No Elves

 

This is not a Talislanta post.

While D&D has added a number of new "races" to the game over the decades, it has remained strongly humanoid-centric. Nothing wrong with that, but I have wondered on occasion if fantasy of a more or less standard variety would feel any different if you placed the D&D races with say, the species in Star Frontiers (just one example, but these have the advantage of already having appeared in D&D via adaptations to Spelljammer)? Not as an addition, but as a replacement for the usual elves, dwarves, and halflings.

Sure all sorts of gonzo PC types appear in various Old School sources, but these tend to move the game away from classic fantasy toward science fantasy or post-apocalytpicness. I think it would be interesting to see how it works if they were inserted into something more basic. 

What's to be gained? Well, for one thing, science fiction has different cliches than fantasy. There are warrior races and superior beings in both, but they don't get packaged quite in the same way. Special relationships to nature or magic are out, for instance. No one assumes Dralasites have Scottish accents, at least.

Security Robots and Dead Chickens

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued this past Sunday with the party warned by the automated voice at the gates of the Gander Foods Chicken Plant that security was on the way. When the four metal men armed with paralyzing batons arrived, the party perhaps regretted their decision to hang around. Still, they ultimately did prevail, but were so depleted they opted for a place to hide and a short rest.

They found cover on another side of the plant behind an old vehicle of some sort. Waylon managed to find a red keycard while trying to find away to activate the vehicle.

With keycard in hand, they were able to enter a side door of the building where they discovered a long hallway with many doors. Behind the first couple, they found numerous chicken cages, a smashed metal man, and the body of a dead chicken humanoid.

TO BE CONTINUED

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.