Big Fin & the Prismatic Hole

West of the Land of Azurth in the Boundless Sea, lie the Motley Isles. Polychrome, the pirate haven, is the most famous of the chain, but not the only one that draws visitors.

Art by Bill Peet

Big Fin is a long, narrow isle, but a short distance from Polychrome. The second largest island of the group, it is dominated by a fin-shaped limestone ridge with bands of color going from vermilion to pink to yellow. Few people live here permanently, owing to the difficult terrain, though some exiles from Polychrome squat on its shores. The rocks, however, provide nesting places for the iridescent red-headed gillygaloo, whose square eggs with large speckles are used in dice games and divination, and whose dodecahedral gizzard stones are sought as good-luck charms. The birds themselves are edible, but the superstitious egg-hunters will only do so in the direst of circumstances.

The Lurid Lair of the Froghemoth is a small, roundish cay and the most distant of the chain from the mainland. Its central lagoon is also known as the Prismatic Hole. It is a saltwater sinkhole with rainbow bands of color--indigo in the deep of its center. The legendary froghemoth has long been said to inhabit the depths of the Prismatic Hole, but the beast is seldom sighted. Still, most Motley Pirates avoid the area.

Wednesday Comics: The Chuckling Whatsit

Richard Sala's The Chuckling Whatsit is an oft-kilter, occasional absurdist noir mystery, like maybe something Tim Burton might do at his most serious or the Coen Brothers being a little Gothic. Of course. It's the story of an outsider artist, a doomed couple of escaped mental patients, a serial killer who may have started up again after more than a decade and is killing newspaper astrologers, mysterious assassins--and a hack reporter caught in the middle.

The dingus (to use Sam Spade's term for a particular MacGuffin) in this case is a missing manuscript, but the more iconic Maltese Falcon analog is the titular Chuckling Whatsit, a strange doll that laughs when shaken, and is either the creation of the deceased recluse Emile Jarnac--or something far older and more sinister, depending on which of the unreliable and eccentric informants you believe.

Sala deftly untangles what appears to be one incomprehensible knot of mystery into several throughlines that have only appeared to be the same thread by Chandler-esque serendity, then collapses them all for a climax that is satisfying, but still enigmatic. It's potrayed in Sala's cartoony but gloomy style, reminiscent of Edward Gorey or Charles Addams.

If you've never read any Sala, this is a good, meaty one to start with.

Mortzengersturm--Back from the Con and Back on Sale

Chris is unmoved by your attempts to haggle

We got back from the NTrpgcon last night. It was a good time as usual, playing some good games, putting some faces to some names of cool folks I know online, and getting to bang out with the Hydra partners and the usual suspects.

The Con ended on sort of a sucky note, though, as I left my swag bag at the hotel bar and it disappeared by morning. I lost my copy of Jason Sholtis's Eyebite, Gamesmen of Kasar, some Iron Crown supplement--and most unfortunately the remainder of the Mortzengersturm stock I had brought to the con. Luckily, I left some at home, but I now don't have as many to sell as I might have.

So, anyway, Mortzengersturm sales are open again, but supplies remain limited!

NTRPGCon and A Random Bit of Art

Commodore Cog art by Jeff Call, colors by me

NTrpgcon kicked off (for me anyway) yesterday. The Hydra Co-op booth is up and running, so if you're at the convention, come on by. The Hydra group plus some other guys played a game of Boot Hill last night, gamemastered by Chris Kutalik. It was my first time with Boot Hill and it was pretty fun, particularly with every body doing their best "Western accent."

Today, I've got Billy Longino's Halfling police procedural Southfarthing Confidential and tomorrow its my Mortzengersturm game.

Wednesday Mini-Comics: The Battle in the Clouds

This is the third mini-comic released with the Masters of the Universe toys. Like the rest, it was written by Don Glut and written by Alfredo Alcala.

We open on Eternia's tallest peak where Stratos is somehow able to hear the sounds of battle far below. He flies down and finds He-Man riding the Battle Ram is putting a beating on Skeletor near Castle Grayskull. Somehow, now Castle Grayskull is near the ocean, because He-Man is able to toss a defeated Skeletor into it.

As He-Man and Stratos fly away, Mer-Man  pulls Skeletor from the water and offers to make a deal with him. He'll help Skeletor defeat defeat his foe in exchange for He-Man's weapons. The two villains start blasting away at He-Man,

Stratos swoops in and gives He-Man a lift to get him out of danger quicker, but a "great gust of wind" knocks He-Man off the Battle Ram, he he falls--only his super-garment protects him. He's just knocked unconscious. Stratos doesn't realize He-Man's gone. He just keeps flying.

Skeletor and Mer-Man see He-Man's fall go. In order to get up the mountain to where he fell to snatch his gear, the evil warriors steal Teela's horse.

Mer-Man gets to He-Man just as he's waking up. He's able to over-power him and steal his super-strength suit. His next stop: the Battle Ram.

He-Man plans to stop him. He goes to the edge of the forest and calls Battle Cat. The two head over to He-Man's place to get his force field suit (Apparently separate from his super-strength suit. Pretty inconvenient.), then to Man-At-Arms' cabin. They decide to fly the Wind Raider up to where Stratos took the Battle Ram and thwart Mer-Man.

He-Man is impatient with the speed the Wind Raider is making and grumbles he could have climbed up himself if he only had his super-strength suit. Man-At-Arms opines that "brute strength must sometimes give way to science" and opens it up full-throttle, shutting up He-Man pretty quick.

Meanwhile, Mer-Man has found the Battle Ram. When the Wind Raider reaches the peak, he attacks them with a volley of ray blasts. Man-At-Arms falls out, and only his armor saves him from dying in the fall. Battle Ram and Wind Raider hit each other head on.  Stratos strikes the decisive blow, though:

The battle in the clouds won, He-Man and Stratos fly off to get back the super-strength suit from the defeated Mer-Man and then rescue Man-At-Arms and Teela.

The Power of Grayskull Compels You!

Dark Horse have been doing a great job with their series of Masters of the Universe reference works. The artbook was great, but for sheer information value and rpg inspiration James Eatock's He-Man and She-Ra: A Complete Guide to the Classic Animated Adventures and most recently He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: A Character Guide and World Compendium are goldmines.

The character guide and world compendium is so thick, I don't think I've given it a complete look through, yet. There is so much there! It covers ever continuity from the original minicomics through the on-going collector toy revival and the current DC Comics (though I don't know how up to date it is on the last group). It even has stuff from foreign comics and kids books. Major characters get much more extensive write-ups, and ever character or thing that has appeared in multiple media gets a discussion of the different portrayals.

At $35, some might balk at the cover price, but it's length and detail make it well worth it.

Anti-Elves

Drow as "elves but evil" has been done. Let's take a cue from Otus's ink-blot, living shadow rendition, and say that they are the arcane Evil Twins of evils. Maybe not quite Bizarro World duplicates, but close. They look like photographic negatives of some elf, somewhere, sometime. (It is quite possible that if a specific elf and anti-elf come into contact there will be an explosion, Or, they will untie into a single, transcendent being and leave this plane. In an explosion.)

Anti-elves live underground in ultra-controlled, industrial, technolgical environments because they hate nature. They want replace it all with a machinery hellscape like Apokolips. The only reason they haven't yet is because they hate the sun, too, and are forced to live underground. They're working on that one.

Anti-elves are profoundly unmagical. All those magical abilities listed in a drow stat block have a technological basis. No surface creature can steal a anti-elf device and make it work because their bio-energy polarity will just disrupt it and make it nonfunctional after a use or two.

Ant-elves don't believe in gods, meaning they accept the existence of tiresome things other races call gods, but they think them ridiculous impediments to their own purposes and would never worship them. All sacrifices you might see them make are strictly translactional. Any temples are really just fanclubs--an anti-elves are the sort of crazy, obsessive fans that are very likely to progress to stalking and murder.