GRIDSHOCK'D!

I had a conversation with my friend Paul Vermeren recently about his 80s-veneered, post-apocalyptic superhero game, GRIDSHOCK 20XX available on drivethru in pdf and in hardcopy from Exalted Funeral. Here's the first part of that conversation:

What's the secret origin of GRIDSHOCK 20XX?

GRIDSHOCK 20XX was born from my then-local gaming group's attempt to return to playing Rifts, a game we had loved as teens, 20+ years after we had left it behind. Though we knew there were things about Rifts that were going to be difficult for us to work with, we still had a lot of enthusiasm for the world and our characters, and we wanted to give it another shot as adults. We eventually ended up replacing the Palladium rules with Fate, and then ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying (when we wanted something Fate-like that could handle all the crazy powers and characters). While we enjoyed it for a while, it eventually fizzled out. Despite all the elements in Rifts that didn't work for us anymore, I felt strongly that there was something worth exploring further. 

For me, the genius of Rifts was that it's a post-apocalyptic game which still seems to include every single thing its creator thinks is cool, sort of like Dungeons & Dragons is a hodgepodge of every variety of fantasy. So, I decided I should try to make my own "spiritual successor" to Rifts. I stumbled at first, but it began to take shape once I realized that rather than starting with the real world as the starting point, I could create a post-apocalyptic setting that included all of the elements I wanted if the world was a superhero setting before everything went wrong. Since the superhero genre already contains elements of every other one, I could include whatever I liked.

As I tinkered with what I was calling GRIDSHOCK, it became less of a Rifts tribute and more of its own unique thing - though the influence of Rifts is pretty clear if you look for it. After several years of tinkering, it dawned on me that I could keep on tinkering forever, so I decided (on the spur of the moment) to publish what I had written as a set of small zine-style booklets, using ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying for the system. Lo and behold, GRIDSHOCK 20XX was born.

As currently conceived, is it in your mind more a "post-apocalyptic superhero setting" or "post-apocalyptic kitchen sink setting?" Essentially, is it more like Rifts where anything goes and it can be played in different ways or is it more focused and aimed as supers?

I've occasionally called GRIDSHOCK 20XX a "post-superhero" setting. It's a superhero world that went terribly wrong in 1986 is very important to understanding its present day, 20XX. Many of the player character templates (called Vectors in the setting) riff on established superhero archetypes. In its current booklet incarnation, it uses a superhero RPG system, because ICONS is relatively light but can handle the full array of powers and characters the setting includes. 

The game can played in many different ways, but the default mode of play in GRIDSHOCK 20XX assumes that you're heroic characters standing up to a villainous status quo. That's not usually the case in the traditional superhero genre. 

If you called the world of GRIDSHOCK 20XX a "kitchen sink" or even "gonzo" setting, I'd say that's probably fair. Those terms are often used to describe Rifts, but while Rifts was apparently a cyberpunk-esque world when its apocalypse happened, GRIDSHOCK 20XX was a comic book superhero world. As a result, I've put a good deal of work into unleashing many of the wilder elements of the superhero genre in ways that I think make for an interesting post-apocalyptic, kitchen sink setting where civilization has been radically reshaped, if not destroyed. 

Are there any particular superhero comics you'd point people to for inspiration?

There's a whole page of inspirations (seinen manga, European comics, British comics, movies, video games, toy lines, cartoons, etcetera that were on my mind in addition to American superhero comics) listed on the back inside cover of the fourth zine, Reference.

But to your question, the "Days of Future Past" storyline from Uncanny X-Men #141-142 is the first exposure I had to the idea of a superhero world gone disastrously wrong - though since it does have all those other influences, GRIDSHOCK 20XX is perhaps not quite as grim. It's still something I would recommend. GRIDSHOCK 20XX also has things in common with "deconstructed" superhero comics like Watchmen or Squadron Supreme, and with "alternate future" stories like Earth X, Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, and maybe even "Age of Apocalypse."

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 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 March 11, 1982.

Batman #348: Conway and Colan/Janson are back, and we've returned to the ongoing storyline with the "Batman Family" returning to Wayne Manor. There's an amusing bit where Bruce and Dick lose control of the giant penny while moving it. Anyway, Conway's looking to tie up the Man-Bat story, so the Man-Bat is lurking about, just as Langstrom's wife, Francine, and kid show up to accuse Wayne (somewhat rightly) of not fulfilling his promise to help them. Batman makes the questionable to decision to take Langstrom's little girl with him into the caves where Man-Bat may be hiding to deliver the new antidote (that may be lethal) to him. In the end, it works out, though not until after some serious child endangerment.  Meanwhile, Vicki Vale has told her editor she thinks she might know Batman's identity, and that information gets to Rupert Thorne.

Flash #309: Bates and Infantino/Jensen have Barry and police colleagues forced to attend the birthday party of Willard Wiggins' son, which is a great opportunity for Colonel Computron to attack again. The Flash thwarts the attack, but Computron escapes. Again, we get Basil Nurbin and his wife watching the news and lowkey accusing each other of being Computron, but now a college age daughter is added to the mix. Then, Captain Boomerang shows up, looking to help Wiggins out for giving him his start, but then Computron makes him a better offer.

The Dr. Fate backup continues in the hands of Gerber/Pasko and Giffen/Mahlstedt. Nelson's again seeing visions of doom in the Orb of Fate, so Dr. Fate must investigate, and Inza again isn't happy, which I suppose is realistic, but seems a bit of backsliding from the resolution of the last story.  Fate investigates an Iowa farm and gets blasted by a farmer who is more than he seems. Meanwhile, Inza agrees to have dinner with Vern Copeland, a museum director who's been trying to get in touch with Nelson.

G.I. Combat #242: Perhaps in an effort to modernize the title, Kanigher and Catan introduce the Mercenaries feature. These characters are an American (Gordon), a Brit (Prince), and a German (Horst) who are ex-members of the French Foreign Legion, now become mercenaries. In this first story, they are fighting to defend a democratically elected African leader from a General and his forces trying to take over the government in a civil war. The story reveals their code (they refuse to work for the General who's willing to pay more because they've already got a contract). In the end, they don't get paid at all because they fail to bring the General in alive.

We get two Haunted Tank stories. In the first, they do mail delivery and then take over defense of a hill for a unit already dead when they arrived. They sit down to answer the dead men's letters. In the second, pretty ridiculous story, Jeb is found wandering and raving, and he's put in a psych unit. Still raving, he becomes the leader of the other patients, and leads them in an escape. They head out and rescue Jeb's crew, only then does he come to his senses and recall what the "green umbrella" he's being yelling about is: the camouflage cover of a German installation. In the end, all this nonsense has cured the other psych unit escapees.

Nothing special in the rest of the stories. Allikas and Glanzman/Ayers have a blacksmith getting back at a deserter in the Sino-Japanese War by sabotaging a horseshoe. Kashdan and Ayers have a photographer turn his camera into a smoke bomb to help defeat a German pillbox. The second story from this team has a black cat being good luck for a squad of American G.I.s.

Jonah Hex #61: Jonah and Mei Ling sent by the Warlord to infiltrate the Imperial palace so Jonah can assassinate the Emperor. Mei Ling is smuggled into the seraglio, while Jonah has to sneak in on his own. Unfortunately, after the agent of the Warlord that helped them is captured and tortured by the Emperor's forces, things get tough, and Jonah appears to be likely to get captured.

Saga of the Swamp Thing #2: Photo cover on this one, a still from the movie that opened less than a month before. Swamp Thing and the little girl, Casey, are captured by goons working for Sunderland Corporation. A man with mechanical hands, Grasp, plans to torture Swampy to get the secret of the bio-restorative formula. Somehow, Casey manifests psychic abilities that saves Swamp Thing. They escape and Grasp doesn't survive. 

New Teen Titans #20: Kid Flash writes a letter to his parents, filling them in recent events in the lives of himself and his friends: a new super-villain calling himself the Disruptor attacks members of the team; the Titans throw a surprise birthday party for Cyborg; and Kid Flash himself is captured by the Disruptor and his demanding father, a forgotten Batman villain, "Brains" Beldon. The Titans run to the rescue, but the Disruptor keeps disrupting their powers until he is defeated by Raven's soul-self. The "day in the life" framing Wolfman and Perez chose for this issue works well and gives the Titans more depth and personality than was typical of supers comics of this era, outside of the X-Men.

Superman #372: This is a crazy one from Bates and Swan. Scientist Mason Strath threatens to destroy the world with a sphere of anti-matter if Superman doesn't go back in time and save his kids from drowning in a "tidal wave." Superman takes him back in time to prove the past can't be changed, but he discovers that the kids were just robots! It turns out his work has made Strath radioactive, and the government removed the kids to protect them and replaced them with robots. When the robots got washed out to see in the tidal wave, they just figured they'd let Strath think they died. Superman creates suits to protect the kids from the radiation and reunites father and kids. Also, he stops the anti-matter that slipped Strath's control.

Rozakis and Kane bring back "Superman 2021." Jimmy Olsen's grandchildren are kidnapped by two extortionists, so old man Jimmy improvises a new secret signal to call Superman III for help. It's amusing how "futuristic" the 2021 clothes look.

13th Age: The Strangling Sea

 

Last night we had our first actual session of 13th Age (after a character creation session). I was running the adventure The Strangling Sea. The setup for the adventure is based on the character's relationships and some random rolls, so we were perhaps a little slower getting started that normal (of course the biggest delay is always the pre-game chitchat), but it ran pretty smooth after that being a D&D derivative.

The party was sent by a wizardly patron connected with the Archmage to find a missing artificer. Their only clue was a friend of his in a distance town. This necessitated a travel montage, which is one of 13th Age's dfferences from other sorts of D&D, which asks the player's to essential describe what happened in a round-robin description of incidents. There seems to be a bit of reticence here in the players' parts, surprising since all of them have run games before and two have published works. Likely, it was just being put on the spot.

After the travel we got to the only combat of the adventure. A battle with some thugs in service of the Diabolist:

The player's triumphed, though without the escalation die, it might have been a close thing. 

Imagining the Hyborian Age

 The map of Conan's world by Katrin Dirim I shared the other day was interesting not just because her her artistic style (though that's great), but because of the way she chose to depict the Hyborian Age costume and material culture. The prevailing style, since the Frazetta covers have been a vague "barbaric fantasy," which each artist working their own variation on the theme.

Howard's stories, by contrast, tend to be much more "historical" in their depiction of these things--though they aren't really consistent in their historical era. Different locales in Conan's world seem to come from different points in history: there are High Medieval tales ("Hour of the Dragon", "A Witch Shall Be Born"), Golden Age of Piracy stories ("Black Stranger"), stories that seem to be set in the ancient world ("God in the Bowl"), and even stories that like ahistorical periods of a Medieval version of the 18th Century ("Beyond the Black River").

I think Dirm's idea to narrow this range a bit to make it make more sense is a good one. On Reddit, she says she capped the level of armor at roughly the early middle ages, and mixed in elements from as far back as the Bronze Age to keep the atmosphere.

I think this fits well with the more "ancient world" interpretation Mark Schultz does in volume 1 of the Wandering Star/Del Rey collection:

Some of the slight re-shifts of the names would be fairly simple. Iranistan becomes the Persian Empire (take you pick which one), and Turan instead of being a stand-in for the Ottoman Turks, are maybe the Parthians? Aquilonia and Nemedian could be recast as somewhat Carolingian Frank:

Though I have seen portrayals (and there is some support for it) that Aquilonia could be Roman!

The Age of Sail stuff in Zingara and the Barachan Isles would require the most change, but there have been pirates as long as there have been boats, so it's possible.

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 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 March 4, 1982. 

Arak Son of Thunder #10: Thomas and Colon/Acala have Arak and Valda head striking out over land now, still trying to get to Constantinople. They run into some scuzzy Byzantine soldiers and then a couple of mythic beings: Valda is bewitched by a satyr's pipes and Arak fights a centaur. The centaur then shows our hero the strangest thing of all: his face carved into a mountain! In the Viking Prince backup by Kanigher and Duursema, the Prince has his arm back, but it won't work, so he runs out into the snow to commit suicide by engaging wolf pack, weaponless. Seeing his dwarf court jester fighting the wolves, though, shames him out of self-pity, and the Prince returns to heroic form. He and the jester travel to the Castle of Krogg the Red, where his sister is being held.

DC Comics Presents #46: Bridwell and Saviuk bring back the Global Guardians from the Super-Friends series. Interestingly, because Super-Friends isn't considered continuity, the fandom wiki lists this issue as the characters' first appearances, but Superman has clearly met then before. Anyway, Dr. Mist summons Superman to help the international heroes of the Global Guardians stop a band of evil magic types from raising an evil sorcerer from the dead. There's globe-trotting artifact collecting to resurrect the sorcerer, necessitating several team-ups. In the end, Dr. Mist and Supes have outsmarted the villains and their apparent victory isn't.

Fury of Firestorm #1: Because Gerry Conway (at least) demanded it, Firestorm has got his own series again with Broderick and Rodriguez on art. Firestorm will make his debut in the Super-Friends cartoon in 1984, so maybe there was already talk of that? Anyway, this issue introduces the Native American shaman villain, Black Bison, when an ancient talisman causes teacher John Ravenhair is controlled by his great-grandfather who wants to get religious artifacts back from the Museum of Natural History. 

The possessed Ravenhair steals the Bison headdress and coup-stick. Calling himself Black Bison, he uses the magic of the coup-stick to animate the taxidermied animal displays causing them to run riot throughout the museum. While Firestorm is saving visitors from the stampeding animals, Bison animates a white steed and declares revenge upon all those who have desecrated the sacred tradition of the Bison Cult. He makes good his escape while Firestorm is distracted, and we last see him in front of the house of a senator.

Justice League #203: If this issue were a TV show, Conway and Heck would have served up a backdoor pilot for a Royal Flush Gang series. Instead, it's just an issue where we get more on the origins of the members of the new Royal Flush Gang then we perhaps wanted or needed. At sea, Aquaman is enjoying a day of hazing the new kid, Firestorm, when the two encounter a hydrofoil piloted by the Jack and Ten of Spades who nearly kill them. Wonder Woman is headed to the hospital to mee those two when she is ambushed and defeated by the King of Spades. Meanwhile, at the Royal Flush Gang's headquarters, the Jack discovers that the Ace, who recruited the other members, is secretly a robot reporting to a mysterious superior he calls "Wild Card."

Weird War Tales #112: Kanigher and Spiegle give us the silliest Creature Commandos story yet. The Commandos are in North Africa and are forced to hide from the Germans inside(!) a pyramid, where they find the tomb of a Medusa. In a D&Dish twist, the Commandos (minus Dr. Medusa) partake of some old wine in the tomb and have a trippy experience--where the actually shrink down to like a 3 inch size! Dr. Medusa is forced to carry her tiny comrades in her snake hair (where they are bitten) and complete the mission on her own, though the Tiny Commandos do group together to provide supporting fire. Somehow, the bite of Medusa's hair's causes them to grow back to normal size.

That's followed by a story of the French Reign of Terror by Newman and Matucenio where an army officer sends his superiors to the guillotine for personal gain, only to be beheaded by their headless ghosts. Finally, Kasdan and Zamora reveal the fate of G.I. who saves an old witch's cat from the Germans and is gifted with nine lives. He uses eight of them being a reckless gloryhound, but the last he sacrifices to save a green kid, earning himself instant reincarnation as a cat.

Wonder Woman #292: Levitz/Thomas and the artistic team of Colan, McLaughlin, and Tanghal continue the Amazon Princess' conflict with the Adjudicator. Wonder Woman doesn't actually appear much this issue. Instead, we get Black Canary, Huntress, and Power Girl defeating Plague at the CDC (or Disease Control Center as it's called) in Atlanta. Supergirl and Madame Xanadu head to war-ravaged Earth-X to team-up with Phantom Lady and confront the personification of War.

The Essential Elf

What's an elf? For a lot of people, it seems to come down to pointy ears. (See any discussion about the accuracy of Talislanta's "No Elves" tagline line--which really seems to upset a lot of people--or discussion of Vulcans as "Space Elves.") Tvtropes, of course, has some ideas, but I feel like their definition only skirts the narrative use of elves in fantasy, mixing both surface characteristics and other qualities. My list overlaps in some places but has some differences. Not all elves or elf-like beings have all of these traits or possess the ones they do have to the same degree, but they tend to have the majority of them to a greater than humans (or whatever the baseline group of the setting is) in a work.

The qualities are:

• Otherworldliness. Magical, mythic, or nonmaterialness. This is probably the essential elven trait.
• Scale. Supra- or metahumanness.
• Alien. Nonhumanness in outlook/mentality.
• Morality. Association with greater moral clarity/absolutism.

Other qualities seem very common, but maybe not essential: "Clandestine/Hidden" and "Dwindling," are two the come to mind.

Tolkien's elves are perhaps only modest scorers except in Scale. Elquest elves are worse performs, but still outdo humans in several eras. The elves of Anderson's The Broken Sword, hit 3 out of 4 significantly. The Minbari of Babylon 5, ostensibly non-elves, manage to tic all the boxes.

Hither Came Conan...

This map of the Hyborian Age world by Katrin Dirim is pretty cool, and gives a different sort of vibe than typical illustration of Conan's world. There are a couple of illustrations from Conan stories, too. You should check them out!