Warlord Wednesday: The Last Dragon

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...

"The Last Dragon"

Warlord #127 (March 1988)

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

Synopsis: Believing Tara dead, Morgan has left Shamballah and returned to wandering. After an encounter with a smilodon, followed immediately by an attack by a pack of raptors, Morgan is saved by a masked bowman named Dreadnar. Morgan loses his horse to the raptors, but decides to travel with Dreadnar for a bit.

Meanwhile, Khnathaiti is hiding from Skartaris’s eternal sun in a cave beneath the volcano. Her powers have diminished since the death of the Scavenger, but she manages to suck the life force of a rat to stave off decay. She swears vengeance on the Warlord who reduced her to this.

After acquiring some now horses, Dreadnar leads Morgan to the Vale of the Dragon. Here his people lived for a thousand years, worshipping the dragons that dwelt there and sometimes appeasing them with sacrifices of “unblemished maidens.” One year, the shamans withheld the sacrifice due to a famine, and the dragons attacked. Dreadnar and his elder son returned to the village to find it destroyed.

The two went on a rampage of revenge against the beasts, killing all but one: a female, with eggs. She ambushed them, killing Dreadnar’s son in a blast of fire. Dreadnar escaped with his life, but:

Morgan and Dreadnar come upon some scroungers digging around the remains of Dreadnar’s old village looking for valuables. Dreadnar routs them and would have killed their leader, but Morgan convinces him the rat isn’t worth it. The scoundrels haven’t gotten far when they’re roasted by dragon fire. Morgan and Dreadnar run for it and dive into a nearby lake for protection.

When they come up for air, it seems the danger may have passed. When again:

In the Siberian gulag, an old enemy of Morgan’s, Danny Maddox, watches Mariah be dragged off to be punished after standing up to the sadistic guards. She’s stuck in an unheated cell with no food. Maddox gives her a little gift:

Things to Notice:

• Shakira gets big hair in this issue.
• While it isn't the first time, the dragon in this issue is a "fantasy dragon" rather than a dinosaur like in previous issues.

Where It Comes From:
This issue shares a title with a 1985 film, but there really isn't a relationship between the two.

Danny Maddox first appeared as a young bully in Travis Morgan's hometown back in issue #91. Fleisher brought him back and gave him many more run-ins with Morgan over the course of their lives as depicted in Secret Origins #16 (July 1987), which seems to set-up his appearance here.

Retrofuture Crosssections

So Haynes Publishing has just released Dan Dare: Spacefleet Operations as part of their Owner's Workshop Manual Series, which already includes a couple on ships from Star Trek and one on the Thunderbirds.

While I have only passing familiar with the venerable British science fiction comic book hero, the sample illustrations shown in this article (from which the base above is taken) lead me to believe this manual would be very useful for any pulp sci-fi game.

The Reboot and Its Application

Like a lot of other people, I caught Star Trek: Into Darkness over the weekend. My capsule review: If you liked the first one as you watched it you will probably like this one as you watch it. If you liked the first one, you probably also experienced an increasing irritation with it the more you thought about it in the hours and days that followed. I suspect that will be you experience with this one.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about Into Darkness so much as the application of things like changes continuity in one way or another in rpg settings. Certainly, there are examples of retcons and reboots in published rpg settings; I'm more interested in what people do in their own homemade settings.

I suspect mild retcons are pretty common in long running campaigns. A little change in some aspect of setting when the GM gets a better idea never really hurt anybody--particularly if the PCs haven't even directly interacted with it yet. If they have, it gets a little trickier, but if G+ posts are any indication, settings are sort of continuous works in progress, even well after play starts.

I don't know about anybody else, but I've engaged in wholesale rebooting of one setting for much of my D&D career. The world of Arn (that I started this blog discussing) has elements that go back to junior high, though its gone through 3 map changes, place name changes (and sometimes back again), and conceptual shifts from vaguely backgrounded generic D&D world, detailed pastiche of Leiber, Howard, and Burroughs, synthesis of those S&S elements with whatever historical period I was interested in at the moment (from Ancient Rome to the 16th Century), and so on.

All of these permutations could be seen as just cannibalizing old ideas for economy of imagination, except that some of the same characters and background elements have been consistent pretty much the whole time--though their presentations have changed. The founders of one of the main cities in the world(s), have gone from actual PCs, to historical personages, to likely mythological characters.

Not only does this sort of thing save work, but I think it can allow for some of the depth of background that comes from a long-running campaign without actually having run a continuous campaign for all that time.

Suit Up

art by Simon Roy

EXOSKIN: a vacc suit of programmable matter. An exoskin forms around a wearer as they pass through a suit membrane aperture found before the airlock on a spacecraft. Once a wearer is clear of the membrane, the suit takes only a few seconds to finalize its configuration. Exoskins come in various forms from skintight to bulbous and oversized. They can be programmed to have slightly different properties, including opacity, color, texture, and thickness. They typically have the features and attachments common to other sorts of vacc suits, other than armor. Suit membranes have supplies of programmable matter based on the crew compliment of the ship. Small ones can create 5 suits. Larger ones may be able to create 20 or more with less than a minute in between. [Essentially the same as the Vacc skin in Stars Without Number in game terms.]

The Penitents

They often call themselves “Penitents,” though the rest of the Strange Stars know them as Deodands—if not some other slur. By whatever name, they are a people viewed as cursed and bringers bad luck. They’re marked by their peculiar coloration: white on one side and black on the other, with a sharp division in between. A few try to hide it, but most accept it as a sign of their crimes as a people.

Deodands are believed to have been a prosperous people at the time of the Great Collapse. They were kept safe through the years of crisis that followed by a godlike posthuman mind. At some point, the people that would be the deodands commited some great crime against their god. They were punished with their unusual appearance, but also with a peculiar form of immortality. Any time a deodand dies, a nanomod in their bodies sends a signal via quantum entanglement to some hidden body bank. A copy of the dead person’s mind is downloaded into a new body, which is delivered back to the deodands' home station via a casket-like, adamantine, life support pod falling from a small hyperspace node. Whatever a deodand may accomplish in life, death causes him or her to start over as a naked beggar on streets of their decaying habitat. They remember only that they have lived previously, but only the barest details of their past lives.

While a few may come to view this immortality in a positive light, most do not. A few have tried to find a way to cheat resurrection, but things only seem to prolong the time to resurrection rather than preventing it. Attempts to remove the nanomods only lead to the deodands death. Deodands are incapable of having biological children, and few try any other method.

Each deodand handles their curse differently. Some become extremely repentant and join ascetic or flagellate cults. Others revel in debauchery (the better to show their sinfulness and guilt) and become sybarites or criminals. Most live marginal lives of poverty and substance abuse in their native habitat or elsewhere. None of these groups contribute anything positive to the reputation of their people among other culture.

The few wealthy deodands would pay almost anything to someone willing to end their curse buy finding the source of their unwanted resurrection and shutting it down.

Warlord Wednesday: The Queen is Dead!

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...

"The Queen is Dead! Long Live The Queen!"

Warlord #126 (February 1988)

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

Synopsis: Machiste, Jennifer, and above all Morgan, grieve Tara’s death, while (in her lair) the evil Khnathaiti laughs. Tara really isn’t dead, merely soulless and in the sorcereress’s thrall. Soon, she will rise and be the plaything of the Scavenger of Souls.

The Scavenger sneaks into Tara’s pyramid tomb:

Meanwhile in Siberia, Mariah is being interrogated by the KGB. They know who she is and how she disappeared at Machu Picchu. They think she’s a CIA spy. Ultimately, she’s dragged off by guards to be “disposed of.”

In Kiro, Tara walks through a barracks full of sleeping guardsmen, stealing their souls as she goes. The soldiers rise and follow here. She enters the kings chamber and awakens Machiste, who at first thinks he’s dreaming. The Scavenger forbids her from taking the king’s soul: He wants it for his own. He grabs Machiste by the throat and begins sapping his soul away. Machiste doesn’t go down that easy:

Machiste tells them both to get the hell out before he gets really angry. They slink away with the souls they have, warning that their mistress’s day is coming.

Sometime later, Machiste bursts into Morgan’s chamber and tells him he’s seen Tara alive. Morgan doesn’t believe it, until Machiste mentions the Scavenger. Morgan, Machiste, and Jennifer go to the cave beneath the volcano. Jennifer leads them through the cave to find:

Our heroes attack Khnathaiti’s thralls. Morgan makes his way to Tara, but she struggles against him and he can’t get her away.Morgan fights with the Scavenger, but the villain gets the better of him. Hearing her mate’s name and seeing him close to death somehow frees Tara from evil’s control. Before the Scavenger can strike the killing blow against Morgan, she attacks. The Scavenger throws her aside and she falls from height. Morgan strikes off the Scavenger’s head with his sword.

With the Scavenger dead, Khnathaiti looses the power she infused in him, she flees. Our heroes are victorious, but at what cost?

Despite appearances, Tara (still) isn’t dead—but Jennifer keeps the truth from her father. Khnathaiti still has Tara’s soul, so she is in a state between life and death. Jennifer could restore her, but only to a state of “unlife” and torment. Jennifer entombs her body with protective spells, hoping that she can find a way, someday, to restore her fully.

Things to Notice:

• The flashback to the events of First Issue Special #8 shows Morgan with the goattee he didn't have at the time he first met Tara.
• The cover of this issue is very 80s.

Where It Comes From:
Mariah's Russian captors make reference to events of her first appearance way back in Warlord #6. Government agents thinking she's a spy mirrors Travis Morgan's ecperiences with his own government on two different occasions.

Labyrinths of Shadow

The planet Tenebrae in the Zuran Expanse lives up to its name. In the gloom beneath perpetually darkened skies, the all but lifeless wastes hold the ruins of two civilizations  These ruins draw treasure seekers and archaeologists, but they don’t easily give up their secrets.

Tenebrae was a terraformed world and once home to thousands of colonists. A few large surface craters suggest this civilization was destroyed by meteor impacts and the nuclear winter that followed. This is believed to have been a purposeful assault rather than chance encounters. Most life above the unicellular level was destroyed.

Sometime later, the enigmatic zurr arrived. As on every other world with a zurr presence, only what appear to be ritual sites have been found: Three labyrinthine structures the size of small cities are evenly spaced along the equator. They’re made of a rock-like material with the appearance of basalt not found elsewhere on the planet.

Artifacts are found within the labyrinths, seemingly at random: small, nonrepresentational sculptures, pieces of the elaborate ceramic masks the zurr seem to wear (seen in the holographic images with the appearance of mid-reliefs embedded in the walls), and oddly, personal items the previous human civilization the zurr or someone else must have excavated from older ruins.

These trinkets can bring a few credits in the right markets, but the most valuable of the Tenebraean artifacts are the obsidian pentachorons. These items (or perhaps their 3 dimensional shadows) are found ensconced in rare alcoves in the walls of the labyrinths, where they have the appearance of glassy, black pyramids. When held by a sapient being the pyramid takes on the appearance of a 4-dimensional solid rotating through 3-dimensional space. The rate of rotation of a pentachoron changes in the presence of a hyperspatial node. Psi sensitive individuals holding a pentachoron hear a multitude of whispering voices. The objects are resistant to damage, but they can be destroyed—though only utterly. No one has ever succeeded in fragmenting or shattering one.

The pentachorons and the other treasures are zealously guarded by short humanoids called “skulkers.” Little is known about them, except that they appear to inhabit subterranean warrens beneath the labyrinths, they shun bright lights, and they are utterly hostile to other species.