Wednesday Comics: 2020 Holiday Comic Gift Guide

 Still looking for something for that comic lover in your life or maybe anticipating having gift cards to spend on yourself after the holidays? Here are some collections I would recommend.

Deadman Omnibus
Deadman has always been one of those deep-bench DC characters I have been fond of. Truthly, also more for the artists than the writing with the likes of Neal Adams, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, and Kelly Jones depicting him at various times. I already have the Neal Adams Deadman collection, but looks like I'll be getting that material again plus some never before collected material.

First Knife

I talked about this post-apocalyptic sci-fi series written by Simon Roy back when it was coming up in monthly issues and was called The Protector. 

The Goddamned: Before The Flood (Oversized)

This brutal, revisionist take on the Antediluvian parts of Genesis written by Jason Aaron is now on its second volume, but what better way to get ready for that collection scheduled for release in February with this version of volume where Cain meets Noah.

The Immortal Hulk Omnibus

It's surprising it took so long to get a take on the Hulk that plays like a horror story, but that's what the Immortal Hulk does. It's the sort of a "new take" on the character and his mythology that it seems like was more common in the 90s than today. 

Star Trek Endeavour: The Evictors

Episode 3: "THE EVICTORS"

Player Characters: 

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

Eric As Lt.Cmdr. Tavek, Science Officer

Jason as Lt. Francisco Otomo, Chief Security Officer
Tug as Dr. Azala Vex, Trill Chief Medical Officer

Synposis: Stardate 5927.1, a festival on the planet Nraka celebrating its 10,000 year of civilization is disrupted by the arrival of gigantic starship carrying a group called the Sanoora who claim to have left Nraka to escape a cataclysm--and now demand the current inhabitants vacate their world!

Commentary: This adventure was based on issue 41 of the Gold Key Star Trek series from November of 1976. In that story, the Sanoora wind up attacking the Enterprise and so the starship helps the Nrakans drive off the would be invaders. Spock only discovers their is some truth to their claim in the coda.

The Endeavour crew handled things in a bit more genuine Star Trekian fashion. They discovered the truth that the Sanoora were indeed from the Nraka, and the Nrakans were descended from the people they left behind when leaving the planet. In a bit of diplomacy, they convinced both sides to stand down, and brought them to the table to negotiate a mutually agreeable solution. The Federation took over from there and sent in a team of real diplomats.

Weird Revisited: The Galactic Great Wheel

So here's the pitch: Sometime in the future, an early spacefaring humanity encounters a gate and gains access to a system of FTL via hyperspace (or the astralspace) and gets its introduction to an ancient, galactic civilization with arcane rules and customs a bit like Brin's Uplift universe. At the "center" of the gates is Hub, a place with a gigantic neutral territory station--like Babylon 5 on a grander scale. Hub connects to all the various worlds. Here's a short sampling:

Archeron: A war world, possibly one where a decadent civilization has kidnapped warriors form different times and worlds to battles for their entertainment.

Baator: The world of beings who (like the Overlords in Childhood's End) look suspiciously like devils from Earth belief, and indeed act very much like them, destabilizing worlds with Faustian bargains somewhat like in Swanwick's Jack Faust.

Beastworld: A planet where many animal species share a group intelligence.

Carceri: An environmentally hostile ancient prison planet.

Limbo: A world in an area of reality warping "broken space" where hyperspace spills in leading to a graveyard of ships.

Mechanus: Robotic beings out to bring order to the galaxy via assimilation. A somewhat (maybe) more reasonable Borg.

Pandemonium: A world only inhabitable in subterranean caverns, but even those are swept by winds that generate infrasound that can drive humanoids insane like the titular Winds of Gath.

Werewolf Trooper!

 

Art by Jason Sholtis

The werewolves were supreme in the 32nd century. Only the destruction of the moon final broke their reign.

Star Trek Ranger: Prime Time

Player Characters: The Crew of the USS Ranger, Federation scout ship:
Aaron as Lt.(jg.) Cayson Randolph

Andrea as Capt. Ada Greer

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

Synposis: Ranger is on a cultural exchange mission to Viden, an advanced world who has given up space travel for television. When the crew intervenes in the apprehension of a sitcom who tries to escape his contract, they find themselves the unwilling subjects of a reality show.

Commentary: This adventure was based on IDW's Star Trek: Year Four #4 written by David Tischman. It's a humorous story in the comic in the manner of the TOS episode "A Piece of the Action," though its plot bears some resemblance to "Bread and Circuses" in it's satire of the television industry. The player's certainly took to it in the way it was intended.

The Three Planeteers

In my short Thanksgiving travels, I managed to complete the audiobook of Edmond Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, originally published in the January 1940 issue of Startling Stories. Other than providing the inspiration for the name, Dumas' novel has little bearing on Hamilton's work.

In a future (Sometime in the 28th Century, I believe. An exact date isn't given.) where humanity has settled all the worlds in the solar system and gradually adapted to them. The fascist dictatorship of Haskell Trask has spread from Saturn and its moons, to all the outer planets, forming the League of Cold Worlds, which now menaces the Alliance of the inner worlds.

The titular trio are the most famous outlaws in the solar system: John Thorne of Earth, Sual Av of Venus, and Gunner Welk of Mercury. It turns out they aren't really outlaws at all, but special agents for the Alliance, pretending to be criminals so the Alliance has plausible deniability regarding their actions against the League. 

With war looming, the only hope of the Alliance to defeat the massive League war fleet is an experimental new weapon which requires the ultra-rare substance radite to work. Good news is there sufficient radite on the trans-Plutonian world of Erebus. Bad news is no one has ever returned from Erebus alive. Well, no one except, it's rumored, a former renegade turned space pirate. Said pirate is now dead, but his daughter reigns as pirate queen in the Asteroid Belt.

Besides the classic space war plotline, Hamilton gives a lot of space opera color: "joy-vibration" addicts, hunters in the fungal forests of Saturn, and the deadly secret of Erebus. It could be easily shorn of some it's old-fashionedness and moved outside of the solar system. Pieces would be easy to drop into Star Wars or any other space opera game.

Go to Very Distant Lands

Art by Steve Ellis

 Adventure Time ended its original run in 2018, but there's a now series of single episode stories on HBOMax. Watching those reminded me how a lot of rpgers were excited about Adventure Time, at least in its early seasons. It's sort of gonzo, post-apocalyptic setting seemed very much cut from the same cloth as a lot of rpg worldbuilding.

No official AT rpg has ever appeared in English, and in the end the show is a kid's cartoon, perhaps more character driven, than exploration based, but I think it would be pretty easy to derive inspiration from the form of AT's Land of Ooo, as opposed to exact content. In other words, if you wanted a D&D campaign for adults to do D&D stuff that was just in some ways reminiscent of Ooo, this is how I would go about it. (If this thread gets comments someone will no doubt mention the Far Away Lands rpg. Let me preempt that by saying that it has slightly different goals. It's more doing an AT but not AT rpg. I'm thinking of "if you want D&D to have more of a resemblance to AT" without going full cartoon.)

So this is what I think:

• Make the setting more expressly post-apocalyptic. Not in the usual Tolkienian way that D&D usually is, but in the Gamma World way.
• Avoid the standard versions of standard monsters. You can use names like "dragon" if you want, but avoid the standard fantasy dragons of D&D. Ok, maybe goblins or giants can stay, but no orcs. My suggestion: borrow a lot of monsters and races from Gamma World, and lean heavy on the AD&D Fiend Folio derived monsters.
• Elementals are important, but maybe not the standard Greek ones. They seem to be part of a fundamental magic structure of the universe, but Fire, Water, yada yada may not be where it's at. Luckily, D&D gives us para- and quasi- elementals that are weirder.
• Don't be afraid of the player's getting ahold of more advanced tech, but not weapons so much. Let them freely pick up a bit of the 20th or 21st Century here and there, but don't make weapons or combat related. Let them find record players (or ipods), or gameboys and the like.
• Mutagens and weirdness. While AT doesn't dwell on it, it has decree of weirdness and even body horror that seems drawn from the most fevered of post-apocalyptic or atomic war fiction. The zones of Roadside Picnic have more in common with it that you might think.
• Negotiation is always an option. Very few creatures should be attack on sight sorts. Most of them have got the same sort of troubles and aspirations as the adventures, just a different point of view.
• Don't be afraid of humor. The first edition of Gamma World embraced the silliness of its premise and with something like this, you should too.