The Solar Frontier

In a universe other than our own, the early observations of the planets were not proved fanciful misperceptions by the march of science, but instead bolstered by it. By the time space probes were sent, the people of Earth knew Mars and Venus were inhabited.

In time, the three species of the inner planets formed a partnership: the Vrusk of Mars, and from fecund Venus the Hadozee and Dralasites. With their combined efforts, the alliance of worlds made rapid scientific advances, and they would need them. Beyond Mars, the Alliance encountered the vessels of a mysterious new civilization, one that would eventually learn was called the Sathar.

There were other species out in the deep beyond of the solar system, but the Sathar ruled there and they had turned their double-pupiled gaze to the inner worlds.

Wednesday Comics: Pre-Crisis Wonder Woman

Over the holidays, I got the quixotic idea to do a survey of DC Comics in the 80s prior to Crisis. Having just watched Wonder Woman 1984, I decided to start there. Some of the late 70s covers looked intriguing in that Bronze Age sort of way, so I started a bit earlier with Wonder Woman #250, cover dated December 1978, but on the stands in September of 1978. So far, I have made it through December 1980.

The quick summary is: none of it is very good. 

In a bit more detail, it seems largely that no one is sure quite what to do with Wonder Woman. It starts with Steve Trevor dead, and Diana Prince becoming an astronaut, but they seem uncertain about that, because they give her excuses to come back to New York City. She also briefly gets replaced by another Amazon as Wonder Woman, which I think happened in the 70s at some point, too.

Jose Delbo and Vince Coletta are providing art, and Jack Harris is writing this uninspired stuff. Then Paul Levitz comes in and tries to stick to astronaut thing, but that doesn't really work either. Finally, she quits the astronaut program and leaves Houston for New York City, after a potential love interest is revealed to be the leader of the Royal Flush Gang.

That's part of the problem: A lack of compelling adversaries. I mean, she fights Angle-Man several times in this stretch. Angle-Man who got half a page in Who's Who and probably hasn't appeared Post-Crisis. Then there are two appearances by Bushmaster who is less compelling than the Marvel villain of that name, which is pretty damning. He doesn't even show up in Who's Who.

So, Gerry Conway to rescue. Or not. I mean, he shakes things up by having reports of Diana Prince's flakiness (owing to her secret identity) leading to her not being able to get her old job back at the UN. So Wonder Woman briefly gets fired up about modern society's lack of privacy with it's files and government records and whatnot. Then Ares and crew make her a little crazy, so the people in New York for a while reject her.

She's fed up with Man's World, and returns to Paradise Island. If all that seems like it might have been going somewhere...well, the only place it was going was a reboot. A young Steve Trevor flies in from a parallel dimension, allowing Wonder Woman to re-enact her origin, then her mom wipes her memories of her previous life as "a kindness."

She follows the new Steve Trevor back to Man's World to be his assistant, and the reboot circle is complete. Angle-Man's still there, though. Good ol' reliable Angle-Man.

These issues end with the introduction of the second Cheetah. There's an interesting (to me) bit of comic chronology there, in that the second Cheetah is the niece of the first, who the story suggests recently died, and appears to have been elderly. Yet, that Cheetah apparently fought the Earth-1 Wonder Woman (no universe crossing shenanigans are suggested), which makes one wonder how long Conway believes Wonder Woman has been active?

And after all that, I decided to take a break. I plan to get back to it. Then again, maybe another title might be the place to start...

Weird Revisited: The Hanna-Barbera Superhero Universe

This post originally appeared in December of 2014. After I wrote this DC did a big crossover series Future Quest with some of these characters...

Art by Carlos Mota

I have, at various times, considered a supers campaign set in the universe of Hanna-Barbera's superhero cartoons.

One unusual thing about Hanna-Barbera's supers characters is that, when you leave aside the licensed properties (Super Friends, The Fantastic Four) and the completely comedic ones (The Impossibles, Atom Ant), very few of the characters follow traditional superhero conventions. For example, few are set on modern day Earth, or have a stable base of operations and supporting cast. The only one that does (Birdman) is unusual because he's a superhuman agent of a governmental organization, not unlike the THUNDER Agents.

Despite this different in focus and presentation, I think many of them could be adapted to a more traditional superhero mold. Call it "Ultimate Hanna-Barbera," if you will.  Let's run the list:

Art by Alex Ross

Space Ghost: A very superhero-y and well realized character as-is. Perhaps like the Legion of Super-Heroes he is a futuristic character in the same universe as the others? A future Phantom/Batman in the same way Captain Future is kind of a futuristic Doc Savage. The other option would be to make him sort of Green Lantern-like. A space cop assigned to protect earth. Or some combination of the two?

Young Samson: (Also known as Samson & Goliath) A teen with a Captain Marvel schtick who wanders around Route 66 or Incredible Hulk style, getting into adventures, works pretty well as-is. As suppose, it would be better to have him settled down and become more of a Peter Parker.

Shazzan: The cartoon has two kids transport to an Arabian Nights fantasy-land after finding their genie, but they could have just as easily stayed in the modern day. Two teens sharing a genie to fight evil would be an interesting concept.

Mightor: A Stone Age Thor, essentially. There isn't any reason a worthy successor couldn't find the magic club and become Mightor in the modern day. Of course, the character is a bit on the silly side and would probably work best for a Silver Age vibe rather than a Modern Age one.

Herculoids: In a comic book universe, the Herculoids could be sort of Ka-Zar type characters where their Savage Land is a world in another dimension, or they could be treated like a primitive Forever People and have them arrive on Earth to be super-powered fish-out-of-water.

Art by MarioPons

The Galaxy Trio: These teen heroes are probably better candidates for Forever People stand-ins. You can transport them to the modern day and have them be alien heroes stranded on Earth for some reason.

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.