It's Witchcraft

American Horror Story has returned to FX with its third season. This one is subtitled "Coven." Though it's already showing signs of mixing several horror tropes like in previous seasons, the title gives away it's focus on a group of witches. More precisely, it focuses on a school for witches; it's kind of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, except they have no interest whatsoever in helping those that hate and fear them.

Each of the students has a specific psychic sort of power. No real Bewitched-like all-purpose spellcasting, but some very powerful witches have more than one power. There are sort of traditional ritual magic spells, too. It's unclear how this might integrate with the innate powers, and I imagine it will stay that way. "Fuzzy on the details" is just the kind of show AHS is.

Besides the general witchery, there's (so far) an attempt to re-animate the perfect boyfriend from the remains of a bunch of dismembered fratboys, a swamp-dwelling Stevie Nicks fan with the power of resurrection, and conflict between the immortal historical figures Marie Laveau and Delphine LaLaurie.

While every season has had things that could be stolen for an rpg campaign, this season probably offers the most gameable setting so far. In fact, there's a suggestion of the European colonial witches versus traditions of oppressed peoples that is a bit reminiscent of GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War.

GIANT SPACE ROBOTS!

A mysterious alien race hid giant robots all over the earth, waiting for the day humankind would need them. That day is today. The sinister invaders the ancient aliens always feared have arrived. They use giant monsters to cleanse worlds of all life to ease their takeover. Earth is their next target. The giant space robots, piloted by intrepid human pilots, are the Earth's only hope!

A pilot has 3 stats: Intelligence, Willpower (Wisdom), and Reputation (Charisma).

A robot has 3 stats: Strength, Agility (Dexterity), and Durability (Constitution).

All stats are 3-18 with appropriate resultant bonuses or penalties.

Intelligence: Determines the ability to unlock new powers in a robot. Every time a power is employed a percentile roll is made with the chance of success determined by intelligence (based on the Spell Learning Probability Percentage in LL AEC, ranging from 20% with a 3 to 90% with an 18 INT).
Willpower: Affects response to saving throws from certain mental powers (like wisdom).
All the other abilities are just like their counterparts.

Robot Classes:

• Tank: Not a literally tank, but a brute force model. d8 hit dice, Fighter combat tables and advancement.
• Blasters: Lighter models with various sorts of special powers or energy weapons. d4 hit dice, Magic-User combat tables and advancement. Blaster pilots have a chance to "unlock" a new power in their robot with every level. They can use a power once a day (contingent on a power roll).
• Defenders: Medium models that combine some aspects of blasters and tanks. d6 hit dice, Cleric combat tables and advancement. They have a chance to "unlock" a power at second level, and an additional one every level thereafter.

Powers: Are reskinned spells, though obviously they are the more combat oriented of them. You could do away with spell levels at your discretion.

Weapons: Robots use giant and futuristically styled hand to hand weapons. Darts or arrows might be missiles instead, but maybe not.

Hit Points: Are possessed by giant creatures/robots. Smaller beings don't rate on the scale and are utterly destroyed by 1 point of damage.

Monsters:
Reskin any monster you want. They're all giant now, and ones bigger than man-size are really gigantic!
Examples:  Voidflyers (stats for bats); Gorillagon (Gorilla); Mechapede (giant centipede)--you get the idea.

All Hallows' Eve Draws Nigh

Halloween approaches and I've got some holiday themed posts in the works. First though, let's take a look back at what we unearthed in previous years. 2011's and 2010's ghastly delights are summed up here.

And here are last year's installments:

Monster Mashup: The classic Universal Monsters in different genres and other media.
New Flavors of Frankenstein: Different twists on a classic archetype.
Monstrous Monday: Jumpin' Jack: Stats for Spring-Heeled Jack.

Warlord Wednesday

Here's another installment of my examination of  the adventures DC Comics' Travis Morgan--The Warlord.  The earlier installments can be found here...

Warlord (vol. 4) #1 (June 2009)

Written by Mike Grell; Penciled by Joe Prado; Inked by Walden Wong

Synopsis: In Tibet, high in a mountain cave, an expedition makes a surpsising discovery: A whole deinonychus carcass frozen in ice.

Sometime later, Alysha Grant shows the head of the dinosaur to her friend Kate who works for a museum. Alysha needs money to get back to Tibet and fully explore the cave the carcass was found in. Kate can't get the funding from the museum, but she has an idea.

They go to rich adventurer Ned Hawkins and give him quite a story:

He agrees to go along and in turn recruits journalist Ewan McBane to chronicle his exploits.

Soon, they're all on a mountain in Tibet. They run afowl of the Chinese military and poor Rhampa the Sherpa is killed.  They make it to the cave, but they're trapped.  Or they think they are, until they find a shimmering, golden portal to someplace warm in the recesses of the cave...

Morgan and Shakira are rousing from a sleep period in Shamballah. Morgan pulls open the curtains to look out onto the city--and is attacked by a griffin!

The commotion brings Tara and her soldiers running, but by the time they arrive, Morgan has dispatched the beast.

Not just griffins are being driven out of the North, there are human refugees, too. Morgan and Tara go down to see what's bringing them in and find Tinder already there. He's already gotten a story, and has a refugee repeat it to Morgan:

It turns out the refugee is from Machiste's kingdom of Kiro. He fears the kingdom may have fallen. The invaders wield a power none can stand against: a power that can kill at a distance. The man's son bears a wound from the weapon. It punched through is breastplate and still grievously injured him:

A bullet hole!

Things to Notice:

• Grell writes Warlord again for the first time in nearly 17 years.
• This issue doesn't have a title.
• The recap of Morgan's origin reminds us he arrived in Skartaris in June of 1969.

Where It Comes From:
This makes several sly references to previous issues: the deinonychus in the cave and the one in First Issue Special #8; Morgan asking Tinder about ballad writing and "Ballad" being the title of the story in the 1992 limited series.

What Happened to Volume 3?
Warlord volume 3 ran from April 2006-January 2007. It was written by Bruce Jones and drawn by Bart Sears and "rebooted" Warlord continuity. It was not particularly well-received and ignored when Grell returned to do this series.

The Crystal Obelisks

The crystal obelisks are anomalous artifacts commonly associated with the Hidden Land. The most famous and enigmatic of these is the so-called Graydon Obelisk, though a similar crystal (an anonymous gift) resides in the collection of the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology. Both these crystals and others rumored to exist figure prominently in Fortean and paranormal lore.

The account attributed to John Richmond Graydon (but only surfacing after his death) asserts that he found the crystal on a skeleton garbed as Spanish conquistador in the Sierra Madres. He describes the crystal psychically projecting voices and visions of another world into his mind. He came to understand the crystal was part of a control mechanism. In a trance-like state, while under the crystal's influence, he produced a crude map of the Hidden Land, the area maintained by this mechanism.

Graydon relates that those who have been to Hidden Land and returned confirm the existence of larger crystal obelisks: perhaps 16 ft. tall, and 4 ft. wide at the base in remote places in the Land. Sometimes they appeared are normal, cloudy quartz crystal, but at times colored pulses of light appear inside them. They provided some influence over weather and even astronomical phenomena--perhaps even time and distance. From his investigations, Graydon believed these to be part of system of smaller obelisks--most of which had been swallowed by the jungle.

The builders of these crystals and the grid they form are an enigma, but at least one of Graydon's correspondents attributed them to the Nephilim of Genesis. Graydon's account is conflicted in regard to whether these giants still exist.

Graydon was found dehydrated and dying from a spear wound in the Matto Grosso in 1908. His appearance (and eventual death) in Brazil presents something of a mystery as he dined with acquaintance in Tucson just two days earlier.

Cast in Ruin: A Taxonomy of Post-Apocalypses

This week, Charlie Jane Anders wrote an article about the disappearance of the "advanced civilization fallen to barbarism" story that used to be so prevalent in popular genre media. She considers a couple of reasons, one of which is that it has been supplanted by the post-apocalyptic story.  That got me thinking about whether those sorts of stories might be related in some way, and that led me to hypothesize a taxonomy of post-apocalyptic tales.

The first thing to consider is: Did the apocalypse happen to the viewpoint characters or their culture or did it happen to someone else?

Happened to the viewpoint characters/their culture:

If it happened recently you're dealing with a standard post-apocalyptic (or perhaps apocalyptic, if it's ongoing) tale. Examples would include The Walking Dead, I Am Legend, and Night of the Comet, just to name a few.

If it happened in the remote past, then we're dealing with post-apocalyptic fantasy like Thundarr or the Heiro novels of Sterling Lanier. There is a variant where the apocalypse is really slow moving: the dying earth story. It's tempting not to consider these post-apocalyptic stories at all, except for the fact that at least some of them (the Zothique tales of Clark Ashton Smith and The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, to give a couple of examples) seem very concerned with pointing out how things are winding down to their inevitable end.

Happened to someone else:
If the apocalyptic event happened recently, and the viewpoint characters have arrived to discover this, we're probably dealing with a science fiction mystery or horror narrative. The Star Trek episode "Miri" probably falls into this category. (Some will protest that the apocalypse in "Miri" hardly counts as recent, being hundreds of years ago. I'd argue the extremely slow aging of the surviving children and the resemblance of the fallen culture to the culture of Star Trek's reviewers in the sixties, gives the story an immediacy that it's internal chronology doesn't reflect.)

If the fall is a remote event, then the "civilization fallen to barbarism" story comes into play (showing up in numerous Star Trek episodes like "Omega Glory" and "Spock's Brain" and as a backdrop in a lot of lost world or planetary romance fiction). If the civilization is mostly gone, but it's influence can still be felt, we're probably out of the post-apocalyptic genre and into science fiction, horror or a combination of the two--but not necessarily. The science fiction and/or horror option is exemplified by works like At The Mountains of Madness, Forbidden Planet, Quatermass and the Pit, and (again) a number of Star Trek episodes like "That Which Survives."

The stories in this category I would consider as in the post-apocalyptic genre itself would be of the "cautionary tale" or "sins of the past" sort. Ralph Bakshi's Wizards fits here, as do two unusual, effective, and Oscar nominated Christmas cartoons from MGM: Peace on Earth (1939) and Good Will to Men (1955).

There are less clear-cut stories that are inbetween these two poles. In this group are stories where the relationship of the viewpoint characters (or the viewer) to the apocalypse or the occurrence of the apocalypse, itself, is saved for a reveal at the end. The original Planet of the Apes is a classic example here, but Teenage Cave Man (1958) also fits the bill.

Also, we can place many so-called "Shaggy God" stories here, as the apocalypse leads to an Adam and Eve scenario. The Twilight Zone episode "Probe 7, Over and Out" is practically the archetypal version of this tale, but it has turned up as recently as Battlestar Galactica (2004).

Look--There's A Map!

Work has been grueling this week! More of my regular posting content is forthcoming, but for now enjoy another map. This one is from Don Lawrence's Trigan Empire. Marvel at its mysteriousness!