Constraints & Creativity

Occasionally, after I do a post on science fiction limited only to the Solar System or single country settings or the like, I get somebody commenting that seems too small or too limiting a space for them. In a similar vein, I feel like settings or games that provide a lot of options for PCs are lauded whereas limiting options for characters is viewed in a negative light.

People are free to like what they like, of course, but I don't agree with these complaints for the most part. Every setting or game excludes as many things (or more) as it includes in how it defines itself. Even kitchen sink or gonzo settings have parameters and boundaries. Game systems themselves constrain with their rules. 

There is obviously some give and take here. A GM who wants to run a D&D setting with more than the usual restrictions on options should communicate that and probably the reasons for it before hand, but armed with that knowledge, players ought to trying to make up characters that would fit the setting and negotiating with the GM regarding parameters. Honestly, I feel like I've had just as much fun playing a well-defined pregen than making up my own character, at least for short-run games.

I'm hardly the first to note this, but it seems to me constraint can stimulate creativity. It's true on the player side, but I think it's also true on the GM/setting creation side. With an large number of worlds to play with, it should be a trivial matter coming up with interesting planets, but the Star Wars franchise seems to have a tough time showing us anything but the same three or four biomes over and over. And most of those are are one biome: deserts, but perhaps that's a different problem. I don't think Star Wars is the only franchise that lets quantity substitute for quality. It's easy to do.

But If you've got a smaller number of worlds like a solar system, you've got to make every one count, and you might well use each one to it's fullest. Maybe they aren't all single biome planets, but even if they are, you would tend to have them have different sorts of jungle or different sorts of deserts to get the most out of it. All of that is creativity you would never have been forced to exercise if you had a bunch of planets to spare.

Maybe its just me. Try it for yourself, by self-imposing some constraints you wouldn't normal give yourself in worldbuilding or adventure design and see how it turns out.

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 1 pt 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! I'm a couple of days later than my usual Wednesday post, but I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of  March 5, 1981. 

Batman #336: After Wolfman's lackluster al Ghul arc, Rozakis/Thomas bring us a much better done-in-one story with Garcia-Lopez art to sweeten the deal. The obscure 60s villain, the Monarch of Menace, has convinced various C-grade Gotham criminals (several other minor characters from over the years) that he has captured Batman and they should pay him to keep the Caped Crusader locked up. Batman, as we know, has only been out of the country, and now that he's back he starts taking these mooks down, including the Monarch. This reminded me a bit of Mike Barr/Alan Davis run on Detective after Crisis, which I liked a lot.

DC Comics Presents #34: The Superman/Marvel Family team-up continues, and in true Roy Thomas fashion we even get obscure Marvel family members like Uncle Marvel and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. No Hilly-billy Marvel, though. Buckler/Giordano might not be the go-to team for the Marvel Family, but they make it work. The team-up of Mxyzptlk, Mr. Mind, and King Kull  have managed to take out the wizard Shazam and make King Kull more powerful than all the Marvels and Superman, but their alliance crumbles when the other two have more bloodthirsty aims than Mxy, and being villains, they tend to want to insult each other rather than compromise. A fun issue. Better than the first part.

Flash #298: The storyline with Barry's parents continues from last issue. You know what? Infantino's art of this era is made a lot better by Bob Smith's inks. Central City is being plagued by periods when everything is drained of color. Flash suspects the Rainbow Raider may be responsible, but he's in prison painting away. Shade shows up from Earth-Two to ask for the Flash's help. He reveals that every time Central City goes black and white Keystone City gets much more colorful. The story ends with Rainbow Raider gloating in his thoughts regarding his coming triumph. Also, this issue features two truly creepy panels of Barry's dad grinning like a maniac, and in the second of these he's holding up Flash's costume and saying he knows just how many days the Flash has to live.

The Firestorm backup has him still fighting Multiplex, but since Ronnie was unconscious when Firestorm was formed, Stein is in charge and things don't go so well. Firestorm is captured, but he manages to escape and manipulates power cables to drain Multiplex, causing him to recombine.

Ghosts #101: We get extra Dr. 13 this month to make up for the lack last month, and I have give it to Kupperberg and Bender: it's better than a gladiator's ghost. Thirteen is recovering in the hospital after the events of #99 (which I don't remember him being injured, but ok. The caption says he got there last issue, but he wasn't even in last issue!). Turns out the hospital appears to be haunted by the ghost of a Haitian contractor that died during construction, but of course, Thirteen doesn't believe it. He and an orderly who gives his name as "Mad Dog" are on the case! It involves a Haitian voodoo cabal using a drug to fake heart attacks and make people appear dead, only in the case of this contractor he fell off the roof and actually died. At a crucial moment, his ghost may have save Mad Dog and Thirteen, but of course, Thirteen is unconvinced.

In the last story by Kashdan and Landgraf/Colletta, thieves shoot down a plane with a bazooka to steal the payroll it was carrying. They hide the loot in a cave, but then one of them gets greedy and murders the other. He's chased by the ghost of his former partner until he runs into some cultist types in robes. They force him to participate in a séance where his victim's spirit reveals his guilt. Then they declare him evil incarnate like them and demand he stay. Later a group is taking a guided tour of the Cave of the Cult of Darkness (sure, I guess that could happen.) where the cult supposedly hid out "100 years ago" and is perplexed by an additional skeleton at the cult's table wearing modern clothes.

G.I. Combat #230: The Haunted Tank stories this issue may be worse than usual. One has Kanigher making his already problematic romanticism worse with a story about a battle of "brave banners" where a German tank commander flying the Nazi flag goes up against the Haunted Tank and its stars and bars. The other yarn is actually not bad, it's just completely ridiculous. The crew leaves the European Theater on a special mission to South East Asia where they join up with some Chinese fighters. They wind up having to use a gunboat like an improvised tank, rolling it along a track of logs and--well, I think that's enough on that, really. Read it yourself if you want more.

The O.S.S. story opens with the replacement of a German officer with a duplicate having gone off successfully. The only problem is the O.S.S. has sent an assassin to kill that officer, and he won't know about the switch! Before the assassin can strike, the real officer escapes. The assassin faces the man and his doppelgänger, not knowing which is which. The French agent saves himself by saying a Hebrew prayer for the dead. The Women At War segment by Laurie and Vicatan has a nurse thrown off a torpedoed troop ship pulling some soldiers into a raft, fighting off a shark attack, then diving to throw a grenade into a Japanese sub's torpedo tube. In a story by Newman and Matucenio, an Italian American G.I. gets to visit the village where he was born and help them fight off the Germans. It's interesting  that the period these war comics stories tend to take place in obscures the fact Italy was an Axis power. They aren't necessarily inaccurate in their portrayal, necessarily, but reading them you  just never know. Kashdan and Henson round out the issue with a short, goofy story about a entomologically obsessed G.I. whose obsession saves his sergeant's life.

Jonah Hex #48: Hex and his bride are really making a go of the farm life and have just gotten in their corn crop in for market, but Hex is careless with a still-burning cigarillo. The crop and their barn go up in flames. In order to get the money they need to pay their mortgage, Hex returns to bounty hunting, but lies to Mei Ling about what he is going to do. Her anger at him is preempted by her finding out she is pregnant. Their disagreements forestalled once again, they vow to make it work.

In the backup, we get Bat Lash by Wein and Spiegle, and it's a nice little story. Bat Lash wins the deed to a social club in New Orleans in a crooked (though he doesn't know it) poker game on a riverboat headed down the Mississippi. The man who had tried to fix the game to win that deed sends men to kill Bat to get it. He outsmarts them, but the lady dealer from the poker game suggests a romantic interlude which Bat Lash is quite willing to indulge in--right before she steals the deed and pushes him off the boat.

A Decade of Weird Adventures

I realized this past weekend that I had missed Weird Adventures' tenth anniversary on December 15, 2021. We are also not too far away from the twelfth anniversary of my introduction of the City on my blog on April 18, 2010.

Blogging about that setting was where my blog really took off, to the extend that it did. While Strange Stars eventually proved to be the more popular setting, at least in terms of sales, I've always felt like Weird Adventures was the more unique setting. While Bloodshadows had been around since 1994 with a combination of high fantasy and noir,  I think Weird Adventures works I bit differently, drawing form not just surface level noir or pulp conceits, but a whole host of early to mid-20th Century pop cultural material. Weird Adventures could sort of do Cast A Deadly Spell, but it's just as much Thimble Theater and Wellman's Silver John stories and American folk- and fakelore--plus whatever period pop cultural ephemera I came across at the moment.

In the past few years, I've been recycling some older posts on my blog, but I've mostly been avoiding Weird Adventures posts because the book exists and an index linked from the blog main page. I think I will start revisiting some of my favorite posts from that series, though, particularly ones with material that didn't make it into the book.

The Books of Babel

I recently finished reading The Books of Babel tetralogy by Josiah Bancroft. The series was so engaging I plowed through them all, only taking a brief intermission between books two and three to read Watts' Blindsight. The Books of Babel are Steampunkish fantasy, set in the titular Tower, which is something of Big Dumb Object in science fiction parlance.

The series starts with Senlin Ascends where the schoolmaster of a small seaside town and his new bride get separated on a visit to the Tower. I hesitate to say too much regarding the arc of the series for fear of spoiling it, but suffice to say there are multiple ringdoms of almost Vancian cultural eccentricity, Steampunk technology including "cyberware" supplied by a mystery inventor high up in the Tower, air ship pirates, and secrets to uncover aplenty, including the mystery of what the Brick Layer, the head of the Tower's construction, actually intended as its function.

The series has a fair amount bit of humor and the chapter epigraphs from in-world works are often wry, but the Tower is also a rather cruel and violent place at times. Bancroft's narrative doesn't flinch from this or keep the events at an ironic distance. Besides Tom Senlin, the headmaster, there are a number of other viewpoints characters, most of whom are capable women--though there's also a fastidious stag whose brain has been transplanted to a robotic body. But I said I didn't want to give too much away, didn't I? 

Anyway, the series is well-worth checking out, and I think would give a lot of inspiration for rpgs in addition to being a fine read.

Wednesday Comics: DC, May 1981 (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 February 19, 1981. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #275: Conway is joined by Jane this issue so the art is a little better. The amnesiac Ultra Boy is becoming disenchanted with the cutthroat and cruel nature of the pirate crew and his new lover, Captain Frake, but an assault on the pirate base by the Legion brings the conflict to a head sooner than it might have. Ultra Boy begins helping the Legion, but when he takes a blast from the pirates' cannon, the device explodes and Ultra Boy disappears, leading Saturn Girl to conclude he now really is dead, so she doesn't tell the other Legionnaires that she ever suspected he was still alive. Not a terrible story, but it seems kind of pointless if it ends with the Legion in the same place they began.

Detective Comics #502: Conway does better here, accompanied by Newton/Adkins. Julia believes Alfred killed her mother, Mademoiselle Marie, famed resistance fighter. Her proof is that her mother kept repeating his name before she died. Alfred isn't helping his case by refusing to say anything and looking guilty. The group is going to execute him if Batman doesn't do something. Batman escapes to track down the real killer. He again visits Dupre, the French policeman that helped him before. He points Batman to the last person to speak with Marie alive. The old woman is in the hospital, but she gives Batman a bullet supposedly from the gun that killed Marie and tells him their was a traitor in Marie's resistance cell. Dupre surprises Batman, revealing that he was that traitor, but Batman is playing possum and captures him. He turns over Dupre and the bullet to Julia and the others, and Alfred is freed. In the end, the reader learners what Batman has already figured out: Julia is Alfred's daughter with Marie, and he has been supporting her, but doesn't want her to know the truth.

Burkett and Delbo continue the adventures of Batgirl in the backup. She overcomes her fears and defeats Dr. Voodoo in a buy-the-numbers yarn.

New Adventures of Superboy #17: Clark's classmate Moosie gives a speech in class arguing they shouldn't be so impressed with Superboy since he's never been tested against a truly super-powered opponent. Clark takes this to heart and designs a super-villain from one of his robots to beat him up all over town.  Then this Kator winds up taking his role a little too seriously. Bates though this story was worthy of a two-parter. The backup is a mildly humorous Krypto tale by Rozakis and Calnan where the dog of steel must go to the vet for shots, but manages to avoid that and catch some criminals looking to dope a race horse. 

Sgt. Rock #352: Kanigher and Redondo are back with one of their heavily-hammered theme stories. Rock and Easy keep running into other units asking the combat happy joes to "buy them more time" as they've been bloodied by German aircraft and need time to regroup before the ground assault. Rock and his crew take a forward position in a bombed out town, but after an assault by scouting party of Germans, Rock sends wounded Easy back to be treated while he holds the line, solo! When it looks out he's done for, Easy comes riding to the rescue, then all the units they had helped.

The Men of Easy feature by Kanigher and Mandrake "Winter Soldier" (heh) focuses on the Ice Cream Soldier. He likes ice cream so much he'll eat snow. That's about it. Then there's a story by Mandrake which is really more a Weird War Tale: A Roman soldier on the Antonine Wall. Oppressing the Picts, he stumbles into a fairy ring and gets transported to present day. The final story is a completely forgettable Civil War tale with art by Duursema.

Super Friends #44: Bridwell and Tanghal have the Justice League all forgetting their super-identities. The Wonder Twins are captured by the alien responsible, but manage to wake the Super Friends up by activating their JLA signal devices. The heroes battle the alien's troops who have transformed into alien monster bodies with the heads of JLA members.  The backup is a Bridwell and Tanghal story of Jack O'Lantern. He catches a hit man who's happened to choose to disguise himself as the hero's uncle.

Unexpected #210: The cover story by Kashdan and Jodloman is the sort of ridiculous high concept I can appreciate. A town sees a vampire ape (!) attacking a guy, and tracks it to its lair and stake it, only to be informed by its scientist-creator that the vampire ape fed only on vampire. It was the only thing protecting the town from the depredations of the local Count and his brood. Kashdan follows that up with an EC-esque Timewarp yarn with art by Vicatan. In a totalitarian future society, a dissident chooses mysterious exile over execution. Her lover pines for her so, he commits a crime to take the same exile. He arrives on an alien world transformed to a sexless, grinch-looking wretch. He's been changed for the conditions of the world--and so has all the other exiles including his formerly lovely girlfriend.

Laurie Sutton and Brozowski/Mitchell deliver a slight tale about a mummy possibly moving around a museum at night and spooking the security guard. Finally, there's the latest installment of the Johnny Peril serial, now with Trevor von Eeden art. I'll just hit the highlights here: There's a "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" riff with creatures sent by the baddie to tear up the plane Johnny and friends are in. Then, a psychic is possessed by the enemy, but Johnny talks her down. In the cliffhanger he flies off solo and the plane crashes.

Warlord #45:  Read more about it here. The OMAC backup by Mishkin/Cohn and LaRocque/Colletta  is a story that could come from a script by Starlin. It even has an extradimensional sequence in a deadly funhouse that it's easy to see in the style of Starlin doing a Ditko homage, but the art is rough to the point of appearing amateurish.

Weird Revisited: The Wild Wood

This post first appeared in March of 2011. This material didn't make it into Weird Adventures...

 

One tragic loss of the Great War was the area of Grand Lludd known as Wild Wood. Covering a hundred acres of farm and woodland, it was the home of various species of anthropomorphic animals. Now much of the land has been despoiled, and most of its inhabitants have been killed or displaced.

These creatures were the product of biothaumaturgy and the eccentric genius of one man, Gaspard Mauro. Mauro gained the support of the crown in his endeavors by promising applications of his techniques in creating servitors to free mankind from hazardous labors.

His work never amounted to more than a curiosity.  Still, the Queen herself was quite fond of them, and on the occasion of her eighty-ninth birthday had a group of the animal-folk perform for her. There is one wax-cylinder recording said to exist of their cheerful, high-pitched singing.

Most of the animal-folk appear to have died in bombing during the war. There is evidence that some burrowing species may have survived, and there are worrisome reports that rats, taken to Communalitarianism, may have absconded with some of Mauro's notes, and are now undertaking a program of evolution and revolution among the rodent underclass of several cities.

Blake's 7

 

Something we read online last week prompted a brief discussion on Discord regarding the British science fiction series Blake's 7 (1978-1981). The show involves a political dissident (the titular Blake) leading a small group of escaped prisoners turned rebels (the titular 7) against the forces of the totalitarian Terran Federation. I don't know anything much more about the setting or how the plot plays out than that, having only seen the first episode years ago on PBS, but I think the concept has plenty of rpg potential.

There's nothing wrong with the set-up as is with the serial numbers filed off. The comic book series Six From Sirius would be another potential inspiration for this sort of thing--both in plot elements and characters and in 80s sci-fi trappings. I can think of a couple of ways the idea might be tweaked, though.

The first (possibly predictably, since I've done this before) is strip away some of the space opera conventions and have it confined to the solar system with more realistic tech. This becomes a little bit more cyberpunk, I think. It would be darkly dystopian, certainly, but serious or satirical would be possible.

My other though is to retain the galactic scale, but not have the setting be so humanocentric. Borrowing a bit from Farscape, the escaped prisoners might be a motley, mostly alien crew.