Hewcrawl Rann

Chris Kutalik wrote a post last week that got me thinking about science fictional (or fantasy) hexcrawl appropriate locals. I've mentioned Krypton before, but that's not the only planet in the DC Universe that has a lot of crazy locations. Check out the map of Rann, above I shared in this old post that has background. Here are some highlights:

Dancing Waters of Athline: A field of high-power geysers whose sprays are shaped by strong winds.
Flaming Sea: Flames sprout from the surface of this body of water.
Illsomar: A ruined city where Nimar, a megalomaniacal, super-intelligent energy being that resembles a gigantic, Bohr-model atom has taken up residence. He is able to animate humanoid figures of metal, stone, and sand to serve him.
Kryys: A city of ice in the polar regions.
Land of A Thousand Smokes: An area containing numerous fumaroles.
Old Reliable: A sinking island in the Sea of Ybss; a source of the rare metal orichalkum.
Samakand: An advanced city that exists outside of conventional spacetime and only appears once every 25 years.

Tower of Rainbow Doom: In the ruined city of Yardana (or Vardana), it is a sacrificial place for the primitive Zoora tribesman. When a switch in thrown in it's central room, concentric flashes of rainbow light surround a throne-like chair and transport anyone or anything in it to a neighboring planet.

The Starrunner Kit

After an untended hiatus caused by internet-outage, I'm back with a copy of Mike Evans's The Starrunner Kit in my hand (figuratively, since it's digital) that got released last week. Mike is a friend, so I wouldn't call this an unbiased review, but I think Mike has done a bang up job.

The "kit" portion of the (so important it gets mentioned again in the subtitle) is the key. Everything that's in here fills in some little gap or another that may be present in the old school sci-fi game you're playing: mechs, or a hover-bike pilot or plant lifeform class. These are particularly aimed at White Star, broadening a bit its serial-numbers filed off Star Wars with stuff out of space opera seen in film, comics, and anime post-Star Wars.

There are a lot of gear and character options, but there are also goodies for the GM. In fact, the plethora of random tables are probably where The Starrunner Kit shines brightest and where it's most useful for those playing a fantasy game not derived from the D&D chassis. There are tables for random jobs, random events between adventures, random sights and sounds in the city, even a short random table of alien religions. All of these are easily usable in any space opera game and more importantly, they are a springboard to the imagination for creating your own setting specific ones. Looking through these I started getting a lot of ideas of things that could be used in Strange Stars--and that was without rolling any die!

If any of that sounds interesting to you, then you should definitely head over to rpgnow/drivethrurpg and check it out!

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The People of the Desert (part 3)

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The People of the Desert (1979) (part 2)
(Dutch: Het Volk van de Woestijn; Alternate English title: The People of the Plains)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

The heli-jet lands at the Prof's lab. He reveals to Ember that he was controlling Storm. He plans to turn them into his homo incultus, too, so that they may lead his new race. Ember resists, by the Prof has one of the White People disarm her. Seeing Storm in the Prof's DNA changing machine gives her a surge of strength to fight back. She grabs the gun and fires, inadvertently hitting the hypnometer. All the mind-controlled slaves are freed.

Hanyin wakes up just in time to signal an alarm as the White People in the mines revolt. The now freed Storm knocks out the Prof, and he and Ember escape in the heli-jet. Unfortunately, Hanyin sees them fly by:

Storm and Ember are found by the White People who recognize them as fellow fugitives. They heal the two with their powers, then sit down in a circle and seem to be performing some silent ritual.

Meanwhile, Hanyin is getting his men together to round up the desert people. The Prof warns him it won't be so easy. Hanyin finds out that's true when his heli-jets are sweep into a desert storm that the White People somehow created.

Hanyin survives the crash. He makes it to a rock reef outcropping where he's found be Storm and the desert folk. Hanyin challenges them to a one man fight,  Storm has a score to settle, so he volunteers. Though the White People could easily deal with their former captor, they agree. Storm and Hanyin seem pretty eveningly matched, but the fight ends abruptly when Hanyin's helmet (and sunglasses) get knocked of:

He's permanently blinded by the sun's harsh glare. The White People let him go. The desert will take care of him.

Before they leave for the deep desert, the White People have one more villain to take care of. They capture the Prof and put him in his machine, making him desert adapted like them. The White People bid Storm and Ember could bye and go off to build a new life. Our heroes find a new aero-transporter and fly out of the desert.

10 Cloverfield Lane and the Mystery Misdirection

I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane this weekend. For those of you wondering if it has anything substantively to do with the 2008 found footage monster film: the answer is "no." There are some easter eggs, maybe.

That's about it. For those of you who don't care anything about that and think the trailers look intriguing: you should see it. It's a decent thriller in a confined space with a couple of twists. In brief: Melissa (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is driving--well, somewhere--after a breakup. There are odd news reports on the radio, but before she can register any of this given her personal drama, she's in a car accident. She wakes up in an elaborate bomb shelter built by Howard (John Goodman) who tells her attacks have come from well, somewhere, and everyone else is dead.

Needless to say, Melissa is not immediately convinced that her captor is telling the truth or that his motivates are altruistic.

 From gaming perspective, you could say the the underground bunker in which Melissa finds herself is a variant of the mystery sandbox--or more accurately, a version of the mystery terrarium, because there are two mysteries in 10 Cloverfield Lane and only one is the protagonist (or PC) initially aware of. A game in as small a space as the film would likely need to be very shorter than the usual mystery sandbox or even mystery terrarium, but it show's the way those sorts of campaign set-ups can be made to work longer, by distraction with another, more momentarily pressing mystery.

Doing something like this, you get more time in a campaign before the Big Discovery. The danger is you build in too many "mysteries of the week" that the big reveal doesn't seem so big when you final get there.

The Coming of Crom!

A little teaser for a project Jason Sholtis and I are working on. More to follow. You can see a brief encyclopedia of Crom's world as presented in the Golden Age stories, and (courtesy of Matt Schmeer) you can read all those stories in one pdf here.

The World of Crom

"Crom" by Gardner Fox and John Giunta's Crom (I've discussed it before here and here) may well be the first sword & sorcery comic. All three Crom appearances are available on line. Here's a short guide to the people, places and things you'll encounter in them:

Aesir: The tribe of Crom; a migrating yellow-haired people.

Akka: The ancient city of the ape men (though they have tails like monkeys).

Balthar: A giant worshiped as a god by the people of the cliff country south of Ophir, and in return, he raided caravans for them.

Bokris: King of Ophir when Tanit was held captive.

Calla: The priestess of Balthar (who was taken with her beauty).

Cave People: The worshipers of Balthar in the cliff country.

Cavus: A soldier of Ophir.

Crom: The titular barbarian hero.

Cymri: Monkey people; enemies of the Aesir.

Dwelf: A wizard who rules an island full of young women. He desires water from the Fountain of Youth from the Black Tower of Ophir.

Garm: A hound by whose teeth Crom swears.

Kard: A rocky land south of Ophir along the the Nexus River; possibly the same place as the "cliff country."

Lalla: Sister of Crom.

Hounds of Hel: Crom compares the Cymri to them.

Id: Presumably a deity. Crom swears by "the bones of Id" 

Ind: A place of jungles where black panthers dwell.

Iormungundir: "the Earth-Spanner"; Crom compares the giant snake in the Black Tower of Ophir to it.

Iss: A deity. Crom and others swear by Iss.

Nessus: Crom swears by this hooved being on several occasions,

Ophir: A city (and possibly city-state or country) considered "the richest on the inland sea"; the location of the Fountain of Youth.

Skull-Biter: Crom's sword--at least in his second and third appearances.

Skull-Cracker: The name of Crom's sword in his first appearance.

Spraa: A giant spider worshipped by the ape men of Akka.

Rou: King of the ape men of Akka.

Taka: An Ophirean soldier.

Tal: An Ophirean coin.

Tanit: The queen of Ophir; Crom initially kidnaps her, but she soon decides being with him is more exciting that ruling alone and she shares his adventures.

Azurth in North Texas

I'll be running a session of Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak at North Texas RPG Con in June. This will be the first time I've run the adventure as written (the game session it was based on was a bit different). I'll be using pregens like character portraits (hopefully) done by Jeff Call whose doing the interior art for the module. Anyway, here's the pitch:

Game Title : Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak
Game System : D&D 5e
Number of players : 4-6
Pregens/Level of characters : yes / 3rd-5th

Game Info : After turning himself into a manticore, the self-styled wizard-artiste Mortzengersturm moved to the crystalline peak of Mount Geegaw to practice his transformation magic without interference. You've been hired to snatch his most prized artifact, the Whim-Wham Stone--or at least some of its eldritch light. A menagerie of magical hybrids, a self-absorbed vampire, more than a few hippogriffs, and of course, the mad manticore himself, await.

I'm not the only Hydra Co-op member running a game at the Con. Chris Kutalik is doing Misty Isles of the Eld on Friday. Hydra will also have a booth to move our wares and give away some swag.

It's been a great con the past two years, and I'm looking forward to it this year.