Inspired by Vance mostly, people have considered spells as living entities. It was discussed in the Gplus days, and it shows up in Eric Diaz's Dark Fantasy Magic. Back in 2011, before I had really read a whole lot of Vance, the Vancian magic of D&D and the film Pontypool got me imagining spells as a neurolinguistic virus or memetic entity.
Friday, March 8, 2024
Got to Catch Them All
Inspired by Vance mostly, people have considered spells as living entities. It was discussed in the Gplus days, and it shows up in Eric Diaz's Dark Fantasy Magic. Back in 2011, before I had really read a whole lot of Vance, the Vancian magic of D&D and the film Pontypool got me imagining spells as a neurolinguistic virus or memetic entity.
Thursday, January 18, 2024
Star Frontiers "Appendix N"
So I thought it was worth coming up with a list of inspirational media that is more to the point. This will be my perspective; I make no claims about what works the original authors made in mind. I will, though, at least for the works I dub "core," try to stick to works that could have been inspirations back in 1982.
The Core
Ralph McQuarrie |
Monday, October 2, 2023
A More Civilized Age
Art by Donato Giancola |
I'm all for "lived-in futures" and dusty, grubby space Westerns, but I feel like there are some science fiction aesthetics that don't get their due. And I'm not talking gleaming, featureless rocket hulls and silver lamé outfits. I mean the more refined, swashbuckling, adventure film derived style.
Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon was probably the biggest feature in promoting this style, but it shows up in other places like Cody Starbuck by Howard Chaykin:
And in Milady 3000 and i Briganti by Magnus (Roberto Raviola):
It's not really absent from the Star Wars saga. It just shows up more in the prequels than in the original films. I think there's a hint of it in Lynch's Dune and the SyFy mini-series version--though it is sorely lacking from the drear Villeneuve version.
Friday, September 1, 2023
The Woods are Dark and Deep
This half-formed rpg setting idea I got the other day. It could probably work with something D&Dish but might be better suited to something else. Anyway, the world that the players' would know and explore is a sort of mythic forest, a dark fairytale sort of woodland with no apparent beginning or end. Within the woodland are areas of human habitation, where everyone probably speaks the same language, and probably some enigmatic ruins, suggesting perhaps a once united human culture or series of cultures, but nothing like that exists in the present and nothing more than fables that hold any memory of it. Memory, like everything else, gets swallowed by the forest.
Monday, August 28, 2023
The Cleric and the Rituals of Faith
Over the weekend, I read this interesting blog series about how polytheism worked in the real world. Check it out.
Anyway, it got me thinking about how D&D/rpg polytheism might be made more realistic without changing it much. Granted, it's a bit of an uphill battle since rpg polytheism of the D&D variety is very unrealistic in a lot of ways, but I'm going to focus here on one thing and that's Devereaux's central point in the early articles: religion is mainly about ritual not metaphysics.
This is actually pretty good for the D&D cleric, because they are largely soft on metaphysics and philosophy (short a lot of worldbuilding) but out-of-the-box do a lot of things like spells and special abilities that could be glossed (and roleplayed) as rituals. It's sort of transactional, even mechanistic from a modern lens, which is good for D&D because that's what clerical magic is.
So, clerics are the most religious (in what Devereaux relates is the Roman sense) because they have the most effective deity-related rituals (spells) and they are the most diligent in their performance (it's their job). The use of the cleric to the adventuring party is this very religiousness: their ritual performances always get results.
I think it would take relatively little roleplaying in this direction and reframing of these abilities in a more religious ritual context to make it feel a lot less merely mechanistic and a lot more flavorfully mechanistic.
Thursday, August 17, 2023
Sail the Microversal Seas!
Artist Jeff Nelson has imagined Marvel's Microverse from the Micronauts comic as islands in a sea. Only tangentially related, but this reminds me how the Microverse would be a good Spelljammer setting.
Friday, August 11, 2023
The Mixed Up Setting
Sometimes, always with an eye toward being able to use the published material for some well-supported game or another, I get (possibly mad) idea to take parts of one setting and combine with another so that the result wouldn't immediately be recognizable.
Ideas I've had in the past playing a wuxia game using the map of Middle-Earth (and MERP materials), The Known World replaced with Talislanta equivalents, or Creation from Exalted, but built as a D&D setting (using published 5e material).
I've never done any of these as at the end of the day the work required wouldn't be that much less than making up my own stuff in some instances, but it's still an idea that pops up from time to time.
Thursday, July 13, 2023
From
I've recently started watching the Epix (now MGM+) TV series From on a free preview. It's the story of a family that find themselves stranded in a small town where no one can leave and they are beset each night by apparently supernatural creatures that appear human, but are not. As a setting and situation, it's the sort of thing I've called a mystery sandbox before--though there's always the chance it will be revealed to be more of a sort of mystery terrarium where the true mysteries are other than what they initially appear. I'm only 4 episodes in, so it's hard to say!
Reviews tend to compared it to Lost, which is not completely off-base, but think it's a bit lazy and possibly inspired by the presence of Harold Perrineau as the town sheriff. More apt comparisons I think are in the works of Stephen King. You've got a family where the parents have some relationship stress, a kid who has supernatural insights, and an eclectic group of characters, some of whom are dangerous to the others. It's perhaps a bit less volatile than how King would mix those elements, because it's meant to potentially last longer. So maybe it's a mix of a Lost-type show and a King work--the second one of it's type, since King's book The Dome was stretched into that sort of show.
Anyway, think this sort of thing would make an interesting sort of short to medium rpg campaign. I'm sort of surprised their isn't a Powered by the Apocalypse hack to do this sort of thing, though maybe their is and I just don't know it.
Monday, June 19, 2023
The New Marvel Universe
In 1986, Marvel launched the New Universe. It was envisioned as a more realistic setting--"the world outside your window." There were to be more subdued and limited super-powers, no gods, magic, or aliens. Jim Shooter argued this was similar to how Lee had thought of the Marvel Universe at it's inception: "the original Marvel Universe -- Stan's conception of it -- instead of doing something Superman or Green Lantern, he was really trying to do science fiction. The Fantastic Four didn't have costumes in the first issue. He was trying to be down to Earth."
Before they created the characters and books of the New Universe they had pitched a reboot of the Marvel Universe, something like the Ultimate line to come along decades later. There is no indication this reboot had the same mission statement as the New Universe, but what if it did? A more realistic Marvel Universe starting in 1986 would be interesting as a supers rpg setting, I think.
What would that look like? I have some thoughts:
Fantastic Four: The crew of an experimental space shuttle are on their test flight when a strange white light fills the sky. They come back changed. Reed Richards has his genius intellect boosted to superhuman levels. Sue Storm develops the power to turn invisible and telekinesis. Johnny Storm develops pyrokinesis. Ben Grimm is transformed into a monster. The four stay together to fight alien threats and other strangeness as a team more Challengers of the Unknown than the original FF.
Iron Man: Iron Man probably works the best in this lower key format, you just make the armor bulkier to seem more realistic. He is never able to reproduce the armor for the military due to some change in his physiology due to the White Event, so lesser exoskeletons and armor suits show up, but nothing on Iron Man's level.
The Hulk: The experiment that created hm would be a genetic one rather than a strictly radiation one. Perhaps something akin to the tv show? Obviously, his strength would be toned down.
Thor: An amnesiac being who has memories of another world roams the world looking for his "brother," a being he calls Loki who is head of a criminal empire. He is able to summon or create his "hammer" a weapon of pure energy to wield against his brothers minions. Thor is one of the hardest for this format, but I think he can be toned down enough to work.
Spider-Man: The White Event occurs while Peter Parker is visiting a science lab and he gets bitten by an altered spider. This one could wind up with a very different, darker tone than the original. There might be a tinge of body horror to Peter's spidery condition.
Monday, May 15, 2023
Revisiting Weird Krypton
Superman's home planet is pretty weird. Weird enough that it makes a good substitute for Carcosa in McKinney's supplement. You can keep the polychromatic humanity (that might explain the Krytonian flag). Then, check out the maps of Krypton for places to visit:
The highlights there ought to be pretty obvious, but let me fill in a couple of salient points of adventure and/or danger:
Jewel Mountains: Formed by the accumulated carcasses of prehistoric, giant crystal birds.
Gold Volcano: It should be mentioned that gold is so common on Krypton as to not be particularly valuable.
Fire Falls: A fall of a fiery fluid from the planets core, inhabited by mutant fish-snakes whose bite is poisonous.
Scarlet Jungle: An expanse of forest in red and purple, including huge maroon mushroom-like growth. It home to at least some disease-causing spores. Then, of course, there's the herd migratory, vaguely humanoid-shaped plants.
Monday, May 1, 2023
Weird Revisited: The Anthology Crawl
Simply pick an anthology. Read every story in it (even the duds--but skimming is ok) and pick some interesting element out of each, be it a monster, encounter, location, or item. Place these on your map in order, or arrange them to taste. You could even get more "madlibs" about it and predetermine what you were going to take from each story (an item, a place, an encounter), before you read (or re-read) the story, forcing you to stretch your creative a bit more to fit it in.
Monday, April 17, 2023
Four-Color Swords & Sorcery: Monsters!
Earl Norem |
Big monsters are a hallmark of Bronze Age Four-Color fantasy of the Swords & Sorcery mode. These creatures are often are the antagonist of the "big battle" of the issue, the full manifestation of the menace posed by the main villain--and occasionally the main villain themselves. Less formidable big monsters may be an obstacle to the final confrontation with the villain.
The monsters come in a variety of forms from merely giant to gargantuan natural animals to animate statues/automata of humanoids or animal shape. Tentacled, tendriled, or pseudopod-waving creatures seem to particularly common. I suspect so their threat is made clear in a way that doesn't immediately injure the heroes or result in a Comics Code Approval imperiling amount of blood.
So are multiple heads. Both of these have the added benefit particularly in games of allowing one creature to engage multiple heroic opponents more easily.
These creatures, at least the bigger ones, are seldom defeated by hacking them until they die. In game terms, the simplest to defeat require a "critical hit" or called shot of some sort, often an injury to their eye. Others are dispatched by a trick of some sort: using the environment or their own abilities or natural weaponry against them. Finally, some can only be killed using a special item or weapon, typically obtained earlier in the adventure.
What does this meaning for emulating the genre in gaming? These are my take aways:
- Unique, big monsters need to show up regularly. Maybe not every adventure, but most of them.
- The best way to defeat the creatures should seldom be the most obvious brute force method.
- This means the GM needs to reward creative thinking by the players to handle these encounters.
- If the ways of defeating the monster are particularly limited, the means must be telegraphed to the players and be available to them.
Thursday, April 6, 2023
Sword & Sandals Mystara
The Known World of Mystara is a Hyborian Age-esque fantasyland of often thinly disguised real world cultures from a variety of historical eras, but the general vibe seems Medieval to early modern. I think it would be interesting reimagine Mystara as a more ancient world inspired, Sword & Sorcery setting, though will not greater adherence to a single era. Here's how it could breakdown:
Emirate of Ylaruam: This desert region has always been oddly placed, but depending on what latitude you think it's at, it might be weird for it to be a hot desert. Maybe it's a cold desert like the Tarim Basin or the Taklamakan. You could ditch the faux Arab culture for something more Central Asian, and give it's central religion a more Eastern flavor.
Empire of Thyatis: Less Byzantium and more Rome, though I would probably move it more in a Hellenistic direction. What the Empire of Alexander might have been like if it had been able to hang together better after his death.
Grand Duchy of Karameikos: This would stll be a breakaway, former province (though not a "Grand Duchy"). There wouldn't be true, Medieval feudalism here, but something more like the Roman latifundia.
Kingdom of Ierendi: This kingdom ruled by adventurers is kind of a pure fantasy trope, but I would give its material culture a Minoan spin.
Minrothad Guilds: A plutocratic thalassocracy more like Phoenicia or Carthage. The Guilds would be collegia.
Principality of Glantri: Well, still a magocracy, but maybe more like the Estruscans?
Republic of Darokin: Keep the plutocratic republic, but cast it less as Venice and more as Republican Rome with a of the "center of caravan routes" feel like Samarkand or Palmyra. A bit of Persian influence wouldn't be misplaced as Darokin does border Sind, which is sort of Mystara's India.
The Northern Reaches would probably still just be sort of Vikings, I guess, maybe more proto-Vikings like the horned helmet wearing raiders of the Nordic Bronze Age. Ethengar might be more Scythians than Mongols. Haven't given much thought to the demihuman lands or Atraughin.
Thursday, March 2, 2023
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.
Friday, February 24, 2023
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!
Monday, February 20, 2023
Elements of 80s Fantasy Style
Thursday, February 16, 2023
The Delver Underworld
In wuxia fiction, the characters are members of the Wulin, the World of the Martial Arts or community of martial arts practitioners. This term has overlap with, but is not identical to Jianghu, which is the sort of demimonde/underworld that includes the Wulin practitioners and associated people and locations.
While D&D and D&Dish settings sometimes feature guilds adventures are members of, I don't think I've ever seen this developed into a full-fledged community analogous to the Jianghu or Wulin. As I've briefly suggested before, there are a number of interesting developments taking this sort of approach would allow, though. Just off the top of my head:
- Schools of magic using types would be given an in-setting function.
- It would provide an in-setting rationale for the separation between adventuring clerics and stay in the temple priests
- The "keeping the Martial (or in this case Adventuring) World" separate from "civilians" aspect of wuxia would explain why adventurers are running every kingdom in the land.
- It would seem to naturally lead to more rivalry between adventuring groups, potentially meaning more faction play within dungeons.
- Guilds/sects/collegia are an easy source of adventure hooks.
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
The Gygaxian D&D Implied Setting Recipe
I present this only semi-seriously, and I'll admit to a less than unassailably rigorous methodology--but I think I have identified the key ingredients and steps involved in creating a D&D setting that would have the true old school D&D (as opposed to Old School Rennaissance) vibe. These steps were developed from pondering the various inspirational reading lists supplied by Gygax, including some forum responses regarding the most important works there in, and comparing it to the implied setting of the manuals and the explicit setting of Greyhawk.
Here's what I came up with:
1. Take Middle-Earth and excise the human nations/cultures, gods and history.
2. Replace with the relevant material from Howard's Hyborian Age (making sure to keep the ethnography and mass migration) and add additional nations/cultures and deities as needed from the Elric Saga and the fantasies of de Camp.
3. Work in a cosmic struggle between Law and Chaos, derived from Anderson with seasoning from Moorcock
4. Place at least one Lankhmar stand-in urban center.
5. Sprinkle in lost worlds from Burroughs and some extra dimensions from Theosophy and de Camp.
5. Strain out any pulp magic in favor of a "logical" and pedantic magical system flavored with Vance, but with a foundation in de Camp/Pratt.
6. Downplay any doomed or destined, great heroes in favor of a cast of scoundrels rounded up in Vance's Dying Earth and Leiber's Lankhmar.
7. Pull monsters from anywhere and everywhere, including science fiction (particularly post-apocalyptic).
8. Emphasize underground environments with a hint of St. Claire and Leiber's Quarmall.
Friday, January 20, 2023
Weird Revisited: The Conquered Setting
Monday, January 16, 2023
Science Fantasy Knights
I feel like knights in a post-apocalyptic setting is an under utilized setting in rpgs. The sort of thing where in the mid- to far future, human civilization has gone back to something more like the Middle Ages. Often magic will have returned or old science will seem like magic. There is some pretty good source material out there, but the only game I think can think of is Mutants in Avalon.
Fiction-wise, we've got: Moorcock's History of the Runestaff, Christopher's Sword of Spirits trilogy, and Harrison's The Pastel City (less so the sequels), at least. Comics-wise there isn't an exact fit (beyond the adaptations of Moorcock's work), but Camelot 3000 is close. There is even an 80s cartoon and toyline in the form of Visionaries.
Stephen King's Dark Tower series does a bit of this, but also leans on Western aesthetic and tropes and does that a bit more. Into the Badlands likewise has an Western element, but also wuxia.