Views on the Great Wheel

Intelligent beings of planar aware civilizations have attempted to conceptualize the meaning of the Outer Planes. Some of the these explanations are mutual exclusive, but that does not mean they are false. The planes are beyond human understanding in their totality. Or best theories are vastly simplified models.

Pseudo-Xrieixes in his frequently cited commentaries to the Analects of Law, proposed that the cosmos was in fact driven by seven syzygies, with the concepts in the pairs being conceptualized as planes, but unable to be fully comprehended in isolation. The earliest of the these was Law and Chaos, but others were elaborated in an increasingly complicated universe:

Community and Isolation
Abnegation of self and egotism
Willing service and imprisonment
Contentment and despair
The natural world and perversion of nature
Liberty and authority
Noble struggle and senseless conflict

Seswura views the planes are distinct entities. She is less concerned with their opposing planes across the wheel, and more concerned with the "major gravities" of concept in the local area. She states their various ethe in the following way (in Grelmarthan's translation):

Mechanus: The Program is All. Execute the Program and Unity will be restored.
Archeron: Law is what Authority makes it. An Army will be forged and subdue enemies without and within.
Hell: The Law must punish all transgression. If Unity cannot be restored we will fashion a new Order.
Gehenna: Nothing burns in Hell but Self-will, and we will immolate it for the New Order.
Hades: All that is left of self is Despair.
Carceri: The Demons of Self-Will must be chained and taught to self-confine.
Abyss: There is only Self and only ever was. All else is ugly falsehood and must be destroyed.
Pandemonium: Is there self? What are these voices that torment?
Limbo: Change is all. Unity is eternal and also never was.
Ysgard: All things are impermanent but the contest. We will harness chaos through noble struggle.
Arborea: Revel in freedom and passion, and let others do the same.
Beastlands: There is a cycle to all things. Be in the moment.
Elysium: What is the Godhead but Joy?
Bytopia: Be content in good works at the foot of the Mountain.
Heaven: There is a Mountain and at its Peak you may know the utter self-lessness of Unity.
Arcadia: Not all may scale the Mountain, but all can find meaning in Law at its foot.

The Known World in the Real World

I've previously re-imagined Karameikos as a state in the Balkans. I don't think it's the only D&D setting Known locale that would be easy to translate into fictional countries in the real world. Here are some others:

Darokin: An alpine microstate and republic (like it's larger neighbor, Switzerland), likely descended from the kingdom of the Lombards. It's a modern banking center.

Glantri: A city-state near the Italian-Slovenian border, landlocked, but not far from the Adriatic.

Ierendi: A volcanic archipelago, part of Macronesia, in the North Atlantic.

The Isle of Dread: A mysterious island in the South Pacific.

And here's a now a non-Known World one:

Barovia: A small region in the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe.

Wednesday Comics: DC, November 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 August 20, 1981. 

Green Lantern #146: Following his defeat last issue, the Goldface has Green Lantern captive and shows him off to a bunch of criminals he invited over in his bid to become a crime boss. Then, Green Lantern remembers that he can effect things that are yellow indirectly and busts out them defeats Goldface. The cops show up and arrest GL, because he's in Goldface's house and the villain claims assault. It seems like Wolfman is trying to make Green Lantern seem like a loser, and the plot seems like something out of a Bronze Age Spider-Man story. I just don't see Green Lantern doing much crimefighting of the Earthly variety, but that's just me.

Infantino is handling pencils on the Laurie Sutton Adam Strange backup. Strange's defeat of the spider creature last time only led to it reproducing. Now it's kids are the problem. It turns out they aren't out to destroy, they just need to food to hatch from their larval stage and go home to space. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #281: Ditko is back on art. The Legion is trapped in 20th Century Smallville as they try to unravel this Reflecto/Superboy/Ultra-Boy mystery, and they have to contend with an android menace called the Molecule Master, the U.S. Army, and townsfolks' intense thoughts about Saturn Girl's outfit! Oh, and the Time Trapper shows up in the end.

New Adventures of Superboy #23: Bates and Schaffenberger continue their story from last month with Superboy, convinced that he's a menace due to some mistakes, deciding to travel into the past because he believes that's the only place he can't hurt anyone. (His reasoning is the past is immutable, so anything he is able to do had already happened anyway.) He winds up in the Old West and gets a job as a reporter, but eventually finds trouble in the form of outlaw Jess Manning and an alien outlaw, too. Superboy gets his confidence back, and the alien adopts Manning's son Toby who will one day become the Superman villain Terra-Man.

In the backup story, the President of the United States (who looks like JFK) has trouble getting in touch with Superboy to take care of an emergency, so the Boy of Steel creates the emergency signal lamp whenever the police chief of Smallville needs to reach him.

Sgt. Rock #358: Kanigher and Redondo again have Rock interacting with kids as he meets a group of war orphans playing at soldiers, but he when the Germans actually attack, Rock tries to save them. They end up saving him when a tank spoils his Molotov cocktail throw. Then we get a story that I feel like we've seen before where a German frogman kills an Allied one, but then is himself killed by a shark. Next is a story set at the time of the Norman Invasion of England where a young peasant becomes a warrior after being taunted and later wishes he had stayed out of the bloodletting. The last story is a "Men of Easy" focus on Jackie Johnson. He uses a grenade in a boxing glove to blow up a German tank.

Unexpected #216: In the cover story by Mishkin and Gonzales, a European vampire has landed in Japan and is preying about the peasantry in the year 1600. A young samurai defeats the creature with the help of a Christian priest. The samurai considers killing the priest and his feels the powerful magic (the Christian symbols) that helped to defeat the vampire are a threat to Japan, but ultimately he decides to leave it to fate. 

The next story is the worst of the issue, with the youngest of the three witches getting a criminal caught who displeased her. The Harris/Zamora story that follows it about a dream door and a fraudulent psychotherapist is only marginally better. It does poke fun at the disappearance of the ongoing features from the past year in the horror titles (like Mr. E, Dr, 13, etc.). The final story by Newman and Landgraf is a overly complicated sci-fi piece about aliens taking the form of robots in an orbital station, convinced they are the rulers of Earth when they are actually the servants.

Unknown Soldier #257: Haney and Ayers/Tlaloc have the Soldier turn the tables on the Nazis who tricked him into believing he had been in a coma and the war ended: he tells them there's a secret missile on the Scottish coast about to fire at Berlin. When they take him there to show them, he escapes and manages get to England to fool the Germans into thinking the Enigma Machine was destroyed.

The next story is a pessimistic tale about a racist  white soldier about the costs of prejudice by Kanigher and Sparling. It contains a couple of racial slurs that wouldn't appear outside of mature reader comics just a few years later. Kanigher is on the next one, too, with art by Gonzales: Captain Storm. I know Storm from the Losers, but here is his origin as a PT boat captain with a grudge against a Japanese sub with shark teeth painted on its bow that killed his crew and cost him a leg. There's a brief appearance by JFK.

Warlord #51:  The many story is a reprint of Warlord #1. The backup is the debut of Dragonsword by Levitz and Yeates. A young knight, Thiron of the King's Isle, accompanied by his talking chimp squire, slays a dragon, but finds that the dragon may in fact live on in his now-talking sword.

World's Finest Comics #273: In the Burkett and Gonzales/Smith continue the story from last issue with Superman and Batman trying to find out who sent the robots that stole some weaponry from the Fortress of Solitude. In a Chekhov's gun moment, Supes shows Bats his "Power Charger" that would restore a Kryptonian's powers temporarily if lost to Gold Kryptonite or give a non-Kryptonian powers--but them kill anyone that used it. They track the mastermind, called the Weapon Master, to his mountain hideout, but he shoots down the batplane, and defeats Superman with Kryptonite. The Weapon Master uses his devices to make Superman and everyone else mindless slaves--except Batman who is back at the Fortress, preparing to use the Power Charger to save the world...

In the Green Arrow story, Count Vertigo has launched a missile toward Moscow, forcing Green Arrow and his sidekick to sick the aid of a Soviet military officer and his troops to take Vertigo down and stop the missile. Pasko and Staton bring more Plastic Man goofiness with Plas taking down murderers in the fashion industry. Punny names abound. In the Hawkman story, the Hawks take a moment to taunt Hyathis before rushing back to Earth to take care of a Thanagarian spy which they deduce to be Byth. Hawkman finally gets him when Byth (disguised as Hawkwoman) calls himself "Hawkgirl." The Bridwell/Newton Shazam story is pretty good. Sivana is upset when he finds out he one a Nobel Prize and tries to turn his trip to the ceremony into another attempt to take over the world, but his efforts are subverted by Captain Marvel and he wins another Nobel Prize.

Weird Revisited: 70s TV Science Fiction Combined Timeline

Back in 2016, I was running a Planet of the Apes game that stole liberally from other science fiction shows besides PotA. In talking it over with my friend Jim Shelley of The Flashback Universe Blog, he hit on doing sort of trading cards of major timeline events. Here's my timeline, and what Jim did with it. I didn't use everything in the game, but it was a fun exercise.

An additional note: This is a TV timeline. A lot of dates in Planet of the Apes are given in the movies, so it doesn't so up in this version. The Logan's Run tv show and film offer different starting dates, but the show is being used here (though in my game, should the City of Domes ever show up, I'm using the movie date).

Creation of cyborgs (like the Six Million Dollar Man) may also rank among the late 20th Century's achievements.

Suspended animation was used in spaceflight in the 80s, so either a less developed version was already in use (as suggested by the POTA films) or data from Hunt's project  did lead to a breakthrough despite the loss of the team leader.

The actual date is August 19, 1980.

The Great Conflict is the name given this war in Genesis II/Planet Earth. These shows make it clear that the war occurred in the 20th Century, though it most have been after a subshuttle station we see in the Planet Earth pilot was built in 1992. The Planet of the Apes tv show suggests a later date. No never specifies, but this date fits with the POTA film series. The Logan's Run series sets the apocalyptic war in the 22nd Century, which is why I chose to go with the earlier film dates in my game setup.

This is also true of the 2nd Roddenbery pilot to deal with this material, Planet Earth. There Dylan Hunt is played by John Saxon.

No evolved apes are seen at the time of PAX (or even Logan's Run), true, but it could be the apes were confined to the area that once was California then. Neither of these shows necessarily covered a wide territory.

Astronauts Burke and Virdon arrive in a North America (or at least Western North America) controlled by apes in a well-established civilization in 3085, so the culture must have spread before that.

The Challenge of Ysgard

Ysgard in some metaphysical sense is found between the pure (or what passes for it in the current multiverse) chaos of Limbo and the pursuit of sensation and individual freedom of Arborea. Indeed, it may well be the ferment from which the heady wine of Arborea was born. Ysgard embodies conflict and striving. It is both the wanting and the expression of the idea that achieving the thing wanted often comes at a price.

In the belief of adherents of Chaos (or at least some of them), Ysgard was differentiated and divided from pure Chaos when the moment the schism between Law and Chaos was recognized. The Ysgard of today, however, bears little resemblance to that primal conceptual realm as it has been shaped by the minds of beings since. It is a realm of archetypes and story, in a myriad variations. The trials it subjects souls to are often of a violent and dramatic cast, with bloody, heroic battles played out on an exaggerated terrain. They seldom have a clear beginning and ending; there is a reason that Ysgard is often associated with the serpent devouring its own tail. 

In keeping with this essential nature of the plane, participants may come to violent ends, but these endings are never permanent, merely transformative. There are some souls, however, that come to perceive their experiences as imbued with profundity beyond that which is readily apparent in the events themselves, while others come realize they are mere shadows, lacking any substance. In the end, there may be little difference between the two positions, and souls achieving either sort of enlightenment are not seen again in Ysgard.

Quest for the Serpent Throne!

We gave Broken Compass a go last night, playing the adventure that appears in the Golden Age sourcebook for "classic" 1930s pulp. I've given me read through impressions of the system previously, but this was my first time running it.

The "Quest of the Serpent Throne!" brings our intrepid adventurers: hunter and sometime smuggler, Kerry "K.O." O'Sullivan, and archeologist, Margaret Stilton to Calcutta to meet with Stilton's colleague, Professor Upandra Ram. They bring with them an artifact known as the Naga Shell which is supposedly to be essential to finding the mystical Chintamani stone, and opening the temple where the stone can be used to summon the Naga back from their exile to the netherworld.

They head out in search of the lost temple in the Bengal Jungle, but on a steamer up the Hooghly River, they discover they aren't the only one seeking it: Sumar Nagarani, an arms dealer and fascist sympathizer also seeks the temple. He offers our heroes a lot of money to recruit them, and they agree, but refuse to give up the Naga Shell. What will the consequence be? We'll have to wait until next session to find out!

The system went pretty well in play or it being our first time with it. Overall, I was pleased with it, but I'm glad I chose to go with an adventure they wrote as it made up for some of the lack of examples of the mechanics in action in the book. Not that there are any, but I could have used more.

The Planar Grand Tour

I've been thinking about finishing this series on the Outer Planes. We'll see if that happens, but here's a review of where it's been so far.

The Planes of Pure Law
The Planes of Chaos
Hell
Carceri

Hades

Arborea

Elysium

Beastlands

Gehenna

The Layers of Heaven (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)

Limbo