Operation Unfathomable by Blacklight

I shoulded the proof of concept version of this cover before, but here's the mostly final version of cover of the DCC Conversion of Operation Unfathomable:

This Woman, This Warrior

In 1958, another Kryptonian craft crashed on Earth. Superman was able to beat the authorities to the crash site and rescue a teenage girl who turned out to be his cousin, Kara Zor-El. She was the last survivor of Argo City, which had remarkable escape the destruction of Krypton by becoming a hastily improvised generation ship, only to have his people succumb to radiation poisoning over the course of the next 30 years.

The comics depicted Kara being placed in an orphanage by her bachelor cousin before being adopted by the kindly Danvers couple. In reality, as in certain “imaginary stories” of the day, Clark Kent was married, and he and his wife, Lois, eventually adopted the girl. Through there government connections, they were able to obtain for her a cover identity, Linda Lee Danvers, an orphaned child who had died. Her Kryptonian heritage was thus safeguarded and kept hidden to allow her a normal childhood, as Kal-El/Clark had had.

But Kara didn’t arrive as an infant. Adapting to life on Earth wasn’t always easy. She had to hide you she was, and she fought against the foreign culture of her adopted world. Kryptonian society had a much greater degree of gender equality than Earth of that era, even in the home of assertive investigative reporter, Lois Lane, and the so-called Man of Tomorrow. Kara defied her cousin and guardian and began adventuring as Supergirl. Superman was eventually forced to publically introduce her.

Kara left home at 18 for Stanhope College and didn’t look back. She got involved in movements for social change: the civil rights movement, protest against the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement. She largely abandoned her superhero identity. In the late 60s, she was living in San Francisco and working at KSF-TV as a camera operator and freelance journalist. That was when she wasn’t involved in activism. She joined the women’s group Sudsofloppen and other organizations, and participated in protests from picketing to guerrilla theater under an assumed name, Karen Starr. It was at one of these protests that she showed up in a cape, white swimsuit, and blue go-go boots. The police and others trying to counter the protesters didn't know what to make of her. The press started calling her Power-Girl, much to her irritation.

By the mid-70s, she was in New York City and took a job as editor of Woman magazine, owned by J. Jonah Jameson. Jameson disliked the “women’s lib” approach the previous editor had taken. He wanted something useful for women: diet tips, fashion, recipes, the like. He was going to be disappointed. The magazine was also provide coverage of a new superhero, Ms. Marvel, who espoused the magazine’s feminist viewpoint. A superhero who was none other than Linda Danvers.

Annihilation and the Dungeoncrawl

Some relatively non-spoilery ways I think the movie adaptation of Annihilation could inform dungeoncrawls:

1. Relatively mundane creatures with an odd twist can create atmosphere, but also a more interesting threat.
2. Oddly behaving things can create a sense of menace without actually doing anything hostile.
3. Dressing a locale is important. The details don't have to be extensive, but they should set the adventuring environment apart from mundane environments.
4. Even a map-able/navigable terrain can be made to feel disorienting or untrustworthy.
5. The terrain itself may be toxic to the visitor. (Operation Unfathomable already points in this direction, as no doubt others have.)
6. The remains and things left behind by those who went before can provide useful clues, but also add to a sense of dread.

My previous posts on Roadside Picnic-inspired elements might be helpful here, too.

Monsters on The Prowl

In the 1950s, superheroes dwindled away for a time. The Justice Society disbanded in 1951 after refusing to reveal their identities to HUAC. Sub-Mariner, Human Torch, and Captain America had disappeared by the middle of the decade.

Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and a handful of others continued to operate, but increasingly they were faced with alien and monstrous menaces. They weren’t the only ones. Whether they came from outer space, under the earth or oceans, or were born of some misguided experiment, monsters were emerging everywhere, and regular humanity was having to face them. The authoritarian alien telepath, the Green Martian Gardner, may have been exerting a conformist influence over the minds of America, but creatures kept crawling forth from the collective unconscious.

The so-called Monster Hunters were an informal group of adventures dedicated to combating these monsters. They were led by Ulysses Bloodstone, who had the bloodgem embedded in his chest, an artifact of the ancient Empire of Tears. He was joined by Dr. Druid, psychiatrist turned mystic, the hero Hurricane, who was actually the Eternal Makkari; and Zawadi, a mysterious Wakandan exile. Later, they were joined by Namor’s cousin, Namora, and the aging adventure with a magic ring known as Congo Bill.

The Monster Hunters seem to have disbanded sometime around 1960 as a new age of superheroes dawned. Their legacy was a number of other teams dedicated to fighting weird menaces where they encountered them like the Challengers of the Unknown, who formed in 1957, the subterranean explorer Cave Carson and his associates, and the undersea adventurers known as the Sea Devils.

Teen Titans, Go!

It’s likely the British Invasion had almost as much to do with the formation of the Teen Titans as the existence of the Justice League. Robin (Bruce Wayne, Jr.), Aqualad (Garth) and Kid Flash (Wally West), wanted to be superheroes, certainly, but in 1964 the trio of teenage boys were transfixed by images of ecstatic girls in the grip of Beatlemania. They didn't know how to play instruments, but they knew how to superhero.

The kids’ ages varied more widely than the published version suggests. Garth was 17, Wally was 15, and Bruce was the tag-along at 13. At first they were just “The Junior Justice League,” but by the time 13 year-old Wonder Woman protégé Donna Troy joined them they had taken on the Teen Titans name. Their parents/mentors forbade heroics unsupervised—though things did happen. Mostly, though, the Teen Titans did public appearances and youth outreach.

The group disbanded by the late 60s, with several of the members going off to college, but the name Teen Titans would be periodically resurrected by other teenage superheroes over the next two decades. In the 80s, John Hughes made a highly fictionalized film about the original group, which today is considered a cult classic.

Leap Day

Both the original Captain Marvel and Superman celebrate birthdays on Leap Day, February 29th. Captain Marvel was, of course, not born in the conventional sense, but chose that day for celebration to mock Dr. Sivana who had wanted to make that day his rival’s “deathday."

Kal-El was born on 38 Eorx 9998, by Kryptonian reckoning, a date not easily translatable any Earth calendar. His friends in the Justice Society, and later the Justice League, chose those Leap day to celebrate it.

Superman would have one of his most memorable birthdays on that day in 1984, when Mongul exposed him to the alien plant called the Black Mercy. He had to be rescued by his friends from the Justice League, particularly the quick thinking of Robin, Jason Todd.

Weird Revisited: The Phantasmagoric Lantern of Kulu Tu

This post originally appeared in March of 2010. Kulu was the name of an NPC created by my cousin, who dungeonmastered my earliest games of D&D.

The exact number of these items in existence is unknown, but it's theorized to be less than seven. Tavern-tales attribute their creation to the infamous Kulu the Illusionist, but these devices are actually the products of an unknown--though no less malign--genius.

These devices appear like any other mundane example of the primitive slide-projectors known as magic lanterns, the only difference being there is no way to change the slide being projected. When activated by placing a candle inside, the device projects strange and unsettling images of distorted, ghost-like figures and beasts. The projected image is larger and more distinct when a magical light-source is used, like a hand of glory, for example.

The image projected is no static scene, but a glimpse of the Negative Material Plane. The longer the device is left on, the thinner the "skin" between worlds becomes until the beings, the phantoms, from that plane are able to enter the Prime Material. When seen in the wan light of the projector the phantoms are ghostly pale, but when they pass out of the projector's cone of light, they become deep, featureless shadow. Their touch drains living things, indeed their very presence can can cause the wilting of nearby plants.

When the phantoms first emerge into the Prime Material, they may be given the name of a single individual. This individual the phantoms will seek out and drain with their life-stealing touch until he is dead. The phantoms are able to travel at great speed, perhaps by traversing between points of mundane shadow, so distance is no obstacle, but it does take time for them to locate the individual (by what ever eldritch means they utilize) and this process seems to take longer for more distant targets.

If they are prevented from getting to the individual, they will continue to try to do so until they are destroyed, or they dissipate. Phantoms drawn forth by light from a normal candle or other mundane light-source can only hold coherent form for twenty-four hours in the Prime Material, and every moment spent in bright sunlight doubles the rate of dissipation. Phantoms drawn forth by a magical light-source in the lantern will last for a week, or perhaps more, depending on the potency of the magic used, but are still just as susceptible to bright sunlight.

The wise user never allows more than three phantoms to emerge before extinguishing the lantern. More than that number, and the phantoms become likely to act more willfully, killing the summoner and anyone else they find rather than heeding a command. If the lantern is left lit and unattended, phantoms will continue to emerge until the light-source burns itself out, and wander out into the world with undirected malevolence.

The lantern can be used to study the beings of the Negative Material Plane, but only if care is taken to limit the length of its usage so that no phantoms emerge.