Kung-Fu Post-Apocalyptic Ravenloft

I have enjoyed Into the Badlands on AMC much more than I thought first saw advertisements for it. The fight scenes are well choreographed (much better than Marvel's Iron Fist) and it's vaguely Western post-Apocalyptic setting is more intriguing than expected.

Anyway, watching Into the Badlands the other night, I thought it not be cool in a mashup with Ravenloft. Perhaps it was the hint of 19th-Century that made me think of it, but you could replace Into the Badlands' barons with Ravenloft's Dark Lords and stir in some Vampire Hunter D seasoning.

This seems like it might work particularly well in 5e where the greater number of character powers/abilities would be easy to translate to a wuxia sort of thing.

This is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but it has martial arts, 19th Century stylings, and supernatural stuff too

Weird Revisited: Toward A Hard-Boiled Fantasy Sandbox

"Walk down the right back alley...and you can find anything."
- Sin City (2005)

Folks of a poetical inclination have called the City "unnamed."  Truth is, the City has too many monikers for anybody to know them all. But you say "the City," and everybody from yokels up in the Smaragdine Mountains, to the newsie on the corner knows where you mean. There was a city here before it became the City, you know?  Then some swell got himself itch to be an emperor and brought the five baronies together. So here we are, and that swell got his empire, but maybe it didn't turn out the way he thought. The City doesn't need soldiers or armies when it's got commerce and style.

Alright, maybe they've got all the movie stars--and most of the sunshine--out there in Hesperia, but all the other culture's right here. Ships come into this harbor from all over the world--bringing stuff to sell, bringing people. And a lot of the decide to stay.  You go to the right neighborhood and you'll swear you got dropped into some foreign country. And the nightlife? This town jumps, friend. From low-class gin-dives to tony swing-clubs, it roars.  I'd steer clear of the hinky alchemical liquors, though.  Word to the wise.

Now, those joints I was talking about are full of would-be toughs and hard-cases come here to make a name for themselves. They go ransack the ruins the Old Ones, left all over the countryside, then they come to the City to sell their haul and hit the town. City-folk are happy to separate a rube from his money. Gin, jazz, janes--you know, whatever. Guys can make money too, if they know were to look. The gang bosses that run the streets always got a need for muscle, or a little cheap wizardry. Sometimes the ghouls from Undertown get kind of rowdy, and the coppers start looking for guys to deputize, too. Or maybe the rail-yards are looking for bulls to crack a few goblin skulls. Then of course there are bounties on monsters that need killing.  What, you think there's only gold down in those ruins? Anyway, you get the idea. There's dough to be had, and plenty.

So welcome to the City.  Have a good visit--but watch yourself, pal, things can get rough.

Wednesday Comics: Steve Ditko

With the passing of comics legend Steve Ditko, I thought it was worth looking at some of his work. I'm going to take a broad view of his career and not just focus on his work at Marvel, which many would consider his high point.

Likely his greatest work, the early issues of Spider-Man also have the virtue of being almost constantly in print in one collection or another.

Ditko's characters got more off-beat in his DC years, presaging the sort of stuff he would do in his later career in indies (though without as much of a political bend). This collection includes both the Shade the Changing-Man and Stalker stories, as well as some anthology pieces. You should check out his Creeper stuff too, but that collection is out of print and pricey.

While we wait for an omnibus of his work with the Silver Age Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and Question at Charlton, you can check out the early issues of that work in this DC Archive.

Finally, for a nice overview of his career, check out Stranger than Strange: The World of Steve Ditko.

The Aberration!

I had hoped to show an example of the layout for the front (fluff) and back (game stats) of the pages in the Armchair Planet Who's Who today, but unfortunately, I was only able to get the front page finished to my satisfaction. Hopefully, I'm have the back page with ICONS stats up in a post later this week.

If you'd like to see the Marvel Super-Heroes rpg stats for this guy, you can find them here.

The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game

TSR's Indiana Jones rpg from 1984 carries a reputation for badness. While tastes, of course, differ, the only factual information used to support this claim is the decision to not include character generation rules in the basic game, the designers intending you to play Indiana and his cohorts. This decision was corrected in the 1985 Judge's Survival Pack in rules that take up one page. The one time I played this game back in the day, we were undeterred and made up our on characters anyway by modelling them on the existing ones.

I've seen other deficits or poor decisions asserted on line that aren't true. Even wikipedia claims "No formal system of hit points or determining actual character death is put forth, and instead is left to the referee as a role-play element." The lack of hit points is technically correct, but the rest of that sentence is completely false. There are other similarly "true, but that gives a false impression" statements in the article.

So what is the game actually like? Well, in brief in resembles in broad strokes other TSR games of 1984-85, including Conan and Marvel Super-Heroes. It uses a percentile system and a color-coded chart in part of the process. It has skills, but it isn't really a skills-based game. It is cinematic and fairly "rules lite" in a pre-1990s way, which is to say not really rules lite by modern standards. More on the light side of rules medium.

It has attributes clearly derived from the D&D standard, but doing slightly different things. Strength is what you would expect, and Appeal is Charisma. Prowess is like Fighting in MSH. Movement is both speed and some of Dexterity, and Instinct is mostly Perception or Wisdom, but carries a bit of Intelligence's water, too.

Most actions are based on roll under attribute rolls. Like those other games, it has something of a unified mechanic, though it has not fully committed to this and has a number of special subsystems, which use the same sort of die rolls but in different ways. Attributes rolls can be modified to twice rating as a situational bonus or half or fourth rating for situational penalties. These are the only dice modifiers. Rolls of 96-00 are always "bad breaks" (critical failures), and 01-05 is a "lucky break" (critical success). Beyond that, there are levels of success based on the roll which have color codes and different meaning depending on which attribute is being checked.

It has the sort of rules quirks common in games of this era. It uses hit locations (different for various types of attacks) which are determined by reversing the numerals in the Prowess "to-hit" roll. The initiative system seems like it would either be fun or really irritating in play. It requires a sort of competition (using Movement rolls) among all those declaring they want to act at a given point. While interesting, I'm not sure what it adds over a simple initiative roll for everybody and seems like it would take up time.

It has "mook rules" of a sort with goons not accorded the same advantages that PCs and villains enjoy. Certain types of threats like drowning or falling are given "Danger ratings" that function like Prowess does in combat-style roles. Chases get almost a mini-game all their own.

So what about the lack of hit points? Well, damage causes wounds, light, medium, and serious, and wounds are applied to various body locations. Wounds are additive with 2 mediums equaling 1 serious, and impairing after a certain level. Three serious wounds carry a chance of death or unconsciousness, and four serious wounds mean death.

All and all, it looks like it would work pretty well in play. Some systems are a little wonky or over-complicated but none look really unfun. Other parts of it seems like good choices for a pulpy, lighter ruled game.

More Superhero Art and A Table of Contents

This first piece is still a bit of a work in progress (coloring-wise). It's the Cosmic Knights by Dean Kotz, of which Earth's hero, the Cosmic Knight is but one.

We're playing on two "issues" of characters and stats. Here's the projected contents of the first issue done up in the appropriate style. It may be subject to minor changes.

Weird Revisited: Stone Walls; Iron Bars

This post is loosely a follow-up to one my one on the lower planes last week, in that it continues to riff on ideas for Taterus/Carceri. It first appeared in 2011. This would pretty much become the Weird Adventures view of the plane.

The Black Iron Prison is the Plane of Confinement. Despite it’s name, the prison is not always as apparent as iron bars and stone walls (though it has plenty of that, carved as it was from ancient bones of some demonic titan)--its evil is more subtle than that. Restriction and imprisonment of various forms permeate it.

Portals to the plane are sometimes found on the Material Plane in the form palm-sized, rusted, black iron boxes, heavier than they appear.  Visitors to the plane describe an "outer" desert of squalid intern camps, stretched arond and inner, three (or more) dimensional Escher maze of cell-blocks, isolation chambers, and interrogation rooms.

The plane is the home (and the prison) of the deodands, a vile race sentenced to serve as the guards and administrators of the apotheosis prison as punishment for ancient crime. Demonologists have cataloged three primary castes or species of these creatures (though there are undoubtably more):

The lowest caste of deodands are tall, emaciated, scabrous creatures with frog-like mouths. Their bare skins weep a tarry ichor from numerous injection sites. They're junkies and dealers; they mix the astral excreta of despair, callousness, and resignation that oozes from the souls that fall into their hands with the bile of arthropodals that make their homes in the prison’s substructure and inject it beneath their skin. The tarry substance--and a brief respite from their paranoia in a cold, sneering high--are the result. The tar is packaged and sold (to the prisoners to be smoked or injected) in exchange for pleasant memories or dreams or hopes--anything that defines the former self-hood of the soul. When not engaged in commerce, these tar demodands are the menials of the prison.  On the Material Plane, their shadows have the same viscous consistence as their tar, but no psychoactive properties.

The middle caste are the color of a fresh bruise.  Their limbs are swollen like blood sausages, and their tick-like bellies appear filled to near bursting, sloshing loathesomely as they waddle or fly drunkenly on ridiculously small wings. Their bloated faces are unpleasantly human-like and wear expressions of volutuous satiety, complete with drool running from the corners of their mouths and down their double (or triple) chins. Always their skins appear to glisten as if oiled; this is due to a slime they secrete.  They sweat even more when they eat, and they eat almost constantly. They fancy themselves gourmets, and there is nothing they consider so refined as dining on astral substance of souls. They prefer fatted souls, though, and always expose victims to their slime before dining on them.  Under the slime's influence, the poor souls become grossly corpulent. At that point, they're ready for the slime deodands to drain them to emaciation but never destruction. The they restart the slime feeding and the process begins again. Slime deodands are torturers and interrogators in the deodand hierarchy.

The highest caste are strutting, sadistic martinets--the wardens and senior guards of the prison. They’re vaguely human-like in form, but with pale, wrinkled skin that seems ill-fitted to their bodies. They’re androgynous with bald heads and unfeminine faces, but pendulous breasts and high-pitched voices. They have a penchant for dressing in uniforms, the more elaborate the better. Sagging deodands (as they’re called) are found of searches, interrogations, and tortures. They foster paranoia not as a hobby, or even a vocation, but simply due to their natures. Infractions are always found, and prisoners are encouraged to inform on others--but only after they themselves are questioned to the breaking point.

It’s a good thing for Prime Material Plane that deodands seldom arrive on it unbidden. Sadistic sorcerers have been known to arrange “renditions” for enemies, though the price for such a service is rumored to be steep.