Incumbents are from Earth, Sivanas are from Venus

In September of 1936, all across America aircraft beginning dropping flyers proclaiming a new candidate for the highest office in the land. At the urging of her father, Beautia Sivana was running for President. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana planned to stage a coup once his daughter was in office. Hers was the most massive, multi-media, write-in campaign this country has ever seen. Her beautiful visage graced the covers of magazines and full page newspaper ads. Her captivating voice could be heard on radio addresses. Women were cool to her candidacy, but men were enthralled. Most men. Boy reporter, Billy Batson, wasn’t fooled one bit. His alter ego, Captain Marvel foiled the Sivanas’ plot and returned mad scientist and would-be president to Venus*, where Beautia would have to content herself with being Empress.

Ultimately, Beautia didn’t share her father’s devotion to evil and in fact pursued a career in social work upon her return to Earth, according to some accounts.

*Or what Sivana said was Venus. It is difficult to square the real planet with its depiction in this record.

Operation Unfathomable is Out

In case you missed it, Operation Unfathomable was released in pdf this week and is (as of this writing) number 1 on rpgnow. I can say that everybody in Hydra was excited to be involved in bringing this adventure out. I personally have played in the con game version, and it was a blast. I'm also honored that my somewhat Scooby-Doo homage logo made the cut and wound up gracing the final product.

The adventure has a great tone, like Shaver Mystery, 50s monster movies, and Jack Kirby Atlas monster comics. Get it now, before the rave reviews start rolling in, so you can have the satisfaction of knowing you got there before the crowd!

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Hounds of Marduk

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 Hounds of Marduk (1985) 
(Dutch: De Honden van Marduk)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

Marduk, the Theocrat of Pandarve, is in a rage because he has been unable to relocate the Anomaly (i.e. Storm). Storm and his companions escaped Marduk's clutches and he hasn't seen them since. His palace staff has suffered his foul mood.

Suddenly, the Pearl of Pandarve begins to turn, meaning one of Marduk's hounds (or sleuth-hounds, as he sometimes says) has located the Anomaly. Sure enough, one of the round screens which are the hounds' vision has Storm in it.

Storm, Ember, and Nomad are in a tavern thousands of miles away. They have just negotiated the sale of Renter's ship, making enough money to buy some new clothes and weapons.

Nomad is bothered by the strange, dog-like creature that keeps staring at them. He pays the blind old beggar who appears to be its master to take the beast away. Meanwhile, another man in the bar has secretly recognized Storm as the Anomaly and plans to warn his men, but keep the anomaly in sight.

Our heroes move out into the street, but the dog (straining at his leash) is still intent on them. he drags his master into a collision with a passing palanquin. It's occupants are dumped on the ground. The rich man responds harshly:

Storm and his friends notice the commotion at the waterside. The hound is paddling for dear life. The beggar is underwater. Storm jumps in to try to save them. He manages to get the dog to safety, but he can't find the beggar's body.

Marduk, watches through the dog's eyes, pleased that his hound was saved. Storm tries to befriend the animal but at that moment Marduk summons the dog back and it runs off.

The three companions continue on their shopping excursion. They buy new clothing and new weapons. Ember worries their clothes look too good; they might attract robbers who think they are rich. Her words seem prophetic when they head down a narrow street to find a group of men blocking their path--and another blocking their retreat!

TO BE CONTINUED

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: