Weird Revisited: Mantis + Prey

The this post appeared on the 1st of March 6 years ago. It was one of a series of posts I did doing variations on the Outer Planes.

The Mantid Sisterhood are ascetic warrior-nuns and servants of Law from the outer planar realm sometimes called the Octachoron of the Archons. They appear as full-scale, porcelain, marrionettes (without visible strings), in the form of insectoid centaurs, with feminine upper bodies, like slim ballerinas. They wear sphinx-like expressions on their perfect, identical faces.

They are sent out to the Prime Material to hunt down those guilty of transgressions against the Grand Algorithm of the Archons of Law. Transgressors need not know they have committed error--the judgement of the Archons is final; the punishments of the Sisterhood is precise and always delivered with the utmost serenity.

#Enc.: 1d6
Move: 40’(120’)
AC: 3
HD: 7
Attacks: 2 (strikes)
Damage: 2d8
Save: C7
Mantid sisters have the abilities of the Monk class at 7th level (except for feign death, and resistance to ESP, which are superseded by other abilities). As constructs of a sort, they possess darkvision, immunity ot mind-affecting effects, and immunity to poison, sleep, paralysis, charm, and disease--anything that requires a target be a biologic living being.  They are able to travel via dimensional doorways from plane to plane at will.

Firefight on the Planet of the Apes

"FIGHT IN THE DESERT" 

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

Nonplayer Characters:
Strother Martin as the Mutant Priest


Synopsis: Irving, Woodward, and La Cava go all Wild Bunch on a group of mutants.

Commentary: After little action last adventure this one was a shootout. For the first time since we started this campaign, though, things got tense as the high Mutant Future hit points got whittled down. The fact that I house-ruled doubling the damage for firearms a few sessions ago also helped.

Though this came up last session and not this one, the mutants venerate "Mendes" as their divinely inspired leader and spokes man for the bomb. The priests seen in this session and the last are slightly more human looking than the Kreeg, but also more unhealthy appearing.

The PCs managed to acquire a couple of submachineguns (an M3 being the most coveted) and a dune buggy.

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 5)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

Marduk explains to a shocked Ember that he really isn't interested in her; she's just bait for the Anomaly. Why is the Anomaly (Storm) so important? His travel through time has embued him with energies that Marduck thinks he can use to control "the powerlines of space and time."

When Storm comes for Ember, Marduk figures that power will be his. Ember tells him others have gone up against Storm before--and failed.

Meanwhile on the Pirate Planet:

All that ice is turned to Vertiga Bas's drinking water via monstrous worm things called griffs:

Storm is partnered with the red (literally) man Nomad and told they will work together until one of them dies.

Nomad shows Storm the ropes in the mines and the use of the equipment. Storm tells Nomad about Rann and his promise to return with money (though now Storm doesn't plan to wait that long). Nomad surmises that if a tariev hunter like Rann knows where to get that much money, it can only mean one thing:

Rann must know the location of the tariev graveyard. Another slave, eavesdropping seems interested in this information.

Storm and Nomad begin an escape attempt. Storm powers up their work lasers so they can actually hurt a guard and capture him. They force him to lead them to the central lift shafts. On the way, some other guards try to stop them, but Storm blasts a griff in the eye, and the creature's death throes kill them. Unfortinately, it also causes a rockfall!

After digging themselves out, Storm and Nomad ambush a maintenance crew heading in their direction. They overpower the guards, and recruit the slaves:

TO BE CONTINUED

The Wreck of the Golden Dawn

This is an adventure idea for Strange Stars:

"Look at me honey, I'm using technology!
Ain't got no time to make an apology.
Soul radiation in the dead of night,
Love in the middle of a firefight." 

Seventy-eight megaseconds ago, a hyperspace traffic monitor AI recorded a vessel transponder signal from an unmapped node. The vessel was Golden Dawn, a pleasure yacht registered out of Smaragdoz and belonging to pop star Xeno Stardust.

Stardust, his band, and his entourage disappeared during a short cruise, ostensibly for the recording of their new album. When a search failed to discover their whereabouts Stardust corporate filed an indemnity insurance claim--a claim currently unresolved and under investigation.

The insurance company gave you the job, and it sounded like an easy one: IP salvage. Get to Golden Dawn and recover any new music. Bringing Stardust back alive would be optimal, but a partial brain download, recordings, or even partial recordings are worth something.

It isn't going to be that easy. Golden Dawn is stuck in the event horizon of a malfunctioning hyperspace node. At least some of the passengers are still alive, but drugs, ego, and isolation in warped spacetime have taken their toll. Making it out with a lost album? You'll be lucky it you make it out alive.

Clankers & Darwinists, Illustrated

I first mentioned the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfield a while back. I just stumbled across a companion to the series The Manual of Aeronautics that is essentially a technical manual to the series, lavishly illustrated by Keith Thompson (who also does illustrations in the novels).

Westerfield's divergent World War I where the Entente Powers are Darwinists (utlizing “fabricated” animals as technology) and the Triple Alliance are Clankers utilizing mechanical technology far advanced of our real history, provided a lot of vehicles and devices for Thompson to illustrate. Here's a German war walker in cutaway Osprey books style:

And here's the British leviathan airship where the heroes spend much of the series:

It also has pictures of uniforms of the major armed forces involved:

It's a great companion if you dug the series and interesting even if you haven't read them books. The only faults I can find with it  is that it is only a slim 64 pages long and it's a portable 7x9 instead of something in more of an artbook 10x12 range.

Strange Stars Review Roundup

GusL over at the Dungeon of Signs wrote a thorough review of Strange Stars OSR yesterday that you should read if you haven't. You should also stay to check out Gus's blog because he does good stuff outside the bounds of bog standard Medieval fantasy.

I also ran across a couple of old reviews for Strange Stars that I hadn't seen before. They might be new to you, to:

Andy Slack's review at Halfway Station
A video review from Red Dice Diaries

You Fate guys need to to get the people some Strange Stars Fate reviews!

Weird Revisited: Mushrooms, Pigs and Cold Light

This post originally appeared five years ago today. It was one of a few posts looking at the Old World (Ealderde) in Weird Adventures:

The thaumaturgic forces unleashed by the Great War have left much of Ealderde strange. For an example of just how weird this transformation can be, one need look no farther than Lumière,the former capital of Neustrie and the Gallian Alliance. Once Lumière’s lights were emblematic of a city that never slept, a place of art and culture. Today, Lumière is a bombed out ruin, and the amber luminescence that crawls or flows through its streets and buildings is something of another world.

The thing is alive; almost everyone agrees on that, but little they agree on little else. Is it matter? Some gelatinous substance similar to the strange denizens of the underground? Or is it pure energy, somehow thickened and held? If it’s the latter, it’s light with no heat.

In the day, it seems to hide in the skeletons of buildings, perhaps fearing the sun. At night it pours forth and spreads out over whole blocks. Rats and vermin flee it. Living things it touches develop strange tumors or growths. When it first rose, victims caught in its path were left rooted to the spot, transformed into masses of cancer.

The glowing touch of the thing seems to have created at least one mutant species. The wild swine that moved into the city to root and scavenge after the devastation of the war have been changed. They've grown large, and bloated and pale as grubs, with eyes that glow with a paler yellow that the thing. Though they can’t speak, they seem to have evolved an evil intelligence. They roam the streets in herds, seeming to take pleasure in spoiling what remains of the works of man, and looking (though they're hardly picky eaters) for their primary form of sustenance: fungal spores.

The Mushrooms, the swines' unrelenting foes, resent their progency being consumed by the swine with a displeasure that's more cold practicality than horror. These fungal sapients likely lived beneath the city even in previous times (certain legends hint at their presence) but when the humans fled they saw an opportunity. From their inhuman alchemical laboratories they create structures from fungal stock and weaponize molds to strike at the swine and keep humans away.

Looters and treasure seekers make forays into the ruin of Lumière, but it's a dangerous undertaking. Even if the poured-honey creeping of the luminescent thing can be avoided, there are the packs of hungry swine to be outwitted, and the silent and dispassionate Mushroom scientists to be dealt with.