Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Wednesday Comics: DC, September 1980 (wk 2, pt 1)
Monday, June 21, 2021
Westwind Garden
If you do Roll20, you should check out Westwind Garden, a whimsical 5e one shot for all ages written by two of my friends and gamers in my group, Gina and Jim Shelley. It's kind of anthropomorphic animal adventure (in the vein, say, of something like Redwall), but provides a rationale for why this is occurring in a human-centric campaign. It's got great art with a70-80s Disney or Don Bluth sort of vibe. Our regular group really enjoyed the playtest.
It's Roll20 features include:
- 22 Colorful Maps - Temples, Greenhouses, Observatories, and Gardens, all in bright and inviting colors
- Helpful Macros - Initiative Macros and Location Macros to help speed up gameplay
- Side Quests - A huge cast of characters with different goals allows your players to explore the setting in different ways
- A Magical Scavenger Hunt - The party must collect several objects to break the curse, but there are multiple ways to find what they need.
- Dynamic Lighting - All maps come with prebuilt dynamic lighting
- Custom Tokens - 23 custom tokens sure to bring a smile to all your players
- Printable DM Guide - All handout materials have been collected into an easy-to-read Downloadable PDF DM Guide so you can easily review game details on your favorite electronic device, or print it out and read wherever you like.
- Printable Player Character Sheets - All eight Player Characters sheets are included in the DM Guide to help them pick the character they like best, and provide easy reference during the game.
Sunday, June 20, 2021
Operation Unfathomable Covers
Jason Sholtis tells me that the work on the remaining Operational Unfathomable Kickstarter items is drawing to close, which is good news to a lot of people. Jason requested I send him all of the cover designs I had brainstormed for the various products. I had not looked at any of these in 4 or 5 years, but once I dug them up and thought they were worth sharing, though none of them may get used on the actually products.
This was my first design for the Completely Unfathomable omnibus. I mainly just wanted to give it an omnibus sort of feel.
This is for the same book, but thinking a bit more out of the box. It's meant to look like an old bubblegum card wax pack wrapper.
This is the is the second design I did for Odious Uplands. It's meant the reference the sort of WPA national park posters.
This was my proposal for the DCC version of Completely Unfathomable. It references the Skywald Publishing horror magazine style (even with a riff on it's "horror mood" tagline). It's my least favorite of these.
Friday, June 18, 2021
Dark Sun: The Templars
We're told in the original Dark Sun campaign setting that the Templars are "clergymen devoted to the sorcerer king of their city. Like other priests, they are granted spells in return for their worship." Also, they "dominate the king's bureaucracy." The revised box set expands on this slightly saying they serve as city guards and in the army, they oversee the city's administration, and they "maintain the illusion that the sorcerer king is a god by using their absolute power to enforce worship and homage to their ruler."
The problem with these portrayals is it seems at odds with what we are told about individual city-states and their sorcerer-kings. Some sorcerer-kings are viewed as gods, it's true, but some (we are explicitly told) just style themselves as rulers or whatever. Also, despite their name implying the existence of temples, we are not, across all the city-states, given any indication of temples' existence or what the practices within them might be. The first Dark Sun novel, Denning's The Verdant Passage supports the view of the setting material, with Kalak of Tyr viewed as a king and little evidence he is worshipped by anyone (though there is a mention of the templar's leading his "veneration.").
Without providing a unified "origin" for the templars and their role, I feel like not only should their exact nature vary from city-state to city-state, but also their name. I suppose for ease of discussing them as a class, templar serves as well as anything, though. For most city-states I like the approach of the setting material and the novel: sorcerer-kings are venerated but not worshipped. (The distinction, may admittedly, be a fine one, but it exists.) The sorcerer-king forms the core of the city-state's civic religion: it's holidays, festivals, and foundational myths. There are no gods on Athas, but there is an afterlife, so perhaps fidelity to the sorcerer-king is tied in dogma to reward in the hereafter. The templars officiate at public observances (except when the sorcerer-king is present) and punish those who don't appear sufficiently devoted. As bureaucrats they also have a role in legal preceding that interact with the civic religion.
Many of the city-states are probably a bit more fascistic than ancient world cities in the popular imagination. I feel like scarcity of resources would tend to push them the direction of Immortan Joe's Citadel in Mad Max: Fury Road. I could see some smaller ones having a cult (used in the modern sense) kind of character.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Streets of Fire and the 50s-but-80s Setting
On other social media, Paul "GRIDSHOCK 20XX" Vermeren mentioned he had watched Streets of Fire for the first time after hearing that it was influential to Mike Pondsmith. I've seen people call it "proto-cyberpunk" which means, I guess, that they see it as punk without any cyber. While I can see how aspects of it would influence the aesthetics of cyberpunk, I think it's difficult to say it's "proto" anything. It's really more like an evolutionary dead-in; a path that wasn't taken.
I do think, though, that taken on something closer to it's own terms, it would suggest a pretty interesting rpg setting, not by adding cyber or other fantastic elements, but rather doing action or adventure stuff in a world that never was. For lack of a better descriptor, a world where the 80s was more like the 50s. Or maybe the 50s was more like the 80s would work, but I think the former is better.
The styles of cars and clothes resemble the 60s, but the urban sprawl is more like the urban decay of the 70s into the early 80s--where it isn't exaggerated for fanciful effect. There was a long war, which was aesthetically perhaps more like Korea, but the public perception of its pointlessness and the difficulties its soldiers had upon return resemble more the popular conception of Vietnam. The gangs that are sometimes the bogeymen of 80s films just look more like the gangs in The Wild One than the gangs in Fort Apache the Bronx. I feel like the media presence Chaykin pushes in American Flagg! (which is, of course, set in the future but like most sci-fi speaks to the fears/concerns of its era, the 80s) or The Dark Knight Returns, could be interesting translated to 50s television without loosing much.
So what would the characters do other than what we see the characters do in the film? Well, just pick any present-day set 80s action movie and give it a bit of a 50s veneer.
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Wednesday Comics: DC, September 1980 (wk 1, pt 2)
Wonder Woman #271: I'll be brief with this Conway/Delbo reset. Diana saves Steve Trevor's life, again (not the one from her Earth than had died, but another one). Then, she wins the right to be Wonder Woman again in a competition. Then, she leaves with Steve Trevor again for Man's World. Years of continuity dumped with no fuss, no bother. There's a backup story starring the Huntress by Levitz and Staton which isn't bad.
Monday, June 14, 2021
Weird Revisited: Zone Commandos!
THE SETUP: In 1985, a deep space probe returns to Earth after being thought lost in a spacetime anomaly. It returns to Earth, dropping otherworldly debris in its wake. Across the globe, zones on anomalous phenomena and monstrous creatures are created!
Twenty years later, only special UN troops stand between humanity and the destruction of civilization as we know it!
It’s Roadside Picnic meets 50s monster and sci-fi movies/kaiju and 60-70s action figures like G.I. Adventure Team and Big Jim.
THE HEROES are mostly buzz cut military men like the MARS Patrol but with code names and personalities more like 80s G.I. Joe. Their ranks many be augmented by beings that appeared from an anomaly (Kirby-esque amazons, aliens) or people enhanced by barely understood and dangerous technology acquired from them (Atomic Man, THUNDER Agent sorts)
THE DANGERS are strange environments, monsters of all sorts of 50s and 60s sorts, from Zanti misfits to human mutates to giant mutant dinosaurs.
This is a refinement/re-imaging of my Rifts 1970 campaign idea, just a little more militarized and more informed by the early 60s.