Friday, March 31, 2017

Again, the Giants!: Wedding of the Hill Giant Chief

This is the first in a series (maybe) of posts inspired by the classic Against the Giants:


Highlights include:


1. Hill-billy Hill Giant father-in-law keeping the groom under lock and key so there's no cold feet!
2. Monstrous would-be Mother-in-Law!
3. Battle-hardened bridesmaids at a bachelorette party bash!
4. The Ettin moonshiner cooking up his "Catoblepas Kick" for the festivities.
5. And of course, the clan's prize pigs!

Thursday, March 30, 2017

A Weird Alien on the Planet of the Apes

"THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD" 

Player Characters:
Jeff Call as Brock Irving
Lester B. Portly as Eddy Woodward
Jason Sholtis as Francis La Cava

Nonplayer Characters:
Ted Cassidy as Eezaya

Synopsis: Irving, Woodward, and La Cava set out to investigate the site of a fallen meteor and find an alien monster with the power to turn men to stone!

Commentary: The alien is this adventure first appeared in Perseus Against Monsters (Perseo l'invincibile) (1963)--which also goes by a bunch of other names. The creature bears something of a resemblance to the alien in an episode of Space:1999, "The Dragon's Domain," but I can't conclusively say they are the same one.

This creatures eye blast was sort of petrifying but turned bodies to hardened ash, sort of like this:


The PCs spent a lot of time trying to think of a creative way to defeat the monster, but it proved to be fairly susceptible to bullets, ultimately.

I used this theremin music to represent the monster's alien call. It's petrifying eye blast made a sound like the Martian heat ray sound effect from Pal's War of the Worlds. (You can hear it here. eventually).

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Wednesday Comics: New Image Fantasy

Image Comics has been on a roll of late. Case(s) in point: Two relatively new fantasy collections you might want to check out.

I mentioned 8House, the science fantasy series of series by Brandon Graham and various collaborators before. 8House seems to have stalled, but the first storyline, Arclight, with art by Marian Churchland, finished as its on series and has been collected in a trade. Arclight is set on a desert world where blood is the source of magic. A queen is this world is trapped in a root-like body while an alien masquerades as her. The queen's served by one androgynous knight (the titular Arclight) while other knights unknowingly serve the pretender.

There was a bit of a gap between issues, so I was a little uncertain of how everything shook out in the end, but all the more reason to give the trade a read!

A Land Called Tarot is a hardcover by Gael Bertrand. The story is wordless, so I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but it is gorgeous. The art reminds me of Akira Toriyama and Miyazaki, but the whole production has kind of a Moebius vibe. Here's a sample:




Monday, March 27, 2017

A Blurry Picture of my Haul of Dubious Treasures from GaryCon


What we've got here is: Journey to the Cloud Castle, All The Worlds' Monsters Vol. 2, DM's Book of Nasty Tricks Misfits and Magic, The Hole Delver's Catalog, Dragons of Weng T'Sen, Amazon Mutual Wants You! Vol. 1, and The Trouble with Friends.

Why these particular items? It would be ahrd to say, though some of them had the requisite amount of old school kitsch or nostalgia from seeing ads in Dragon. I did buy a couple of newer things but this was the weird stuff.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Weird Revisted: Weird Weapons, Weird War

Usually with these revisitations, I go for a most from around the same date, but Jason "Dungeon Dozen" Sholtis aske me a related question yesterday, so I thought it was worth revisiting this one from 2010:
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

- Gen. George S. Patton
When the crazy-quilt patchwork of nations that was Ealderde erupted in the Great War, a number of new technologies were brought to bear. Thaumaturgical and alchemical weapons and "weaponizable" advances were among these, and were utilized on a scale never seen before--with long-lasting, and terrible consequences.

First among these was the use of alchemical weapons, particularly gas. The forces of Neustria were the first to utilize them with fragmentation shells filled with stinking cloud potions. The Staarkish army soon escalated to lethal chemicals. Their "Magic Corps Men" cast cloudkill which, as a heavier than air gas, was ideal for filling enemy trenches. Since mages are a quirky lot, generally ill-suited to military discipline, their numbers in the Staarkish forces were small, and it proved expedient to replace them with thaumaturgic shells which could be fired from artillery at a greater distance.  The gas could also be pumped out of tubes, if the wind directions were right. Soon these methods were adopted by all the larger nations.

Other, more exotic chemicals were tried. Acid fog was released from sprayers to discourage attackers or soften defenders. Yellow musk, the pollen of the eponymous creeper, cultivated in secure greenhouses, was used to entrance enemies and make them easy targets. Amorphing solutions delivered via artillery shells sowed terror by making flesh malleable, dissolving limbs or even melting soldier's together. The only limits were the imaginations (and funding) of the alchemists and thaumaturgic engineers.

Magical weapons of mass destruction were also employed, and could be delivered to distant targets through the use of artillery and airships. Thaumaturgical explosives and blights laid waste to cities and farmlands. Rays of searing light, or jets of intense cold fired from zeppelins cut swaths of destruction across enemy trenches. Implosive weapons literally collapsed fortifications--or hapless troops--in on themselves.

Then there were the weapons calculated to cause as much terror as direct damage. Teleportation beams were turned upon population centers. Fear rays lead to mass panic. The battlefield fallen were briefly animated to turn on their grieving comrades. This is to say nothing of the even more exotic reality-warping weapons which, though rare, were powerful enough to disrupt the elemental fields to this day.

Another technological change in the Great War was touted as potentially rendering the human soldier obselete. Constructs and automata have been used before, but never in such a scale. "Land ironclads" or "landships"--now colloquially called "tanks"--were an innovation by the army of Grand Ludd on thaumaturgical techniques used to make anthropomorphic golems. Some tanks required human operators, but others were automonous to a degree, like the golems. This proved to be another one of the mistakes of war, as man-hunting kill-machines still roam the blasted former battlefields and depopulated wastes of Ealderde.


Man-shaped golems were still used--largely for their flexibility and, in some cases, greater psychological effect on the enemy--but these were produced with greater mechanical skill, giving them a wider variety of uses. Once again terror was a prime goal, as squads of murderous constructs with the appearance of children's toys were sent into unsuspecting villages in the dead of night. 

It's the hope of many that the most lasting innovation of the conflict will be that man has finally had enough of war. Certainly, the devastation wrought in Ealderde, and the refugees that still pour into the New World to escape the post-war horror, ought to be powerful reinforcers for such a lesson. Still, as the cynics among us would point out, no one has ever lost money betting on the short-memory or long-term foolishness of mankind.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Wednesday Comic: Head Lopper #5


Andrew MacLean's quarterly heroic fantasy comic Head Lopper returned last week with the first part of a new story arc: "And the Crimson Tower." I've discussed Head Lopper before, pimping the collection of the first storyline. In brief, it's the adventures of a burly, bearded warrior with a flair for decapitation and an unusual sidekick--the still-living, severed head of a witch he decapitated.


This new arc starts off with a setup pretty much as D&D as you can get. Head Lopper, his friends, some plucky little humanoids, and some ne'er-do-well adventures, enter the Crimson Tower of Ulrich the Twice Damned. It's pretty much a killer dungeon with puzzles, deadly traps, and a fight with a three-headed dragon automaton.


Check it out!

Monday, March 20, 2017

Midnight on the Prismatic Peak


I've been working on Mortzengersturm, Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak all weekend--and Jeff Call has put in some awesome work too. Check out the illustration of the Prismatic Peak above. Jeff does a really good Mary Blair, don't you think?