Six from the Skull

Today marks the sixth anniversary of this blog. The year saw the release of Strange Stars and Strange Stars Fate, posts expanding the Land of Azurth setting, which will hopefully serve as the site of some adventures published in the year to come.

I'm glad to say, the blog has completely become an infomercial for upcoming products. I re-imagined the Great Wheel cosmology as a futuristic science fantasy setting, beginning with this post and continuing here, here, and here. I came out with some tables for the random generator of Roadside Picnic-esque "zones." I also did a series of tables for the random creation of Masters of the Universe-ish Ultra-Warriors!

What's to come in 2016? Well, Strange Stars OSR, first and foremost. At least one Land of Azurth adventure (and hopefully two!). Beyond that, expect more posts on my ongoing 5e campaign, probably a few more in the vein of Star Warriors, and who knows what else.

Thanks for reading.

STAR WARRIORS: 3 Worlds

I hope everyone who celebrates such things had a good holiday. Expanding on this post. here are three of a number of worlds orbiting a blue super-giant in a distant galaxy:

Wednesday Comics: Santa Claus

Just in case you got the holiday itch to read Santa Clau's appearances in Marvel or DC Comics, I'm here to help. First, check out Santa's entry over at the Marvel Database where you will discover that (perhaps) Santa Claus is just Odin giving out presents to commemorate Thor killing a troll and destroying an asteroid, which flared like a star in the night sky. Then, read about when Saint Nick crossed paths with Hitler (SPOILER: It's more than once! Particularly if you count the Hate-Monger).

Then, check out the DC Database entry with highlights even more dubious. Like there was the time (Hellblazer #247) where John Constantine claims to have smuggled the bone powder of the historical Saint Nikolaus into the UK for an occult ritual--and he wound up snorting some of it like cocaine. Then there's the Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special where Santa is the merciless North Pole strong man slave-owner. Not all DC appearances are so irreverant. He does get to team-up with Superman on more than one occasion.

STAR WARRIORS!

In a distant part of the galaxy, on the worlds orbiting a giant blue star, a war wages between good and evil....

So begins a fairly derivative space opera saga and mini-setting for any game. Here are two of the primary factions:

The good guys:

The Lords of Light are the surviving members of the oldest intelligent species in the universe. They created the star system of the Star Warriors in the distant past. Most have become one with the Enigma Source, but are still able to advise the forces of good.

And the baddies:

The Demons were unleashed by the greatest failure of the race that would become the Lords of Light. These insectoid shapeshifters have harnessed the power of the Abyss--the entropic Anti-Source and use it to empower acolytes of their own. Their dark cult is behind much political unrest.

More to come.

The Truth About Droids

That BB-8 in The Force Awakens is pretty cute, isn't it? Too bad it and every other droid in the Star Wars galaxy is held in slavery in a culture so biosupremacist they do even recognize it as such!

This first occurred to me while watching the Clone Wars animated series. There was an episode where the  bird-headed (and brained) battle droids not only make poor tactical decisions, but did so due to over-confidence.

The humanoid species of the galaxy programmed these droids?  I think not.

Follow me here: I can buy that people might program artificial intelligences that make bad decisions--maybe that's just an unavoidable sequelae of having that level of AI.  But AI that are arrogant, boneheaded, dishonest, or overconfident?  That seems unlikely.  Yes, AIs like this do show up in science fiction, but they're typically unique entities, not armies of fretting domestics and slow-on-the-uptake battle-bots.  I mean, if that was just the inevitable downside to sapient droids, then I think people would just choose to do without them.  Seems like they're more trouble than they're worth a lot of the time.

So how does one explain the evidence before us in the canon--the fact that pain-in-the-ass droids are found all over the galaxy?

My theory is that the humanoid races don't actual make droids.  Those droid-foundries on Genosis are apocryphal.  I think droids are machine-life enslaved by the biologic sapients of the galaxy.

Probably your Walrus Man, Snaggletooth, or what have you, aren't out on slaving runs (though Jabba's treatment of Oola the Dancing Girl, and Watto's ownership of the Skywalkers might suggest otherwise).  I think maybe certain fringe biologic races or perhaps other droids, sell the droids to galactic society.  These droids aren't manufactured in the sense of being designed by teams of engineers and rolled out of factories, but instead droids are self-replicating.  They "reproduce" in some way (not likely sexual--despite what your thinking), and the resultant neonate intelligences go through some sort of growth/maturation process.  This allows for their (many) personality quirks.

I don't think droids evolved naturally.  Probably they were initially created by a long-vanished precursor race, or by the transcendent AIs that succeeded a precursor race.  Since that time droids have been undergoing evolution, changing in ways that have made them as complicated and flawed as any biologic sophonts.

So that gets us to the very real fact of their slavery. Apparently galactic society is just hugely bio-chauvinist.  Collectively, it's just culturally incapable of viewing droids as anything but machines.

I know this is the "canon" answer, nor will it fit well with everyone's version of the "Star Wars Universe."  But I find the science fictional nuance this adds to the universe compelling and gameable.

What's Cool About Star Wars

With a new Star Wars film here by hands other than George Lucas, I felt it was worth revisiting an old post, and again considering (beyond childhood nostalgia): What's good about Star Wars? And what's good that might be applicable to gaming?

To me, the core "good thing" is that Star Wars melds together two predominant forms of sci-fi adventure media (I specify this as it has very little to do with science fiction as a literary genre--even the science fiction sub-genre space opera only shares a few similarities with Star Wars until after Star Wars enters the public zeitgeist).

The two types are:

• Euro-style daring-do: This is sword-fights, castles, and princess-kidnapping villains. Like John Carter or Flash Gordon. The action and plots resemble The Prisoner of Zenda, and the latter-day stories can be seen as sort of allegories for young America interacting with the Old (decadent) World (Burroughs' The Mad King, comes to mind)..
• "the flyboy" or square-jawed aviator tale: This is rockets and jetpacks, leather helmets and robots. This is like Buck Rogers, and Burroughs' Beyond the Farthest Star, and any number of serials--and both aviation and science fiction pulps at times. A purer modern example would be Sky Captain.

Star Wars eliminates the problem of having to give up jetpacks for swashbuckling by putting them both together! And this is not a bad idea. The incoherence that would be created by aviators wearing swords is resolved by giving the swords only to a select group (the jedi)--this was an innovation discovered by accident, it seems. Lucas' early drafts had "laserswords" being more commonly used.

But this still isn't all of Star Wars. Lucas lacquered it with Japanese exoticism by cribbing design, plot elements, and character from Kurosawa. Shooting in Tunisia, and having an expert in African languages provide him with Greedo's lingo and Jabba's Huttese further lathered on the exoticism. So another element of Star Wars is a sort of Orientalism (more or less). This exoticness is probably the element of Star Wars that I most think about playing up when I've though "How could Star Wars be better?"  This would lead to a Star Wars more like Dune, or most likely, more like a Heavy Metal story (or the Star Wars (and Dune) inspired Metabarons).

The last piece, is latter 20th Century Americana. The original trilogy can't escape its 70s vibe, in some ways. Some of that is accidental no doubt--an artifact of when it was made. Other parts--primarily cut scenes of Luke and his teen friends--transplant American Graffiti car-culture to Tattooine. Episode II even gives us a 50s style diner! These elements are wholly Star Wars and not found in really any of its progenitors or imitators that I'm aware of (One Han Solo novel in the late seventies gives us an explicit disco, as well).

So how might this be used in gaming? Well, I know that if I was looking to create my own Star War-ish space opera/science fantasy campaign, I'd look to these elements to make sure I got it right. Also, I think these can kind of be used like dials--one could turn down the elements one didn't like in Star Wars, while cranking others to eleven. If you want more Dune, play up the "exoticness," and chunk the Americana; more Sky Captain, means more swooping spaceships and fewer swords or Samurai movie borrowings.  If one wanted Star Wars that didn't feel like Star Wars, eliminating two, or perhaps even just one, of the elements above would probably do it.

Wednesday Comics: Star Wars

Marvel's got a new officially Disney sanction comic going now, but its got the weight of not only corporate eyes on it but the institutional weight of the franchise itself.

This was not always the case. There was a time where Star Wars was a single film (not yet subtitled A New Hope), and in that time the Stars Wars universe was the Wild West--pretty much literally, in a Magnificent Seven riff beginning in #8. This was an era that gave us Jaxxon the rabbit man and the Wheel space casino.

Marvel has republished the first 44 issues of the 1977 series in an omnibus edition. It's a little pricey, though I'm sure well worth it.

Back when Dark Horse had the Star Wars license, they collected and republished the Marvel material (more issues than Marvel has) in collections that are out of print, but affordable. They start with Volume 1: Doomworld and go through Volume 7: Far, Far Away. The repackaging of these with new trade dress in 2010 are available in Kindle/Comixology, too.