Cautious Exploration on the Planet of the Apes

"DANGER AT THE PASS" 

Player Characters:
Jeff Call as Brock Irving
Lester B. Portly as Eddy Woodward
Jason Sholtis as Francis La Cava

Nonplayer Characters:
Aurelius
Alfonso Arau as Lope


Synopsis: Irving, Woodward, and La Cava go off on a scouting mission and (thanks to random encounter rolls) find evidence that there is a dangerous predator on the loose.

Commentary: A low action session, but a lot of exploration. Left without a clear goal, the group explored westward into San Augustin Pass. They see evidence of some sort of burrowing monster. Theories as to its nature include land shark, sandworm, and (based on a sighting) some sort of bear thing.

In the end, they see mutants approaching (likely for revenge) who are led by a guy who looks like this:

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve (1983) 
(Dutch: De Piraten van Pandarve) (part 2)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

It turns out the hunter coming at Storm with a polearm isn't trying to attack him but instead carves into the whale and takes a small sphere out of its cranium. He gives it to Storm to eat. Reluctantly, Storm does. At first, he's in pain, but then his consciousness gets expanded and finally:

Despite the fact that Rann thinks Storm is a god, he refuses to take him back to rescue Ember, citing the fact he only saves one person a day. When Storm insists (violently), Rann karate chops him and ties him up. After Storm calms down, Rann explains that this tariev (the whale) means life for his family. He has to get it home first, but he will bring Storm back to the place where he found him after. Storm agrees to help.

They approach the asteroid Kyrte when Rann makes his home. When they seem smoke rising from where his home would be, Rann fears trouble and they cut free the tariev to hurry back, They find his home destroyed. A dying servant tells the two that the house was attacked by pirates from Vertiga Bas. The Lady Rann and some servants fled into a burning crypt, preferring death to capture, but Rann's daughter fell into pirate hands.

Rann prepares to follow his wife into death, but Storm argues they should try to resuce his daughter. Rann is skeptical, but agrees to try.

Meanwhile in the palace of the theocrat, his agents present him with what they found when they went to seek the anomaly. Though the anomaly was gone from the coordinates, they did find Ember. Not knowing their intentions and not speaking the language of Pandarve, Ember fights futilely with the Theocrat's men.

Marduk the Theocrat realizes she might be valuable in luring the anomaly to him:

TO BE CONTINUED

Azurth Indexing

It's mostly been play reports and con game related posts, but a few worldbuilding Azurth posts did occur in 2016, so this is as good as time as any to collate them:

Alchemical Dwarves: An unusual and alien species of Dwarf found in the Country of Sang.
Arthopods from Nowhere: There is a place that the inhabitants call Zrgztl, but you might as well call it Nowhere because it's here and not here all at the same time.
Motley Isles: The islands are known as a haven of pirates who value their freedom above all else, except perhaps the plunder they take from hapless ships.  Vessels that call the Motley Isles their home often fly a distinctive flag: a skull and crossbones emblazoned on a crazy-quilt pattern.
Paper Town: It is generally held that Paper Town (in some sense) occupies space in the Uncanny Valley in the west of the Country of Yanth, but the most reliable way to gain entry to the town is via a fictitious entry on any map...
Shooting Star Folk: A vagabond and rowdy bunch, who are generally not welcomed among the Stars and Planets that comprise polite society of the heavens. They are forever crashing into things, (Planets, Stars, each other) and despite the danger, consider it a great thrill to do so, burning bright and screaming to the void.
Velocipede Gangs: In the eastern plains of the Country of Yanth in the Land of Azurth, there are nomads with an unusual mode of travel.

The Hermetic Manse: Meet Your Ghastley Hosts

A side project I'm (slowly) working on an expansion of a locale in Jason Sholtis's Bewilderlands settings called the Manse Hermetic. Here was part of the brief:

A manor house dominates the only hill on a small island in the middle of the slow-moving Lazybones River, barely visible behind a perpetual bank of heavier-than-normal Bewilderlands haze. A noble family and all their servants, rendered into a hideous undeath millennia ago by a sorcerous curse, carry on as if nothing has happened. 

This brought to mind (intentionally, I'm sure) something like Castle Amber, so first off I decided to make up an eccentric noble family to inhabit the manor.  Here they are:

The Monsters Outside the Circle of the World

Art by Simon Roy

When posthuman intelligences began dismantling planets to build rudimentary Matrioshka brains, the apotheosis refusenik near-human remnant was cast out of their reservations to space habitat redoubts. Most of these continued in the relatively carefree people had lived on the now-recycled worlds, but in a few something went wrong. Sometimes very wrong.

The Weal (as the inhabitants now know it) is one of those places. After war and perhaps a period of utter barbarism, a roughly Medieval technology level society has emerged (amidst the half-functioning remnant of what came before) of androids (though they would think of themselves as "people," thank you): the artificial biologic beings once servants and playthings for the idle human rulers. Being an android has some advantages, not the least of which is the reality of resurrection, if you are attended to by the appropriate authority (i.e. super-user).

These post-human people have developed into tribes that carry some echo of their previous function: the clerics receive wisdom from the old god-machines, the fighters still hold as their sacred duty the protection of the Weal, and the wizards broker deals with spirits and command the various nanomachines and utility fogs gone quiescent or feral after their former masters forgot the eldritch codes to command them.

All these tribes or fraternities wind up battling monsters. Their is only so much space in the Weal, and the people need it. The lower, outer levels are the abodes of creatures once human (altered into strange forms by adaptive and cosmetic gememods gone wildly off model by natural selection unleashed), nanotech that will not be tamed, and in the outer, deepest levels there are posthuman sociopaths and grifters trying to break in.

The Weal is a dangerous place, but intrepid heroes can claw back the world from darkenss or die in the attempt.

Inspirations: Habitat, Starlost, Charles Stross's Saturn's Children universe, Numenera, Book of the Long Sun

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve (1983) 
(Dutch: De Piraten van Pandarve)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

We open on world called Pandarve:

Marduk, the Theocrat of Pandarve, has had his scientists and magicians hard at work at creating a device to bring someone called "the Anomaly" to him over a great distance. He places the last element needed into the device: a red sphere called the Egg of Pandarve.

An energy beam shoots out across unimaginable distances and arrives on Earth, striking Storm and causing him to disappear. Ember jumps into the beam after him and disappears as well.

Storm and Ember find themselves in orbit around a planet, falling slowly, yet someone able to breath. They have arrived near Pandarve at least, but this isn't exactly what the Theocrat wanted. His technicians are looking for them, but a rebel attack disrupts their power supply. The "Anomaly Detector" tells Marduk that the object of his search has arrived in the system at least.

Meanwhile, Ember and Storm encounter something surprising:

Staring down the maw of some sort of space whale, Storm and Ember push away from each other. the force carries each of them out of the creatures path but on opposite sides.

A harpoon strikes the creature. It writhes in agony, hitting Ember, knocking her out, and sending her drifting away. Storm manages to grab on to a fin as the beast is hauled in by the hunter:

The hunter reels the creature in closer, then fires another harpoon.

Storm realizes the only way he can reach Ember is with the hunter's ship. He shouts to the stranger, asking for his help. The man's language in unintelligble, but he does move toward Storm:

TO BE CONTINUED

Into House Perilous

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last night with the first session in an adaptation of X2: Castle Amber. While the PCs had been getting used to their being a new mayor in town and tying up loose ends from previous adventures, the Elf Ranger Shade had received a visit from her mother, Oona whom she hadn't seen in one time. Oona told her it was time for her to visit her family in their manse and fulfill her familial obligation to house Sylaire (obligations her mother had notably fled herself all those years ago) and perhaps set right what has gone wrong.

Art by Tony DiTerlizzi

Shade is reluctant to reveal all of this to her companions but ultimately, she does. They accompany her to the Aldwode on a night of the new moon to find the phantom House Perilous, the home of the Sylaire clan. To save her from the unwanted marriage they are sure is coming, they do a hasty marriage of dubious legality to the bard Kully. The party finds an iridescent salamander in a clearing and the creature tells them to walk widdershins around the area, then sleep the night with no light sources. They do as the the creature bids them, and they wake up in the foyer of the house.

art by Dana Guerrieri

In the salon, the rakish Jereth and his waxen pugilist offer them a wager. Against Shade's warning, Erkose takes him up on it, and knocks the creature out in under 2 rounds, winning them 500 gold. Jereth suggests to Shade that the grand matron, Carmilla, might wish to see her and "do a reading of the cards."

art by George Barr

In the study they encountered strange cat men who wanted only to sleep and warned the party off with hisses and curved daggers. In the banquet hall, the party declines to eat with the elegant, fancy-dressed phantom dinners. Waylon and Erekose did feed some roast beef to the cat men, to no visible effect.

In the Mirror Hall, half the party is blinded for an hour. They encountered a leprous looking servant (a thoul) who leaves them be when Shade invokes her mother's name. They avoided the other rooms in that wing and went into the indoor forest. Again, they mostly stayed clear of trouble, keeping to the path.

Erekose's greed was enticed by a chest ensconced beneath the gargoyles in the fountain, and he and Waylon contrived to get the chest without entering the water. The chest scraping across the bottom, however, roused the ameba lurking there, and it attacked. The party lit it up with blasty cantrips and drove it back. As the party peered at the riches in the chest, a feminine voice from behind them asked just what they were doing.