Weird Revisited: Gnomes: Magical Mystery Tour

The original version of this post appeared in 2010, the first full year of this blog. It relates to the setting I briefly ran (and wrote about) prior to launching into the City and Weird Adventures. I late stole ideas from this setting for other stuff.

 

As mentioned before, there are two types of beings called "gnomes" in the world of Arn. One is a scholarly group akin to halflings, inhabiting and maintaining the Library of Tharkad-Keln. The other are ultraterrestrials--extraplanar beings--who have been characterized as an annoying group of pilgrims, or even less charitably, as an infection of the Prime Material Plane. It is this second type of gnome that will concern us here.

Gnomes usually appear as diminutive men with nut-brown skin and large, amber eyes. There are reports of green-skinned gnomes, and youthful females, but these are more rare. No one knows if these different forms reflect real differences within the gnomish race, or are only affectations.

Their demeanor is often perplexing, as well. They often project a knowing amusement in their interactions with other intelligent species, but can at times view even the simplest and commonplace things with child-like wonder. Unless directly threatened, they often seem blissfully unaware of dangerous situations.

No one knows on what plane the gnomes arose. Some hold that it was the elemental plane of earth itself, given their connection with that element. Others hold that they hail from an alternate material plane with a higher concentration of elemental earth. Wherever they came from, they're now a race of travelers--though the purpose of their travels is mysterious.

Gnomes go anywhere there is elemental earth. They somehow dwell within--and move and communicate through--something they refer to as "tesseract networks" within the elemental particles of earth (which as all natural philosophers know are cubic in nature). Gnomes occasionally invite other sapients into their "networks," but those who return are unable to give coherent descriptions of what they have seen.

Certain species of mushrooms represent "nodes" in the gnomish network, and are places from which gnomes emerge into our plane. Consumption of these mushrooms expands the consciousness in unpredictable ways--sometimes allowing experiences of the areas around other nodes in the gnomish network, perhaps in other time periods, or allowing direct mental communication with the intellects of the gnomes themselves. The minds of other species don't always recover from these experiences.

Despite their alien nature, gnomes are generally friendly toward other intelligent races. They will often trade gems or precious stones, though the items they desire in exchange can't be predicted. They are often skilled mages and have been known to join adventuring parties for a time, when they can find one willing to put up with their eccentricities. They go and come as they please with no explanation.  Mostly, they observe with interest, as if the world was a play put on for their amusement.

DC, October 1980 ( wk 2, pt 3)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This continues my look at the comics at newsstands around July 24, 1980.

Sgt. Rock #345: In the lead story, Kanigher and Frank Redondo almost make you feel sorry for the Iron Major. He's constantly losing to Rock (and presumably other Allied forces) and seems to keenly feel his men's deaths. At one point, Rock stops him from killing himself! It's an interesting tack to take, not because it strives to portray a German officer with some positive traits (that's not uncommon in Kanigher's war books that often focus on how bad war is for everyone), but that this supposed arch-nemesis of Sgt. Rock is portrayed as kind of a sad sack.

The next story is set in Korea and is written by its protagonist Sgt. Major Richard J. Bissette, who I assume is the father of the artist, Steve R. Bissette. Bissette's group is ordered to stay back and clear the way for a brigade to cross a bridge before it is blown. Bissette's team has to hold on until after the bridge is blown and swim the river. Pretty harrowing stuff! "The Bridge" (creators aren't credited) is the story of a selfless GI trying to get a group of Japanese civilians, including women and children, to surrender rather than commit suicide after the U.S. takes an island. He succeeds but only at the cost of his own life. In the last story (also uncredited, but maybe the same artist) a doughboy in the trenches of WWI thinks the pilots have it easy until he's forced to witness the mercy killing of one who is burning alive in his crashed plane. 

Super Friends #37: The main story has that comic book trope of the villain who is barely a match for one hero in a solo hero book becomes a challenge for an entire team in a team book. In this case, it's the Weather Wizard who's up to some nonsense, but the real story is about Supergirl being jealous that Linda Danver's students lavishing so much attention on the Justice League while Supergirl does most of the issue's heroics. It all works out in the end, of course. The backup story by Bridwell and Tanghal presents the origin of the Global Guardians member, Jack o' Lantern. It backs a lot of Irish cliches into one story.

Unexpected #203: The horror host Judge Gallows returns courtesy of Seeger and Patricio who offer up a penal theme horror story, which is unsettling in 2021 for reasons the author didn't intend. Murderer Joe Mundy gets his mother to plead for leniency at his trial, so he gets life in prison rather than the electric chair, which the guards assigned to him think is a complete travesty. So do the ghosts of his victims who torment him in his cell. The horrific part is the guards standby and watch him do this in response to unseen entities only thinking maybe they should intervene when it's too late. One of them quips upon finding that Mundy is indeed dead that maybe he was just "energy conscious" in avoiding the chair. 

The second story by Wessler and Patricio is a kind of Frankenstein movie riff only with the twist that the corpses are reanimated by clone tissue and there's a good one and a bad one. The final tale, also be Wessler, opens with a well-rendered scene by Malgapo where a Gadwin, about to be burned at the stake defends himself by claiming he's a sorcerer not a necromancer (he might have wanted to consult a lawyer there). Anyway, he burns, but not before cursing Joshua Xerxes Tabor, his accuser, and vowing to destroy his family 300 years from that day. Why he waits so long to enact his vengeance and allow generations of Tabor's to live and die in great wealth is beyond me, but eventually a Tabor is in line to be President, only the other baby, Lester Colt, saved from a fire in the hospital years ago and supported by the Tabor family is his challenger. When Colt seems to be winning the Tabor patriarch decides to shoot him. As he gets the electric chair, the ghost of Gadwin reveals that the man he shot and killed was his real son and the man about to win the presidency was the real Lester Colt. Revenge! This issue is a big step down from last month, I think.

Unknown Soldier #244: Haney and Ayers pit the Soldier against a Japanese "ghost sub" and throw in Captain Storm of The Losers as a guest star. The solution to this one is pretty convoluted: a German sub crew is pretending to be Americans and actually impersonating a Japanese sub. Haney's  approach to his book is very different from Kanigher's over at Sgt. Rock. We get to compare the two side by side, because the lead story is followed up by a Kanigher/Yeates story told from the point of view of an American bomber that flies on after it's crew is dead to crash into the intended target. The Dateline: Frontline feature by Burkett and Estrada continues to be not on the frontlines. Instead, this installment looks at the jobs women took over on the homefront for the war effort as the correspondent Clifford meets a woman mail carrier who wants to join the WAC.

Tolkien in Blacklight

It's well known that hippies were into Tolkien's work. Some of it's themes appealed to them, certainly, but like with Ditko's Dr. Strange comics, there was also the idea that the works might somehow be drug-influenced. That the author might be taking the same trip as them. This was, of course, a false belief, but it was one that existed.

I feel like this appreciation of Tolkien filtered through 60s countercultural and mixed with the prevalent cultural representations of fairytale fantasy led to a a subgenre or movement within fantasy, most prevalent in the late 70s and early 80s, before D&D derived fantasy came to ascendancy. While this subgenre likely finds expression in literature and music to a degree, I think it's most obvious and definable in visual media. It's evident in works like the Bakshi's film Wizards and the comic Weirdworld ( both in 1977), and in the Wizard World sequences (starting in 1979) of Mike Grell's Warlord. Elfquest (1978) shows the influence to a degree. Bodē's Cheech Wizard (1966) and Wally Wood's Wizard King (introduced 1968 but significantly presented in 1978) are either the oldest examples or it's direct progenitors.

Essentially, the subgenre eschews the serious world-building of LotR for a more drug-influenced riff on The Hobbit, often with greater use of anachronism, camp, and sexiness, and often with a degree of psychedelia. Beyond the Tolkien influence, these works tend to share a number of common features:  a "traditional" visualization of elves and dwarfs as "little people," arising in folklore and classic illustration, but coming more directly from Disney animation and the fairytale comics of Walt Kelly; the influence of Denslow's Oz illustrations or design aesthetic of The Wizard of Oz (1939); more unreal and visually alien settings informed by Sword & Sorcery comics rather than the historical or mythic sources of Tolkien.

Given they were contemporaries, why didn't D&D borrow more from this? I think in some of the less than serious aspects of classic D&D, it did. It may have influences some of the visuals as well. But as a game that arose from wargaming there was always a thread of verisimilitude or equipment fixation that runs counter to this freewheeling psychedelic adventure vibe.

Wednesday Comics: DC, October 1980 (wk 2 pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around July 24, 1980. Other obligations kept me from getting through all the comics by Wednesday, so look for a follow-up later in the week with the rest.

Legion of Super-Heroes #268: I like the Perez/Austin cover on this, but the story is rough. DeMatteis introduces perhaps one of the goofiest villains to ever appear in a comic, and I don't mean goofy-charming like sometimes happens. Having Ditko on art chores doesn't do the story any favors either; he's a poor fit for the LSH. Anyway, Dr. Mayavale appears as a handle-bar moustachioed guy with hair something like a white guy's afro, a cowboy hat, a "Like Ike" medallion, a chainmail skirt, and 6 extra, noodly, green arms. He's a bit like Marvel's Stranger, I suppose, but with worse fashion sense. And more arms. Anyway, he's an alien mystic who's aware of all his past lives, retaining the knowledge of them. After being virtuous for so long he decides to be evil for a bit. He bedevils the Legion members that fall into his grasp by sending then back to their supposed past lives including being Native Americans of the Great Plains and the assassins of Julius Caesar. He plans to sacrifice Dream Girl for, well, I don't really know what. It turns out all those "past lives" really aren't and the characters they meet are robots. The Legion prevails against them and Mayavale withdraws to contemplate his next move. Hopefully it takes him a long time. 

Mystery in Space #112: The first story by Barr and Sutton is that old standby: a tale of prejudice. The starship U.S.S. Liberty assumes the humanoid race on an alien world to be the virtuous defenders and the reptilians the aggressors--a perception the humanoids foster until they've had human help to eliminate their foes. Then they turn on the humans. In "Howl!" by DeMatteis and Wise, the United Earth ship Lenin rescues a young ensign, Luanna Helstrumm adrift in a lifeboat following an attack by alien warships. Captain Karamozova is uneasy about the Helstrumm, and gets even more so when her crew starts turning up dead. Helstrumm is revealed to be a vampire and Karamozova tries to kill her in a star, but has to settle for entombing her forever in a starship made of silver. It's a bit silly, I guess, but I feel like DeMatteis redeems himself (a bit) for that Legion story.

In the next story by Kasdan/von Eeden, an emblezzer injured in a spaceship crash gets rebuilt in the image of his stepson's reptilian toy by helpful aliens. The final story by Kashdan and Bingham sees a ham radio operator in a loveless marriage accidentally transporting a beautiful alien to earth in a radio beam. They develop a relationship over a number of nightly encounters. When his wife discovers them she attacks the alien only to to killed by an equally alien pet. The radio ham is arrested for her murder. When convicted he gets the electric chair, which transports him to the realm of his alien lover when he's shot full of electricity. Overall, this issue was a cut above what we previously got in Timewarp, I think.

New Adventures of Superboy #10: Superboy travels to the 52nd Century where he finds a replica of Smallville and an android ("humatron") version of himself in a futuristic theme park. He subs in for a malfunctioning humatron and gets nabbed by a rival of the park's owner who wants to improve his own alien replica androids. Superboy teaches the thief a lesson while never revealing he's the real article, then slips back to his own time. Bates' and Schaffenberger's story could reasonably be said to have "Silver Age charm," though it probably wouldn't have interested me in the 1980, and honestly isn't the sort of thing I would seek out now. The Rozakis, Calnan, and De Mulder backup is sort of a day in the life of Krypto and has a similar feel to the main story. The only break with Silver Age tradition is that this Bronze Age Krypto thinks in full sentences.

Warlord #38: Read more about it here. In the backup, Starlin's continuation of OMAC rolls on with the GPA destroyed and the U.S. now in the hands of corporations. We are told by the corporate representative Wiley Quixote that IC&C control's one half and Verner Bros. controls the other. Given the similarity of those names to the corporate owners of the Big Two at the time (Cadence Industries Corporation and Warner Bros.) I can't help but think Starlin was making doing some allegory for the comics industry here.

On Fantasy Naming

Since I read Lin Carter's worldbuilding advice in Imaginary Worlds, at least, I've had an interest in names and neologisms in settings. I certainly have an interest in the "conlang" end of things--the world of Professors Barker and Tolkien appeal to me--but I don't think it's necessary to invent a language or even partial devise one to have character and place names that seem plausibly like they might arise from a an actual language.

Carter points out in his essay, names need to have an appropriateness to them. He uses the example of Stonehenge (the location), and asks the reader to imagine it was named Piccadilly. Stonehenge seems a much more appropriate name for the place, not the least because it has "stone" as a component. Obviously, the "fit" of a name depends on preconceptions arising from one's native language, but also one's personal preferences. There are people that feel Clark Ashton Smith was horrible at invented names, and plenty (Carter included) who think he was a master of them.

In coming up with names I try to first consider this aspect of appropriateness: What vibe do I want the name or names to convey? The second thing I try to do is give them a sense of linguistic cohesiveness, as if they might come from the same language. 

For the imperial Vokun in Strange Stars, I wanted them to have names that suggested a tradition-bound, decadent, warrior culture. I thought longer names with some "heavier" (to the English speaker) sounds would fit the bill. I wound up using a list of Old Avestan names as my base, adding in some names from other sources, mixing and matching syllables and selecting mostly longer ones that I further tweaked to taste. Online name generators that accept a list of words as an input are good for inspiration, but they seldom provide a lot of "keepers" without tweaking. I wound up with names like this: Artazosthra, Ishramis, Jannaxa, Valakasta, Vahupareshta, Zrayangashamesh.

For my as yet unnamed science fantasy setting, I wanted most of the human names to have an easy and obvious rhythm and length for English speakers, but not generally be actual (or at least common) English names. the naming styles of Edmond Hamilton and Jack Vance were particular influences here, leading to names like: Glattis Malva, Godo Shrune, Yreul Dahut, and Festeu Harfo. The place names similarly were devised to be like English place names, but not actually be English place names.

The names of the nonhumans in this setting (like the various clades in the Strange Stars) had names suggesting they came from different languages:  hohmmkudhuk, ythlaxu, and hwaopt are "weird" in some way for English speakers, but trell and ieldra are much easier. Not every alien should have a name like something out of Marc Okrand's Klingon!

Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider. Carter's essay suggests things like trying to spread them out over the alphabet to make them distinct. 

Paleomythic, Ewoks and Rats

 

by Michael Whelan

I recently picked up Paleomythic by Graham Rose, and it's a relatively simply but definitely flavorful "Stone Age" rpg--or "Stone and Sorcery" as the subtitle would have it. It's perhaps a little less Jean Auel and a little more Robert E. Howard than say Würm, but really I think you could do pretty much the same stuff with each system depending on your preferences.

One thing I've been thinking about this past week though is using Paleomythic for a setting where the characters are primitive, but not necessarily human. 

Without their toyetic, teddy bear looks, the story of the Ewoks is one of a "primitive" culture in a world of magic and exotic creatures (if we consider the cartoon and tv movies)--and then it's invaded by murderous aliens. Plenty of game fodder to be found in that, I think.

Simon Roy's Habitat and other Metamorphosis Alpha-adjacent stories feature post-technological primitive humans. Betram Chandler's "Giant Killer" is in no sense post-apocalyptic, but has a bit of the vibe of those settings--only with nonhuman protagonists. There are mutated rat tribes making their caves in the walls of a spacecraft and their "giant" antagonists are the human crew. The rat(ish) scale would make the sizes of generation ships more vast and add some interesting detail to those sorts of settings.

Weird Revisited: The Like You for Your Brains

The original version of this post appeared in 2011...

Bored with the standard monsters? Tired of the same old thing? Here’s a couple of mechanically-unchanged stalwarts with a shiny new finish:

Moon Men
Mysterious beings that appear by night and move silently to feed upon the minds of humans. Moon Men appear as tall humanoids whose heads are hidden beneath gleaming, featureless domes. These scientist-sadists rarely make any attempt to communicate, and treat other sentients with clinical detachment, as if they were mere cattle.

These are good ol’ mind flayers--because tentacles are so last year. The only change would be to dispense with the tentacle attack--or maybe keep it and have pseudopods emerge from a Moon Man’s liquid metal head. With that option, they might literally eat brains, but otherwise its the mind they’re after, not the meat.

Though the picture is Mysterio, the name was inspired by a pulp hero with a similar look.

Brain Parasite
“The brain was in a serious state of liquefaction. Only the brain-stem had any discernable structure. A puncture in the back of the skull likely indicates where the creature insert its venom...Yes, that’s the thing in the preservative vat there. It was completely invisible--or more precisely, simply, unseen--on the victims back until it was killed.  And by then it was too late.”

These reskinned intellect devourers look like the zanti from the Outer Limits and act sort of like the mutant spiders from Metebelis 3, the titular Planet of the Spiders in Doctor Who. I imagine they inject some sort of a toxin into the skull, dissolve the brain slowly, and suck out the sweet, sweet juice over time.