Storm: The Battle for Earth

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

Storm: The Battle for Earth (1980) (part 5)
(Dutch: De Strijd om de Aarde)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

The saucer holds an Inspector of the Azurian Grand Council. His arrival (plus a timely avalanche) allows Storm and Solon to escape capture--and even comandeer the saucer. For all his failures, the Supervisor will be expected to give an accounting before the Council.

Storm and Solon discover the ship they have us a dimension-ship when they find themselves in another universe--and under attack by a winged, reptilian creatures that live in space. The creatures are about to break into ship, but Solon shifts them again to a watery world. That doesn't turn out so well, either:

They shift a third time, and finally, they're back in the Himalayas. The creature attached to their ship dies. By the time they get back to the monastery, though, the Supervisor and the Inspector have taken off, bound for the Grand Council on Mars--and again taken Ember with them.

On Mars, the Grand Council punishes the Supervisor for so mismanaging things on Earth. It's set to work with other convicts on the dome-vaulted canals. The Grand council plans to correct the Supervisor's mistakes--and the first step in that agenda is dealing with Storm.

They contact Earth and demand Storm come to Mars, otherwise Ember will be killed. Storm agrees, only on the condition that the ship that comes to bring him to Mars will also return Ember to Earth. It's agreed.

TO BE CONTINUED

I Was Going to Stat These Guys for 5e...

...but I was too tired after getting home from NTrpgcon, so "Toast" and "Toast, Burnt" will have to wait. I did not get the Field Guide to Encounters (where those two "monsters" come from), but I did get this other old Judge's Guild stuff from the con: Shield Maidens of Sea Rune and Operation Ogre. The former is part of the Wilderlands, the latter has a fairytalish cover and a modernish title and content that doesn't really match either. In fact, Siembieda draws a completely different sort of ogre on the cover than the interior. I also picked up what a think is the last of the Talislanta books I didn't have, Thystram's Collectanea, and the Role-Aids supplement, Undead.

I demured from Chaosium's Thieves' World Companion and some Japanese D&D modules, mostly due to price--beyond the quite reasonable objection that I wouldn't use them. Not a bad haul, though.

Mortzengersturm at NTrpgcon

Saturday morning I ran a playtest of Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak. It went well, with the player's really diving in and giving the pregens some really funny characterization. And in the case of Billy Longino's Zabra Kadabra, illustration:

Zabra stole Mort's magic items!

Dennis Higgins described Azurth in his first exposure as "Disney meets Adventure Time!" (presumably with the man-eating manticores being a given. Justin "A Field Guide to Doomsday" Davis said he kept imagining it all as a Rankin-Bass stop motion feature. Justin's lips to God's ears!

Kreg Mosier, fellow Hydra Collective member Humza "Legacy of Bieth" Kazmi, and my wife Andrea (who's played this adventure 3 times now1) rounded out the group. It was a good time.

NTrpgcon Day One

James Aulds had this shirt made from my design and it is awesome

North Texas rpg con had an auspicious start for the Hydra Collective with our very first official con booth. All our stuff was selling well as were Jason Sholtis's adventure zines (the exclusive disappeared before I even arrived) and artwork by Jason and Dave Johnson. Positive things were said about Strange Stars by at least one old school luminary, which was gratifying.

Yesterday evening, my wife Andrea and I and a few other Gplussers, including Mike Davison, played in Jason's Operation: Unfathomable game (Andrea's pull quote: "truly unfathomable" (in a good way)). My pregen was a timelost Buck Rogers/Rocketeer type named "Smash" Hannigan so I got to subject the group to my attempt at a rapid-fire, mid-Atlantic accent. It's the little pleasures, you know?

Today, time to hit the dealers room and spend money on things I don't need by must have. I'll be manning the booth this afternoon, so if you're at the con and I haven't met you yet, stop by!

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Battle for Earth

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

Storm: The Battle for Earth (1980) (part 4)
(Dutch: De Strijd om de Aarde)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

It's been months and the Supervisor still hasn't returned Ember. Luckily, Solon remembers (finally) that the Supervisor used to talk about a secret base in the Himalayas. Storm and Solon take off to find it.

With poor visibility in the driving snows, they crash their plan into the mountain. They survive and make their way into a cave only to be set upon by another threat:

They drive the creature away, but the melee led to the collapse of the tunnel entrance. They have no choice but to go deeper into the cave where amazingly, they find a jungle valley.  After being chased by a reptilian monster, they make a raft. The current is strong and they are carried along not to a falls, but to a torrent of water streaming upward! They're carried up it and their raft is smashed on a ledge. From there, they pass through a tunnel and step out again into the snows--with the Azurian Chultu Monastery in sight.

An Azurian patrol has discovered the the wreckage of their plane and informed the Supervisor. He watches Storm and Solon approach with a captive Ember close at hand. Our heroes walk right into a trap.

Suddenly, a strange spaceship appears out of nowhere:

TO BE CONTINUED

X-Men: Apocalypse & Changing Times

I saw X-Men: Apocalypse Friday, and if you liked First Class and Days of Future Past you'll like this one too. A complete aside from the overall point of this post: contrary to many Marvel fanboys and girls I kind of like it that Fox rather than Marvel Studios gets to make X-men movies because (1) the X-men have long been sort of a sub-universe within the comic with their on distinct feel, and (2) if Marvel had had all there characters from the beginning, I don't think we would have seen an Ant-Man or even an Iron Man movie this soon--and we'd probably have Wolverine on the Avengers.

Anyway, one thing about the latest trilogy of x-films is that that are firmly rooted in specific eras of recent history (the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s), even if their evocation of those eras is more akin to Happy Days than Mad Men in accuracy. This is a departure from the Marvel Studios films which are always up to the minute "now" (except flashbacks) and most comic books which are in a strange present, that keeps getting retconned as time moves forward. Stan and Jack may have told us that Reed and Ben fought in World War II but by Byrne's Lost Generation limited in the '90s, they weren't even out of college in the 80s--and now they are probably younger than me.

The reasons for this are understandable, but it doesn't have to be that--in the comics or in your superhero rpg campaign. Maybe most campaigns don't run long enough to see much history pass during them even if you had the sessions take place more or less when they were played, but there's no reason you can't start in the past and skip ahead, playing a certain number of sessions in each era or maybe establishing a "legacy setting" by running a short campaign as "the Justice Society" before moving to the present (or at least a couple of decades) to play their legacies. The setting quickly gets historical depth that means more to the players than backstory the GM just made up.

The Wild Cards books edited by George R.R. Martin are on example of this sort of campaign and Marvel: Lost Generation is another. Both are fairly different, which shows the versatility of the concept. 

Mortzengersturm Playtests

My NTrpgcon of Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak is just 6 days away. This past week there were not one but two playtests of the adventure: one Friday by Jeff Call (whose art will grace the adventure when published) and one by me yesterday with a group of seasoned gamers other than my regular one. Both sessions seem to go really well and will inform some minor tweaks I'm make to the adventure at the con and also to the eventually published thing.

After spending a good bit of time this past week on the pregens, I was curious to see which one the players' picked. Sir Clangor (fighter), Minmaximus the Mighty (dwarf fighter), Wulf Howlen (barbarian), Moonflower (elf ranger), and Brother Mudwort (frogling cleric) were chosen, so both the intelligence-based spellcasters and the thief were eschewed--probably having some implications on how they made to approach problems later.

One interesting thing was how much I forgot! Having written the thing based on an adventure I ran in my regular campaign (almost a year ago now, admittedly) I didn't necessarily prep in the way I might a published adventure (Orr either my desire to adhere to adventure-as-written is stronger with my own stuff! Likely a bit of both.) and so there were so fun (to me) details and NPC bits that fell by the wayside. I didn't really effect the players' enjoyment, obviously.

Another was how things play differently in the context of an ongoing campaign than they do in an isolated adventure. I've tried with the pregens and through the adventure itself to convey the feel of the Land of Azurth, but interacting with the Clockwork Princess of Yanth Country or encountering a bunch of weird creatures with punny names plays differently depending on how much you've run across this stuff before. Again, I don't think that effects player enjoyment, but it gives me something to think about in terms of generizing an adventure enough it can be used most anywhere and without losing the flavor that makes a particular setting (hopefully) interesting, because with an adventure or adventure locale derive from an ongoing campaign, that was part of the alchemy that made it fun.