Pulp Readings: The Spider: Corpse Cargo (1934)

Volume 3, Issue 2 of The Spider magazine (July 1934) is as clear an indication as any that Norvell Page (writing as Grant Stockbridge) is not going to pull any punches with his Spider yarns. His first Spider outing saw kids dying from the bubonic plague unleashed by the villain. In this one, we're only a few pages in when a young member of a club of wannabe Baker Street Irregulars, "The Spider Fan Club," is tortured to death by a gang of modern-day pirates using a knife charged with electricity.

This is part of a larger plot where the gang, led by the beautiful villainess who calls herself Captain Kidd, is using a pulpy invention to electrify rails so that that glow with almost magical "green fire" and electrocute all the passengers of trains so their corpses can be robbed without any witnesses. The trains are sent rolling on to their destinations with no one living on board.

It's a hell of a lurid set-up, and Page is up to the challenge of delivering on it. The pirates set some pretty good death traps for the Spider to have to escape from. There's also a bit of a mystery regarding a kidnapped inventors missing granddaughter that isn't a big point but has a nice little payoff. 

The only thing missing, maybe, is any hint of femme fatale regarding Captain Kidd. The righteous and driven Spider finds her utterly loathsome (and with her disregard for human life, who can blame him!), and though Page says she is attractive, he doesn't give her the sort of loving description a Robert Howard would have.

Get The Spider: The Corpse Cargo here. Tim Truman did a loose adaptation of this story in comics format in the 1990s.

Retrostar RPG Review

Retrostar by Barak Blackburn bills itself as "the rpg of 1970's-era sci-fi television." It's from Spectrum Games who publish other niche, genre emulation systems like Cartoon Action Hour.  I haven't had a chance to play it yet (though I plan to give it a try), but these are my thoughts on a read-through.

It's a fairly narrative game whose conception and playstyle probably owe a lot to PbtA games, though it has different mechanics. I find its player character mechanics to somewhat straddle a line between "meta" and diegetic. For instance, characters have three traits: Adventure, Though, and Drama. These could have functioned the same way and been called Physical, Mental, and Social, but I think using the terms they do puts you more in the mindset of thinking of a character's role in the imagined series, not necessarily their capabilities within the world of the show. On the other hand, characters are further defined by "descriptors" for above or below average attributes that are more in-world qualities.

Nonmechanically, characters are described with a Background supplied by the Showrunner (GM) and by Casting notes created by the player. The author of the game wrote up Buck Rogers from the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century this way:

Background: Time-displaced USAF and NASA Pilot from 1987, unofficial captain in the Earth Defense Directorate; cocky, charming, dashing, roguish, ladies’ man; perpetual flirt; attracted to Wilma, who is put off and charmed by his manly nature; frequently gets into trouble because of lack of understanding of 25th century.

Casting: Brown haired, rugged, charismatic smile, playful, wiseass, loyal to his friends.

Adventure: 1 (derring-do) 

Thought: -1 (impulsive)
Drama: 1 (magnetic personality)

SFX: 4
Feat of 1987 Machismo 1/ 2d
Laser Pistol 1/ 2d

The basic mechanics are pretty simple and again, in some ways, reminiscent of PbtA games, but not identical. Players roll at least two dice, and add the results together with results of failure, mixed failure/mixed success, or success. Descriptors, SFX, and situation modifiers alter what you roll. The absolute magnitude of the total modifier determines the number of dice rolled, whereas the valence determines whether ultimately sum the highest or lowest two dice. For example, total modifiers of -1 mean roll 3 dice and take the lowest two, whereas +1 means roll 3 and take the highest two.

To simulate the structure of 70s TV, a session or episode is broken into 5 Acts, with each Act only allowing characters 12 dice rolls. Rather than the typical "actions" (or the PbtA term "moves") Retrostar terms these Intentions. I suspect this is because they want to promote the players thinking in terms of scene resolution rather than task resolution, but it's different. An intention is about achieving a goal within a scene, so one roll might stand in for several rolls in games concerns with more granular representation of actions.

The Showrunner guidance talks a fair amount about helping players to frame intentions and how to adjudicate the results. It also talks about structuring adventures in 5 Acts.

The rest of book is focused on series creation. Retrostar defines series with 5 Dials (Thematic, Plot, Recurring, Cheese, and SFX) with describe roughly how topically socially conscious, serial, formulaic, trend-chasing, and well-budgeted the series is. In its introductory section, there's an overview of 70s sci-fi tv and the dials of a number of real TV series are given. The dial ratings are rolled against in prep to see if that element will play a part during a particular adventure. 

For its rules lite-ness, I think Retrostar will take a bit of getting used to. Its mechanics are sort of novel. Its subject matter is appealing, though, and I think it approaches it in a clever way.

Space: 1999 the Role-playing Game

I pre-ordered the Space: 1999 role-playing game coming from Modiphius not because I am a big fan of the show (the only complete episode I've seen as an adult I reviewed here) but I do like retro-sci-fi in general, and I am always at least curious about another instantiation of the 2d20 system, which I like a lot in Star Trek Adventures. With my pre-order I got the quickstart and with it a window into what the game is going to be like.

First off, they get the aesthetic right. There is a lot of beige and orange in this pdf. Unlike the Trek books, they use stills from the show in this one, though there is some original art.

Characters are defined by Skills and Attitudes. The Skills (Command, Flight, Medicine, Security, Technical) seem analogous to STA's Disciplines (Command, Conn, Medicine, Security, Science, Engineering), but they also serve an attribute function with the rules telling us Command has to do with "charm" and Flight with "athletics," for example. Attitudes (Bravery, Compassion, Dedication, Improvisation, Mystery, Perseverance) are essentially approaches as used in Fate and other games (the 2d20 Dishonored game calls them "Styles"), though they don't work as well conceptually for me because they seem to be a mix of character traits and traits and motivations, but they probably will work okay. One problem I forsee is that with approaches/styles doing things one way means you probably aren't doing it another way, e.g. if you are Quick you aren't Careful or Sneaky. It's less clear to me that the Attitudes have that sort of exclusivity.

Beyond Momentum and Threat, which are in most 2d20 games, Space: 1999 characters have Spirit which serves the functions of both Determination and Stress in STA.

There are some sample characters in the quickstart and a short adventure, but no real gear, aliens or monsters. Still, from what's shown it looks like a good 2d20 riff on the lower crunch side. I'm looking forward to seeing the full game.

Wednesday Comics: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Volume 11 of the manga Frieren: Beyond Journey's End came out in English this week. I've mentioned the anime adaptation of this series before but I thought it was worth giving a shout out to the manga by writer Kanehito Yamada and artist Tsukasa Abe, which is ahead of the anime--and may forever be, given that the first "season" has completed and it's unclear if there will be more. The manga could be one's only chance to see the end of the story.

I'll try to be light on the spoilers for later events, but as I mentioned before, Frieren is a nigh immortal elf adventurer on a long, meandering journey to retrace the steps of her original party's journey into the demon-haunted North to find the place where the dead can speak to the living, so she can talk to one of her old party members. Her companions are her apprentice (a child adopted by her old party's cleric) and a warrior who was the protégé of another one of her former comrades.

This goal led to a storyline where Fern (the apprentice) and Frieren attempted to gain status in a wizard organization who controls access to the North. The current storyline involves some of the characters and situations from that one and centers around a town turned to gold by the actions of a demon, Macht, which the wizardly organization has been "containing" for decades.

Now, the containment has dropped and the diagoldze spell threatens to spread. Macht is being aided by another greater demon named Solitär. Several mages (including Fern) have already been defeated by them. Freiren arrives, but she's armed with the counterspell to diagoldze. Still, she has two powerful demons to defeat.

The manga, like the anime, finds its strength in its characters. In the somewhat alien outlooks of the demons and the extremely long-lived elves, it also considers human relationships and their meanings. It's an unsual series, and one I highly recommend.

The Caped Crusader

Over on the Flashback Universe Blog I reviewed the new Amazon Prime Batman animated series, Batman: The Caped Crusader.

More Gwelf

Larry MacDougall released another book in his Redwall-esque fantasy series, Gwelf last month. This one is called Gwelf: Into the Hinterlands. In this one, Willburton Fox and his party set out into the North, first the Scrublands, then the dangerous territory controlled by the Ravens and menaced by Rats, Trolls, and the Mange.

MacDougall's art is just as wonderful as the first book, and there is good worldbuilding in the union of the text and pictures.

John Benteen's Fargo

On my recent vacation, I decided to check out the men's adventure paperback series Fargo by John Benteen after discovering the whole series was cheap on Kindle. I became aware of the series thanks to the upcoming graphic novel adaptation, Fargo: Hell on Wheels, by Howard Chaykin.

Amazon bills the series as a Westerns, and I suppose some of them are, in the same way The Professionals (1966) or Fist Full of Dynamite (aka Duck You Sucker) (1972) or other adventure films in Western locales are considered Westerns. They take place in the early 20th Century (1912-1915 in the ones I've read so far) and involve imagery and action out of Westerns (tough men in wild country on horseback with guns), but they involve a range of locales more again to traditional adventure pulp. They range to the jungles of the Philippines and Panama, as well as the more traditional Mexican desert or Yukon.

I've read blogpost reviews that refer to Fargo as sort of a "Western Conan." I can see what they mean in that Fargo is tough as hell, irresistible to women (apparently due to sheer manliness, as he is described as unhandsome and hardly has a scintillating personality), and good at most everything in his warrior and outdoorsman purview. However, Benteen's attention to detail regarding gear and preparation for obstacles his hero faces, and his penchant for pitting Fargo against enemies that appear to be a match for him, serve to make the series feel more grounded and realistic. Only slightly pulpy instead of completely so.

Benteen's prose is lean in the mid-Century way, not pulp purple. His action and dialog are punchy and mostly effective but without any lyricism or descriptive vistas despite their natural locales. Unfortunately, but expected given their genre and when they were written, they carry a streak of misogyny, some of the volumes moreso that others. There is likely some cultural and racial insensitivity lurking in their too, but in the volumes, I have read the narrative is not unsympathetic to both Native Americans and Latinos, and Fargo himself doesn't exhibit any prejudice that I recall--though some of the villainous characters use racial slurs. 

They're all quick reads (under 200 pages) and fast-paced. So far I've read:

• Fargo (vol 1): Set in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution, Fargo is hired to rescue an engineer (and his mine's haul of silver) from deep inside that war torn and escape bandits with revolutionary pretensions.
• Panama Gold (vol 2): A prequel set in 1912. Fargo is asked by Teddy Roosevelt himself to investigate and thwart an attempt to foreign powers to use a mercenary army to sabotage the nearly completed Panama Canal.
• Alaska Steel (vol 3) In 1914, Fargo is hired by a movie starlet to find her wayward husband so he can claim his oil money inheritance. The problem is, he's disappeared in the Yukon where he was seeking his fortune as a prospector.
• Apache Raiders (vol 4) Just started this one, but Fargo is back in Mexico in 1915, smuggling guns for Pancho Villa. Presumably there are Apaches.

Seven Blades in Black

Seven Blades in Black is the first volume of The Grave of Empires series by Sam Sykes. A scarred, gunslinging bounty hunter with a magical sentient gun seeks the vengeance on the seven mages that betrayed her in the war-torn landscape of a country caught between two powers. 

The plot and some aspects of the setting certainly have a classic Western feel to them (and perhaps a bit of Kill Bill), and the guns and devices (including tanks) employed by the Republic have a Steampunk feel to them. For me, what it has the feeling of more than any Steampunk novel, however, is anime. This is mostly in certain aesthetic details. The gun employed by the heroine, Sal the Cacophony, shoots shells of various magical effects like the caster Gene has in Outlaw Star. The mages are classed by the type of magic they employ, and these tend to work like super-powers or special abilities rather than spells. Then there are little aesthetic things: Sal has a signature long scarf. The wind mage has tall spikey hair when "powered up."

Another thing that might be borrowed from anime is the very cinematic approach to action, which there is a lot of, and I think, very well done. This is the heavy worldbuilding sort of fantasy with a glossary in the back, but the setting is well realized, and a lot of interesting details are dropped. Despite my pointing out references or inspirations above, the setting has a number of unique elements. For instance, mages can hear "the Lady's song" when other mages employ magic--the mysterious voice of the goddess magic is derived from. When a mage dies and the Lady takes them, only ashes are left, which are harvested to make magic items like powerful healing spells.

There is a touch of the, well, Whedonesque to the proceedings. Sal's snarky, first-person narration might grate on some readers, and the telling the story to an interrogator frame could feel a bit precious. Both were deficits to me, but more than made up for by the book's strengths. I intend to continue with the series and perhaps seek out other books by Sykes.

The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Despite the attention lavished on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and even Star Trek or the Alien universe, I feel like the science fiction franchise most consistent in quality is the Planet of the Apes. Sure, it's not without its duds (Burton's film) and lesser lights (the last original film, the cartoon, perhaps), but the Wyatt/Reeves reboot?/prequel? series of the 2010s defied sequel gravity and only got better as it went along. (To me, anyway. Some would say Dawn was the high point. Either way, War was still good.)

When Reeves left and Disney acquired Fox, I had some trepidation about where the series would go. Happily, it seems like Wes Ball has things well enough in hand, at least with this first installment. While it's not as good as the best of the 2010s series, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was more enjoyable and more substantial than any other existing-franchise entry I've seen in the theater since the end of the pandemic--though perhaps that's damning with faint praise.

Anyway, it's "many generations" after the time of Caesar. He has become a mythic/religious figure. His name is borrowed. and his legacy evoked by an up-and-coming bonobo tyrant who (like King Louie in the Jungle Book) wants the technology of humankind. He needs (ape) slave labor to get it at it and a mysterious, young human woman, so when he captures Noa's village and kills his father, the young chimpanzee makes common cause with the human. 

There are hints of Beneath of the Planet of the Apes in here, and (perhaps unintentional, perhaps not) Biblical echoes with a hero named "Noa," but those are as they should be with an ape installment. The special effects are amazing, and it makes me mad the Marvel Cinematic Universe films often seem sloppy. I guess when your whole premise requires motion capture, you have to get that thing right.

I miss Andy Serkis here like everybody else, but he trained the new cast of apes well. It probably could have been a bit shorter, particularly for a film that is a lot about establishing a new conflict, but I'm not immediately sure what I would have cut.

All that to say, if you liked the previous ape films you should see this one. If you haven't seen any of the new apes films (which lately I've discovered a large group of folks that haven't) then you should see those and see this one.

You can also check out the watch and commentary Jason "Operation Unfathomable" Sholtis and I did of the much less good but still entertaining 70s Planet of the Apes TV show over at the Flashback Universe Blog.

Star Scoundrels

 

I mentioned Black Star from LakeSide Games a few weeks ago, but since I've discovered another neat, rules lite, space opera game, Star Scoundrels is from Peril Planet. It's another game clearly intended to play Star Wars without obviously violating the IP and mentioning that. It uses the Action Tales system I've appreciated in the cyberpunk game Neon City Overdrive, which is also pretty much the same system as the fantasy game Dungeon Crawlers and the author's game Hard City for Osprey.

The basic mechanic is a d6 dice pool of Action Die and Danger Die, with graduated success from complete failure to complete success. Dice are added to the pool based on player traits, Threat (enemy) traits, and situational modifiers. All rolls are done by the players. 

Each Danger Die can cancel out a matching result on an Action Die, and uncancelled 6s on Danger Die accumulating Pressure. Pressure gives the GM the ability to make things more difficult for the players when it reaches a certain level. It's like Threat in 2d20 games in that regard but isn't near as much of an economy around it nor as many rules relating to it.

PCs are described by Trademarks (sort of a basic concept, role, profession, and alien species), Edges (specializations or talents linked to a Trademark), Flaws (disadvantages or troubles), gear, Grit (hit points), and Flow (the Force stand-in). Flow can be used to increase the success of roles or use a second Trademark die in a check.

Starships are statted similar to Threats. There are some fairly simple rules given for space battles and a table of random space travel encounters.

There are also random tables for adventure generation, planets, and names.

All and all, it offers the barest bit more crunch (but in places that flesh out a character a bit more) than Black Star while remaining very rules light. Either would be a great choice for a Star Wars pickup game or one shot.

Holiday Viewing

Got some time over the holidays? Over at the Flashback Universe Blog, Jason Sholtis and I have been watching selected episodes of old TV shows available on streaming and reviewing them. Something here is bound to be what you are looking for!

Mr. Lucky (1959)

Gigantor (1964)

Barbary Coast (1975)

Raumpatrouille Orion (1966)

M Squad (1957)

Riverboat (1959)

The Renegades (1983)

Space: 1999 (1975)

Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All (1982)

Yancy Derringer (1958)

Blackstar (1981)

Miami Vice (1984)

Blake's 7 (1978)

Peter Gunn (1958)

Cliffhangers (1979)

Dragnet (1951)

Broken Compass What If?

CMON, the current owners of Broken Compass, have been slowly releasing the books in the second Broken Compass Kickstarter in pdf to drivethru. (When and if there will ever be a physical book reprint is unclear. There have been conflicting reports.) The latest of these is What If? It's a book of 14 "mini settings" adding to the pulp, pirates, and Verne style Voyages extraordinaires setting books already available. I've been anxious to get my hands on this book for some time as I knew it had rules adaptations for some genres I was interested in.

So, what's it got?

• Cosmic Horror for Lovecraftian stuff. It's got new rules for Madness. This one is a bit of an odd fit for BC as it's a game of cinematic action heroes, but they make a few suggestions to up the lethality.
• Space Opera is particularly geared toward a Star Warsian setting, giving rules for Energy (the Force) and succumbing to Darkness--and also for beam weapons that haven't appeared in any setting before.
• Gods and Men for Hercules and Xena style adventures. It would also work for things like the Clash of the Titans remake, and probably the Harryhausen Greek myth films or even Sword & Sandals movies. It has rules for Mythological Adventurers (demigods, exiled gods and the like).
• Good Boys, an animal adventures (typically pets) setting. It includes Animal Tags (which could be some use in creating nonhuman alien tags for a Space Opera game, now that I think about it)
• Fantasy Quest for D&Dish fantasy. It has the rudimentary magic system and rules for fantasy races. I'd choose it over D&D to play something like the Dungeons & Dragons movie! :D
• High School for stuff "kids on bikes" fare or stuff like The Faculty or a number of CW shows.
• Last on Earth, a post-apocalyptic setting. It has "Danger Clock" rules for impending doom.
• Black Light is a classic cyberpunk setting. It has rules for Grafts (cyberware).
• Toon City is for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Cool World type games, though you could probably ditch that angle and just use the rules for a toons game. In addition to toon characters it also gives rules for "stuffed" characters, so you come do Muppet movies, too.
• Urban Legends does X-Files or Warehouse 13 sort of stuff. It could probably also be used to set up a GvsE thing, too. There are rules for playing Supernatural entities.
• Leaving Wonderland has a narrower premise, I think, than the others. It's about trying to escape a weird, fantastical world like Alice in Wonderland or Labyrinth. There are rules for creating a random Wonderland.
• High Noon is an Old West setting. It's got Quick-draw Duel rules.

There are also guidelines for hacking the Broken Compass system, and a couple of adventure set ups.

While not all of these settings are things I see myself playing, all of them give rules that I could see myself kitbashing to make up other stuff. As such, this is a really useful book for BC fans. One caveat: in order for these settings to stay "mini" they reference material presented in the other, full setting books. If this is the only BC expansion you buy, you aren't going to be able to use it's contents to the fullest.

Games I Liked in 2022

The pandemic led to more gaming, and that continued in 2022. In addition to running my long-standing 5e Land of Azurth game, I ran a few other systems:

Broken Compass: I really like this rules lite pulp game, and so do both the groups I've run it for. It makes for a great palate cleanser when you might get tired of a longrunning campaign in something else. I hope to run it more in 2023.

Marvel Heroic: I ignored this game at the time it was released, but I really shouldn't have. After running it for a short-time, I think it will become my go-to supers game in the future. There are somethings I don't like about it, but it runs quick and has a comic book feel. I might "update" a game to Cortex Prime (the latest iteration of the basic engine) if I was to run it again.

Rocket Age 5e: I only ran one session of this. I don't think it's a bad system, but 5e just doesn't seem the best to me for pulpy, retro-sci-fi. I think if I tried to run this setting again, I'd likely do it in Broken Compass. I would still recommend Rocket Age (both 5e and otherwise) for the setting material, though.

Cowboy Bebop and the Faithful Adaptation

I've watched one episode of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop. so I could be wrong, but I think I already see how this is going to be. I don't think it's awful, but there are definitely things I'm not fond out.

Watching it brought to mind Rodriguez's first Sin City film. That film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the comic, down to the composition of shots, but my reaction on first viewing was very different from my reaction to the comic. It felt silly; I was vaguely embarrassed by it. It's not that I missed that Sin City the comic is over-the-top in some ways, and part of that over-the-topness is Miller's dialogue and narration. But when I read it, I get to decide how the characters deliver the lines, and the almost superhero comic level action scenes are just Millerisms to be translated to real world terms. (Much in the same way I know when reading a comic that characters don't have time for long discussion while they trade a couple of lightning quick blows. It's mere convention of the form, not something to be taken literally.) But on the screen their were actors not selling the clunky lines they were saying and all the action was taken all too literally.

Cowboy Bebop came from a cartoon not a comic so it's closer to film, but it's also the product of another culture (and honestly, another era) so maybe that all washes out. The show gets the details right in cosplay sort of way, but it doesn't feel the same. Gone is grubby future and much of the range in tone. The action is similar in prosaic description but what seemed dynamic in the anime feels fairly flat here. It may be less wacky than the cartoon, but then my tolerance for wacky is much less in live action.

Perhaps the biggest disappoint is some of the choices they made. The first episodes of the anime and the live action show have the same basic plot, but are otherwise fairly different. The anime opens with Spike's dream (enigmatic at that point) then goes into spare scenes of the solitary, early morning rituals of Spike and Jet, accompanied by blues harmonica. There is a lonesome feel to this sequence, and there is nothing like it in the live action show, which instead opens with quipy action. The cartoon returns to a bit of this somberness later with Spike's discussion with Katerina. This is also quite different in the live action episode. The show perhaps gets Bebop's silliness right, but misses the anime's mix of tones, except as absolutely requisite to the plot, and then it can't quite land it.

There's also the indication that we will be seeing hints of the Vicious-Spike conflict every single episode. This is no doubt to make a "season arc" fit for a modern streaming show. Cowboy Bebop the anime was structured like old school tv, with "stories of the week." Over-exposing Spike's arc robs it of any sense of slow reveal or discovery and has the potential to make everything else feel secondary.

Anyway, I'll keep watching. The wife likes it, and I've still got the animated series to watch when I want.

Sentinel Comics Role-playing Game

The Sentinel Comics rpg is based off of a superhero card game. Presumably like the card game, it has the conceit of being based on a comic book universe. Mock covers are shown and issue numbers thrown around, etc. It's art is a bit cartoony, which seems to be kind of a trend in supers rpgs (ICONS is the same way).

The game is best characterized as a somewhat narrativist, superhero combat simulator. "Somewhat narrativist" meaning that it is built to emulate superhero stories not model a world which has superheroes, and that some things that might be specified in other games are left loose, or a lot of different fictional descriptions might fit the same basic mechanics. I say "combat simulator" meaning that it, like 4e D&D, seems geared toward combats. Almost all of it's abilities are aimed in that direction and it's bells and whistles for players to engage with are combat oriented. Unlike 4e, combat really isn't tactical; there is no strict movements or battle maps. I guess you could say combat most reflects its card game roots.

I find a lot of things about the system compelling. In many ways, it seems a refinement of some of the concepts in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (at least one of the same designers worked on both). It's basic mechanic is make a dice pool from a Power, Quality, and status (more on this soon), and take the middle number. It's pretty easy and quick.

Status follows a color-coded system called GYRO (Green, Yellow, Red, and Out). Advancing from one color to the next "unlocks" new abilities specific to your character. I think this models pretty well something seen in comics, where Spider-Man does usually seem to have the proportional strength of a spider until he really needs to have the proportional strength of a spider. The Hulk gets angrier and stronger the longer he fights, etc. 

All actions are subsumed into four categories: Attack, Overcome, Boost/Hinder, Defend. Overcome is probably the broadest of these. It's used for most sorts of story obstacles from finding information to disarming a bomb. It's also the main one that gets leaned on in none combat situations. Success at it is graded with narrative consequences: twists of the major or minor variety, than are similar to 2d20 system Complications. Sentinel Comics only having subsystems for combat is one of its deficits for me, though admittedly the Overcome action works in a more "cinematic" (or comic book) way than a bunch of skill challenges or the like.

My biggest complaint with it is character creation. It's kind of a mini-game onto itself and can be done Guided (random die roll), Constructed (choosing the options you could have rolled), or then for modelling characters, just picking and choosing individual abilities, which would be the hardest of the three. Every step gives you certain options and dice types to distribute to those options. It takes a longer time than I would like and requires a lot of flipping back and forth in the book, without even giving you the freedom that other "complicated character generation" supers games like Champions or Mutants & Masterminds. It's easier to tolerate an extended character generation to get exactly the sort of character you want, but Sentinel Comics rpg is an exercise in making compromises, some of which seem arbitrary.

Ending on my big complaint perhaps makes my review seem more negative than I intend. With two sessions in, I feel like the game plays pretty well at the table. It would be great for pregens and a con game. I'm less sold on it, as yet, for a longterm campaign.

Wednesday Comics: DC, January 1980 (part 1)

October 11, 1979, was (according to Mike's Amazing World of Comics) was likely the date that the first batch of DC Comics cover dated January 1980 appeared on the racks. 

One difference between DC's output his this period and the latter half of the 80s is readily apparent: There are a lot more nonsuperhero titles being published. Only fifteen (if we don't count Swamp Thing) of 29 titles published with this cover date are superhero titles; The rest are war, horror, western, and one sword & sorcery.

Anyway, let's look at this first batch of issues:

All-Out War #3: This is a Dollar Comic format war anthology, fronted by Kanigher's Viking Commando, who I always found conceptually dubious. Here he has a forgettable adventure, working for the Allies and calling the Germans "Huns," because that's his thing. The other recurring characters in this issue, I had never heard of before. They didn't make the Who's Who even. Black Eagle is the titular leader of a group of Tuskegee Airmen Blackhawk-types. "Guerilla War staring Force 3" is but an American, a Pole, and a Greek resisting Nazis in the Mediterranean. Both of these stories are perfunctory, but the art by Jerry Grandinetti on the Force 3 piece, "Dominoes of Death," is off-beat--thick-lined and a bit Toth-y, perhaps--and interesting. I barely remember anything about the other two stories here, and I read it last week.

Batman #319: Wein and Novick give pit Batman against the Gentleman Ghost. Nothing special, but it hits the right marks, so I don't think any Bat-fan who bought it off a spinner rack (this ain't a library, kid!) in '79 was unsatisfied. I wonder if we ever found out if the Gentleman Ghost was really a ghost or not? Catwoman is apparently reformed (and retired from costumed stuff) at this time, but has some sort of beef with Lucius Fox. Bruce is still living in town, not in (stately) Wayne Manor, though Alfred's there.

DC Comics Presents #17: Conway brings back Firestorm about a year after his short series dying in the Implosion to team up with Superman against Killer Frost who, as is often in the case with villains in team-ups, becomes powerful enough to give them both trouble. The artist here is the always great Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. Superman offers Firestorm JLA membership at the end.

Flash #281: Cary Bates has Barry Allen in the middle of the length storyline about the murder of Iris. There are corrupt cops and Professor Zoom. This issues really drives home the transitional nature of this era at DC. The Don Heck cover could easily be on a Silver Age Comic, but the story itself is more gritty and 80s-like.

Ghosts #84: Bland horror analogy. One of the stories didn't even have a ghost, I don't think.

Jonah Hex #32: Long-time JH scribe Michael Fleischer and Garcia-Lopez deliver a decent but unspectacular tale of Hex going to confront a bounty hunter who had humiliated him when he was starting out, only to have a different sort of reckoning than he was imagining.

Justice League of America #174: This Conway and Dillin joint seems a bit like a Marvel story in the socially relevant (and blaxploitation) 70s. Green Arrow thinks the way the League treated Black Lightning (who GA wanted to join the team) last issue was basically racist, so he and so others go to try to track him down, but everybody gets sidetracked by an African American scientist in Suicide Slum using a device he control rats and giant rats into rampaging to get back at the Man. When the villain is defeated, Black Lightning still doesn't want to join the League, because he likes to play by his own rules.

Men of War #24: Gravedigger is a badass, black commando in World War II, dealing with racism on both sides of the conflict. His story here by Harris and Ayers is pretty good for a war anthology of the era, which may be damning with faint praise. Rosa by Kupperberg and Grandinetti (again with his unique style) is another character I'd never heard of: a mid-19th Century adventurer with a vaguely Dumas vibe. This story feels like there show be more too it, being more serial. 

Secret of Haunted House #20: Better than Ghosts, this at least has one decent (for this sort of thing) yarn, then another where a couple of criminals are tricked by their own reflections. Destiny (later of the Endless) hosts.

Superman #343: Is a goofy, Silver Agey tale by O'Neil and Curt Swan about a wizard/seer from ancient Pompeii who keeps interpreting his visions wrong and messing things up. but ultimately Superman saves the day and teaches the wizard not to jump to conclusions. Of course, Pompeii is long destroyed, so lesson learned at last, I guess? This story buys into the conceit that Superman is not merely as vulnerable to magic as any normal person, but is specifically susceptible to it. Every Superman story published this month outside of the team-ups feels like a throwback compared to almost any Marvel title published this same month.

Superman Family #199: These stories feel less like throwbacks (well, except the "Mr. and Mrs. Superman" story, which does) and more like episodes of tv series that never existed. Supergirl takes on a guy who steals her (invulnerable) cape to sell to a crime boss, Lois Lane busts a sinister corporation testing mind control drugs on inner city school kids, and Jimmy Olsen foils a blackmail plot against one of his journalistic mentors who's harboring secret. All of these stories are pretty good in basic storytelling ways (baring in mind it's 1979 and a comic), but are utterly without the color and bombast one typically associates with superhero comics.

Weird War Tales #83: Doesn't have much to recommend it. Of note, however, is that only one of the three weird war tales in the issue takes place in World War II (Nazis versus vampires). The others are in the Syrian-Israel conflict and British Rhodesia, respectively. I guess eventually you can get too much WWII in comics!

Wonder Woman #263: I talked about a bit here. 

Also on your local grocery magazine aisle at this time, two DC digests: Best of DC #3 (Superfriends) and Jonah Hex and Other Western Tales #3, and a Dollar Comic reprint issue, DC Special Series #20, featuring three Wein and Wrightson Swamp Thing tales.

Wednesday Comics: Pre-Crisis Wonder Woman

Over the holidays, I got the quixotic idea to do a survey of DC Comics in the 80s prior to Crisis. Having just watched Wonder Woman 1984, I decided to start there. Some of the late 70s covers looked intriguing in that Bronze Age sort of way, so I started a bit earlier with Wonder Woman #250, cover dated December 1978, but on the stands in September of 1978. So far, I have made it through December 1980.

The quick summary is: none of it is very good. 

In a bit more detail, it seems largely that no one is sure quite what to do with Wonder Woman. It starts with Steve Trevor dead, and Diana Prince becoming an astronaut, but they seem uncertain about that, because they give her excuses to come back to New York City. She also briefly gets replaced by another Amazon as Wonder Woman, which I think happened in the 70s at some point, too.

Jose Delbo and Vince Coletta are providing art, and Jack Harris is writing this uninspired stuff. Then Paul Levitz comes in and tries to stick to astronaut thing, but that doesn't really work either. Finally, she quits the astronaut program and leaves Houston for New York City, after a potential love interest is revealed to be the leader of the Royal Flush Gang.

That's part of the problem: A lack of compelling adversaries. I mean, she fights Angle-Man several times in this stretch. Angle-Man who got half a page in Who's Who and probably hasn't appeared Post-Crisis. Then there are two appearances by Bushmaster who is less compelling than the Marvel villain of that name, which is pretty damning. He doesn't even show up in Who's Who.

So, Gerry Conway to rescue. Or not. I mean, he shakes things up by having reports of Diana Prince's flakiness (owing to her secret identity) leading to her not being able to get her old job back at the UN. So Wonder Woman briefly gets fired up about modern society's lack of privacy with it's files and government records and whatnot. Then Ares and crew make her a little crazy, so the people in New York for a while reject her.

She's fed up with Man's World, and returns to Paradise Island. If all that seems like it might have been going somewhere...well, the only place it was going was a reboot. A young Steve Trevor flies in from a parallel dimension, allowing Wonder Woman to re-enact her origin, then her mom wipes her memories of her previous life as "a kindness."

She follows the new Steve Trevor back to Man's World to be his assistant, and the reboot circle is complete. Angle-Man's still there, though. Good ol' reliable Angle-Man.

These issues end with the introduction of the second Cheetah. There's an interesting (to me) bit of comic chronology there, in that the second Cheetah is the niece of the first, who the story suggests recently died, and appears to have been elderly. Yet, that Cheetah apparently fought the Earth-1 Wonder Woman (no universe crossing shenanigans are suggested), which makes one wonder how long Conway believes Wonder Woman has been active?

And after all that, I decided to take a break. I plan to get back to it. Then again, maybe another title might be the place to start...

Wednesday Comics: New Science Fiction

This continues to be a good era for science fiction comics outside of the Big Two. Here are a couple of recent releases:

Protector

Simon Roy, the co-writer of Protector, is no stranger to quality science fiction, and he and his co-creators (co-writer Daniel Bensen and artist Artyom Trakhanov) have crafted a story set among warring tribes in a North America post a global warring apocalypse. The Hudsoni tribe worship the Devas who seem to be advanced artificially intelligent technology of some sort, but they may have met their match when a member of the Yanqui tribe awakens a robotic demon. There are two issues of Protector out so far, but I'm eager for more.

Starship Down

Cultural anthropologist Jocelyn Young is brought to a secret site in Siberia where delegations from other all over (including the Vatican) are congregating in secret around a startingly discovery: an ancient, crashed spacecraft. And then there's what's inside... Written by Justin Giampaoli with art by Andrea Mutti, starts with a vibe not unlike Arrival. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

Skywalker is Risen

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has not exactly been embraced by critics, though this is unlikely to blunt its box office draw much. Stars Wars fandom is ever hopefully that the dark times are over and what they love above Star Wars will finally be restored (when the fall from grace occurred, depends on who you ask, and probably what point in their life you ask them).

Like Abrams' first Star Wars film, RoS feels like it's trying to jam several movies into one, though the finale draws mostly from Return of the Jedi. It all moves very fast, and largely that's to its benefit, though that means no location develops a sense of place beyond set-dressing and character development is pretty shallow. (This film and the short run-time of the Mandalorian episodes, which are like hour dramas with most of the non-action excised, make me wonder if perhaps SW works best as a modern serial. Certainly the Clone Wars animated series played to those tropes as well to good effect.) It's fine, but it has the upshot of only occasionally (for me) wringing any real feeling from the proceedings, even failing to evoke any appreciation of it on a toyetic level. I saw nothing in this one that makes me want to buy the art book to delve into the design.

None of this is to say I didn't like it. It was a pleasing experience, though the enjoyment was pretty shallow. Only in a couple of places did it evoke any nostalgic feelings for the series' passing (I won't say which scenes for the sake of spoilers), and then only on the level of say the recent finale of The Deuce. Nothing on the level of the death of Spock (to evoke it's closest cultural competitor).

I am curious about the future of Star Wars, which will  probably get me in a theater to see at least one more.

Carapace

In a fit of waning Google+ generosity, Goblin's Henchman sent me a copy of his zine-size adventure Carapace, available for free on drivethrurpg.

Carapace is an interesting product. The adventure (geared toward AD&D but usuable with any flavor), involving a giant ant-hill near a isolated town has no keyed locations. There is a brief bit of setup, covering not only the situation but what various parties in the community might want done, and what the consequences of the adventure might be. After that, there's section of on not one, but three different methods of procedurally generating the maze of tunnels and rooms in the colony: Pointcrawl, Labyrinth Move, and Hex-Flower. Read the Henchman's brief explanation of them here. Finally, there's a section on random encounters and random "dungeon dressing."

If you really dig new procedural approaches and procedural generation in general, this will definitely be your thing. Even if you are like me and this isn't generally your thing, the alien structure of an ant hill seems to me exactly the place where something like this might be useful. Not only would I run this, I may steal some of its techniques for use in other environments.