortuna I). She leases parts of it to mining concerns, but mostly uses it for entertainment and gambling. Bot races take place on the planet’s darkside with feeds for teleoperation and telepresence for the casinos' patrons. It’s rumored Alys may also have a data vault buried deep underground along the terminator, where the heat starts to climb to metal-liquefying temperatures.