Wednesday Comics: Darklock Delay

Don't go summoning demons or anything, but the next installment of my review of Jim Starlin's The Price is going wait until next week.

We Made Our Own

My first foray into "role-playing game design" was a G.I. Joe game. I still have it, but I don't know where it is at the moment, but I remember the basics. It was the mid-eighties, my group had been playing TSR's Marvel Superheroes, and dabbling in universal table-based games. They all made it look so easy.

I think it used attributes similar to FASERIP, though instead of descriptively named levels, it used numbers 1 to 10. The filecards on the back of the G.I. Joe packages (and helpfully collated in one place in the G.I. Joe: Order of Battle limited series put out by Marvel) made it easy to adapt the lists of training and qualified expert rating with various weapons into skills.

We played it on more than one occasion. Enough that I was inspired to make a second game using the same (highly derivative system) based around the Transformers. That was even easier because the Transformers packaging even had abilities and ratings:

I don't think we ever played Transformers. We also never got around to playing the Wrasslin' Roleplaying Game made by a buddy of mine, born from his love of the UWF, and (as I recall) based on roughly the same engine.

Superize Your Fantasy

“Men and women who had worn suits for decades traded punches powerful enough to crush elephant skulls, dodged and deflected attacks too fast for the eye to follow, and died suddenly, often before the crowd registered the killing blow.
Victors and dead men were separated by a blink of the eye.” 
- No Return: A Novel of Jeroun, Zachary Jernigan

Zero-level funnels and slow grinds to hero-hood are all well and good, but there ought to place for adventurers born to perform great deeds with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Something like Masters of the Universe or the non-science fantasy equivalent of Dreadstar or Guardians of the Galaxy.

This isn't necessarily a new idea. Mythology is full of characters with superhuman abilities. Anime does this too--as does that rpg bastard child of mythology and anime, Exalted. But Super Saiyan martial arts is not the only way to go with this. Check out these guys:

This is the League of Ancients (an Atlantis-era superhero team from JLA). You can read about them on the image there, but just as a highlight, the armored guy above is Tezumak, who gets scientific and technology mastery from his smith god. He powers his armor with blood sacrifice.

In summary: Think about ideas that show up in traditional fantasy and crank up the power level. Make sure that characters are distinctive in there powers. Have them do big things.

Heed the Words of Miss Liberty

Happy 4th of July!

And as always...

In the Days of Archaic Oikumene

The Archaic Oikumene controlled the area of the Strange Stars until approximately 31.5 gigaseconds [a millennium in Old Earth reckoning] ago. This fabled age was even stranger than the present:

Art by Jack Kirby

An astronate, carrying within its containment suit numerous acquired minds, walks the lesser known hyperspatial paths to find the proper place and time for the transformation of all its minds into single, toposophically transcendent intellect.

Art by Simon Roy

A tlekaklek grandee from the rail city on Mercury astride a humandrill bearer (whose troop mind-consensus has chosen to side with the tlekaklek) seeks an audience with the sleeping Gaia oversoul in a temple in the Mediterranean basin of Old Earth. The tlekaklek seeks loans of computronium to support xir people's conflict with the Jovian Unity. 

Art by Lennart Verhoeff

Some principalities sponsored hunts for hyperspace worms, ostensibly because they damaged the exotic matter supports of the hyperspace conduits, but also to harvest their neural fluid (a mild intoxicant that enhances spatial awareness). Hunters scoured the spacing lanes perhaps never guessing--at least never caring--that the beings they hunted were also descendants of paleo-humanity. By the end of age, the worms (then known as hyubh) had grown to gigantic size and had become a true hyperspace shipping menace.

Wednesday Comics: The Price

We continue our examination of Jim Starlin's Dreadstar Saga with The Price. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

The Price

Eclipse Graphic Album Series #5 (October 1981) Story & Art by Jim Starlin

Synopsis: The Empirical Galaxy is in the midst of a 200 year-old war between two super-powers: The Monarchy and the Instrumentality. Altarix is a world of the Instrumentality, home to its mystic Order of Vieltoor. It's also the home of Lord High Bishop Darklock and his brother Ajar'l Darklock.

Ajar'l is a tax lawyer, ferreting out those who seek to defraud the Instrumentality. Where his brother is interested in the mystical, Ajar'l is concerned with the practical. All things considered, Ajar'l doesn't get the sort of death he would've expected:

Darklock senses his brothers death and quickly goes to the scene. The police tell him it was a murder committed by fringe religious cultists. Darklock is skeptical that it was a human crime. The police assure him that supernatural involvement was ruled out by one of the cardinals of the Papal Council who has already been there.

Darklock does to the Lord Papal to request a leave of absence:

The Lord Papal know's Ajar'l's death smacks of demonic attack, and he warns Darklock against engaging in unauthorized vengeance.

When he's gone, Cardinal Spyder asks Lord Papal why he granted Darklock leave. He knows he plans to seek vengeance. Lord Papal did so because he senses what Darklock sensed--and more:

Darklock is a powerful and ambitious man. Lord Papal sees this as a chance to get read of a potential rival.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Things to Notice:

• In the Dreadstar-verse, the Earth was destroyed in 1980.
• The original story was in black and white. It was later colorized and reprinted as Dreadstar Annual #1.

Commentary: 
This graphic novel is billed as "A new Metamorphosis Odyssey book" thought there isn't anything in its setting or characters to tie it to that other work (yet).

An oppressive church state is a trope Starlin has worked with before. The Church of Universal Truth was the main bad guy of Starlin's "Magus Saga"  at Marvel. The use of the term "Instrumentality" may have it's origins in Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind.

The Future of Superheroes

Most superheroes (and superhero rpgs) are set in the modern day. There's no reason superheroes have to be limited to that era, of course. At least as early as 1955, we got a glimpse of Brane Taylor, the Batman of the year 3000. Just a few years later, the preeminent group of future heroes made their debut: The Legion of Super-Heroes. These guys were big enough to get supplements of both editions of the Mayfair DC Heroes rpg: Legion of Super-Heroes vol. I and II and 2995: The Legion of Super-Heroes Sourcebook.

Marvel's answer to the Legion was the Guardians of the Galaxy. These guys were not the super-group of b-list characters about to get a movie; this was a group of freedom fighters against Badoon tyranny in the 31st century. They were (originally) mostly from the Sol System, leaving one to wonder how they were going to guard the whole galaxy. They got a series in the 90s, but then their name was given to another group. No rpg supplement for any Marvel game.

There are a number of future heroes in dystopian futures--enough that I think they are really a separate subgenre. Most of these are at Marvel and the lion's share are alternate timelines from the X-Men. Marvel did have a whole 2099 line that was slightly less dystopian than most X-Men futures.

A more science fictionish approach to the future supers is Image's Prophet. The story isn't particularly superheroic so far so maybe a superhero rpg wouldn't be the best system for it, but it is completely tied to the modern day Extreme comics universe and does feature future versions of Prophet, Diehard, Troll, and Bedrock.

Anyway, there's a lot of inspiration to be had in the above works, I think.