Azurth in North Texas

I'll be running a session of Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak at North Texas RPG Con in June. This will be the first time I've run the adventure as written (the game session it was based on was a bit different). I'll be using pregens like character portraits (hopefully) done by Jeff Call whose doing the interior art for the module. Anyway, here's the pitch:

Game Title : Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak
Game System : D&D 5e
Number of players : 4-6
Pregens/Level of characters : yes / 3rd-5th

Game Info : After turning himself into a manticore, the self-styled wizard-artiste Mortzengersturm moved to the crystalline peak of Mount Geegaw to practice his transformation magic without interference. You've been hired to snatch his most prized artifact, the Whim-Wham Stone--or at least some of its eldritch light. A menagerie of magical hybrids, a self-absorbed vampire, more than a few hippogriffs, and of course, the mad manticore himself, await.

I'm not the only Hydra Co-op member running a game at the Con. Chris Kutalik is doing Misty Isles of the Eld on Friday. Hydra will also have a booth to move our wares and give away some swag.

It's been a great con the past two years, and I'm looking forward to it this year.

Wednesday Comics: The People of the Desert (part 2)

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The People of the Desert (1979) (part 2)
(Dutch: Het Volk van de Woestijn; Alternate English title: The People of the Plains)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

Hanyin and his goon reveal that the Directors of the United Cities plan for the "white people" (or Desert People) to be hypno slaves used to construct the new settlements for them. Hanyin figures they can delay the Prof and use the hypno slaves to empty the cortite mines before then. The Prof, hearing all this via surveillance, is none too happy that his new race will be slaves.

Meanwhile, Ember wakes up and manages to escape thanks to a drunken would-be rapist. She forces him at gun point to take her to Storm. On their way up in the elevator tube, Hanyin sees them and realizes something is up. He shoots the controls and causes the elevator to stop.

Ember won't be detered. She forces the guard to climb out through the elevator's roof and:

They make it to the top, but they're met by the Boss Hanyin. Ember tries to use the guard as a shield, but the Boss just shoots him. Still, Ember is faster:

Ember makes her way into the mines and locates Storm, but a guard gets the drop on her. He's about to put a hypno spot on her. Then, Storm turns and fires his laser drill at the guards back!

Ember runs to him, but his blank expression and stiff movements show he's still being controlled. He picks her up and carries her to a heli-jet. The Prof watches them approach on his viewscreen.

TO BE CONTINUED

Mortzengersturm's Menagerie

Here are some of Mortzengersturm's creations that appear in his menagerie in the upcoming Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak:

Parrotbear: A bear covered in downy, green feathers with parrot’s head. It will mimic short phrases spoken to it.

Iron Shrike: An eagle-sized bird of prey made of metal. His crest and wings are sharp as knives.

Ink Dog: A sepia dog, technically, but Mortzengersturm has never been one for pedantry so far as his art is concerned. The creature resembles a messy, living sketch of a large fox made entirely of brown ink. As it moves, it throws off squiggles and errant marks in the air behind it to fall to the ground in drips. Its bite leaves tattoos.

Mocka: This attempt to cross a naga with a clown triggered even Mortzengersturm’s coulrophobia in the end. It giggles and mugs, and sways and bounces like a jack-in-the-box unboxed, eager to bring laughter and joy. Or something.

Moonster: A glowing spherical creature resembling the moon with a face: a bemused smile under half-lidded eyes. The Moonster is a narrator—and an annoying one. It will narrate the actions of anyone that enters the shaft in a somewhat florid diction, but with an ironic distance. It knows the past of the subject of its narration with certainty; its predictions for the future are only speculation, no matter how assured their delivery.

Salvage on Gogmagog

Here's an excerpt from Strange Stars OSR with new art by David Lewis Johnson. Okay, the excerpt's repeated, but the art is new!

GOGMAGOG
(Strange Stars Setting Book p. 9)
Tags  Desert World, Local Specialty
Enemies Crazy bot-breaker Haxo Ysgar; Robber gang
Friends Merc Faizura Deyr working for the bot-breakers, A free trader supplying bot-breakers
Compl.Von Neumann machine swarm, Malfunctioning giant robot
Things Hidden entrance to the mysterious planetary substructure, A forgotten ancient giant bot
Places a shanty town; a junkyard

In the Twilight

At least ten empires rose and fell during the Meridian of Earth. Each was glorious and wrested such secrets from the universe as to enable it to bend laws of nature obdurate to earlier cultures to its whim. Each in time fell into decadence, dwindled, and died, but at the end of the Meridian Time, the Earth had been transformed by their works; it had become the abode of beings other than Man.

As the Twilight fell and the sun grew bloated and sanguine, those Outsiders and abhuman things encroached ever closer on the nations of Man. By and by, they gained greater dominion over the Earth. In the early centuries, the technologies of the elder Meridian still functioned, and Man comprehended enough to build great walls as a defense against the inhuman. As Twilight deepened, many of these redoubts fell, but a few stood fast and managed even to throw back their foe. The Coming Night was held in abeyance for so long that generations passed and many began to doubt it would ever fall.

But beyond the walls, the Great Beasts crouched and waited with patience inhuman but not infinity, and abhuman armies gathered in the deepening in gloom...

Here's the pitch: Take the early modern bleakness, occasional black humor, and body-warping chaos of Warhammer Fantasy and put it in a Dying Earth gone weird like Hodgson's The Night Land, making sure to filter the Watchers (Great Beasts in this case) through Lovecraftiania, a hint of kaiju, and good old fashion goetic demonology. Wrap it all in "points of light" surrounded by walls out of Attack on Titan.

Six Mysteries in Azurth

While I "built in" some mysterious background elements in the Land of Azurth setting, more have emerged in the year and a half of play. Here are some of the questions the player's have been left to ponder--and possibly follow up on in the future:

1. Who is the man in the metal suit beneath Castle Machina?  The name "Lum" was thrown around, and Mirabilis Lum is said to have disappeared beneath the castle, but is the man in the metal suit him, who was he gaming with, and why does he stay down there?

2. What does Calico Bonny look like? The Queen of the Floating World of Rivertown tends to hide behind a folding screen if she bothers appearing at all. Is there a reason?

3. Who were the builders of the Cloud Castle? The scale of the castle indicates they most have been near giants, though the ancient images suggest they looked something like the Cloud People that live there now. Who were these people with a flare for Googie architecture and mid-Century design and what happened to them?

4. What does the projector do? The Princess Viola says it can open a portal to another world once it is fixed, but what world? And who built it?

5. Where does the magic portal in Mortzengersturm's mansion lead? The frox thief Waylon saw an image of another world: people in unusual clothes in an impressive city, beyond the technology of the Land of Azurth. Where (or when) was this place and why did Mortzengersturm have a portal to it?

6. What was the deal with Mr. Pumpkin and his carnival? Since when can a swarm of rats manage a carnival, and what became of all those rats that got away when the carnival got destroyed? Do these events have anything to do with the giant rats seen later in the beer cellar of the Silver Dragon Tavern in town?

Wednesday Comics: Storm: People of the Desert

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The People of the Desert (1979)
(Dutch: Het Volk van de Woestijn; Alternate English title: The People of the Plains)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

Storm and Ember stumble through a salt flat desert that was once a sea bottom. Ember soon passes out from heat and exhaustion, but Storm manages to carry her to the shelter of an ancient coral reef. despite an attack by vultures sensing their weakness. Finding shade and fresh water, the two rest until the hear someone:

The oddly white-skinned stranger collapses. They notice he has a red circle on his forehead. They are about to get the man water when:

One of the men fires a gun that places another red disk on the man's forehead. When Storm tries to remove if, he gets a strong shock. The disk seems to place the man under the control of the two strangers. Under their command, he stands then easily overpowers Storm knocking him out with a chop to the neck. Storm and Ember are taken prisoner.

On the March to their camp, one of the men explains what's going on. The United Cities want to colonize the salt desert, so they commissioned "the Prof" to engineer a race of people capable of living and toiling there. This guy and his crew raid the tribes at the edge of the desert to supply test subjects. The place a "hyno" on them to get them under control. He plans to turn Storm over to the Prof and give Ember to "the Boss," who he thinks will like her.

Later, in the raiders' cave base, the Boss, Hanyin¹, is indeed impressed with Ember's beauty; Ember's response to his advances is predictable:

Storm wakes up and manages to get a knife to Hinyan's throat. One of the raider's fires a hypno at Storm, however, and he is quickly under their control. Ember tries to remove it and is shocked to unconsciousness. Hinyan has her thrown in a cell to await his return.  He gets a message the Prof wants to see him.

Hinyan takes a glass tube elevator to the Prof's lab. The Prof's experiments to perfect homo incultus--the desert people--are almost done. He only needs one more batch of test subjects. Hinyan doesn't want it to be the last one; there's still a lot of work to do in the cortite mines. The Prof is adamant, however, He only worked with Hinyan and his crew and put the desert people to mining to fund his research. Now he's close to a solution to the cities' overpopulation.

Hinyan isn't happy about any of this. He takes the elevator to his heli-jet and heads over to the mines. Storm is at work there beside the mind controlled desert people. Hinyan tells his confederate about the Prof's orders. They begin to plot on how to insure the mines stay open--unaware that the Prof has them under surveillance.

TO BE CONTINUED

Notes:
1. "Banjo" in the original Dutch.