Wednesday Comics: Dreamsend

Here's the next installment of  Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

"Dreamsend (Metamorphosis Odyssey Chapter XII)"

Epic Illustrated #8 (October 1981) Story & Art by James Starlin

Synopsis: The light cutter arrives at Dreamsend and finds Zygoteans already there. Aknaton and crew fight their way toward the temple built by the ancient (now disappeared) Kalloombrians. There the Infinity Horn is hidden inside.

A stairway opens in the floor at Aknaton's command, spiraling into black infinity. It's actually a multi-dimensional corridor leading to a plane where the Horn will work and also the conduit by which its power will be transmitted back.

On the other end of that corridor is...

With the Zygoteans on their heels, they make their way into the skull. Before them they find:

Juliet says she can't go through with it. She's only 15 and she doesn't want to die. She, Whis'par, and Za will survive to be the future of a new mankind. Vanth and Aknaton will not be a part of this new world. They will hold off the Zygoteans until the Horn is blown.

Aknaton asks Vanth why he didn't come in to see the Horn. Vanth says he realizes he didn't belong there--and neither did Aknaton. They are yesterday's mistakes; the other 3 are hope. Vanth summons his sword. The Zygoteans approach. Aknaton asks Vanth to stay close...

Things to Notice:

• Vanth is still not completely convinced Aknaton's solution to the Zygotean menace was the only one.
• Kalloombrians?

Commentary: 
If there is a silver lining to Aknaton's plan (other than the obvious extinction of the Zygoteans) its that intelligent life in the Milky Way will live on through the three horn blowers. What that exactly means isn't clear.

Vanth believes (or at least hopes) they violence and killing won't be part of their new world. He doesn't have see the Horn they've come so far to find. Aknaton doesn't really express these same hopes; His revenge against the Zygoteans apparently just ends in his death, joining his extinct people at last,

The Gods Themselves

I've being thinking on the idea that all deities in fiction can be defined by two axes: Mythological-Literal and Transcendent-Physical. Mythological gods have origins and interactions that don't make sense in a literal sense; Think gods born from salt licks or jumping from their fathers' skulls. On the other end of the scale are literal beings whose origins are at least logical and generally pretty much biologically or technologically similar to other classes of lifeforms. Transcendent beings are bound by the usual limitations of single body, mind, and/or perspective, while physical beings certainly are.

The gods from the Greek or Norse mythology are typically mythological, but either physical or transcendent. (They tend to be physical seeming in the texts of the myths, but seem somewhat transcendent in terms their actual historical worship.) 

The Asgardians of Marvel Comics or Apollo of the Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonis?" are mostly literal and mostly physical in portrayal. The Asgardians of the movie Thor and its sequel are entirely literal and physical.

AI masquerading as gods? Literal, transcendent or physical. 

The Endless from Sandman? Straddling the literal-mythologic border, transcendent. 

Kirby's New Gods? Slightly mythological, physical.

So there it is. There may be other factors I haven't thought of.

A Place Called Darksun

Still thinking a bit about Dark Sun as a Western.  Here's the set of inspirations I would probably throw into that (which would work well for any relatively post-apocalyptic science fantasy Western):

Books:
The Gunslinger by Stephen King (less so the other Dark Tower books, though they're good too).
The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman.
The Eric John Stark novels/novellas by Leigh Brackett.

Comics:
Hex
Madame Tarantula

TV/Movies:
BraveStarr
El Topo
The Road Warrior

Different Dark Suns

Dark Sun is an evocative setting as is, but there's nothing wrong with a little variety. Maybe there are two great tastes that taste great together? Try these:

Art by Kevin O'Neill

Dark Sun, Red Sands
Killraven (and the War of the Worlds tv shows, and perhaps The Tripods series of novels by John Christopher) posits a world where the Martians from Wells's novel return and succeed in their conquest. The Masters would no doubt turn their vast, cool, and unsympathetic intellects toward areoforming Earth in the image of their homeworld. Desertification and cooling, accomplished by casting dust into the sky (making the sun appear darker and redder).  Over time, the Masters became decadent and lost the ability to produce much of their technology. They amused themselves with bloodsports and petty intrigues. The mutants and monsters they had bred for various purposes escaped into the wilds. Earth becomes almost Mars, and almost Mars becomes Athas, or something pretty close.

Art by Frank Frazetta

Dark Red Sun
Two ideologies fought a centuries long war, unleashing weapons they destroyed their world's environment, mutated its creatures, and cast both civilizations back to a more primitive state.Perhaps these competing tribes were called the Kohms and Yangs, but certainly the victors in their struggle flew a red flag (as ERB had it, in the original version of the book that became The Moon Maid). In any case, their former differences don't matter as much anymore in a harsh world where human and inhuman is a bigger distinction. Sometimes, though, the desert tribes still give the ancient war cry: "Wolverines!" though none remember what it might mean.

Art by Ken Kelly

Dark Western Sun
This riff is to BraveStarr what McKinney's Carcosa might be to Masters of the Universe. When galactic civilization tore itself apart in civil war, many frontier worlds, left on their on, backslide into primitivism. The strange, psionic races of Darksun left their reservations and remote hiding places and turned human habitation into settlements isolated by wilderness, where the only law comes from the barrel of a gun.

They Always Get Their Man

The ngghrya are humanoids native to a world on the border of the Coreward Reach and the Vokun Empire. Their population has slowly dwindled under Vokun occupation. Today, ngghrya are confined to the montane forests of their world, but exiles and refugees are not infrequently encountered in the Expanse.

Appearance and Biology: Ngghrya are thin, almost skeletal in appearance with rough, nodule-covered skin that almost resembles carapace. Their thinness belies their strength and durability. Their skin is scaled in places with dermal denticles, but also has ridges and horns of calcium carbonate deposition that begin to form at puberty and elaborate as they age.

Ngghrya exhibit slightly less sexual dimorphism in terms of size than baseline humans, but some male ngghrya grow "tusks" of keratin from both ends of their upper lip.

Psychology and Psi: Ngghrya are a somewhat superstitious people, but do not revere gods or supernatural beings as such. Rather, they seek to avoid notice of spirit entities by the proper ritual behaviors and taboos (some of them idiosyncratic) except at certain times. 

They tend to be a taciturn people by the baseline standards but fairly accepting of other cultures so long as they are respected. The stresses of their current existence on their homeworld have led to increased substance use, violence, and a mistrust of non-ngghrya.

Some ngghrya (a disproportionate number found off-world) are trackers, bounty hunters, or skiptracers, thanks to a psi-like ability. They are able to track any quarry across any distance, even light-years of space. This ability (called yaa'hii by the ngghrya) is thought to be instilled by a ritual involving an hallucinogenic substance native to the caves of the mountains of their homeworld.

Psi-researchers believe this ability creates in their brains circuits the equivalent of time loop logic computer, using telepathic data sent back through time by their future self and the Novikov self-consistency principle for error correction. This theory is lent support by the assertion by ngghrya trackers that they cannot catch any quarry they haven't already caught. 

Stats: Stars Without Number:  Ngghrya have +1 to Constitution. Tracking: On a failed Mental Effects saving throw, the target will be found by the ngghrya. Note that being found doesn't necessarily mean capture or defeat. Escape may mean another saving throw, if the ngghrya is alive and still on the job.

Wednesday Comics: Nightfire

Here's the next installment of  Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

"Nightfire (Metamorphosis Odyssey Chapter XI)"

Epic Illustrated #7 (August 1981) Story & Art by James Starlin

Synopsis: Zygotean cruisers swoop down on our protagonists, so they make for the shelter of Vanth's ship. Aknaton wants to resort to magic, but Vanth suggests it's his magic power that they followed to begin with. Better to use Vanth's ship that's small, fast--and loaded with weapons.

They could easily slip past the slower cruisers, except those ships must have been transported there by a swifter dreadnought.

First, they need to deal with the cruisers. Vanth turns the ship and comes up behind his former pursuers.

Now for the dreadnought. Even the Osirosians were ultimately unable to stand up to their power.

Vanth asserts they didn't study their enemies' ships closely enough. The dreadnought has dispatched all its cruisers to catch them. Its hangars are open and its shields are down. Vanth flies inside the dreadnought, firing.

The dreadnought is destroyed thanks to its unshielded power pods. Vanth's light cutter's shields hold. Cunning did what Osirosian power could not. Aknaton wonders if they had had warriors like Vanth, if they would have had to resort to the plan they embarked on.

They're off. To a planet called Dreamsend.

Things to Notice:

• We get some Star Wars-esque space battles.

Commentary: 
This chapter injects some action after the exposition of the last one. It also serves to highlight just how Vanth will be able to defend the others.

Aknaton's tale last chapter did its job. Vanth now seems to come around to Aknaton's way of thinking about the Zygotean menace.

The Alex Toth Casting Agency

Need a different look for an NPC or a weird monster of some sort? Check out the model sheets and concept art created for Hanna-Barbera by the late, great Alex Toth:

"futuristic city dwellers", maybe. Or maybe some fantasy city:

Demons:

The rulers of the cat people:

A wizard and his pets:

A wizard with a nose piercing and fairy lackeys:

Visiting dignitaries: