Weird Revisited: Curse of the Wolf

This post first appeared five years ago today. It a part of the mostly unpublished (except here) planar stuff for Weird Adventures:

Besides the usual sorts of lycanthropes, the City sometimes sees a rarer sort created by an elixir from the Outer Planes. Known as the Potion of Werewolfism, the magical elixir is thought to be brought to the Prime Material Plane by agents unknown from the Land of Beasts. It appears as a shockingly effervescent liquid of shifting color within a somewhat oversized test tube stoppered with a cork.

Imbibing the liquid has the immediate effect of transforming the drinker into an anthropomorphic wolf resembling the inhabitants of the Land of Beasts. Despite the startling change, people encountering the person for the first time in werewolf form will not react as if anything is unusual: such is the extraplanar magic of the potion.  This initial transformation lasts 1d100 minutes, but there is a 50% chance that the potion has given the imbiber the hiccups and each hiccup will bring a shift between forms. After the initial transformation, the imbiber will return to normal, but the wolf form will re-emerge ever night at sundown.

Persons suffering from this werewolfism aren't ravening beast like common lycanthropes but are compulsive carousers and cads. No attractive member of the opposite sex is safe from their crude come-ons. While in werewolf form a individual can be hurt, but quickly shrugs off any damage sustained (regenerating like trolls). They do not have any particular susceptibility to silver.

Victims of this “werewolf curse” often make themselves destitute with their spending and unwelcome in any night-spot in town with their skirt-chasing as they fulfill their wolfish appetites.

Straight from the Prismatic Peak

A Mortzengersturm preview! The Oubliette of Mistakes wher ethe mad manticore wizard keeps the creations that displeased him. The roll call:

Mocka: This attempt to cross a naga with a clown triggered even Mortzengersturm’s coulrophobia in the end. It giggles and mugs and sways and bounces like a jack-in-the-box unboxed, eager to bring laughter and joy.

Gruebird: This spiteful creature hides in total darkness that only a magical light source can penetrate. It will attack anything that comes close enough for it to peck or snatch with its talons.

Chimerical Chimera: A swirling, churning cloud of protoplasm that never looks like the same thing twice. Each round, its abilities and appearance changes.

Jam: A sweet-tasting, edible variant on the deadly slimes or jellies of Subazurth was not to be. It is sweet, but no less deadly. Those entrapped by it may die in a euphoric sugar-sleep.

Moonster: A glowing spherical creature resembling the moon with a face: a bemused smile under half-lidded eyes. The Moonster is a narrator—and an annoying one. It will narrate the actions of anyone that enters the shaft in a somewhat florid diction, but with an ironic distance. It knows the past of the subject of its narration with certainty; its predictions for the future are only speculation, no matter how assured their delivery.

Miszm Throppe’s wizardly capotain, indigo and silver and arrayed with mystical symbol, crouches atop his decaying skull and waits. It was never a particularly virtuous piece of headwear, and somehow it has gained a degree of life and with it an even greater measure of malevolence.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: Pirates of Pandarve

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Pirates of Pandarve (1983) 
(Dutch: De Piraten van Pandarve) (part 5)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

After recruiting the other slave miners to their side, Storm and Nomad lead them to the elevator out of the mine. Along the way, they defeat more guards and bring ever more slaves to their side.

When Storm reaches the surface, he finds Rann just about to buy back his freedom from the mine owner.  That's all unnecessary now as the battle is joined between the former slaves and the owner:

The slaver breaks out some shuriken:

Before the mine owner can have his monster throw Storm in the pit, Nomad pushes them in. The monster tries to climb out, but Storm shoots the rope.

Storm has trouble keeping his army under control. They run wild in the street, looting and burning, as he attempts to lead them to the harbor. They force the ferryman to carry them into orbit, where they promptly commandeer a ship, sending the crew down to the planet.

Nomad poses a question to Storm:

THE END OF PIRATES OF PANDARVE

Silver Keys in House Perilous

Our Land of Azurth game continued last night with the third session of my adaptation of X2: Castle Amber. We had ended on a cliffhanger with the chaplain in gold armor about to attack. He got in a couple of blows, but the party made short work of him and stole his loot.

They also found a chest containing a meteorite, which unfolded into Astra, one of the Shooting Star Folk. She was vague as to how she got here, but just as eager as the party to find a way out, so she joined them.

Astra by Jeff Call

Next was a room full of skeletons in cassocks, a four armed one had a silver key around its neck. The party took heavy damage, but prevailed. Searching for a place to rest, they found more gold and a cockatrice, but no one else got petrified. Our heroes left the chapel feeling they had either killed or allowed to be killed a person with information they needed to get out.

They passed through the garden again, wisely avoiding a field of poppies, and came to the other wing of the house. The bard, Kully, shook off an attempt at possession in a throne room full of skeletons. They chatted with a well-mannered ice salamander, but had nothing they would allow him to freeze to trade for more information.

Finally, they came upon the first generally helpful person they've met in the whole mansion: a mastiff-headed man named Claudas they encountered in the library. He showed Shade a scroll that revealed they needed several magic items to lift the curse and escape the house. These items are on Earth in a place called France. The players realize they have some of the Silver Keys they surmise open to the gates to France, but now they just have to find those gates.

Closer to the Prismatic Peak

The first published adventure in the Land of Azurth, Mortzengersturm the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak, is scheduled to drop in June. We're close now, so barring some unforeseen calamity, I feel fairly confident in that. Ideally (though there is less certainty in this), the physical copies will debut at North Texas RPG Con.

Mortzengersturm features art (like the cover above) and cartography by Jeff Call and layout and design will be by Lester B. Portly who made the Strange Stars series look so good. It's written for 5e, but that means its fairly easily "back adaptable" to older editions.

Planetary Picaresque

We're all familiar with the Planetary Romance or Sword and Planet stories of the Burroughsian ilk, where a stranger (typically a person of earth) has adventures of a lost world or derring-do sort of variety on an alien world. I'd like to suggest that their is a subgenre or closely related genre that could be termed the Planetary Picaresque.

The idea came to me while revisiting the novels in Vance's Planet of Adventure sequence. The first novel, City of the Chasch, is pretty typical of the Planetary Romance form, albeit more science fiction-ish than Burroughs and wittier than most of his imitators. By the second novel, Servant of the Wankh (or Wanek), however, Vance's hero is spending more time getting the better of would be swindlers or out maneuvering his social superiors amid the risible and baroque societies of Tschai than engaging in acts of swordplay or derring-do. One could argue the stalwart Adam Reith is not himself a picaro, but the ways he is forced to get by on Tschai certainly resemble the sort of situations a genuine picaro might get into.

These sort of elements are not wholly absent from Vance's sword and planet progenitors (Burroughs has some of that, probably borrowed from Dumas), but Vance makes it the centerpiece rather than the comedy relief. Some of L. Sprague de Camp's Krishna seem to be in a similar vein.

The roleplaying applications of this ought to be obvious. You get to combine the best parts of Burroughs with the best parts of Leiber. I think that's a pretty appealing combination.

Weird Revisited: Desolation Cabaret

This post appeared in March 20, 2011. I think it was first straight up "rpg fiction" on the blog.

In 5880, writer and Great War veteran, Geoffersen Turck, arrived in the Republic of Staark intending to write a travelogue of post-war Ealderde. What follows is from Turck’s journals...

Like home, the capital of Staark has an old name, which nobody bothers to use. It’s just “the Metropolis” these days.  I have to admit, it outdoes the City in some ways--giant skyscrapers are everywhere, with aircars flitting busily between them like insects, interrupted by the stately passage of the occasional zeppelin. Automata direct traffic in the streets, and there’s the ever-present hum and vibration of the underground factories and power plants. You could almost forget the country was flatten by war, then buried by debt--but of course, glittering towers and airplanes keep you looking up, instead of at the faces of the poor walking the low streets.

Then there’s the dark side--what they call “the half-world.” This is a town so full of prostitutes they actually publish guidebooks so the inquiring libetine can stay up on the shifting codes of clothing and color accessories that signal what sort of perversions a hire is game for! Below the elevated roads and railways, lurid neon decorates cabarets and clubs that offer all that's on the streets and more. These streets are all-night candy store for drug fiends--their narco-alchemists must work in shifts. Maybe they’ve got automata doing that, too. In the shadows on the periphery of this underworld are the poor, discarded veterans of the Great War. Those pressed into service by crime or poverty as Eisenmenschen--men thaumatosurgically reconstructed in the Imperial bodyworks with machine parts to be implements of war. The rising National Purity Party has been scapegoating these unfortunates in their rhetoric--blaming them for Staark’s humiliation and defeat.

The air’s starting to get to me. They say things about Metropolis’ air, like its some sort of intoxicant all its own. To me, it’s just the constant stench of stale cigarettes, diesel fumes, and sweat, poorly covered with cloying perfume.

I think I'll give the country a try.

There are areas of the Staarkish countryside posted with warnings. These are the desolation zones, places still tainted by the strange weapons used in the War. Mostly people heed the warnings--the signs aren’t even needed really, when you can see the sickly vegetation, or the pale glow on moonless nights, or hear the weird cries of things unseen. Locals sit in taverns and swap tales about things like gibbering mouths, dire worms, flabby men, or susurrous shamblers. They talk about the zones, but they stay out.

The fellows I’ve thrown in with have other ideas.

The government’s put a bounty on the malfunctioning constructs and golems from the war still stalking the countryside, still carrying out their orders. Menschenjäger--manhunters--they’re called. From the description of the frightened farmers, the leader of our band calls the one we're after a Betrachter, but when we finally see the thing, it looks like a cyclops to me.  Then it fires that disintegrating ray out of its eye and one of our group is seared to ash in its too-bright glow.

That night, after we’ve wrapped the head for transport, we’re sitting in the cold, and the tomb-stillness with the smell of burnt flesh still lingering unpleasantly, and eating iron rations, and I think--Maybe Metropolis isn’t so bad after all?