Weird Revisited: When Noom Comes

This post first appeared in 2015...

There is one holiday in the Land of Azurth that can never be scheduled because it comes when it will. Loonsday, it is called, and on Loonsday, Noom, the shy, hidden face of the Moon, turns toward Azurth. When the light of smiling Noom shines down, many strange things have been known to happen.

Here are ten strange visitations that have occurred on a Loonsday, under Noom's beaming face:

1. Street cobblestones are disturbed as by ripples in a pond.
2. A strange, scintillant mist attaches itself to a person and follows them around for sometime making a soft sobbing sound.
3. People don strange hats and spontaneous start a parade, winding through the streets of the city, as if in some ecstatic trance. At some point, they cease their marching. The participants throw their hats aside and return to their previous business. They profess no memory of the events.
4. Inanimate household objects have come to life and demanded their freedom from enslavement for perhaps an hour before returning to normal.
5. A rat-king and its retinue emerge from the sewers to hold court in a city square. He will answer 3 questions about the future, promising that at least one prediction will not be a lie.
6. Someone finds a kazoo whose sound will banish lesser devils.
7. Shadows take on weight and texture of a thin piece of felt and detach from their owners with a bit of tugging.
8. A rain of frogs occur over an area of the city, but each frog drifts down slowly under a tiny parasol.
9. A swarm of small, translucent portuguese man-of-war fly through like balloons in a strong wind. They strike anyone in their path like thrown boxing gloves.
10. Small groups of people in odd clothes with their heads replaced by glowing orbs are seen in the streets. If accosted or hindered in their obscure tasks, they will search their pockets or purses and produce a few alien coins and give them to the person confronting them. The coins hum and writhe gently in the hand.

Loonsday inserts itself into the more sensible and regular calendar of Azurth without warning. The appearance of Noom in the sky will always signal that it has begun. When Noom has set (and not in the normal way but by simply drifting away like a handful of sand blown on the wind) Loonsday is over and the normal precision of time resumes.

The New Old Solar System

The "Old Solar System" with a wet, fecund Venus, and a habitable desert Mars, doesn't have the be the relegated to pulp retreads with gleaming, silver rockets. S.M. Stirling wrote a couple of alternate histories in his Lords of Creation series wherein Venus and Mars just happened to be habitable (well, not just happened to be, but no spoilers), but the stories were otherwise fairly hard sci-fi. The anthologies Old Venus and Old Mars have a few stories in a similar vein.

There's some reason you could put a pulp-derived but more rigorous in its details Mars or Venus in the background of an rpg setting like Transhuman Space or The Expanse or any other nearer future or solar system only sci-fi thing.

A habitable Mars or Venus doesn't require much of a stretch of scientific plausibility, but it might be fun to go full Edmond Hamilton or Leigh Brackett with fungal forests on Saturn or mud-mining on Io. I can't think of any reason why in an rpg you couldn't overlay the trapping of hard/near future science fiction on a completely pulp solar system.

Ravenloft 1934

Perhaps it was merely all the death from war and disease that open a portal some dread place, or maybe it was the purposeful act of malevolent intelligence of the Outer Dark? Whatever the cause, at the end of the Great War a strange mist settled over much of Europe.  Supernatural beings of legend were again free to walk the Earth...

The idea is to take the style and ahistorical setting of the Universal and RKO horror films of the 30s--what in Shadows Over Filmland Robin Laws called the "Backlot Gothic"--and apply it to Ravenloft, whether the Masque of the Red Death version of Ravenloft or the original recipe would be up to you, but I think recasting various Ravenloft denizens as "off-brand" Universal Monsters stand-ins would be the way to go.

Wednesday Comics: We Only Find Them When They're Dead

 

"The Gods are always beautiful...And the Gods are always dead."

Writer Al (Immortal Hulk) Ewing and artist Simone Di Meo imagine a science fiction future where, in an inversion of Galactus yarns, working stiffs mine (or perhaps "butcher" is more apt) the titanic corpses of cosmic gods for the needs of humanity. Captain Malik and the diverse crew of the Vihaan II have had enough of corporate wage-slavery, though, and devise a daring plan to escape and do what no one has ever done: find a living god.

The first few issue really only use the god corpses as a backdrop. The real focus is on the system that traps the ships crews and keeps them working for the company. It sketches the various members of Malik's crew and their reasons for wanting to risk all they've got to break free.

Ewing has an interesting premise, and Di Meo's art is like some European comics I've seen in the past decade with vibrant colors and character designs that seem somewhat animation inspiration.

The collection of volume one is due out in May.

Spelljammer 1961

"Thinking beings of earth planet. This message was sent subsequent to the bravery of Yuri Gagarin and the achievements of the Soviet Union, but its intended recipient is every individual of your species. We are the Esoteric. We are now honored to admit you into the interstellar society. Many things we have to show you will definitely shock you and cause confusion. We have regret in that our policies mean you are living in a controlled environment where your understanding of physics has been restricted. We guarantee that this was done to protect you. Now, you are graded ready to have the safety guard removed to more fully experience the universe. We look forward to meeting with your government representatives and giving you a menu of offered services."

The poorly translated message broadcast to the entire planet was from beings who called themselves the Arcane. They revealed the image of the solar system taking shape from modern observations was an illusion. The real solar system was teeming with life, and ships powered by something more like magic that rocketry sailed through the heavens.

Once the principals were understood, humanity was able to get impossible, physics-defining things to happen even deep within Earth's gravity well, but it was always easier the thinner the atmosphere was. Humanity wasted no time in establishing orbital colonies and bases on the Moon, though they were ultimately more fantastic than anything science fiction had dreamed since the Victorian era. Once trade started with Mars and magical wood was imported, even private individuals were able to build all manner of spacecraft.

The Space Age had truly begun.

Wild Wild West Wednesday: The Night of the Whirring Death

Let this re-posting of a Christmas-ish episode of Wild Wild West serve is a reminder that Jim and I are reviewing the series here on his blog...

 

"The Night of the Whirring Death" 

Written by Jackson Gillis
Directed by Mark Rydell
Synopsis (from IMDB): Jim and Artie are collect money from millionaires buying bonds to save California from bankruptcy. The problem is, Dr. Loveless is back and blowing up the would-be benefactors with booby-trapped toys to steal the money.

Trey: This is the closest WWW came to a Christmas episode. It isn't stated in the episode to be Christmas, but the winter weather, focus on toys, and other story elements give they vibe. It aired, however, in February of 1966.

Jim: It starts off with a nice tip of the hat to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with Jeremiah Ratch taking the place of  Scrooge. Ratch is played by Norman Fell, aka Mr. Roper from Three’s Company. Fell’s comedy chops come in handy as he hams it up with the Ratch character for the short time he’s on the screen.

Trey: This is Dr. Loveless' third appearance and the first not written by his creator. It sticks pretty close to the established Loveless schtick though: he's still trying to carve his own kingdom out of part of California. Voltaire (Richard Kiel) and Antionette (Phoebe Dorin) are back, as well.

Jim: I believe this is the one and only time Loveless is ever shown smoking. It’s mostly for comical effect, admittedly, after he's revealed as the “child” who gifted Ratch toy soldiers.

Trey: Voltaire speaks for the first time, too. It's note as being a change within the episode. One Loveless related conundrum: Why does the brilliant doctor continue to employ lovely female assistants in his plans, who he knows by now are only going to fall for West's charms?

Jim: He tries to maneuver Priscilla away from it, but to no avail! She is the most wide-eyed innocent of the group, so far.

Trey: Unbelievably naïve is the better descriptor! I wonder if her toy maker grandfather raised her with no contact with the outside world?

Jim: A funny bit is the look of cynical disbelief on lovely Antionette’s face when Priscilla is convinced by Loveless that the exploding toy train is a perfectly fine toy.

Just putting this out there: with the naivete Priscilla displays, I think a nice plot twist for the episode would’ve been to have her be revealed as a human sized animatronic created by Loveless. 

Trey: I could buy that.

Jim: In general, I think the level of technology in this episode seems a bit advanced. We see electric trains and phonographs.

Trey: The phonograph was an anachronism noted in Loveless's first appearance. The electric train is similarly just a bit ahead, having been invented in the 1890s. Incidentally, this episode actually gives us an onscreen place and time: "San Francisco, 1874."

Jim: One of the unintentionally funny bits to me: After West is ground zero at the explosion in Ratch’s shop, Gordon proclaims that he's fine and just needs some rest. Supporting him in this dubious claim is a city cop who says, “He’s right lady. Working this beat, I’ve seen enough to know he’ll be fine.” Just how violent is this neighborhood?

Trey: Thinks are hard in California in this alternate 1874, apparently. I mean, the governor's plan here is explicitly laundering money for rich people with shady, possibly criminal, business practices to keep his state solvent. 

Jim: Vote Loveless! How could it be worse?

Reconquest of the Surface

The war, known now to the survivors as The Fury, was devastating. As many as could be saved were moved into underground habitations built for this very eventuality. Not everyone was lucky enough to have a place in the shelters, and when the leaded doors were closed and sealed, many people were left to fight for survival in the gloom, as the radioactive and mutagenic haze played strange tricks with the light of the sun and moon, and death burrowed into their bones.

The species survived, though, and in those underground redoubts, so did civilization. The old nations were forgotten with time and new ones formed, as fresh tunnels linked farflung bunkers. They only need to wait and endure. Eventually, the scientists said things might be safe, and so scouts were sent outside.

They were not prepared for what they found. The natural world, as they had hoped, had healed itself. There was no trace of the world that had been or the war that destroyed it. Things were lush and green--though that didn't mean all the horror or strangeness it was gone.

There were people on this new Earth, apparently the deformed descendants of those who had been left outside. Dwarfish ones one had perhaps come from makeshift bunkers not sufficiently sealed as they too spent much time underground. People of the forest, grotesquely thin and large eared, and then the most numerous people who lived in primitive cities. All of them were hideous. There was sometime neotenic about them in a way that made the skin crawl: their teeth were so small, their foreheads flat, their jaws receding.

Councils were convened to consider this information. The technological know-how of the people was superior to their mutated cousins, but they were limited in their access to resources and many of their machines had broken down. They were, ironically, fewer in number than those who had survived the terrors of fallout. 

The decision was made not to wage an all out war for the surface, but instead to look for out of the way places to recover resources. They would approach the mutants, when necessary using similar technology--they could not afford to have any more advanced devices fall into the primitives' hands. They could perhaps surreptitiously influence them, maybe create allies to prepare for their return. Some might have to die, of course, but perhaps the more could be shepherded toward civilization.

It would be a long project, but humanity was up to it. For now, they would have to embrace the name "orc" given to them by the mutants and play the expected role.