Wednesday Comics: Things I Read Recently

Classic Star Wars
From 1981-84, the Star Wars newspaper comic strip was written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Al Williamson. I am a big fan of Williamson particularly with sci-fi, and these stories, while hardly standouts, are serviceable, and will make you nostalgic for the days before Star Wars became a genre unto itself with an immense backstory.

Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #1
You know, of course, that Alan Moore had at one point pitched the idea of that would become Watchmen using the characters DC had acquire from Charlton Comics. One of those was Peter Cannon aka Thunderbolt, who was the initial inspiration for Ozymandias. Morrison used the Charlton characters in a way that referenced Watchmen in Multiversity, by DC had lost the rights to Peter Cannon by that time.  Enter Dynamite and Kieron Gillen, who (mild spoilers) pits one version of Peter Cannon against another, with the fate of the world at stake.

Martian Manhunter #3
I keep telling you this is good.

The Off-Worlder Funnel

The person from another world arriving in fantasyland is a genre staple. Typically, these off-worlders, whether they be John Carter on Mars or the kids from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, have some sort of edge that gives them a fighting chance or better in their new environment. But what if that wasn't the case? What if they were as unprepared as the survivors in zombie apocalypse fiction?

The death rate would be pretty high, particularly if you drop them in a typical D&D world and allow for the almost absurd horrors of the dungeoncrawl. It would be an interesting way to do a DCC-esque funnel with starting characters other than the usual suspects.

Here's another image of regular folks dying tragicomic deaths from "Planet of the Damned" in Starlord #2 (1978).

The Martian Froniter

A Martian farmhand

To many a colonist of Mars, it might seem that if there is a bright center of Solar civilization in the days of the Empire, the deserts of Mars are far from. Sodbusters and homesteaders came in with the promise of free land, but the arid land and rarefied air don't make it easy.

Strange monuments, pyramids, and the occasional ruin reveal the existence of a Martian civilization of the past, when it was perhaps a greener world. Historians are divided over whether any of the current inhabitants are related to these ancient people. The gangly limbed, barrel-chested Sand People of the deep desert that raid Earther settlements, show no cultural interest in the old places and are as ignorant of the ancient hieroglyphs as they would be the mating habits of a Venusian dracosaur. The rodentine scrappers with their crawling junkyards seem no better adapted to the Martian environment that humans.

The Amos Isley Spaceport (named for one of the early rocket barons of the Red Planet) is as raucous as most of the other farm town settlements are quiet. Many a being with a price on its head ends up hiding out here, and in fact, interplanetary criminal gangs are known to have hideouts in the Martian wastes.

Solar Trek: The Amok Trigger

These are the voyages of the exploratory vehicle, Enterprise...

In 2262, Dr. Leonard McCoy discovered the continuation of outlawed genetic practices among certain prominent families of Mars. This was revealed when Enterprise's first officer, Commander Spock began experiencing drastic mood swings and neurologic pain. Neurochemical triggers made Spock seek to return to Mars, regardless of his orders to the contrary.

The cause of his condition was an engineered gene sequence, created in the 21st Century by Martian geneticists for the purpose of making arranged marriages among their people compulsory and binding. The small, modified human population of Mars practiced arranged marriage for purposes of genetic diversity and promotion of genes critical for survival in the partially terraformed Martian environment to come over the next century. An unidentified family member of Spock's betrothed had introduced the genetic sequence through use of a viral vector when Spock was in his teens. The reasons are unclear, but may have had to do with Spock's father's diplomatic position.

T'Pring, Spock's betrothed, was absolved of any wrongdoing in regard to the genetic manipulation, but she did instigate a trial by combat that could have resulted in the deaths of one or more Space Fleet officers in order to be free of her obligation to Spock.

Dr. McCoy was able to repair the genetic damage to Commander Spock. His efforts led to a greater understanding of historic Martian gene-engineering techniques.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: Vandaahl the Destroyer (part 2)

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: Vandaahl the Destroyer (1987) (part 2)
(Dutch: Vandaahl de Verderver)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

When last we left our heroes, so kids on the water planet had just released a conqueror from another universe from what was supposed to be his eternal prison. One of his first acts is to zap Ember.

Back in his home universe, scientists inform the Lord Judge than sentenced him, that Vandaahl the Destroyer might well be alive, having slipped through a wormhole instead of being killed in a black hole. They decide the only decent thing to do is retrieve him, rather than let him lay waste to other words.

Vandaahl has already started by laying waste to the tree settlement, though he allowed the people, including Storm  and friends, some time to escape first.

With Vandaahl on the loose, Storm decides they must warn the people of Pandarve. To help him get off world, the Water-Planet people summon dolphin-like creatures that tell them of a waterspout leading off planet.

The vessel the people of the Water-Planet give them isn't made for long space voyages, though. Luckily, they run across a large trading vessel before their supplies run. They're able to get a ride.

TO BE CONTINUED

Carapace

In a fit of waning Google+ generosity, Goblin's Henchman sent me a copy of his zine-size adventure Carapace, available for free on drivethrurpg.

Carapace is an interesting product. The adventure (geared toward AD&D but usuable with any flavor), involving a giant ant-hill near a isolated town has no keyed locations. There is a brief bit of setup, covering not only the situation but what various parties in the community might want done, and what the consequences of the adventure might be. After that, there's section of on not one, but three different methods of procedurally generating the maze of tunnels and rooms in the colony: Pointcrawl, Labyrinth Move, and Hex-Flower. Read the Henchman's brief explanation of them here. Finally, there's a section on random encounters and random "dungeon dressing."

If you really dig new procedural approaches and procedural generation in general, this will definitely be your thing. Even if you are like me and this isn't generally your thing, the alien structure of an ant hill seems to me exactly the place where something like this might be useful. Not only would I run this, I may steal some of its techniques for use in other environments.

The Other Side of the Frontier

Much has been made of the themes of colonialism in D&D--perhaps too much, not because they aren't there, but because there are a lot of ways to play D&D, and "taming the frontier" doesn't seem to be the most common approach these days. In any case, it seems to me that it would be easy to reverse the roles and have the PCs and their cultures fighting colonization (or the remnants of colonization) rather than colonizing.

We can image the ur-humanoid species (be they orcs or trolls or something else), arriving at a new world and working to suppress its technology and abducting natives for experimentation like the greph in Vance's The Dragon Masters. The humanoid invaders might be technological or employ magic, but either way their "science" would be origin of many of the monsters of latter times.

The invaders have a weakness (or perhaps several, but one big one): they are from a world with a less bright sun, so they're nocturnal and prefer underground bases. Perhaps due to the magic possessed by the natives, or perhaps due to fractionalization among the invaders, the shock-and-awe conquest becoms a protracted slog that wears down both sides. The invaders borrow in and hunker down, and maybe in some places the original inhabitants think they have been wholly defeated.

The natives, of course, have paid a price as well, being reduced in number by weird weapons and alien diseases. Their civilization has as has their population, leaving many areas as wilderness filled with ruins.

So then what happens is up to the PCs and people like them. Do they drive the former invaders from their world? Do they make alliances where they can? Is it just recovering the wealth and technology for their on benefit they are after or do they try to restore their cultures to their former greatness?

Art by William Stout