Wednesday Comics: Storm: 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 4)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

Storm's plan to free Rann's daughter involves starting a fight with the slaver, Redeye. The police almost arrest him--for not giving every a chance to wager first. Though Storm is weaponless and the slaver armed with a sword, Storm wins and Redeye lands on his on blade.

Unfortunately, the slaves now become the property of the auctioneer. Rann assures Storm he can get the money to buy back his daughter, but it will take time. Storm another idea: Rann can sell him and use the money to save his daughter, then go get the money to buy Storm back later.

They go through with the plan with Rann promising return in a few weeks. Storm, meanwhile, is sold to the boss of the watermines:

Meanwhile, Ember is getting the beauty-treatment much against her will, courtesy of the servants of Theocrat Marduk. He's pleased with the result:

He orders her image broadcast via newsfax and telepathic transmitter throughout the system. His hope is that "the Anomaly" (Storm) will see it. Storm does on a poster as he's being dragged off to the watermines, now regretting his deal with Rann.

Marduk tells Ember his plan:

TO BE CONTINUED

Blood & Stone in House Perilous

Our Land of Azurth game continued last night with the second session of my adaptation of X2: Castle Amber. When last we left the party, they had managed to open a chest they found in a fountain, but had been caught in the act by an Elf woman. She looked sort of like this, and she and her hound were riding on the back of a rather large crocodilian with a gold chain and leash:

Art by  Vladislav Erko

She gave her name as Dismé and demanded the party put back the chest. After some hemming and hawing they did--except for a silver key, which Waylon the thief pocketed. She told them the Sylaire family was cursed and no one could leave the manor. Only perhaps, someone named Ystyvan could help them. She suggested they try the chapel, then rode off.

Next, our heroes encounter bronze-furred squirrels who could turn acorns (or anything they thought of as food) to gold with a bite. Shade the Ranger spoke with animals while Erekose and Waylon gathered gold acorns. All this activity brought the forest's ruler and his wild hunt from beneath a hill:

The party was afraid they were outmatched by this guy and his cat-and-dog-men riders. They tried diplomancy, but Herne (as he called himself) only agreed not to attack his "cousin" Shade. The party concentrated their fire on him and took all their foes out surprisingly swiftly.

The entered the chapel and found it lined with sinner statues in mockery of saints and the  personifications of sins leering from the altar:

They hoped one of the statues might be Ystyvan. Instead one winked and kissed Shade and her intelligence went up. After almost visiting all the statues, one reached out and touched Dagmar and turned her to stone!

The others had no way immediately to save her. They heard a voice calling from under the stones. Prying it open, they found a pit-like grave and released a little girl named Mabdalene:

She wanted to find her brother for revenge. Shade panicked and shot her and the party fought with her a bit, before she scuttled past them and escaped.

Looking desperately for a place of safety to rest, the group found monk cells inhabited by zombies. They cleared three rooms, but the undead fortitude of one zombie allowed him to comically old on to unlife after being reduced to zero on multiple attacks.

After a long rest they explored the rest of the chapel, finding the dead body of a Sylaire family member (presumably Mabdalene's brother) in a library, and a man in golden armor praying in another. After an exchange of pleasantries, he attacked.

Strange Stars Soft Cover & A Review

The wait is over! Strange Stars OSR is now available in soft cover as well as pdf. If you're still on the fence, here's our first review to help you decide.

Designing for Hydra

For the Hydra Products that I've been able to work on/contribute ideas to covers for, I like to play on nostalgia, but not strictly nostalgia for rpg books of the past. Weird Adventures was meant to evoke the original AD&D Player's Handbook, sure, but also the covers of pulp magazines.

In working with Jason Sholtis on ideas for a cover to Odious Uplands, I did a rush promotional cover without a lot of thought. It was fine, but neither of us were think of it as a potential final cover. In brainstorming later, I suggest we try a cover evoking the WPA Federal Art Project National Park posters made from 1935-1943:

In the meantime, though, David Johnson had done a great job of coloring the Fossil Forest image. That seemed like the cover version to use, so I made this mock-up riffing off a Fodor's Travel Guide design:

I don't know what the final cover will be, but it's an enjoyable process working with talented artists and trying out new designs.

Wednesday Comics: Gothic Romances

Storm will wait a week for a special holiday adjacent edition of Wednesday Comics. The Big Two produced a lot of standard romance titles from the late Golden Age until the mid-seventies, but they also tried to move away from the standard formula. Spurred on by a horde cheap paperbacks and likely Dark Shadows, they delved into Gothic Romance.

In 1971 at DC, the Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love took its place along side other eldritch property listing anthologies like the House of Secrets and the House of Mystery. In '72, it was joined by the Sinister House of Secret Love. In addition to having titles that sounds perhaps more boundary-pushing than its actual contents, both series share the same fate of having the romance angle jettisoned. The Sinister House of Secret Love became Secrets of Sinister House, while love also disappeared from the dark mansion leading to Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion, both with issue 5.

Stuff like this was always going on at the Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love

A trend had begun, though. Charlton began Haunted Romance in 1973, Atlas released the oneshot Gothic Romance in 1974, and Marvel's Curtis magazine line in 1975. None of these lasted very long.

DC at least has recently revived the title of one of theirs with the Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love series.

Most of the titles are unreprinted and uncollected. DC did put out a Showcase Presents volume of Secrets of Sinister House that also included the "secret love" days, but it is out of print now.

Spacehunters

Luis Royo

Watching the new season of The Expanse has led me to start thinking about a game I ran in GURPS perhaps decade ago. A "hard" science fiction thing using a lot of stuff from Transhuman Space put giving it more of a Cowboy Bebop spin: a little bit cyberpunk, a little bit 70s action film.

Howard Chaykin

If I ever ran a similar I again, besides using a system besides GURPS, I think I would draw more visually from '80s and 80's sci-fi, borrowing some elements from things like American Flagg! and 80s cyperpunk rpgs. The players' would still be ne'er-do-well, planet-hopping bounty hunters/troubleshooters but with a different skin.

Janet Aulisio

Strange Stars: A Recent Science Fiction Appendix N

A few weeks ago, Rob Barrett made a request in the comments of this post for "more recent SF" suitable for Strange Stars inspiration. In the section on galactic adventuring, I relied mostly on older, well-known and non-science fiction references because I want to convey the idea that the setting is easily accessible and usable for the sort of stuff people typically use science fiction games too do.

That doesn't mean science fiction from the past twenty years hasn't been an influence on the conception and development of Strange Stars. I mentioned a few of these in the intro of the setting book, but here are a few more:

Hannu Rajaniemi. The Quantum Thief; The Fractal Prince; The Causal Angel. This series is one of the biggest inspirations for Strange Stars, but its influence is diffuse. The interaction of information and physical life that pervades the series is very Strange Stars, as are the exotic societies of Earth, Mars, and the Oort Cloud.

Greg Egan. Diaspora. The conception of moravec, infosophont, and biologic groups was inspired by Diaspora, specifically, w

Alastair Reynolds. The Prefect; Chasm City. The Glitter Band is a great example of the varied polities of the League of Habitats or the Circus. The Ultras have some resemblance to the Star Folk, if not the same style. Chasm City in particular would make a pretty good Strange Stars adventure.

Karl Schroeder. Permanence. The primary inspiration for the metascape is the exoscape of Permanence.

Charles Stross. Glasshouse; Accelerando; the books in the Saturn's Children universe: Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood. The technology and economic considerations in Stross's novels underpin similar concepts in Strange Stars. If you want to really get a feel for how I envision fabbers, read Glasshouse. Neptune's Brood also has a very well-realized "water world."

Scott Westerfield. The Risen Empire (Succession Book 1). Though I haven't written a lot about military matters in Strange Stars material, the planetary assault and space battle in this book greatly informed what I think such things would look like among "modern" powers in the setting.

John C.Wright. The Golden Oecumene  trilogy and related stories. The technology of the Golden Oecumene with the trappings of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of man gets you a good representation of the Radiant Polity. The novella "The Far End of History: A Tale from the Last Days of the Seventh Mental Structure" is a great example of what sort of things went on in the Archaic Oikumene.