Invading Mars

The first thing that strikes any Earthling visiting Mars for the first time is that Mars is old. The seas and lush vegetation of its youth have given way to anemic canals and barren rock and sand. Many of its canal cities are more ancient than Sumer--and even these are young compared to the ruins that dot the dust-choked wastes.

The Great Powers of Earth came to Mars hoping steal knowledge and wealth from the dying world. It was the first planet to be conquered with the arrival of the Age of Space and with good reason. The 1898 invasion that had nearly ended the human race had come from the red planet, after all. When man mastered the psychic technologies of the Invaders, it was only natural to want to strike back.

The Invaders weren’t actually from Mars, of course. That had only been a staging point. But the old canal cities of the true Martians had been waystations for space travelers in the past, and they still held ancient secrets. In the arid wastes there were underground complexes, the abandoned redoubts of ancient Martian civilization, constructed when they burrowed in to survive their world growing inhospitable. These subterranean ruins contain treasures both magical and mundane.

Treasure-hunters, thieves, and spies flock to the colonial cities. The British and French have governmental presences and peacekeeping forces. The Americans are represented by soldiers of fortune and freewheeling traders. The Russians are divided between White Russian spies, dreaming of a czarist resurgence, and Communist agitators, looking to make Mars more Red. German agents of the Nazi Ahnenerbe or the more shadowy Vril Society search out secrets for their mysterious “Aryan” masters in Agartha.

The Martians themselves tolerate these new invaders like all the others over the millennia. The canal and Lowland dwellers are generally solicitous and eager for Earth coin--though there are occasional small scale uprisings, and always there are rumors of murderous cults that wish to purge Mars of alien influences. The grim highlanders, however, seldom recognize colonial authority. They act as bandits and are often organized around fanatical ghazaerai monks.

Post-Apocalypitc Drive-In

Pull in at A Field Guide to Doomsday (remember to let your ticket-dodging friends out of the trunk) and get ready for Devastation at the Drive-In--a free pdf collection of posts by Justin Davis fashioning Mutant Future monsters from shlocky films:

Your Blood Will Chill...When faced with the Cinderkid from The Children (1980).
You'll Feel A Bit Unconformtable...As you learn the horrible truth of the Fangbaby from It's Alive (1974).
You'll Be Confused...By the Bleast from God Monster of Indian Flats (1974).
You'll Be Amused...By the improbability of the Ro-Man from Robot Monster (1953).

Check it out at Justin's site.  Bring your own popcom.

Veterans Day

In honor of Veterans Day here are a few of comics' stellar servicemen...

Where else to begin, but with Sargeant Joe Rock? The Rock of Easy Company fought his way through World War II--and beyond.  Brave and the Bold #108 had him teaming up with Batman to take on the Devil.

Captain Simon Savage may not be as well known as Sgt. Rock or Sgt. Fury, but he also led an eccentric commando squad known as the "Leatherneck Raiders." Those soldiers knew how to surf--which puts them one up on the Howlin' Mad Commandos.

Captain Ulysses "Gravedigger" Hazard outdoes them all.  He overcame polio and racism to become a one-man special forces unit and even led Easy Company briefly--but only after he broke into the Pentagon just to prove himself!

Happy Veterans Day to all the nonfictional veterans, too.

Beneath Rock Candy Mountain

It’s imparted by the sagacious urban druids that contemplate on street corners and rumored by stoned hobogoblins that pass canned heat ‘round campfires that there is an earthly paradise hidden in the great mountains of the West. The wondrous land’s fame has even spread to the world we know, where balladeers longingly recount the virtues of the Rock Candy Mountain or the Hobo’s Paradise.

The hidden mountain valley (so the tales claim) sits in the benevolent shadow of a mountain of candy (or at least with the appearance of such) and boasts trees which grow cigarettes, whiskey running in streams, and ponds of hearty stew. The inhabitants of the valley comport themselves like those in small towns elsewhere, but they are unfailingly friendly, even deferential, to the lowliest of visitors—perhaps especially the lowliest. No crimes against property are prosecuted; in fact, everything is given freely.

Adventurers, notorious hard cases (or thinking of themselves as such), scoff at those yarns. Calloused to eldritch horrors and exotic treasures alike, they’re disinclined to get misty over vagrants’ fairy tales of a hobotopia. Still, a few have caught the fever and gone looking over the years. As far as is known, none have returned.

Even in the tales, the way to the Hobo’s Paradise isn’t easy. Though the trail’s exact location is unknown, it’s believed to run treacherously through the cold heights of the Stoney Mountains. Mine slavers and road agents haunt the lower parts of the trail, while apemen guard the more remote passes.

These may not be the only dangers. Certain heterodox urban druids believe that this Paradise may not be what it appears from a distance. The air that should be fresh and sweet is instead choked with the stench of an abattoir. The whiskey streams are spiked with methanol and cause blindness, delirium, and death. And the smiling, wooden-legged constables and comic railyard bulls, aren’t benevolent—and aren’t even human behind their skin masks.

Could be that more than teeth rot in the shadow of the Rock Candy Mountain.

For the Garrisons at the Old School Heretic family of blogs.

Warlord Wednesday: Curse of the Unicorn

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Curse of the Unicorn"

Warlord (vol. 1) #72 (August 1983)

Written by Cary Burkett; Penciled by Dan Jurgens; Inked by Dan Adkins

Synopsis:  Morgan and Shakira arrive in the real Castle Deimos in the after passing through Jennifer’s magic mirror portal.  She’s glad keeping it open all this time paid off and allowed two to get home.

Morgan plans to tell her about the somewhat grim future they visited, but first he just wants to rest.  Fate has other plans however, as something comes through the still-open portal:

Trying to stay out of its way, Shakira is scratched by the unicorn’s horn. The creature bolts down a hallway.  Morgan, laughing at the absurdity it all, doesn’t notice another visitor following behind.  Morgan fights with the tall stranger while he yells at Jennifer to close the damn portal.

Morgan gets the upper hand, but the stranger isn’t giving up.  Finally, Jennifer puts him to sleep with a spell. 

They’d like to send him back to his own world, so Jennifer plans to enter his mind like she did with Rostov to find out where he came from.  While she’s preparing, Shakira in cat-form (miffed at being laughed at) scratches Morgan on the leg.

Ignoring them, Jennifer enters the strangers mind and gets his story:

The gifts even included the hand of the chief's daughter, Lianthe.

Unfortunately, Wynah Hunnuh's happiness didn’t last long.  He returned from a hunting trip to find everyone in his village dead.  The old chief lingered long enough to tell him that the unicorn he captured brought a plague.

Waynah Hunnuh built a pyre for his people.  He vowed to avenge them by hunting and slaying the animal responsible for their deaths.  He surrendered his old name and becomes Scarhart, the name without a tribe.

The hunt wasn’t easy.  He tracked the beast deep into the enchanted forest of Vulnicarn, and ultimately through a strange waterfall—which Jennifer surmises is a portal just like her mirror.

Suddenly, Shakira falls ill and collapses.  The unicorn’s contagion was passed to her when it scratched her!  Luckily, Jennifer has a plan that might save her:

Morgan rushes out to track the unicorn and bring it back alive.  Reading its tracks, he finds the beast is heading back to the Terminator, the band of darkness at the border of Skartaris.

Meanwhile, Jennifer is so intent on tending Shakira, she doesn’t notice Scarhart awaken.  He knocks her unconscious and makes his escape.  He has a quest to fulfill and plans to let no one stop him from killing the unicorn.  Like Morgan, he quickly picks up the animal's trail into darkness.

A distance ahead, Morgan follows the animal into a grove of weird plants.  He wonders how they grow here without sunlight.  Then, he finds out when he sees the unicorn struggling in their tendrils: They're carnivorous!

Morgan frees the unicorn, but now he’s in the plant’s grasp.  He manages to mortally wound it, but he’s still held in its death grip and blacks out out from the struggle. 

From a ridge above, Scarhart clutches his tomahawk and watches the battle…

Things to Notice:

• This is the first issue written by someone whose last name isn't Grell.
• The Terminator is so dark here Morgan needs a torch.  Previously, its generally been portrayed as a land of eternal twilight.

Where It Comes From:
This first non-Grell penned issue of Warlord features a Grell staple: the unicorn.  Unicorns have played a role in issue #3 and issue #12.

In a bit of irony (perhaps intentional), the story has a plague coming from world with pseudo-Native American culture to world with a pseudo-European feel, reversing history.

Images from the City

More weird things from the City...

The wizard was rich, eccentric--and dead.  His house awaited adventurers' brave enough to try to seize what treasure he had left behind.  The fresh bodies decorating the facade were only a mild deterrant.

The Hissmen sort of resembled gatormen, but they were much smarter and more dangerous. The attacks ended as mysteriously as they started. What they did with the humans they took back to their subterranean world, no one every discovered.

No one would have guessed the unassuming old lady was a witch. That’s before her dollhouses with their ritual dioramas--each room replicating (and causing) a recent murder--were found.

City officials were never happy with the public danger the monster trade represented, but of course, mail order businesses presented a question of jurisdiction.

The Bestiary and Bill

Tim’s post about monster manuals over at Gothridge Manor got me to thinking about an interesting monster book from back in the day: The Bestiary (1986) from Bard Games. It was part of the “Atlantean Trilogy” which included The Lexicon (a setting book) and The Arcanum (a rule book). The Bestiary was co-written by Stephan Michael Sechi (creator of Talislanta) and, most interestingly, featured art by then popular comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz:


The stats were for the Arcanum system but that was close enough to AD&D at a glance that conversion wasn’t too difficult.

The Bestiary separated the stats and fluff--and it gave quite a bit of fluff, which was written “in world.” While this isn’t fashionable in some circles these days, it did allow most of the book to perhaps function as a reference for players.  Kind of a unique approach.