Frankenstein Reprise

Halloween approaches. Cue up the Edgar Winter track and revisit a couple of classic posts about the modern Prometheus. From 2010, here's "Famous Monsters: Frankenstein." Make it a double feature with 2012's "New Flavors of Frankenstein." (And you thought it he only came in green!)

The Cloud Castle of Azurth

This is a map of the Cloud Castle of Azurth and its environs by Arlin Ortiz. Here are some points of interest:

The Vitrified Forest, where lives a man with a very fancy hat.
The Terrarium, giant-sized, as is everything in it.
The Tower. where Zykloon, the Tornado Tyrant dwells.
The Air Docks, where visitors once arrived to see the sights.
The Lair of the Cloud Dragon, perhaps not forlorn, but lonely.
A Cosmic Cat, curled upon a fallen star.

Horror Comic Name Generator

Since the days of EC, horror comic names often have a certain ring to them. Use this hand generator to create your own just in time for Halloween!

Apply rolls on the table to the following patterns to generate titles:

[B] of [C]
[A][B]
[A][C]
[A][B] of [C]
[A][B] of [A][C]
[C] of the [A][B]

Over There

Take the fairyland across the border of Lud-in-the-Mist or A Fall of Stardust. In between it and the "real world" there is a wall or barrier-- let's say an "Anti-Alien Protection Rampart" in official terminology. Instead of England on the real world side there's East Berlin and the GDR or some sutble Eastern Bloc stand-in. Drüben indeed,

While "Workers of the World, Unite Against the Faerie!" would be interesting enough, recasting the fairy presence with some Zone phenomena-like details out of Roadside Picnic and a bit of the seductiveness of the Festival from Singularity Sky: "Entertain us and we will give you want you want." Faerie should be weird and horrifying but also weird and wondrous--in a horrific way, naturally. Miracles, wonders, and abominations.

Of course, the authorities don't want anybody having interaction with the faerie, much less smuggling in their reality-warping, magical tech--and maybe they have a point. But if PCs did the smart thing they wouldn't be adventurers, would they?

New Land of Azurth Rumors

Another edition of The Public Observator for my home groups adventuring needs as our Land of Azurth campaign prepares to enter its second year.

Campaign Rumor Report Card

Eleven months ago, I presented a list of rumors for adventure fodder for the players from an in campaign broadsheet called The Public Observator. I thought it would be a good time to check back and see how many of those things the PCs have delved into.

They first bit on the investigation of the Enchanted Wood. It turns about things were pretty much as rumored: There was a group of wealthy pleasure-seekers paying  Ursa the Witch o' the Woods to turn them into manhounds. The PCs put an end to that.

Next, their patron, Mayor Gladhand, asked them to look into the Lardafan ambassadors disappearance. He was indeed in the Floating World and being held by the Burly Brothers and their gang.In the end, the ambassador was rescued and the Burly Brothers met their demise.

After that, the party's curiosity was piqued by a mysterious device they found. This led them to ask the Clockwork Princess for help. They undertook a mission to get light from a magic crystal in possession of a manticore mage named Mortzengersturm. He wound up being more than a bit homcidal, so the party had to kill him and take the stone--or at least the light from it.

On the way back home, they were waylaid by a cloud giant wizard named Zykloon. He had the Cloud Folk under his thumb and was making them raid the surface world for him. The truth behind another rumor was discovered.

So that pretty much gets us up to the present day. Of the original rumors, only the doings in the Kingdom of the Bee Folk have yet to be investigated. Not too bad.

Strange Stars Setting Assumptions

Art by John Berkley

There are a set of underlying premises to the Strange Stars setting which might affect the play of the game. My assumptions don’t have hold true in your version of Strange Stars, but it is probably helpful to consider how the pieces might interact before rejecting things.

Post-Apocalyptic. The technology level of civilization in the past was higher than today. This provides the rationale for some “sufficiently advanced” Clark level technology, the “points of light” nature of civilization, and also for lost world exploration and space scavenging.

Big But Bounded, and Subdivided. Strange Stars exists within one galaxy--and only a relatively small part of that one, but still there’s plenty of room for new clades, cultures, even minor empires to be introduced without much disruption. The use of hyperspace means that there are “clusters” that can serve as smaller sandboxes if the whole area is too daunting. The game can be as focused as a single world or station.

Harder than Average. While Strange Stars is in no sense a “hard science fiction setting,” there are a number of details I tried to keep “semi-hard” and realistic. Earthlike worlds are most often the result of engineering and there are seldom multiple earth-like planets in a system. Most people will live in orbital habitats. FTL exists but works in such a way that it couldn’t violate causality. There are very few “single biome” planets, and those there are tend to have an explanation for why they exist. The aliens aren't very alien, but that’s because they’re most likely the descendants of humans or human creations.

Intersystem, Fast. Intrasystem, Slow. Related to the last point is the way FTL works. Hyperspace nodes tend to go to one place in a system (and may well dump out somewhere other than directly at the planet of interest). In system travel is most likely non-FTL and takes a while. This allows both zipping around the galaxy (at least a part of it) and “realistic” distribution of clades, but with a hard science fiction scale to a solar system, allowing the full array of grizzled asteroid prospectors, fringe religious communities on gas giant moons, or isolated research bases. The planets highlighted in the setting book are just the “major feature” of their respective systems, not the whole story. Of course, the way space travel works also has implications for how and where space battles are fought.

A Post-Internet Conception. Most classic space opera doesn’t take into account the internet in general, much less ubiquitous social media, but these things are present in Strange Stars. As a rule of thumb, imagining “how would that work in the Strange Stars?” involves more extrapolation from the present that looking back to how it was done in Star Wars or Star Trek.

There’s Always Belief. The future doesn’t mean belief systems go away. The best of space opera (Dune, for instance) deals with this, but it was something I didn’t want to leave out or to portray one-dimensionally. From the arbitrary taboos of the Kosmoniks to the realpolitik theocracy of the Instrumentality, it’s an important part of what makes cultures in the setting distinct.