Revisiting the Wild Wild West Season Two

Jim Shelley and I are continuing our selective re-watch of the Wild Wild West weekly on the Flashback Universe Blog. We're now starting the second florid, full-color season.

You can catch up on installments here.

Star Trek Ranger: Patterns of Vengeance (part 2)

Player Characters: The Crew of the USS Ranger, Federation scout ship:
Andrea as Capt. Ada Greer
Billy as Lt. Cmdr. Sobek, Ship's Counselor

Dennis, as Lt. Osvaldo Marquez, Medical Officer
Paul as Cmdr. D.K. Mohan, Chief Helmsman

Supporting Cast:

Ensign Elana Duffy, Security Officer

Lt. Thera ch'Reith, Security Chief

Synposis: With Capt. Greer trapped on the USS Brackett with a being that calls itself "Unity" possessing some of her crew, Mohan takes Ranger to the icy planetoid of Mycena to try and determine what this has to do with the transporter experiments of Janet Hester. They discover the experiments in long range matter transmission may have lead to one or more of Hester's team being somehow trapped in dematerialized form.

Commentary: The Deneva Research Team which Hester and her ill-fated team were a part of are first mentioned in the Spaceflight Chronology. 

Within the Star Trek Universe, long distance transporter experimentation was attempted by Emory Erickson has depicted in the Enterprise episode "Daedelus," and has been depicted in use by other civilizations such as the Kalandans in "That Which Survives."

The away team encountered a monster that burrowed under the ice on Mycena that was inspired by the Delta Vega creature in Star Trek (2009).

Adventuring in the Harveylands

I wrote a post about a year and a half ago about the Harveylands, the setting of the Harvey Comics universe as codified on the map above in the 80s.

While there are obviously elements of the comics that wouldn't fit a game of a D&Dish of even a somewhat unusual sort, I feel like you could jettison those and have something that wouldn't be that off-model. The only Tieflings of the "standard races" would appear, of course, providing for Hot Stuff and the Devils. There are several ghost races (for Casper types) floating around the internet, though. Witches like Wendy and rich kids like Richie would just be classes.

As presented, something like the Harveylands would be a fairly small setting, but big enough for a campaign, I think. Particularly, if the edges bled into more fantastic realms: the Hells, the Land of the Dead, etc.

Weird Revisted: Monster Apocalypses

The original version of this post appeared in October of 2013...

Zombie apocalypses have been done to death with films, books, and tv shows. Other classic monsters deserve their (proverbial) day in the sun, too:

Vampires: The most obvious non-zombie contender for virtually extinction of the human species. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and it's various movie adaptations have already ventured into this territory (as has the film Stake Land and the TV show The Strain) --and the comics Planet of Vampires and Vampire Hunter D have already shown on vampire overrun post-apocalypses. Trading bloodsucking for flesh-eating is almost too obvious.

Piscoids: Cast them as Creatures from Black Lagoons, Manphibians, or walking catfish men, fishy humanoids are ready to climb from the depths and overwhelm the surface world. Perhaps a full-fledged takeover is the ultimate goal of the Deep Ones in Shadow Over Innsmouth? Global warming and rising sea levels would no doubt be part of their plan. A piscoid apocalypse might wind up looking more like Waterworld than Walking Dead.

Werewolves: Like vampires and zombies, werewolfism is passed by a bite, making them a reasonable stand-in. I don't know of any media werewolf apocalypses, but Dog Soldiers sort of does the "trapped in an isolated farm house" riff of Night of the Living Dead. Depending on exactly how the werewolves worked, things might be pretty tough for humanity: zombies are slow and dumb, while vampires have to sleep in the day time. Werewolves have neither of those limitations. Of course, their just humans in the day, trying to scourge for survival just like everybody else. Only at night would they join packs of killers to howl at the moon as they hunt through the ruins.

Frankenstein's Monsters: This seems like the biggest stretch given than Frankenstein had only one monster (or maybe two, depending on who you believe). Still, two monsters can overrun the world (unless they're giant, which still movies us out of zombie apocalypse analogous territory). Technology has advanced a lot since Frankenstein's day, though. Wein's and Wrightson's Un-Men in Swamp Thing (and Burroughs' Synthetic Men of Mars, for that matter) point the way: Mass production of monsters. In some ways, this would resemble an alien invasion apocalypse or robot apocalypse more than a zombie one--though perhaps the monsters "consume" humans by dragging them back to their secret factories to use as raw materials for more monsters?

Wednesday Comics: Waiting for the Omnibus

 A couple of DC Omnibuses I've been waiting for sometime are finally available.

One was solicited over a year ago, then cancelled only to be resolicited again. As of last week, it was finally released. The Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus vol. 1 collects the series by Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum that imagined a darker future for the United Planets and the now adult members of the Legion.

This was the run that got my interested in the Legion of Super-Heroes.

The publication of the Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus vol. 3 was probably never in doubt, but it's been one I've been eagerly anticipated since they embarked on this series. Batman RIP has good, but marred by changing ideas of what the series was going to be and the need to fit in with the Final Crisis event. Batman and Robin was better still, but to my mind Batman Incorporated is the best of Morrison's work it takes the Silver Age-y flourishes with a modern sensibility that had surfaced from time to time in the early portions of his run and makes it the centerpiece of the seris. 

Star Trek Endeavour: The Clarity of Crystal

Episode 2: "THE CLARITY OF CRYSTAL"

Player Characters: 

The Crew of the USS Endeavour, NCC-1895, Constitution Class Starship (refit):
Andrea as Lt. Ona Greer, Chief Engineer Officer and Lt. Taryn Loy, Geologist
Bob as Capt. Robert Locke
Gina as Cmdr. Isabella Hale, Helm Chief
Jason as Lt. Francisco Otomo, Chief Security Officer

Eric As Lt.Cmdr. Tavek, Science Officer
Tug as Dr. Azala Vex, Trill Chief Medical Officer

Synposis: Checking in on the research station on the inhospitable Erebus III, the crew of the Endeavour discovers the unscrupulous head of the station is drugging the scientist in an attempt to make psionic contact with an ancient crystalline computer network.

Commentary: This is an adventure I wrote based off a session for a Star Trek Starships & Spacemen game back in 2013. When this group finishes the adventure, I may redo the notes to be Star Trek Adventures congruent and reshare them.

This adventure (inadvertently) featured yet another planet you couldn't transport down to. I'll have to avoid that in future adventures.

A Tale of Two TV Show Episode Guides

It would be reasonable to ask what's the use of a print episode guide to a TV show in an age where the internet makes the basic information readily available on the likes of Wikipedia or IMDB? If you're dead set against it, I won't be able to convince you, but I would say a good episode guide doesn't just relate facts easily amenable to one internet search. At a minimum, a print episode guide should collate information that would likely require multiple searches to get, but a truly good episode guide presents a depth of research not generally achievable on the internet. It moves beyond the basic facts to give insight into episodes for someone already familiar with the basic facts.

The three volumes of These Are the Voyages: TOS by Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn are the most comprehensive guide to Star Trek the Original Series available. Cushman's commentary on the episodes as tv drama is limited (though as much as many other guides available), but he presents a wealthy of information on the development of each episode from story idea to final aired version, with quotes from interview with creative staff and memos from producers and network execs. 

If it has a flaw, it is that it is not concise. Every season is its on volume, and every volume is sizable. But then, the audience for this sort of detail would just go Wikipedia if they wanted surface detail.

Scott Palmer's The Wild Wild West: The Series is sizable and pricey, but is lacking in the sort of details that make These Are the Voyages worthwhile. The appeal of Palmer's book is that, unlike with Star Trek, there are few books on The Wild Wild West available. In fact, there's only one other: The Wild Wild West, The Series by Susan E. Kesler. 

Where Kesler's book resembles Alan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium in being a similar sort of thing to These Are The Voyages, but much less detailed and confined to one volume, Palmer's book only gives a detailed plot summary of every episode, a list of the primary actors involved (with pictures), and a number of stills from the episode. In the number of photos it exceeds the other works mentioned, but that's the only way. There is not insight into the creation of the episodes. It doesn't even list the screenwriters. 

So is it valueless in this age of the internet? Well, it does contain information you'd need to go to Wikipedia, IMDB, and Aveleyman to get, so it simplifies your searches, but it's got a high price tag for that. My recommendation would be Kesler's book, if you can find one.