Wednesday Comics: Incredible Shrinking Heroes

Getting ready for Ant-Man this week? Here are a few comics to read to get into the mood for big superhero action in a small scale:

Know nothing about Ant-Man? This collection starts with the original character's first appearance (pre-superhero identity) back in 1962, then takes him through establishing himself as a hero, meeting his wife to be and helping her create a superhero identity, and giving up the ant thing to be a Giant-Man.

The Ant-Man of the film isn't Hank Pym, but Scott Lang. Ant-Man: Scott Lang will get you up to speed on the comic book version of Paul Rudd's character in the movie.

Marvel hasn't cornered the market on shrinking heroes. In fact, DC beat them to it in 1961 with the Atom. (Never mind that Quality's Doll Man had gotten there in 1944.)  Showcase Presents: The Atom vol. 1 chronicles the origin and earliest adventures of Ray Palmer, the Atom.

By the 80s, the shrinking hero just wasn't enough for the jaded fanbase, so Jan Strnad, Pat Roderick, and Gil Kane sent the Atom into a world Burroughsian lost world adventure. This wasn't the first time a hero had gotten to a lost world by shrinking: Ray Cummings had shrank his hero so he could romance the "Girl in the Golden Atom" in 1923, The Incredible Hulk had had a similar romance and adventure in 1971. But Sword of the Atom has guys riding frogs drawn by Gil Kane.

The Moving Pointcrawl

Over at the Hill Cantons blog, Chris has written a lot about the pointcrawl, which abstracts a map to the important points, eliding the empty places/boring stuff a hexcrawl or similar complete mapping would give equal weight. One unusual variation not yet explored is the crawling of moving points.

Admittedly, these would be pretty unusual situations--but unusual situations are the sort of stuff adventures are made from: Exploring a flotilla of ancient airships or the various "worlds" in a titan wizards orrery; Crawling the strange shantytown distributed over the backs of giant, migrating, terrapin. Flitting from tiny world to tiny world in a Little Prince-esque planetary system. Some of these sort of situations might stretch the definition of pointcrawl, admittedly, and to model some of them in any way accurately would require graphing or calculus, and likely both.

Let's take a simple case--something from an adventure I'm working on. Say the wrecks of several ships are trapped in a Sargasso Sea of sorts. The weed is stretchy to a degree, so the wrecks move to a degree with the movement of the ocean, but the never come completely apart.

The assumption (to make it a pointcrawl, rather than just a hexcrawl, where the points of interest move) is that there were pretty much only certain clearer channels a small boat could take through the weed--or maybe certain heavier areas that a person who wasn't too heavy could walk over without sinking in complete.

The map would look something like this:

Note that this map is pretty abstract, despite appearances. The distances or size of the weed patch aren't necessarily to scale with the derelict icons. Length of connecting lines is of course, indicative of relative travel distance. The colors indicate how "stretchy" an area is: blue can move d4, orange d6, and red d8 in feet? yards? tens of feet? Not sure yet. Anyway, whether this drift is closer or farther away would depend on a separate roll of 1d6 where odds equals farther and evens closer. Of course, they can't come any closer than the distance they are away on the map, so any "extra" distance would be a shift to one side or the other.

Zigzags denote a precarious patch, where there would be an increased risk of a sudden thickening (if I'm going with boat travel) or falling in (if I go with walking). Dots will denote an extra wandering monster or unusual event check.

So there are a lot of kinks to work out, but that's the basic idea.

Hyades Plains Drifter

Take McKinney's Carcosa, remove whatever homology to Masters of the Universe is there, replacing it instead with echoes of Bravestarr. For the more literary minded: take out some of the Lovecraft and replace it with elements of King's Dark Tower series. Now you've got a weird western on an alien world.

A Bone Man, probably

Drop those sorcerous rituals that upset some people and replace them with drugs. Now you've got an acid weird western on an alien world. That ought to be enough for any game, but you're a jaded bunch with a decadent palate so don't let the alien thing keep you from borrowing from Forteana related to the America West: tombs of giants, tiny mummies, underground lizard (or snake) men. Thunderbirds. Season to taste with Shaver mystery.

Saddle up, cowboy. Lost Carcosa awaits.

Here Comes the Moon Goon

I've blogged about these guys before--twice in fact. But I've never before had an illustration of their weird villainousness. Now I do, thanks to Matthew Adams.

Moon Goons get their name from their heads or masks, large, round, and faintly luminous like the Moon, and their vile behavior. The Moon Goons avoid the real moon, only striking when it is new. Their spindly, bone-white limbs are animated with odd gestures and faintly aglow despite the lack of moonlight. They are forever mumbling and conversing, but their lips never move and their speech is unintelligible.

Azurthite Bestiary: Heap

Heaps are lumbering creatures most commonly found in the bottomland swamps along the Yellow River in the Country of Yanth, particular in the environs of Lardafa, the Beggar City. They appear as anthropomorphic mounds of plant material, sometimes mixed in garbage.

Though only a few in the Land of Azurth are aware of their origins, Heaps are made when the process of generating a Green Man goes awry, leaving them unconnected to the spirits of nature, and dumb brutes, in the main. Heaps are nevertheless dimly aware of what their mission would have been and at least seem to intend to protect the forests where they dwell, though their means of doing so is not always effective.

Heaps are feared by most folk (and not without some reason),  but Lardafans view them with reverence and augur meaning from their mysterious comings and goings.

HEAP
large plant, neutral
AC 15 (natural armor)
Hit Points: 128 (15d10+45)
Speed: 20 ft.
STR 18(+4) DEX 8(-1) CON 16(+3) INT 8(-1) WIS 11(+0) CHA 7(-2)
Skills  Stealth +2
Damage Resistances bludgeoning, piercing
Condition Immunities blinded, deafened
Senses passive Perception 10.

False Appearance. A heap looks a mound of vegetation if it lies motionless.

Actions:
Multiattack. A heap makes two slam attacks per round.
Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit 13(2d8+4) bludgeoning damage.

Wednesday Comics: The Spire

The Spire #1(July 2015); Written by Simon Spurrier, Art by Jeff Stokely

The Spire is a massive tower city in the middle of the desert of the Nothinglands. It's plagued by ethnic and class divisions and enemies on the outside. It's Baron has just passed away, and on the eve of it's new Baroness's coronation, a series of strange and grisly murders has occurred. There just may be a conspiracy afoot, and Commader Shå of the Watch, a "skew" (a slur for a nonhuman), has to deal with the prejudices of the people around her while trying to catch the murder and reveal the bigger picture.

The Spire (at least the first issue) has a bit of a manga/anime feel (mostly through the art) but the world itself, particularly the ramshackle Spire, its faux-Shakespearean street punks (antiki), and various nonhuman species, reminds me most of works of the New Weird, particularly Mieville's Bas-Lag novels and the Deepgate Codex by Alan Campbell.

It's only the first issue, so it's hard to say where it's going, but it seems like it's going to be well worth finding out.

The Beggar City

art by SkavenZverov

Lardafa, the Shanty City, the Beggar City, lies in the bottomland swamp along the Yellow River in the Country of Yanth. Its sobriquets are mostly accurate. It's buildings, plank and rope thoroughfares, and pubic monuments, are almost are of ramshackle design and built with salvaged or scrounged materials. It's people beg as a vocation, supplemented with "coney-catching," meaning thievery or small confidence games. These activities they practice outside their city, up and down the River.

Lardafans ape the political bureaucracy of other towns and cities, but in truth, this is mainly for propriety's sake. Lardafans look to their families (loose gangs where blood kinship is not required) and informal alliances between them for order and the mediation of disagreements.

This has not always been the case. In the past, Hobo Kings (perhaps Shagrick I the greatest among them) have arisen and set their people on campaigns of mass panhandling and cadging on the roadways around the swamplands, and even on the River itself, causing a great deal of bother to travelers. Such kingships seldom last long, the Lardafans being a people adverse to authority.

Lardafans are masters finding items of value, sometimes very unusual ones in the backwaters of their swamplands. Their stories say that those waters were once a dumping groups for failed experiments by Mirabilis Lum and his associates, but no one knows for sure. It is not advisable to attempt to search the Lardafan's lands without their permission.

The other strange thing found in the swamps are the Heaps, large creatures the Lardafans view with a certain reverence. These beasts or fae-creatures resemble roughly man-shaped, shambling masses of vegetation and detritus. Many stories are told by the folk along the Yellow River about the Heaps: that they've saved lost children, left flowers for pretty maidens, but also that they've drowned hunters, and over-turned skiffs and consumed the occupants. Despite these tales, Lardafans do not hold them to be creatures of menace, if left alone--though they superstitiously view the appearance and activities of Heaps as prophetic. Usually only one is seen at a time and they are seldom heard to make any sound. Lardafans believe they sometimes gather perhaps as many as a half dozen and hold primitive conclaves where they're low howls travel throughout the bottomland.