Wednesday Comics: Multiversal Spotlight: Earth-10

Earth-10
Concept: Earth where the Axis Powers (or at least Germany) won World War II
Pictured: (left to right) New Reichsmen: Leatherwing, Blitzen, Brünhilde, Overman; Freedom Fighters: Human Bomb, Phantom Lady, Uncle Sam.
Sources: The Multiversity: Mastermen #1 , Justice League of America (vol 1) #107-108, Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1-2, Countdown to Adventure #2 and Countdown to Final Crisis #16.
Analogs: Pre-Crisis Earth X, home to the Freedom Fighters, a group of characters originally appearing in Quality Comics) first appearing in  Justice League of America (vol. 1) #107 (October 1973); Post-52 Earth-10, home to a version of the Freedom Fighters and a Nazi-themed version of the Justice League, die Gerechtigkeitsliga or JL-Axis,  first appearing in 52 Week 52 (May 2007).
Comments: Earth X (the letter, not the roman numeral) first appeared in a Justice League/Justice Society team-up story in 1973. It was a world where Germany had won World War II and the "freedom fighters" against the Nazi regime were a group of characters DC had acquired from Quality Comics in 1956. (A couple of other Quality characters--Plastic Man and the Blackhawks--had already debut in the DCU and were not included in the Freedom Fighters.) The heroes from Earth One and Two helped the Freedom Fighters overthrow the fascists. In 1976, the Freedom Fighters got their own short-lived title after they immigrated to Earth One.

In the 1980s in the pages of All-Star Squadron, Roy Thomas retconned the members of the Freedom Fighters to have been from Earth-Two but had them go to Earth X later. Roy Thomas also introduced World War II Nazi counterparts of at least some of the members of the Justice League in the pages of Young All-Stars in 1987. It's unclear if Axis Amerika served as an inspiration for Earth-10's Nazi League in either the JL-Axis or New Reichsmen iterations.

Alternate Worldcrawl

One of the complaints against the standard D&D Planes is that, while conceptually interesting perhaps, its hard to know what to do with them as adventuring sites. One solution would be to borrow a page from science fiction and comic books and replace them with a mutliverse of alternate worlds. These would be easy to use for adventuring purposes and could put an additional genre spin on the proceedings. Here are a few examples:

Anti-World: An alignment reversed version of the campaign setting. Perhaps humanoids are in ascendance and human and demihumans are marauding killers living underground.

Dark Sun World: In this world, the setting underwent a magical cataclysm in the past and is now a desert  beneath a dying sun.

Lycanthropia: The world is cloaked in eternal night and lycanthrope has spread to most of the population.

Modern World: This version has a technology level equal to our own (or at least the 1970s) and the PCs have counterparts who play adventurers in some sort of game.

Spelljammer World: A crashed spacecraft led to a magictech revolution and space colonization.

Western World: Try a little sixguns and sorcery and replace standard setting trappings with something more like the Old West.

Ships in the Strange Stars

Art by Peter Elson

Alliance Fleet
Military ships in the Alliance are based and maintained in one member world or another.

Smaragdine registered Alliance ships: Frumious Bandersnatch, Chemosit, Blatant Beast, Coeurl, Peryton, Lurking Grue, Basilisk, Owlbear.

Neshekk registered Alliance ships: Binding Arbitration, Creditor, External Audit, Accounts Payable, Devaluation, Termination with Prejudice, Constructive Dismissal.

(And let's not forget the dread neshekk privateer vessel Crimson Permanent Assurance)

Art by Bob Layzell

Vokun Fleet
All Vokun ships save more the most minor custom vessels or intersystem shuttles are controlled by the Vokun themselves. Their names reflect their bellicose and imperialist culture.

Sample ship names: Martial Prowess, Indomitable, Destroyer of Worlds, Conqueror, Inevitable Victory, Imperious Will, Unchallenged Might.

Meanwhile, in the Land of Azurth...

The Land of Azurth has gotten a lot of time here on the blog lately with Strange Stars getting released and my last gaming session getting canceled (Mainly because I was out of town and totally forgot it, but we'll stick with "cancelled.")

Anyway, Renee Calvert has turned out some more custom paper minis for my game, this time the PCs' current antagonists, the Baleful Burly Brothers, Goofus and M'Gog.

Hyperspace Travel Times

As discussed before, the travel times between nodes along the hyperspatial network of the Archaics is color-coded to denote connection speed. While the actual travel times can be determined through the use of advanced physics even an ibglibdishpan mathematician might need the aid of a calculation device to perform, approximations for gaming purposes are fairly easy.

The basic formula is:  [color modifier] x [distance modifier] in kiloseconds.

Color Modifiers:
Red = 18
Orange = 45
Yellow = 100
Green = 450
Blue = 900
Indigo = 4500
Violet = 6750

Distance Modifiers:
very short = 1
short = 2
medium = 3
long = 4
very long = 5

Vague other variables may make the color modifier vary by 1d6 kiloseconds.

Wednesday Comics: Multiversal Spotlight: Earth-39

Earth-39
Apparent Concept: Earth T.H.U.N.D.E.R agents.
Pictured: (left to right) Accelerator (Lightning analog), Psi-Man (Menthor analog), Cyclotron (Dynamo analog), Corvus (Raven analog), Doctor Nemo (NoMan analog).
Sources: Tower Comics's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (1965-1969), DC Comics's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (2011-2012) .
Analog: None in previous versions of the DC Multiverse.

Comments: The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents were a creation of Wally Wood and Len Brown who wanted to combine the Justice League style superhero team with popular spy-fi like The Man from UNCLE and James Bond. All of the agents derived there powers from some device (an element Morrison has retained for his stand-ins). The characters have been published by a number of companies since their debut in the 60s. DC first attempted to publish them and perhaps add them to the DC Multiverse in the early 2000s, but things didn't come together until 2011. DC introduced a black Lightning (not to be confused with Black Lightning) into what had been an all white group and Morrison retained that element with his Agents of W.O.N.D.E.R.

Majestrum

Henggis Hapthorn, foremost discriminator (detective) of Old Earth in the far future time of the Archonate, has a problem. Well, perhaps a series of problems. First, there are his cases that may have something to do with a plot to overthrow the government, but perhaps even more troubling is the impending return of a time where "sympathetic association" (i.e. magic) is ascendant over scientific rationality. This problem has been made peculiarly personal for Hapthorn as he shares his brain with another persona, born the magically separated intuitive part of his psyche, and his integrator (a personal AI device) has been turned into a cat-monkey creature familiar. As one might expect, Hapthorn's personal woes and his case are not as separate as they might seem, and he will have to confront further magical forces.

The return of a time where magic works is familiar from games like Shadowrun and Rifts, and even kid's cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian and Visionaries, but what none of those have is the placement of an ultra-logical, far future Ellery Queen, trying to oppose the coming paradigm shift, which has become a fairly personal affront.

Hughes's universe and his writing style are in a Jack Vance mode. His setting of the Archonate and the Spray resembles Vance's Oikumene and Gaean Reach. It makes his Hapthorn tales something like if Magnus Ridolph or Miro Hetzel was confronting the dawning of the Dying Earth. There is plenty of stuff to borrow for a Vancian science fiction game, or inspiration for a whole setting.

Majestrum is the first Hapthorn novel (though based on how it opens, I suspect some short-stories predate it). There are three others and a short-story collection, all pretty cheap for Kindle.