Revisiting Skaro

I originally posted these maps in 2018, but I came across them again and thought they were worth re-sharing. For those of you not familiar with Doctor Who lore (it's at least possible somebody reading this isn't!), Skaro is the homeworld of those plunger-armed, shrill-voiced robotic monsters, the Daleks.

According to the map, first appearing in The Dalek Book (1964), Skaro is almost AD&D Outer Plane weird. Check out the named locales here:

Seas of Rust, Ooze, and Acid. The Lake of Mutations. The Radiation Range. All pretty dire stuff. Also, don't miss the note on the giant "serpents" of Darren that are really mutated earthworms!

If that's not enough, subterranean Skaro, is just as weird:

Readings in Planetary Romance: Lost on Venus

Not too long ago, I made the case for Planetary Romance, and particularly its Sword & Planet (sub-)sub-genre, as good fodder for role-playing games, particularly games focused on exploration of the sort come to old school hex and point crawls. I've recently re-read the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs Venus series, Pirates of Venus (1932) and read for the first time its sequel, Lost on Venus (1935). These provide could examples of the Sword & Planet virtues I mentioned.

The Venus series follows the adventures of Carson Napier, young engineer and daredevil, who's launched out in a missile for Mars, but due to faulty calculations, winds up on Venus. Unlike most epic fantasy or even Sword & Sorcery heroes, but like most of his Sword & Planet brethren, these adventures largely come down to him being lost a lot and stumbling onto monsters and weird civilizations.

In Pirates of Venus, he falls in (literally) with the Vepajan loyalists in exile, in a city built high in titanic trees. After learning the language, he gets a job as a tarel gatherer in training, which turns out to be a dangerous line of work, as tarel is the silk of a giant spider. After getting lost in his first outing, he and a friend end up on the ground, where they encounter more hostile wildlife before being taken as slaves by birdmen working for the Vepajan's enemies, the Thorist revolutionaries. 

Taken on board a Thorist vessel, he foments a conspiracy among the other slaves and leads a mutiny to take control of the ship. They briefly turn pirate (or privateer without letters of marquee since they act in Vepaja's interests), until the Vepajan princess Carson is in love with is abducted by Thorists into the wilderness and Carson gets tossed overboard in a storm.

Lost on Venus picks shortly after that, when both Duare (the love interest) and Carson have been captured and taken to a Thorist colonial settlement. There, Carson is placed in a death trap with 7 deadly doors. He escapes though and manages to rescue Duare through a series of the sort of coincidences that Burroughs is famous for. They run into and get lost in the Venusian forest where they have to avoid dangerous animals and cannibals and figure out a way to get food, which involves making a spear and bow and arrows.

Eventually, there's a capture by a mad scientist-type with an army of undead (and another escape), then Carson winds up in an advanced, scientific "utopia," which is really a totalitarian state with an obsession with genetic purity. And then they escape...

If this all sounds rather episodic, well it is--in exactly the way roleplaying games are episodic. The deficits (at least in this regard) these originally serialized stories have as literature are virtues for the table. Finding food and shelter is a concern, too, in a way it might be in a hexcrawl, though the plot armor provided Burroughs' characters ensure none of them starve.

Burroughs' protagonists, and Sword & Planet protagonists in general, are often more reactive than players are or at least often like to be. Things happen to them, or they are forced into a certain course of action. I feel like some of this is broadly acceptable, though there should usually be ways to avoid an encounter by cautious players, and there should always be multiple of ways out of any predicament. 

Wednesday Comics: DC, December 1984 (week 1)

My mission: to read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis. This week, I'm looking at the comics that were at newsstands in the week of September 6, 1984. 

Atari Force #12: Conway/Helfer and Garcia-Lopez/Smith move toward the climax of the arc. Christopher Chance starts his trial on New Earth by condemning the authorities for their foolishness and trying to escape again. Meanwhile, the crew of Scanner One, still dealing with Blackjack's betrayal, are pulled toward the Dark Destroyer's ship in orbit around a planet at the edge of New Earth's system. Escaping via a smaller craft, they land on the planet in secret and discover the Dark Destroyer's horrifying antimatter bomb. They attack the Dark Destroyer's forces, but they're outnumbered, and Blackjack betrays them again. Though defeated, Martin confronts the Dark Destroyer, who removes his helmet to reveal he's Martin Champion, or at least looks like him.

There's a humorous Hukka backup story by Giffen. In the letter column, we're given the news that Garcia-Lopez is leaving the book for the New Teen Titans and Barreto is replacing him.

DC Comics Presents #76: Mishkin/Cohn and Barreto team-up Superman and Wonder Woman. As weird creatures attack a demonstration of new biological research, the heroes spring into action. It turns out the mastermind behind the attacks is a woman raised by the Amazons who now uses their secret of living clay, like the substance from which Wonder Woman was created, to make warriors and monsters that do her bidding. Ultimately, it's revealed she's doing this to seize the scientist's formula as rescue herself from the potentially fatal results of her self-experimentation, but she fails and dissolves to mud in Wonder Woman's arms.

Fury of Firestorm #30: Cavalieri and Kayanan/Tanghal pick up where last issue left off. Mindboggler has Firestorm in her control, but before she can bring him back to Breathtaker, the cops show up and arrest him for his erratic behavior in Central Park. Still out of it, he's beat up in jail, before being picked up for transport to another facility. It turns out, though, that the transport is a fraud, perpetrated by Incognito who has gone rogue to prove himself to Breathtaker. Firestorm escapes after a run-in with a rival gang, but Mindboggler grabs him again and appears to be in total control.

Justice League of America #233: Conway and Patton kick off the Detroit League's debut in the regular title with a story that perhaps emphasizes their new direction: a focus on the characters and their interactions. The spotlight here is mostly on Vibe who is challenged by the Skulls to take a stand in the conflict between their gang and his former gang, El Lobos. Zatanna and Vixen step in to help, but Vibe doesn't appreciate their involvement. When local grandmotherly type Mother Windom fills in the other Leaguers on Vibe's background and the fact that his brother is now leader of El Lobos, they get involved in the turf war, easily ending the conflict--for the moment. Not exactly high stakes superhero action, but in the coda, Crowbar, former leader of the Skulls, is mysteriously transformed by an unknown being calling itself the Overmaster.

Vigilante #13: Kane is still on art, and Wolfman switches things up for a more investigative mystery sort of story, though still with a lot of action. Vigilante sets out to clear a man who appears to have murdered his partner and his partner's wife (with whom he was having an affair) by poisoning, but Vigilante doesn't buy it. In the course of proving the man's innocence, he fights with the guy twice, then causes him to fall from an airplane in a continued scuffle, shoots him, and steals his parachute, leaving his dead body to drop to the ground. But in the end, Vigilante figures out who framed the guy even though he can't tell anybody. Justice!

Wonder Woman #322: Mishkin and Heck/Maygar engage in some patching up of continuity as they bring this arc to a close. Following Eros's assertions last issue, we find out from Hippolyta (and Aphrodite) that the goddess was only able to resurrect Steve Trevor the first time he died by melding him with the power of Eros, which is why Eros now thinks he was Trevor. The manipulation of Diana's memory is revealed, but then Eros goes on a rampage, trying to kill the Steve Trevor, who (this issue reminds us) is the Steve Trevor of an alternate Earth. Anyway, by the end of this issue the current alt-Steve Trevor has the memories of the dead Earth-One Steve Trevor, so all's well, and we can never speak of this all again! Diana, disillusioned by the Hippolyta's manipulation leaves Paradise Island "forever."

In the editorial, we're told that due to sales, Wonder Woman is going bimonthly following this issue. The next issue blurb teases an appearance by the Monitor who, we are told, has been appearing all over the DCU getting ready for his role in something called Crisis: Earth. 

Bigger and Better! A New Random Appendix N Generator

James over at Adventures in Gaming v2 took my throwaway idea from last week and ran with it! Check out his much more comprehensive generator on his blog.

Random Appendix N Campaign Concept Generator

Need a campaign idea or at least a prompt to develop your own? Just roll on the following table based on the AD&D "Appendix N" and fill in the blanks! 

Protagonists like [A] in a setting like [B] with magic like [C].

Roll     Author

1         Poul Anderson

2         Leigh Brackett

3         Lin Carter

4         Edgar Rice Burroughs

5         L. Sprague De Camp

6         De Camp & Pratt

7         Lord Dunsany

8         PJ Farmer

9         Gardner Fox

10       Sterling Lanier

11       Fritz Leiber

12       H.P. Lovecraft

13       Abraham Merritt

14       Michael Moorcock

15       Fred Saberhagen

16       Magaret St. Clair

17       J.R.R. Tolkien

18       Jack Vance

19       Manly Wade Wellman

20       Roger Zelazny

So, I got A=17, B=20, and C=12, which gives me: Protagonists like JRRT, a setting like Zelazny, and magic like H.P. Lovecraft. I'll interpret that this way: There's a tidally locked planet (suggested by Jack of Shadows), where the nightside is dominated by Elder god-horrors with an oppressed human class in a technological realm, and the dayside is a sylvan realm of elves and dwarves, who seek to keep back the encroaching hegemony of the nightside.

One more example: A=4, B=14, C=10. ERB, Moorcock, and Lanier. This is an easy one. A group of "modern" Earth folk find themselves in post-apocalyptic realm of knights and chivalry where psychic powers are viewed as magic.

Give it a try!

Wednesday Comics: Drome

Last week was a big one for graphic novels for me. I picked up four, and two of the three I've finished, I liked a lot. I wrote about The Avengers in the Veracity Trap over on the Flashback Universe blog, but here I wanted to talk about Drome by Jesse Lonergan. 

Drome is a creation myth in a world part Kirby's New Gods and part Metal Hurlant. He draws bits from a lot of different sources, I imagine, including the association of the platonic solids with the classic elements, but much of it echoes events in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

A black, horned, male deity creates humans, and they war upon each other and the beasts of the world until a white, mohawked or crested female deity sends a heavily muscled demi-goddess born of water to subdue the humans, then teach them civilization. Later, a bestial, nature demigod born of Earth becomes the lover of the god-queen. The two must deal with the arrival of a rampaging spirit of fire, then a rebellion of jealous humans who unleash a cosmic bull.

Lonergan's style is integral to the telling of his story. The pages are often broken in equal-sized squares which are just as likely to be a grid imposed on the scene or part of the scene as they are to organize the story spatially or temporally. There is relatively little dialogue, leaving the images to tell most of the story.

I read the story digitally, but I'm considering picking up the hardcover because it's gorgeous and a work I think I will revisit. It's definitely made me want to seek up Lonergan's other work.

It's A Madhouse!

This weekend I got my (first) shipment from Magnetic Press and the Planet of the Apes RPG Kickstarter. The books are gorgeous and the extra swag (including a cloth map of Ape City) is suitably well done. 

The game focuses on the original POTA continuity, not the 21st Century prequel/reboot films. Hopefully there will be a supplement for that in the future, but obviously the original film era is what most people (including myself) really want. Thankfully, the Burton film was likewise ignored.

The game uses the "Magnetic Variant" of West End Game's D6 system: you roll a bunch of six-sided dice and total the result, comparing it to a difficulty. There have been some modernizations and modifications, but having not played a D6 game in years, I'm not sure the extent of them. It does use a wild die to add additional consequences (positive or negative) to the results of a roll giving the "yes/no, and" and "yes/no but" sorts of spread. The Core book covers rules (and gives archetypes) for ape, astro-naut (they always spell it that way), mute, future human, and mutant characters. There's a clever detail where it is suggested (similar to the Cavemaster rpg) that the players of the bestial, future humans attempt to communicate with the other players only by gesture or pantomime, assuming they are in a mixed character types party.

After equipment, the rest of the book is given over to gamemaster (Lawgiver, in this case) stuff: setting info, campaign advice/suggestions, and adversaries/monsters.

Additionally, I got the ANSA Files Sourcebook, which details the era (or eras, really) related to the original film series. Really, the core book gave the essentials, but this book deep dives into the various time periods of each film, gives suggestions for running games in each, and stats prominent NPCs. I don't know that anyone would want to play a Cold War, space race game in an alternate 1970s, but with this supplement, you could!

In addition to the new films, I'd like to see more coverage of the TV show era and the ability to play speaking humans Also, delving into some of the more gonzo aspects of the various comic series would be cool for a supplement, too.

The Planet of the Apes rpg isn't as yet available to non-backers, but Amazon has pre-orders up for January, and I would suspect it becomes available in pdf prior to that.