Weird Krypton

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Krypton.

Superman's home planet is pretty weird. Weird enough that it makes a good substitute for Carcosa in McKinney's supplement. You can keep the polychromatic humanity (that might explain the Krytonian flag). Then, check out the maps of Krypton for places to visit:

The highlights there ought to be pretty obvious, but let me fill in a couple of salient points of adventure and/or danger:

Jewel Mountains: Formed by the accumulated carcasses of prehistoric, giant crystal birds.
Gold Volcano: It should be mentioned that gold is so common on Krypton as to not be particularly valuable.
Fire Falls: A fall of a fiery fluid from the planets core, inhabited by mutant fish-snakes whose bite is poisonous.
Scarlet Jungle: An expanse of forest in red and purple, including huge maroon mushroom-like growth. It home to at least some disease-causing spores. Then,  of course, there's the herd migratory, vaguely humanoid-shaped plants.

Azurthite Bestiary: The Face of the Deodand

In previous posts, I've mentioned the three species of deadly deodands in Subazurth beneath the Land of Azurth proper. Now, you, the reading public, can see what these horrible creatures look like from the safety and comfort of your own home. I commissioned artist Matthew Adams to render the deodands from the descriptions of first hand accounts. Here is the startling and slimy Gleimous Deodand for your education and wonder:

Marlinko Fever

Colorful, eccentric cities are a fantasy staple: Lankhmar, Viriconium, and New Crobuzon, are characters as distinct (or intriguingly ambiguous) as any humans in their respective stories, perhaps more so. While gaming has given us a lot of place names to hang our on imaginings on or perhaps tools to use to apply to creating these sorts of places, it has given us very few of actually places. (Modesty forbids me from mentioning the City of Weird Adventures. Wait. No it didn't.) Whatever size you think that pantheon is, you can now add Marlinko to it.

I'm listed in the credits of Chris Kutalik's Fever-Dreaming Marlinko in recognition of my haphazard punctuation hectoring of the product in its various stages, and I am a partner in the secretive Hydra Collective, so I'm biased--but also well-positioned to tell you what's good in this thing that was only meant to be a stretch goal for another product's Kickstarter and has now grown to comparable length and scope.

First off, Marlinko has the Slavic spice (They exist. Look it up!) flavoring the stew of Vance and Leiber and Chris's own fine sense of the absurd that informs the Hill Cantons setting in general. This isn't just Appendix N with a twist, though. Each of the contradas (quarters/neighborhoods) are detailed briefly enough so as not to wear out their welcome, but in-depth enough to make them seem like distinct places. Each has its own traditions, history, and possibly even deities, described in a manner I would call Glorantha for the old school oriented, meaning enough detail to show that genuine care was put into it, but enough humor to show no one is taking it too seriously--and always with an eye toward gameability.

Then, there are NPCs and locations. Rogues and scoundrels, all (or at least mostly)--some of whom seem like they have more story than what you are given. That's another important point, here: Marlinko is lived in. It didn't spring fully formed from Chris's brow, but rather it's been used and abused by the Nefarious Nine, the PCs of the ongoing Hill Cantons Google+ Experience.

The presentation of Marlinko puts it above some old school city books too (I know. Heresy!) Jeremy Duncan's and Jason Sholtis's work is put to perfect use with subjects ideal for their styles. Luka Rejec's maps make me feel like I need to throw money at him to get him to draw maps for some project of mine. I mean, look at this:

Then there are a lot of fun generators: news, tiger-wrestling, carousing. I'm not so big on those things, but they're fun to read. Some of them were polished or designed by Robert Parker, who is a man who I sometimes think believes the gaming is in the subgaming, so the love is there.

Anyway, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko is available where all fine Hydra products are sold.

Wednesday Comics: Books on Comics

Lately, I've picked up a couple of books about comics. They're pretty different in tone and content, but both are well-worth checking out.

David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America is concerned with the "Comic Book Panic" of the late 40s-50s, while giving the era context by briefly covering comics' beginnings and the players involved. In fact, Hadju's coverage of this topic is as good as any book on comics history I've read. To it's main concern: If you only know Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent, you don't know even half of the story. While the traditional narrative of comic book fans of artists standing against oppressive moral scolds, their is also more than a little hubris in the tale of publishers and creators pursuing the freedom and the money, heedless of the looming darkness on the horizon.

The League of Regrettable Superheroes by Jon Morris covers some less than stellar moments in comics history from a creative standpoint. The characters are grouped by era, Golden Age through Modern Age. They range from unoriginal (The Fab Four) to really strange (the Eye), with a whole lot of poorly executeds in-between. More than a few of the characters (like ROM) I don't find regrettable at all, while several are perfectly serviceable, except for costumes that have aged poorly. Still, whether you agree with Morris's assessment of these characters or not, his coverage is interesting.

A Manticore Named Mortzengersturm

Last night saw another session in our 5e Land of Azurth game. The players: the sorcerer Kairon (Eric), the dwarf cleric Dagmar (Andrea), the elven ranger Shae (Gina), the bard Cully (Jim), the fighter Erkose (Bob), and Waylon the frox thief (Tug).

Interested in the strange device they found last adventure, the gang ultimately decided to take an illusionary image of it to the Clockwork Princess Viola to help them identify it. There's only so much she can tell without seeing the real thing, but she's able to tell them its a laterna magica of some sort. Finding no other option for discovering its nature, curiosity overcomes caution, and they take the item back to her. Using her devices she determines it is a projector to another plane. It was made using ancient, "wild magic" from the item before the creation of Azurth. It needs a "film" (an image on a piece of glass) to project, and it is currently damaged. Its lens has a small fracture.

There is a way to fix the lens: more wild magic. This that can get from the jewel in possession of the manticore lord of Geegaw Mountain, Mortzengersturm. Mortzengersturm is a wizard exiled by the Princess for his dabblings in wild magic that created many a combined monstrosity like owlbears, ant-lions, and hippogriffs. He dwells now on the Prismatic Peak of Geegaw where his experiments continue. The Princess suggests even the light from his crystal will be enough and loans them a magic hand mirror to capture it.

There's the matter of transport. The Princess also agrees to lend them a swan boat, like these, They find them in a grotto in one of the castle's sublevels. They have to fight a slimy covered creature to get them:

Them they sail the boat down the channel out of the grotto, down a waterfall, then into the sky. After half a days travel (through rain), they stop for a rest, and in the setting sun they can see the rainbow light refracted through the crystalline mountain that is their destination.

Arriving on the flat top of the moutain (like an angled, triangular prism set on one end), they pass through a garden with beds of sunflowers, each with a giant human eye at their center, and arrive at an angular castle guarded by hipogriffs. Through the jewels on the hipogriffs' barding, they are able to converse with Mortzengersturm, who bids them enter.

In a grand audience chamber, a goblin with a trump announces the entrance of a manticore with a monocle and a cigarette holder. Mortzengersturm!

The Mystery Terrarium

I don't mean the sort that might be investigated by Scooby-Doo and the gang, but rather a variant of the mystery sandbox, maybe one where player's don't even know it's a mystery sandbox to begin with. Or (to state in a more player-centric way), a setting where the level of mystery can be dialed up or down as desired.

What got me thinking about this is Wayward Pines wherein what appears to be a place again to the Village (from The Prisoner, I mean), is actually slightly more like the Village from The Village and is in fact [SPOILER] apparently a model 21st century town in a post-apocalyptic future.  So we get a setting where people are living in an artificial society where the reality of the world is hidden to one degree or another. It could just as easily be a faux-Medieval society as opposed to a modern one.

This differs from your standard post-apocalyptic fantasy setting like Tekumel in a few of ways. One, the nature of those settings isn't a secret from the inhabitants. There are details that don't know and things they don't understand, but most of time people are at least partially aware they are in a fallen world. Nor, generally, are there forces actively trying to hide the nature of the world from them. Lastly, the world is artificial to an extent--it was setup to to provide a certain environment and to fool people. It would be as if the quirky societies in the biospheres in The Starlost had been purposely created rather than be accidents of cultural drift. If the world of Anomalous Subsurface Environment were a big, crazy social experiment. Or a human ant farm.

The players' can run around the ant farm, blissfully unaware of their captivity--or they can take on the bigger mystery and try to break out.

It Came From the Trapper Keeper

A blue one, in a plastic cargo crate along with the contents of the Gamma World 3rd Edition box set, Advanced Marvel Super-Heroes character cards, Descent Into the Depths, and The Isle of Dread. I was looking for the G.I. Joe game my friends and I wrote, but instead I would the partial Transformers rpg.

The credits says the writers were myself and my friend, Al. My brother gets a "design consultant" credit. Most of my gaming group are credited as "playtesters", but that must have been aspirational as it was never played, as far as I can recall.

It was partially inspired by Marvel Super-Heroes--it used an action table, though it also seems to have had some sort of "action points" (called "Firepower") possibly borrowed from FASA Star Trek, I haven't compared the charts to know for sure. The abilities were inspired by the Tech Specs on the back of toy packages.