The Planetary Spheres

I posted this on G+ a few days ago, but I thought I should share it here, as well...

There are seven spheres whose aetheric densities allow them to be reached by the technology of Man. With the Earth as our reference point, the planets can grouped thusly:

The Postlapsarian Worlds, thither went the Nephilim and the Atlanteans following the Deluge:

Saturn: Ringed with the petrified and crumbling corpses of titans and monsters. A rebellious demiurge imprisoned in its litharge-colored mists.

Jupiter: The peripatetic court of the most convivial of monarchs in continual celebration. Visitors glide down from the several moons on bat wings to hunt giant beasts in a sea of endless, variegated storm clouds.

Mars: Empires clash, and machine brains compute the scientific perfection of eternal war.

There was once another world between the spheres of Mars and Jupiter, but the iniquity of its people destroyed it.

The Prelapsarian Worlds, closer to the Sun and the Demiurge that dwells within:

Venus: Torrid jungles and vast, shallow oceans. Strange and beautiful plant women.

Mercury: Blazing court of the heliocephalic Emperor, a Philosopher-King.

Luna: The pallid, coralline gardens and laboratories of the Fair Folk. The fae themselves, ashen, luminous, and moth-winged, and their insectoid Selenite servants.

Have You Seen These Aliens?

I had hoped I wouldn't be doing another Strange Stars update because it would be in your hands by now, but at least I cane report the final round of proofreading is complete, and Lester is making the requisite changes as I write this.

Assuming the submission process to rpgnow goes smooth (and for pdf, at least, it usual does), it is very close.

Here's one last page to whet your appetite.

Wednesday Comics: A Bronze Age Alphabet

Back in 2009, I did a series of posts for the blog of my friend Jim Shelley called "A Bronze Age Alphabet." Inspired by articles like "A Secret History Alphabet" by Kenneth Hite, it actually didn't deal with any actual Bronze Age alphabet, but instead an alphabet of the Bronze Age of Comics.

I should warn you that it's still incomplete. One day, maybe.

Part 1: A to G

Part 2: H to L

Part 3: M to P

Part 4: Q to U

Death and Time

Saturn moves in the furthest sphere from the Sun reachable by the starships of Man. Beyond, the Cosmos is more chaotic and the laws of Nature are strange. Saturn and those more distant spheres are remnants of a renegade cosmos that was or perhaps might have been. In that world, Saturn would have been the sun and a source of life instead of a graveyard and place of death.

Unique among the planets are Saturn's great rings made of the petrified remains of titans and monsters and the dust and remain made from their collisions in the void. The greatest of these pre-Creation monsters form the moons of Saturn. Men sometimes find treasure among these cold, sepulchral bodies, but ancient and malefic intelligence still lives in some, and there are tales of the dead becoming animate in their influence.

Some seek riches within Saturn itself, but its sickly yellow vapors streaked with dull gray can only be safely penetrated in thick, lead diving spheres that afford voyagers protection by alchemical affinity from both the crushing pressures and the saturnine radiations. Without them, living things petrify then turn to dust and other metals and materials corrode or decay. Travelers have recounted hearing the voices of souls, and ancient and damned, raging or crying in the dark mists, but whether these things are real, no one can say.

At Saturn's north pole, there hangs a great cube of stone like black onyx. Inside, dwells the Oyarses spirit of Saturn, long-bearded Aratron. He has made a great study of time and death, and is to possess a laboratory where he grows new physical forms for himself that he transfers his intelligence to him the old one succumbs to death. As well as being Aratron's palace, laboratory, and treasure house, the cube is said to be the tomb of the rebellious titan that created this world--or at least what is left of him. Though his giant, apparently-dead form has been accreted with stone, he is still well bound and meant to be for eternity.

The Sea of Stars and A Free Adventure

Fellow blogger Sean Holland over at Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal has launched a Kickstarter for The Sea of Stars Campaign Sourcebook for Pathfinder. the Design Journal blog is always a good read with spells and magic items that come with interesting and flavorful backstories making them at once integrated into Sean's setting, but also eminently usable in any setting. He also does write-ups of his campaign sessions that always sound like a great time.

If you're not already a fan of the blog--you should probably rectify that by checking it out--but you can also get a taste of what Sean has in store for us in the sourcebook with this handy sheet of introductory facts and this free 1st level adventure.

Check out the Kickstarter page for the artists Sean has lined up. Also, you'll not that stretch goals include companion pieces written by folks like Benjamin Baugh and Brandes Stoddard--and somehow I slipped in there, too.

36 days to go, but don't wait around. Go check it out.

When Noom Comes

There is one holiday in the Land of Azurth that can never be scheduled because it comes when it will. Loonsday, it is called, and on Loonsday, Noom, the shy, hidden face of the Moon, turns toward Azurth. When the light of smiling Noom shines down, many strange things have been known to happen.

Here are ten strange visitations that have occurred on a Loonsday, under Noom's beaming face:

1. Street cobblestones are disturbed as by ripples in a pond.
2. A strange, scintillant mist attaches itself to a person and follows them around for sometime making a soft sobbing sound.
3. People don strange hats and spontaneous start a parade, winding through the streets of the city, as if in some ecstatic trance. At some point, they cease their marching. The participants throw their hats aside and return to their previous business. They profess no memory of the events.
4. Inanimate household objects have come to life and demanded their freedom from enslavement for perhaps an hour before returning to normal.
5. A rat-king and its retinue emerge from the sewers to hold court in a city square. He will answer 3 questions about the future, promising that at least one prediction will not be a lie.
6. Someone finds a kazoo whose sound will banish lesser devils.
7. Shadows take on weight and texture of a thin piece of felt and detach from their owners with a bit of tugging.
8. A rain of frogs occur over an area of the city, but each frog drifts down slowly under a tiny parasol.
9. A swarm of small, translucent portuguese man-of-war fly through like balloons in a strong wind. They strike anyone in their path like thrown boxing gloves.
10. Small groups of people in odd clothes with their heads replaced by glowing orbs are seen in the streets. If accosted or hindered in their obscure tasks, they will search their pockets or purses and produce a few alien coins and give them to the person confronting them. The coins hum and writhe gently in the hand.

Loonsday inserts itself into the more sensible and regular calendar of Azurth without warning. The appearance of Noom in the sky will always signal that it has begun. When Noom has set (and not in the normal way but by simply drifting away like a handful of sand blown on the wind) Loonsday is over and the normal precision of time resumes.

The Best of 2014

...Otherwise known as a lazy holiday post with no new material. Here's a selection of posts that you guys liked (based loosely on number of comments and G+ pluses) and posts that I liked. Sometimes they coincide; sometimes not. I stirred away mostly from Strange Stars art posts, though, to focus more on the text content. (A Strange Stars note, since I mentioned it: after holiday delays, the book is in the hands of the last proofreaders, with hopes of submitting the pdf very soon.)

So without further ado, here they my picks:

"Strange Stars Covered": 2014 was the year Strange Stars moved forward. Lester B. Portly's retro-cover designs with Eric Quigley's art made this post garner the most pluses of the year.
"Old Soldier": The lives and wars of Hannibal Tecumseh Early in the Strange Stars.
"In the Days of the Archaic Oikumene": Strange days, indeed. One of the "picture and description" posts that I did a lot in the early days with Weird Adventures, but this is the only one this year.

Moving away from Strange Stars, my current  "Oz by way of Dunsany and Smith" 5e setting, The Land of Azurth, got a number of posts:

"Witches of Ix": My most popular Azurth post, and I think one of my best.
"Azurthite Bestiary": Manhounds: This beastie was elevated above the others by Jeremy Duncan's great art.

Sometimes, my best (and most popular) posts are unrelated to my current setting obsession:

"Ruritanian Rogues": suggested picaresque adventure in faux Europe. People liked it. Jeremy Duncan has picked up the ball and really run with it.
"Baroque Space": I've made Spelljammer weird before, but this post gives it an age of sail and filigreed plate armor spacesuit weirdness.. More posts to come in this series, but this was the first.
"The Finer Points of Inner Planar Adventuring": Are the elemental planes boring? Not if you do something interesting with them.
"A Traveller's Life": Inspired by the Dumarest saga by E.C. Tubb, ideas about how you could run an interesting sci-fi game without FTL and limited to relativistic speeds.