Old Soldier

The military of the Radiant Polity consisted of one soldier, and that man was named Hannibal Tecumseh Early. It was he who held the hyperspace nodes against the tide of 23 Enigma enraged hordes, saving the lives of thousand of moravec citizens; he who smashed the torture gardens of the Algosians and drove them back into the Expanse, and he who was vilified in the noosphere after his heavy handed tactics against the Aomist separatists of Wallach.

Early mostly appears as a steely-eyed, taciturn veteran of late middle years, but when necessary ten of thousands of versions of him were embodied in battleships and war fogs, spy drones and strategic minds. The Early war machine was manufactured to whatever size was needed, but at least one Early was kept in hibernation, as a reserve.

When the Radiant Polity began to disintegrate, Early's military might was turned against himself. Aomist hacks of Early fought to the death against secular ones. He performed interrogations on himself, knowing for certain at what point his resistance would break. In some habitats, memes and conditioned responses extracted from his mind were introduced into the psyches of the populace to ensure unwavering public support for the war effort.

When the Radiant Polity was gone, the Instrumentality of Aom thanked him for his service and requested his seppuku in recompense for his war crimes. Early did as ordered, a soldier to the last.

It's rumored that not all copies of Hannibal Early were destroyed. Balladeers claim that the old solider still hibersleeps in some remote location, his armor and weapons, arrayed around him, waiting.

Banana Republics

I don't mean the clothing retailer, or even merely the political science term in its broadest since, but instead something matching O. Henry's original use to describe his fictional Central America country of Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings (1904). The banana republic then is a sort of sultry colonial companion to the Old World charm of the Ruritania: A fictional, politically unstable Latin American or Caribbean country under the thumb of foreign interests. In gaming terms, it might be the more cynical (and perhaps more interesting) result of the standard D&D endgame.

The real world prototype of the banana republic was Honduras in the late 19th to early 20th Century; a nation that fell more and more under the thrall of U.S. fruit companies. The mercenary army of the Cuyamel Fruit even toppled the elected government and installed General Lee Christmas as commander in chief of the Honduran Army and U.S. Consul. Guatemala in the 1950s shared a similar fate when the elected government was successfully painted as pro-Communist to the U.S. government because they were anti-the United Fruit Company. These examples have the banana republic essentials: greedy foreigners, downtrodden peasantry, passionate revolutionaries, corrupt oligarchs, violent mercenaries, and torrid jungle.

In real-life, adventurers (we could even call them murderhoboes) like William Walker set up regimes pretty much fitting the banana republic mold in the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike the Ruritanian Rogue, your foreign rogue in a banana republic might be a central player in the countries woes instead of just having to deal with them.

Here's a list of fictional Latin American countries. There were a lot of likely banana republics in 80s TV and film, though they weren't always potrayed specifically in those terms. Good examples include Costaguana from Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and Queimada from the film Burn! (1969). Though the Zapata Western (either in its Italian or American form) is always set in Mexico, its themes, roquish characters, and ample chili con carnage are good inspirations for a banana republic based game.

Odyssey Delayed

No new chapter of Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey today on account of illness. Catch up on the old entries and I'll see you next week.

Infinite Earths

This a diagram of "major divergences" of parallel realities in Mark Gruenwald's A Primer on Reality in Comic Books. Things have only gotten more complicated since 1977.

DC has always had more alternate earths, thanks to their desire to explain away continuity errors by saying they took place in another reality (Marvel No-Prizes were simpler), but then Crisis came and they got rid of them all. After a few more crises, they came back though. Check out a list of them here.

Marvel traditionally had very few and didn't give them number (too DC, I guess). In 1983, Alan Moore and Alan Davis did a story for Marvel UK where the main Marvel earth was given the designation 616. Fans ran with that, and from a throwaway line, Marvel parallel Earths got numbers, too. Find them here. Of course, this probably doesn't catalog all the dystopian alternate futures the X-Men wind up in. Those guys just can't catch a break.

Any, I'm sure all of this can be plenty useful for a superhero game.

Send in the Clones

Orphan Black returned for it's second season last night, and I watched a few episodes of the Netflix-only final season of Clone Wars, so I have clones on my mind. Here are a couple of clone-related campaign ideas:

Art by Julie Baroh

Clones Underground
Dungeon exploration is dangerous business, but lucrative. Some wealthy land, ruled by a wizard (or wizards) might contrive to save on the risk (and potential challengers to their rule) by raising alchemical clones of themselves and their own companions to deliver the treasures to them. Using clones easily allows for replacement of dead characters, and the wizard serves as both patron--and perhaps future adversary.

Dupes
As in "duplicates". Maybe. Mashup the Bourne Identity and Orphan Black and throw it into Night's Black Agents and you've got sleeper clone agents created by an occult conspiracy. The characters must unravel the mystery of their own identity while staying ahead of there pursuers.

Of course, any speculation about vampiric "soul clones" (as put forward by Chuck Loridans, inspired by the events of The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires) is left the GM to indulge in at their own discretion.

Plugs, Shameless and Otherwise

Christopher Helton, tabletop gaming writer for the entertainment site Bleeding Cool debuted his first post on self-published rpgs yesterday, shining it's spotlight on Jason Sholtis's Dungeon Dozen, Jack Shear's Planet Motherf*cker, and my very own Weird Adventures. It was great to be asked to participate. The primary result seems to be more traffic to the Weird Adventures Companion post.  All I can say guys is: It is coming, but I have no ETA. I'm planning to get it out the door after Strange Stars.

In other self-publishing news, Anthony Hunter (cartographer for Weird Adventures) has launched Sleeping Griffin Productions. He's putting out layered pdf maps various sorts for personal or small press use. Check them out.

Graustarkian Karameikos

The Grand Duchy of Karameikos is a small nation in the Balkans on the Adriatic Sea. It has a long history going back to ancient times when the Romans built a fort and founded a trading outpost at Specularum--now Karameikos's capital, Spekla. Since those days, Karameikos has been in the hands of a succession of empires: the Byzantine, the Serbian, the Ottoman, and briefly, the Austro-Hungarian.

The current ruler of Karameikos is Stefan III. He has retained the title of "Grand Duke" despite his nation's liberation from Austria-Hungary. Grand Duke Stefan and most of the nobility trace their families back to Byzantium, but rule over an ethnically mixed populace of Albanians and Serbs, as well as Greeks. The predominant religion is the Orthodox Church of Karameikos, though there are also Muslims and a small number of Roman Catholics.

Believed to be the only photo of the leader of the Black Eagle

One of the greatest threats to modern Karameikos is the terrorist group known as the Black Eagle. The group is vaguely related to Albanian nationalism, but its direct aims seem to be criminality and destabilization of the current government. It's leader is named either Ludwig or Henrich. As his name would suggest, he is said to be of Austrian descent. His primary advisor and bomb-maker is believed to be a former monk named Bargle.

The Mad Monk Bargle, while briefly in custody

This post relates to my previous Ruritanian ruminations--and of course to D&D's Known World.