Weird Revisited: Apocalypse Under Ground

This post first appeared in March of 2012. It was the first of a series of 3 in this setting...

He could barely remember a life before the refugee camp. His family had fled there like the others when their village had been overrun. They were without his two sisters; they had been carried away to fill monsters’ cookpots, perhaps. While he spent his days begging for food to feed his family, the monsters took his father, too. Maimed and in constant pain, his father had died with the beak of some leech-thing in his arm—a drug sold to those without hope by agents of the mind-flayers.

If the cleric was to be believed, the monsters took his mother as well. Even then, boy that he was, he knew enough to be skeptical. The wasting sickness that claimed her seemed all too common in the conditions of the camp—gods know he’d seen it enough. The cleric, evangelizing among the refugees, had claimed it was a magical disease sent by the monsters. The clerics always blamed the monsters. Their gods were as hungry for monster blood as the monsters seemed for the blood of man.

The boy didn’t care about the truth. He found a makeshift club, beat some scavenged nails into it, and joined the new crusade. Down he went, with a few veterans but many more hollow-eyed youths, into the lair of the foes of man, into the underground. The boy had survived. He had watched most of the others die in horrible ways: cut down, rended, chewed, dissolved. He had survived.

That was years ago. He barely remembered how young he had been—how weak he had been. Wounds that would have been fatal before now healed within days. He was strong and fast. The underground changed you. The trick was not to change too much. Some scholars thought that many of the tribes of monsters had once been men, in ages past.

Those same sages said it had always been like this. When a civilization mastered enough magic to discover the undergrounds, the war started. Who built them, no one could say. All the beings fighting for them now were like babes crawling through a grand temple in search of a toy. They understood so little. They knew only that there was treasure to be had: the doors in the depths through which the most ancient monsters traveled, the magic they fought over, and the gold that drew the poor and the greedy.

And no one—not goblins, not trolls, not dragons or men—was inclined to share.

Babylon Berlin

I've been enjoying the German crime drama Babylon Berlin on Netflix. It's location and time period (the 1920s) is always one I've found interesting--and I have the old posts to prove it!

For some nonfiction recommends to make your cities even more decadent: Urban Decadence Made Easy.

Here's a post on the Weird Adventures analog of Weimar Berlin, Metropolis: Desolation Cabaret

Unfathomable Azurth

Following up on my Operation Unfathomable in other genres post, this was to be about how I would adapt Jason Sholtis' awesome adventure to my current setting, the Land of Azurth. But busy work week, baby, and all that... So instead, this is my brainstorming for what I what things the adventure makes me think would be good Azurth tweaks. I am thinking mostly of how I responded to it in play, which was a version in length like the Knockspell original, but with some elements closer to their final concept in the Hydra edition.

So, the Azurth version will muddy Jason's conception with Oz, Fleischer Studios cartoons (and possibly Cuphead), and different comic books than the ones that likely inspired Jason. The Operation Unfathomable Underworld will be a dangerous "wildernes" region of Subazurth.

First, off "Worm Sultan" makes me think of this guy from the The Yellow Knight of Oz, so he's in:

The final version has several types of dwarfs...

Then, there are some religious factions:



That's all I've got for now.

Operation Unfathomable Cover Aprocrypha

During the Operation Unfathomable Kickstarter and run-up to publication, I did a number of cover mockups, as brainstorming and placeholder images. Here are some of those, most of which are unlikely to grace a product. 

Remember these are mockups, not finished products. They were not complete in some cases.

First up, here's the Jason Sholtis artbook that was one of the stretch goals we didn't reach:

We thought about blacklight covers (or covers with the black vibe) for the DCC conversions:

Finally, here's an unused design for the Player's Guide recalling old Boy Scout merit badge pamphlets:

Season of the Witch

Agatha Harkness, elderly former governess to Franklin Richards, was alive (according to some sources) well before the sinking of the last remnant of Atlantis. She is one of the homo magi, a subspecies of humanity with a greater facility at the magical arts. A witch, in other words, and one of the oldest still living. Mundane humanity has not always been kind to members of homo magi, and the witches and wizards have long sought an escape from persecution. Some sought refuge in other dimensions; Harkness and others hoped the New World would be a place of safety.

She and her coven contrived to bring a witch homeland into being through their actions in Salem village in Massachusetts in the late 17th century. The project is depicted in the television series Salem, albeit in a sensationalized and one-sided fashion. Mistakes were made, to be sure, and many of those could be blamed on Harkness’ son, who would begin calling himself Nicholas Scratch in mockery of the Puritans’ fear of the Devil. The Harknesses and their cover were forced to move on.

They found refuge in an isolated valley in the Rocky Mountains and founded the town of New Salem where they could live in peace. Once the town was well established, Agatha chose to return to the outside world, perhaps to search for other homo magi, perhaps to keep a closer eye on wider humanity. During World War II, she may have joined our magical practitioners in helping the Allies. She likely had a hand in helping to establish the national Council of Witches and Miss Robichaux's Academy in New Orleans to secretly nurture more attenuated homo magi bloodlines. Certainly, she would have checked in on the Spellmans, her descendants through her daughter, Abigail.

In her absence, Nicholas Scratch eventually took power. He fathered several children by several wives: those becoming the magically mutated individuals known as the Salem Seven, and at least one illegitimate child among another hidden sect of witches named Klarion Bleak. Eventually, Scratch and his children and followers in New Salem sought to move against Harkness. With the aid of the Fantastic Four he was defeated and vanished to another dimension, though he would continue to plague the Fantastic Four and his mother.

The settlement of New Salem does not survive the end of the 21st century. Its inhabitants will choose to join other homo magi refugees on the distant world of Zerox.

Wednesday Comics: X-Men Grand Design

X-Men: Grand Design is a mini-series, planned to last 6 issues, that is intended to weave the over 40 years of X-men publication history into a single, epic narrative. This bold perhaps even foolhardy task is undertaken by Ed Piskor, alternative comic artist, who has already authored another sprawling epic, the Hip Hop Family Tree.

Piskor's version begins with Namor's flooding of New York in the 1940s (setting the stage for mutant hysteria) and moves through the formative years of both Magneto and Xavier, before getting to the formative years of the X-men--and that's just issue one. This is no summary like Marvel Saga, but something more like comic book adaptations of the Bible. It's pretty condensed, but it's a genuine narrative. Piskor makes up very little. Instead he emphasizes certain elements and streamlines or omits others in the name of giving these stories by numerous creators with different visions a throughline. The incarnation of a new Phoenix Force host is a big thing that obviously didn't appear quite some early in the original comics.

The style of the comic is a fusion of an alternative comics sensibility with the decidedly retro that works. There are no glorious splash pages to drool over, though. This is all about the story.

Issues 1 and 2 are currently available.

Cult of the Cobra

On May 25, 1953, one of a pair of twins was stolen from a New Delhi hospital by the shadowy Cobra Cult. Twenty-three years later, Jeffrey Burr ruled the cult as Kobra, and had transformed it into an international subversive organization.

In the next few years, his organization would see even greater expansion in Western hemisphere and pose a sufficiently serious threat to American interests that a special task force would be created to deal with them. The unlikely architect of this success was a recent convert to the cause: A former car salesman turned con man and anti-government agitator who would become known as Cobra Commander.

The key to the future Cobra Commander’s success seems to have lain in his ability credibly speak to the desires of angry political fringe of whatever persuasion. He could recruit from the United Freedom Front, Black Spectre, Posse Comitatus or the Sons of the Serpent, or keep things ideologically light and bring in disaffected members of strictly criminal groups. Cobra Commander’s only certain belief personally seems to have been in brokenness of the current system, and in the power of fascist symbols and pageantry. He tossed the snake-scale costumes and robes for a more imposing, paramilitary vision. Given the Commander’s success, Kobra allowed it.
It was quite a rise, but in the end too high and too quick. Kobra would not share the throne. In the mid-eighties, barely a decade into his meteoric rise, Cobra Commander was assassinated at Kobra’s command.