Wonders Beyond the Orbit of Old Earth

Few denizens of Old Earth or worlds of the Anadem that dance around it like myriad, glittering jewels, would think to brave the distances to visit the worlds of the solar system beyond. Let mariners with starlight in their blood make the journeys of weeks, months, or more to these distant and often uncivilized places!

Still, who can fail to wonder at these literally unearthly locales? Everyone enjoys the tales of the far roving spacers in the comfort of familiar surroundings.

The Giant and the Beanstalk

Growing up from one of the mountains of the Martian desert is a beanstalk grown from an alien seed, purchased on some distant world. At the top of it is a castle where a giant lives. Once this giant was a congenial host and servant of visitors, but now he is jealous of his prerogative of access to the castle and has been known to eat trespassers. Once travelers move frequently up and down the beanstalk, and ships docked at the castle, but no longer.

The Titans of the Belt

The legends say that long ago, Titans from the Outer Dark tried to conquer the solar system. They were defeated by Gaia and the Overminds of the other planets and somehow petrified into a state not living, but not fully dead. Their corpses floated in the wastes between Mars and Jupiter and over the centuries, rock accreted on them. their rock-encrusted corpses now often serve as the home bases of the notorious Gith pirate bands.

Wednesday Comics: DC, January 1982 (week 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 October 15, 1981.

Batman #343: The arrival of Colan on art suggests we are getting close to some issues I remember from my youth. We pick up shortly after last issue, as Batman is still looking for Man-Bat without success. Also, Poison Ivy is about to take over Wayne Enterprises and Bruce can't tell anybody as they tiresome storyline continues. But the "A-Plot" this issue features another of Conway's one-off villains: Dagger, who specializes in thrown edged-weapons. He manages to destroy a Batmobile (indirectly) before Batman strikes down the origin of his weapons to a Rennington Steel plant in the small town of Stokely. Turns out the owner is Dagger, and Batman defeats him on his home turf.

In the backup, Robin just can't catch a break. After taking the traumatized girl he saved last issue to a psychiatric clinic he just happened to pass in Virginia, Robin learns that the "staff" are actually stand-ins and drug smugglers! The crooks capture Robin and leave him tied to a bed to overdose on anesthesia. Seeing Robin brings the young woman out of her dissociation, and she saves him. Robin is able to capture the criminals and free the real staff of the clinic. When the cops arrive, they ask Robin if there is anything they can do to repay him. He asks for a bus ticket to Gotham City!

Flash #305: Bates and Infantino/Smith present a Silver Age throwback sort of issue with Barry tormented by a dream about the death of Joan Garrick, then journeying to Earth-Two to investigate. His worry increases when he finds out from Jay that she as disappeared! Their search involves Dr. Fate and leads them to the realm ruled by the Lord of Limbo Barry tangled with back in issue #284. Joan is saved and everyone goes home--except the Lord of Limbo, who's still trapped there.

G.I. Combat #237: In Kanigher's and Glanzman's first Haunted Tank yarn, the crew is tasked with meeting the Soviets at the Elbe, and a courageous war photographer is sent along with them. Trouble is that the crew think the photographer's a jinx as they notice he's the only survivor of all the incidents he takes pictures of. They try to leave him behind or thwart his picture-taking, but in the end, he saves them from a Nazi ambush, and his own death is the last thing he photographs.

Kanigher and Trinidad follow that up with story of a lone-surviving Marine tricking dug-in Japanese troops into revealing themselves on an island in the Pacific. Next up is the obligatory O.S.S. story. This one features Kana the Ninja so unlike a lot of O.S.S. tales, the protagonist survives. 

Kashdan reveals a rematch between two Olympic skiers, one a German officer and one an American. The American sacrifices himself to blow up a German train so this time "The Loser Takes All." Then, we're back to the Haunted Tank as the crew helps defends Dover from an invasion from Calais with a group of wounded Commonwealth soldiers.

Jonah Hex #56: Having shoved Jonah's wife and child aside, Fleisher and Ayers/DeZuniga can get Hex out of the domestic world and back to done-in-one adventuring. Here he discovers a damsel in distress in a somewhat improbable frontier mental asylum. Jonah's meets up with the woman's husband who reveals she was committed by her uncle in an effort get control of the future left to her by her father. Jonah manages to get her out, but then the husband reveals that he plans to kill her and get the fortune for himself. Jonah dispatches him with a knife.

Bates/Mishkin/Cohn and DeZuniga present a pretty good El Diablo backup. A young gun comes to town convinced that Lazarus Lane is just pretending his "locked-in Syndrome" state and his really notorious outlaw Del Corbett. After the gunman shoots the sheriff, El Diablo comes to bring him to justice, and it is revealed that the town preacher is actually Corbett, having become the peaceful, empathetic role he played for years.

New Teen Titans #15: Wolfman and Perez bring this Doom Patrol-related storyline to a close with nonstop action, and more than a little meditation on trauma. Zahl and Rouge put Robotman and the Titans in a "Devolving Pit" causing them to begin changing into "Neanderthals." The two villains continue their brutal invasion of Zandia, which is actually a haven for escaped criminals. Changeling teams up with the new Brotherhood of Evil to attack the villainous duo and their followers and to free his friends. In the battle, Zahl is killed when one of his bullets ricochets off Robotman's body, and Madame Rouge meets her death accidentally in a struggle with Changeling but ends up thanking him for it. The Titans and the Brotherhood escape from the villains' flying island before it explodes, and for their help, the Brotherhood is allowed to go free. The original Doom Patrol is avenged at last, and Changeling and Robotman are reunited with Mento.

Secrets of Haunted House #44: The first story by Cohn/Mishkin and Gonzales is appropriately Halloween themed. A farmer invites a writer on the paranormal to see the Halloween God that supposedly lives in the town pumpkin patch. The creature is harmless, but the writer finds to his horror that the goblins that it produces every 20 years demand a new Halloween God take its place--and the writer is it.

Next to futuristic scavenger hunters fall prey to aliens also on a scavenger hunt, the difference being their hunt ends with the humans' heads on their wall.  Finally, Mishkin and Cohn are back again with Carillo on art and a tale of colonialists as a sought-after artifact is the means of an Indian cult's supernatural vengeance.

The Perilous Road to Yai

 Our Land of Azurth game continued last night with our 8th Anniversary session!

The party emerged from Subazurth in the vicinity of the domed city of Yai. They followed a mountain trail and were forced to do battle with mindless, mutated and muscled beastmen:

Then, they scaled a precarious ledge to find an apparent entrance to the domed city guarded by a faceless, silver man. He first incapacitated all the party but Kairon with some sort of gas, but otherwise didn't seem particularly belligerent. 

Shade scouted into his cave invisibly and found him trying repeatedly to shut a great mechanical maw (perhaps a door) with a violet light emanating from his hand. 

With no other way to get around him, the party reluctantly attacked. He shot needles at them and was resistance to injury, but couldn't long hold up against them all. He died in a shower of sparks.

The group climbed between the half open "teeth" and entered the room beyond. 

Return to Planet Funhouse Dungeon

Back in 2016, I wrote a post suggesting that there had never really been a sci-fi rpg equivalent of old D&D in the sense there had never really been a gonzo, promiscuously borrowing from all sorts of media sci-fi game of exploration that is generic. I think that statement is still largely true, if we limit it to games that really capture the gaming zeitgeist. Currently, horror science fiction hybrids seem to the order of the day.

It's true that gonzo/less serious science fiction has never been its most popular form in other media, but I feel like it's as popular as it has ever been with Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, and less popular but still big budget movies like Jupiter Ascending and Valerian.

The think, though, that the best model for a game of this sort is a show from nearly 60 years ago: the original Lost in Space. Sure it was aimed at kids and the amount of money spent on episodes left it with special effects like something from a decade earlier in comparison to Star Trek, but the mix of the lack of concern for serious science fiction (or logic at times) that came from making a kid-focused so combined with chasing the aesthetic of the popular Batman tv show, created encounters with the "unknown" that would be at home in any old school goofy dungeoncrawl.

A vending machine that can deliver androids to order--but then you have to pay for them. Faceless aliens in besparkled bowler hats. A space prospector that look like a miner forty-niner (complete with mule) but is blasting away to find an element that can create (or bestow) life. Space hillbillies. The Great Vegetable Rebllion.

Of course, Lost in Space has a bounded setting--and I think this is important. The Space Family Robinson are lost and marooned for most of the show on first one planet then another. This makes there adventures closer to a dungeoncrawl or at least wilderness crawl of a specific area. Of course, we never see the Robinson's methodically exploring, but there isn't a lot of ten foot pole poking around in Sword & Sorcery fiction either. If you want that sort of thing nothing stops you from doing it. 

In any case, I think the appeal of a science fiction campaign limited to one world, like Vance's Planet of Adventure or Lost in Space, but a world that is pretty gonzo as appeal.

Plasmoids of the Anadem

These rubbery, elastic invertebrates are one of the most commonly encountered nonhumankin of the Anadem. They have few wordlets of their own but can been found on many multi-kin habitats. They are generally easy of disposition and gregarious. They can often be found among the ranks of entertainers. 

It is believed that the ancestors of the plasmoids were discovered on some distant world by ancient human explorers. This world has been lost or at least misplaced, so that none of the scant visitors Old Earth receives from the outer galaxy can recollect any details regarding it. The tale told on Old Earth is that the pre-sophont ancestors of the plasmoids were known as zhmoon and came from a pleasant world called (appropriately, if unimaginatively) the World of the Zhmoon. Earlier spacers happening upon the world noted the gelatinous species, with seemingly no fear of other creatures. They also noted the tastiness of zhmoo flesh if appropriately prepared. 

It is possible hungry visitors would have caused the extinction of the zhmoon had not conservationists noticed them beginning to exhibit signs of intelligence greater than that of an animal. These behaviors, curiously, seemed to increase over time. It was generally accepted that exposure to human behavior and culture had triggered an aptitude for evolutionary mimicry, though there were other opinions. A renowned scientist, noting the malleability of zhmoo structure, suggested the only mimicry had been in the reciprocal consumption of some hapless would-be zhmoo hunters. The zhmoon had thereby absorbed human knowledge and mental structures. The scientist, determined to prove his theory, disappeared in the wilds of the World of the Zhmoon.

Shortly thereafter the zhmoon present humanity with manikins, the vaguely human-shaped, living but nonsentient snacks still cultivated on Old Earth today, demonstrating a biochemical know-how heretofore unseen among them. The snacks enjoyed a brief period of faddish popularity, but they were the plasmoids entre to galactic society.

Wednesday Comics: DC, January 1982 (week 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! Today, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of  October 8, 1981. For the first time since I've been doing this series, DC has four weeks of releases with this cover date.

Arak Son of Thunder #5: Thomas and Colon/DeZuniga Carolus Magnus is holding a tourney and Angelica and family shows up. Arak wants to fight them, but he can't because of the tournament truce. The champion of White Cathay defeats Rinaldo with help from Angelica's sorcery, and they force him to accompany them back to their country. Arak and Maligigi follow to get proof of sorcery, but they are beset by monsters and defeated. Angelica wins this round!

DC Comics Presents #41: Clark, Perry, and Lois are headed off to Los Angeles, but so are the Joker and the Prankster. The two villains are temporarily working together to steal from a comedian-turned crime boss the two super-villains have a grudge against. When Prankster double-crosses the Joker and kidnaps Perry White, it's Superman and the Joker who must become uneasy allies. Pasko manages to take a number of digs on L.A. and Hollywood. I like how the script uses a the then-common not psychopathic but still potentially deadly Joker, and ups the menace of the Prankster, so the two are roughly as "serious." Jose Luis-Garcia Lopez art helps everything, though, and this is no exception.

There's a "A Bold New Direction for... Wonder Woman" insert by Thomas and Colan/Tanghal where Wonder Woman receives her new "double-W" halter from a feminist organization, and then returns to Paradise Island. There she has to best Hercules in a contest of strength and Hermes in a contest of speed to win freedom for the Amazons. Oh yeah, and Steve Trevor is dying--again. I've complained about Conway's wishy-washiness about how powerful Wonder Woman is. Thomas clearly comes down on the "very superhuman" side.

Ghosts #108: Squire Shade presents an unnecessary frame regarding a wrestler who has had three lifetimes to be tested. In the first story by Gill and Gonzales/Martin a treasure-seeking tender of his family gravesight is forced by his wealthy brother's ghost to pursue the bikers that took a metal, gargoyle-head ornament from his tomb. The man receives it and returns it, never noticing the jewels he had been seeking leaking from it. Snyder and Craig have a young man on vacation confronting a haunted house and defeating it's illusions with his refusal to believe. O'Flynn and Texiera/Celado reveal the hubris of a scientist who takes credit for his assistants discovery of a means to demonstrate the the soul leaving the body in a sensory deprivation take. When the scientist's eagerness to gain fame leads to his assistants death, the assistant's spirit seeks vengeance. 

The last story is another weird science fiction piece from Drake and Vicatan. Two criminals and their collaborating guard escape a future prison, discover a means to make their spirits leave their bodies after an alien encounter. They visit a utopian alien civilization who offer them the formulas for all sorts of societal improvements, but when they return to their own bodies the one them memorized the formula is left without a body. 

Justice League #198: Conway and Heck/Breeding break out a Old West crossover. In 1978 amnesiac Leaguers Green Lantern, Zatanna, Flash, and Elongated Man encounter and enlist the aid of Jonah Hex, Cinnamon, Scalphunter, and Bat Lash, respectively, all while under the watch of a shadowy, glowing-eyed figure.

Back in the present, Superman heads to the Grand Canyon where his colleagues disappeared but winds up being defeated by a Kryptonite-containing robot serving the Lord of Time. The villain explains that he is responsible for sending the League members back into the past. He knows that a cluster of antimatter energy is going to fall in the Arizona deserts in 1878, and he plans to use the League to collect the powerful energy source for him!

Weird War Tales #107: In a story by Newman/Carrillo a German commander must contend with the Furies of Greek myth who bring his plans to ruin and then get him arrested by his own people. Next Snyder and Trinidad present a non-weird non-actual war story about National Guard re-enactors in Oregon who change the result of the battle of Rappahanock Station. Newman is back with Rubeny for the story of a mercenary crew hired to terrorize and drive out indigenous peoples in Africa, find themselves in trouble when the people they are attacking hire a mercenary local sorcerer.

Barr and von Eeden/Smith present a presumably a fall of Skylab inspired story. The Wanderer satellite is going to fall to Earth and peoples fear leads to a political push that shuts down the space agency, effectively ending America's exploration program. However, a young boy sees the satellite falling like a shooting star and is inspired to one day go to outer space.

Wonder Woman #287: With the DC Comics Presents preview promising a "new direction" for Wonder Woman starting next issue, Wolfman and Heck are left to finish the lame duck "old direction" here--which means a Titans guest appearance. Wonder Girl and Starfire respond to a mysterious summons to a New York harbor dock and are attacked by costumed assailants, who manage to capture Wonder Girl. Starfire captures one of the gang, and contacts Robin, who in turn calls Diana Prince to get Wonder Woman's aid. Wonder Girl is being held prisoner by Dr. Cyber, who lures Wonder Woman to her hideout, intent on having Dr. Moon transplant her brain into Wonder Woman's body. Rather than risk Donna's life, Wonder Woman appears to agree to Cyber's terms. But the Teen Titans bust in to free their friends. Wonder Woman defeats Cyber, and Wonder Girl breaks herself out of the glass prison she had been held in. I feel like this one was better than most of the Conway issues that preceded it.

Travelers Tales at Bar in the Anadem

The blogging equivalent of a clip show this week, as I give you a chance to catch up on my posts in the Spelljammer-ish setting of the Anadem:

Lycaon, the Werewolf World

Those itinerant Earthshiners

The mysterious Toymaker