Weird Revisited: Lies Your Mummy Told You

This post first appeared on August 13, 2010. It was written for Weird Adventures, but I think it could be useful in any setting...

Far to the west of the City, within the great Stoney Mountains, there are remote places where ancient ruins dot the hardpan, high-desert landscape. Unusual artifacts sometimes come from these ruins, and few are more unusual than the so-called dwarf  mummies.

Dwarf (sometimes pygmy) mummies look just as their name suggests: they are wizened figures little more than a foot tall, in their usual seated pose. Despite having none of the usual signs of life, the mummies are endowed with the magical semblance of life at least, and though they don’t move (usually) they are aware, and interact with their environment.

The susurration of the mummies can be heard by all, if conditions are quiet enough, but only the one “owner” of the mummy will be able to understand their dessicated whispering, which will sound as if spoken directly into their ear, even if they are as much as ten feet away.

The mummies' utterances will fall (either randomly or at the GM’s whim) into the following categories:

01-02: Pained, non sequitur reminiscences, possibly related to their long ago lives. These are related to times far too remote for modern hearers to relate to them in any useful way.
03-04: Cryptic foretellings of the future (anywhere from 1 week to 10 years hence) which will relate to the “owner.”
05-06: An exact and surprising statement about some predicament currently vexing the “owner.” The mummy will not elaborate.
07-08: A cryptic statement which seems to be about some predicament vexing the “owner,” but is in fact just nonsense.
09-10: Veiled Suggestions that someone the “owner” is close to is in fact conspiring against them. This may or may not be true, but the mummy will have details that make it seem so. Details will only be delivered in a way that makes the mummy seem reluctant to talk about the issue.

The longer a person owns a mummy, the more uncritical they will become about its statements. After a week or more in their possession, the owner will react to the mummy as if it has a Charisma of 18. After a month, a failed save will mean the owner acts as if charmed by the mummy in regard to believing everything it says, and treating it as if it is a trusted confidant.

No one knows who the dwarf mummies are, nor their purposes.  Any answers the mummies give in this regard will certainly be lies.

The Games I Play

Despite relatively frequent reports of Gplus's demise, it turns out it still is a pretty good place to here about some Google Hangouts games. Real life stuff and my Hydra efforts don't allow me to play in as many as I might like, but I manage to squeeze them in every now and then.

I am a semi-regular in Jack Shear's Krevborna game. This is sort of 18th-early 19th Century horror fantasy in 5e. Jack expertise in Gothic literature really helps give this sort of era a distinct flavor. My character is (currently) the highest level surviving character in the campaign. He's Tobias Rune, "Scientific Diabolist" (i.e. Warlock). He's looks a bit like a young Terence Stamp here:

Recently, I'v played a couple of sessions of Paul Vermeren's Gridshock playtest. Gridshock began as a re-imaging of the Rifts setting, but very much became its own thing early in concept and has is attached to a system reminiscent of TSR's Marvel Superheroes. It wears its 80s-ness on its sleeve in many ways, (but it's hardly a pastiche of anything) having elements of superheroes, G.I. Joe, and anime about it. My character is a cactus-man alien named "Scorchin'" Ray Alpha.

Art by JP Cokes

I also continue to play in Jason Sholtis's biweekly Bewilderlands with a very funny crew. My character there is the Wampus Country refugee, Horvendile Early.

All of these games are a lot of fun. I look forward to revisiting them in the future.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Seven of Aromater

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 Seven of Aromater (1984) 
(Dutch: De Zeven van Aromater) (part 5)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

While Ember struggles in the grip of the tentacles, a battle rages with the Seven fighting the seven followers of the brother of the Eternal Prince who watches the battle in amusement. With the power of the brain coral of Pandarve his to command he controls the battle.

Meanwhile, Ember has been lifted off the ground by the tentacles and held tight. Even her now-superhuman strength cannot free her. Then, she remembers the energy she absorbed from the lightning. She releases it:

The Prince commands the Seven to weaken through the power of the brain coral, and his servants gain the upper hand, some rendering the Seven helpless, He commands his servants to finish them. But then:

Ember stands in the doorway. She tells the Prince she has realized that that the Seven and his servants are evenly matched and are the colors of the rainbow. But she and the Prince were affected by the Blood of Pandarve differently. She became white and the Prince black. Her body begins to glow: "Where there is light, darkness disappears!' she says.

She drives the Prince back with her light, but then she falls in to the blood liquid, spent. When she rises:

She looks around for Storm and sees:

TO BE CONTINUED

Now in Color

I've been working on coloring the pregen portraits from Mortzengersturm, mostly to practice for coloring things for the Azurth Adventures Digest, but also just the have them in color. Jeff Call (the original artist) has not seen or approved my coloring job on his images, so blame me!

Here's Minmaximus the Mighty:

And here's Astra, Princess of the Star Folk:

Dungeons of High Camp

Art by Jim Holloway

Over the weekend I was reading Hero A Go-Go by Michael Eury. which chronicles superhero comics' response (and influence on) 1960s camp pop culture. It's a combination that didn't always work well; many of the works perhaps now seem more goofy kitsch, and some are really just unfunny parody or of superheroes. Still, when it works there is a certain charm to a lot of folks, as the revival comics Batman '66 and Wonder Woman '77 indicates.

I wonder why there hasn't been as much of concerted attempt at published camp works in Dungeons & Dragons? Certainly, farcical humor abounds at the gaming table, and a number of comedic adventures have been written (a lot illustrated by Jim Holloway), and there are humorous illustrations in the older AD&D books. But as far as I know their has never been a camp setting or camp-informed setting--unless maybe HackMaster counts? Maybe it's just too difficult a tone to sustain well throughout a written project?

The settings of some OSR-related folks seem to me to have elements of camp without going all-in: Jason Sholtis' Operation Unfathomable, Chris Kutalik's Hill Cantons, some of Jeff Reints stuff, and my own Mortzengersturm. Dungeon Crawl Classics with its "airbrushed wizard van" elements could be taken as camp, but I'm unsure whether that is the intention.

Art by Jim Holloway

Time Gone By

Despite Gygax's admonition about meaningful campaigns and strict time records, the games I've participated in don't show a lot of evidence that anybody is doing this beyond the tactical level. In some ways, I feel like this is a miss opportunity and I enjoy media with a "sweep of history" or strong chronological grounding. It isn't really an issue in drop-in adventuring, but it makes a campaign feel more real to me.

That said, I don't usually pay enough attention to it myself when I'm gamemastering. There are always other things to think about. Sometimes I do, though. In my Weird Adventures campaign, I was able to construct a timeline, not so much from clocking downtime activities but from time references within the adventures, and the length of time they took in-game. Holiday themed games are a help in this (two Yuletimes past in that game).

My current Land of Azurth game is a good bit looser, partial because I want to capture the "time runs different/timelessness" inherent in inspirations like the Oz books. While I typically narrate some passage of time to have occurred between the adventures (we only game once a month), I've also drops hints that time "runs strange in Azurth' so they might spend a longer or shorter subjective time on an adventure than what time has passed for folks back in town. This allows me to have a fairly static status quo at times--or to shake things up. For instance, the party return from one adventure to find an election cycle passed and a new Mayor elected--and a new group of heroes the toast of the town!

How about you? Kept really strict time records or done something interesting with the passage of time in your game?

Some Azurth Adventure Digest Art

The art for the Azurth Adventure Digest is rolling in.

Here's a a group of heroes versus the mummy of the Candy Temple by Jason Sholtis:

And here's the creature from the Prismatic Hole by Jeff Call:

Stay tuned for more!