Madness in Castle Machina

Our 5e Land of Azurth came continued last night, with a new player: the daughter of two or regulars. Her character, Bellmorae the Dragonkin Sorcerer, joins the party after their visit to the benevolent Frog Temple. The party means to find out how this dark future came to be, and thinks that The Clockwork Princess, if she still is in the castle, may be able to give them the answers they need.

Find the castle isn't difficult. He tends me be crab-walking a wobbly orbit around the ruins of Rivertown. Getting in his a little bit more difficult. They fly up to the courtyard and find the palace doors replaced with an industrial metal one with a mechanical face (that looks something like the Princess) at its center. The face's eyes scan each party member who approaches and demands a pass code. When it scans Dagmar, it declares her a "maker" and allows her to reset the pass code. Inside, the party finds the entry area and throne room replaced with the gigantic gears that power the legs.

Down one hall is a furnace and engine room. Automata shovel coal into a magically warded boiler, where eyes like a void in the white-hot flame watch them. A voice from the fire claims to a prince that was drawn into this cold world and trapped here, asks or demands they free him. The party does not.

Elsewhere they find the elevator shaft empty and blocked 3 floors up. In the turret around the stairwell, 3 scruffy,  gray gnome-like creatures behave like lunatics in an asylum. The party initially plans to avoid them, but with no other exits is forced to engage them in conversation. The think the creatures are perhaps the debased descendants of the gnomes that worked for the Princess in years past.

The madness of the gnomes prohibits meaningful dialogue. Waylon attempts to charm the one they appears to be their leader. The spell fails, and the enraged creature attacks. The party makes short work of the six of them, though they all managed to deliver nonsensical last words as they die. They have nothing of value in their possession.

The party climbs the spiral stair, slowly becoming aware of a curious and unsettling background hum or droning...

Weird Revisited: Over There

The original version of the post appeared in 2015. I still like this idea, just haven't got around to using it in any way.

Take the fairyland across the border of Lud-in-the-Mist or A Fall of Stardust. In between it and the "real world" there is a wall or barrier-- let's say an "Anti-Alien Protection Rampart" in official terminology. Instead of England on the real world side there's East Berlin and the GDR or some subtle Eastern Bloc stand-in. Drüben, indeed.

While "Workers of the World, Unite Against the Faerie!" would be interesting enough, recasting the fairy presence with some Zone phenomena-like details out of Roadside Picnic and a bit of the seductiveness of the Festival from Singularity Sky: "Entertain us and we will give you want you want." Faerie should be weird and horrifying but also weird and wondrous--in a horrific way, naturally. Miracles, wonders, and abominations.

Of course, the authorities don't want anybody having interaction with the faerie, much less smuggling in their reality-warping, magical tech--and maybe they have a point. But if PCs did the smart thing they wouldn't be adventurers, would they?

Heroic Headshots!

I've been busy with real-life stuff, projects have been backburnered for a bit now, but looking back over art done for the Armchair Planet Who's Who I've posted to the blog before makes me eager to get back to it. Just take a look at these team headshots done by Agus Calcagno:

Branded as anomalies--beings who were dangerous simply because they were outside their proper timestream--they were imprisoned in an extra-temporal prison. They escaped and now survive as crosstime soldiers of fortune... The Tempus Fugitives!

They are the source of our legends of fairies, trolls, and goblins, but the truth is they are a genetically altered subspecies of humanity with incredible powers. They are the Abhumans, and they have remained hidden...until now!

Wednesday Comics: Captain Fear

Captain Fear is an obscure DC character who's first (of two) runs was as a feature in Adventure Comics with art by Alex Niño, written by first Robert Kanigher and then Steve Skeates. Captain Fear appears in issues #425-427, 429, 432-433 for this first arc in 1973.

The titular Captain Fear is Fero, a young member of the Carib tribe from what is now Haiti. He enters the story as part of a fishing expedition that encounters a Spanish ship. The Spanish seek to capture the Caribs, who fight back. Fero's father is killed, but he gives a last admonition to his son:

The remaining tribesmen swim to land, where they are captured by the Spanish. They are taken to a mine at put to work. Under Fero's leadership, they escape, killing the sleeping Spaniards, and stealing their ship. Unfortunately, they are struck by a storm. The ship is destroyed, though Fero survives, adrift on flotsam.

He must drift a really long time, becauses he's picked up by a ship that looks like a Chinese junk, crewed by Asian pirates. Fero challenges the pirate captain and easily beats him, assuming the captaincy, with the other pirates quickly proclaiming they will "follow him to hell."

The next installment begins with Captain Fear and his men saving a young woman from sacrifice to the god Thu in the jungles of "Indochina." (The year in this installment is given as 1850, which seems unlikely, given the vibe of this story. The later run places him in the 17th Century.) After a tense escape in the jungle, Captain Fear's ship is attacked by another group of pirates. No sooner are they defeated, than the woman, Denise, threatens him at gunpoint to return her to her father--though she reveals he is not a rich plantation owner as Fear had hoped, since he wanted to ask for a ransom.

Her father is a pirate who's ship is fast approaching. In a pitch battle, Fear's ship is destroyed and he and his men are taken captive. Later, Denise has a change of heart and frees him. He fights Denise's father and kills the pirate. Now, Denise is Captain and offers Fero a position as her second in command.

Fero rejects her offer and jumps into the ocean to swim away. Denise vows revenge.

The next installment, Denise is as good as her word. Her men capture Fero when he reaches land. She has him sold into slavery. You can't keep Captain Fear down, though, because at the first oppurtunity, he stages a mutiny. Which fails--but soon after a storm strikes the ship, and it hits a reef. Fero is able to escape.

He reaches shore and is quickly captured by the Spanish. He's back in the Carribean--on his home island! Horrifyingly, he is told his tribe is now gone. They died fighting the invaders. They intend to make Fero a slave.

He is purchased by a Senora Fernandez. When he refuses her offer to be her personal bodyguard, he rebuffs her, and she calls her suitor, Captain Gomez to dispatch him. Fero bests Gomez and escapes. In the jungle, he is rescued by a group of black men who take him to a fellow Carib and friend.  He finds that all of them are escaped slaves from the Hernandez plantation.

The men take the plantation, but then enacts the rest of Fero's plan. They take a ship, determined to be pirates. Captain Fero sails over the horizon, and won't appear again for 7 years, and then in the hands of a new creative team.

Another Visit to the Alex Toth Casting Agency

Need a different look for an NPC or a weird monster of some sort? Check out the model sheets and concept art created for Hanna-Barbera by the late, great Alex Toth:

Cyclops:

Dragon, Four-eyed:

The rulers of the cat people:

A wizard and his pets:

A wizard with a nose piercing and fairy lackeys:

Weird Revisited: Waterfront Rogues

This post originally appeared in 2014. I think I will have to add a few more of these sorts of operators to the environs of Rivertown in the Land of Azurth.

Ocean-going pirates and landlubber thieves are common rpg archetypes, but there's another group, less dear to the pop culture imagination, that sort of bridges the gap between the two. The river pirate lurks in that gap, connecting the urban, wilderness, and sea-going adventures into one larcenous tapestry.

This sort of thing has gone on as long as there have been boats and things to steal, of course, but there are some great examples of this from American history. The Cave-In-Rock game operated out of this place on the Ohio River:

The 1790s were the high point of the piracy there. Samuel Mason and his gang robbed flatboats carrying farm goods to markets in New Orleans.

Still, the Cave-In-Rock gang aren't near as colorful as their urban counterparts. Consider Sadie Farrell (also known as "Sadie the Goat" for her modus operandi of headbutting male victims so her accomplice could mug them), a leader of the Charlton Street Gang. In 1869, the gang stole a sloop on from the waterfront on Manhattan's West Side. They embarked on a piratical spree, reading up and down the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, even going as far as Albany, supposedly. They robbed small merchant vessels, and raided farm houses and Hudson Valley mansions, occasionally kidnapping people for ransom. Sadie was said to have made male captives "walk the plank" on occasion. Eventually, the villagers organized and began to fight back. The gang was forced to abandon the sloop and return to street crime. One assumes it was fun while it lasted.

The Swamp Angels had an even more innovative approach. Based in a Cherry Street tenement named Gotham Court (also called "Sweeny's Shambles"), the Swamp Angels had a secret entrance to the sewers. There they made their lair and launched their nocturnal raids on the East River docks. Here's what the chief of police said about them in 1850:

"[they] pursue their nefarious operations with the most systematic perseverance, and manifest a shrewdness and adroitness which can only be attained by long practice. Nothing comes amiss to them. In their  boats, under cover of night, they prowl around the wharves and vessels in a stream, and dexterously snatch up every piece of loose property left for a moment unguarded."

The police tried waterfront snipers then sewer raids to fight the bandits on their own turf. Only regular sewer patrols drove the gang from its subterranean lair. Even those didn't end their piratical ways.

More interesting and game-inspiring tales of riverside criminality can be found at your local library. Or the internet.

Wednesday Comics: A Return to Storm

It's about time I got back to my exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm. This is a repeat of the beginning of Vandaahl the Destroyer to freshen your memory. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: Vandaahl the Destroyer (1987) (part 1)
(Dutch: Vandaahl de Verderver)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

In a small, strange universe, somewhere in the multiverse, a war which has lasted for millions of years comes to an end. Vandaahl the Destroyer, Lord of Chaos, Agent of Death, is brought before his triumphant enemies. He gloats that he won the moment they chose to take up arms against him, and he relishes the irony that they will now kill him in the name of peace.

But his enemies don't plan to kill him. Instead, he will be locked in the Armor of Eternity. He will be held in stasis until the end of time. They also plan to throw the armor into a black hole. They are unsure of what will happen. The All-Creator will decide his fate.

Apparently, the All-Creator isn't done with Vandaahl. Drawn into the black hole, he isn't destroyed, but instead shunted through a white hole into another universe...

He comes down like a meteorite into the water world where Storm, Ember, and Nomad have been living with a community of fishermen. Nearly drowned in the resulting wave, our heroes decide to dive down and investigate when they see a glow beneath the water. Storm and one of the fishermen don special jellyfish and diving helmets and go down.

The next day, they come back to haul up the armored figure. Storm weirdly has a hard time touching it, like his hand and the figure are two magnets, repelling each other. They take the mysterious figures back to the fisherfolks' nest to take counsel with the elders.

While the adults are talking, children are playing around the figure. They inadvertently activate some controls...

And Vandaahl lives!

TO BE CONTINUED