Weird Revisited: Professor Crowe and his Ugly Bird

 This Weird Adventures post first appeared in August of 2010. I recalled it due to this cool post.

Art by Daniel Kopalek

Professor Enoch Crowe and his familiar/partner-in-crime are wanted for the sell of unlicensed alchemicals, and fraud related to such, in the City and smaller municipalities in the Smaragdines and the South. The Professor (this title is an affectation--he holds no known degree) sells dubious nostrums from the back of his truck which he drives on a circuitous route mostly through rural areas, but sometimes visiting poorer neighborhoods of cities.

Crowe will typically have the following “cures” for sale, but will only be specifically hawking one at a time:

• Priapic Vigor - said to increase male sexual performance (allegedly made from extract of satyr musk, and other natural ingredients).
• Hirsutific Unction - said to cure baldness cure (from "essential oils" of de-odorized skunk-ape hide)
• Triodia’s Specific - An unguent (sometimes tonic) to cure venereal disease. (from alchemical purification of a species of lilly that grows in secret Ealerdish grottoes where nymphs are known to bathe).
• Panaceatic Lens Treatment - The patient sits under a head-sized dome of purplish crystal (actually colored glass) which he or she is told will “re-align their mental energies and vital forces to be in greater harmony with the universe.” Mostly, it does nothing, but Crowe can use it to given a suggestion (as per spell) to the patient.

Crowe can also produce some genuine minor magical potions, but only sells these to high-dollar costumers, and may just as like substitute a minor cursed potion, if he thinks he can get away with it, and might lose a sale otherwise.

Crowe’s partner or servant, is called by him “Dearest” or perhaps just “Bird,” but is known to everyone else as “Ugly Bird.” Ugly Bird is an harpy of a particular spiteful disposition--and this is in comparison to others of her kind who aren't paragons of compassion. She won’t generally be seen when Crowe is about his business of sales, but she is always watching, and never far from his side.

Prof. Enoch Crowe: MU4, HP12, spells commiserate with his level, and 1d10 real potions in his truck, besides his charlatan’s wears.

Ugly Bird: AC 7 [12], HP 17, 2 talons 1d4 each, Special: flight, unlike often presented, harpies in the world of the City have no “siren’s song” power.

Mythic Exalted: The Gods

 

I wanted to continue the thought process from this post by looking as the gods of the Exalted universe. It's interesting, because the theogony and cosmogony have echoes in Greek myth, but in it's "final form" as interacted with by the players, it has some features of Chinese traditional religion.

The earliest gods or god-like beings are the Primordials who arose in chaos and then created the world from it. Their group name and function recalls the Greek Primordial deities (Gaia even shows up in both groups), but few are well described and there are hints that they are monstrous (like the Mesopotamian primordial deity Tiamat) or aloof and alien (like Lovecraft's Outer Gods, particularly as referenced in the Dreamlands stories) or both. 

The Primordials create the lesser gods to run Creation for them. Chief among these are the Celestials or Celestial Incarnae who are based on the classical planets--the seven moving astronomical objects visible to the naked eye. They are largely just given the modern names for these celestial objects borrowed from Greek myth, which I think is sort of mistake, in that those names have connotations that may mislead as much as illuminate. They don't really have the roles or portfolios of the Olympians, at least.

While Apollo and Artemis are solar and lunar deities, respectively, the Unconquered Sun and Luna resemble more the gods that were the personifications of those Celestial objects, Helios/Sol and Selene/Luna or those sorts of deities in other cultures. Along those lines, I think it's better to think of the Five Maidens not as the goddesses of war, serenity, endings, etc., but as the deities of fortune and destiny related to those areas like the Greek Fates or the Norns of Germanic myth. It's a subtle distinction, but one worth making because it makes the Celestials less gods more personified cosmic forces--but more relatable and understandable ones than there Primordial creators.

They would be at the top of the Celestial Bureaucracy like the gods of Heaven China traditional belief. Beneath them were the various gods that might get more direct worship and serve as the analogs for traditional fantasy rpg deities. 

All of this works pretty much as is, I think. The Celestial Bureaucracy might be viewed as working against a Sword & Sorcery or ancient (European/Near East) feel, but I don't view it as a problem. Incorporating some ancient Chinsese elements is fine with me. The names of the Five Maidens bug me, so I might change those, but do know to what right off hand. Maybe substitute the names of the Olympian Spirits?

GRIDSHOCK'D! (part 2)

This continues my conversation with Paul Vermeren about his 80s-veneered, post-apocalyptic superhero game, GRIDSHOCK 20XX available on drivethru in pdf and in hardcopy from Exalted Funeral. You can read part 1 here.

How much does "retro" play a part in the aesthetic of GRIDSHOCK 20XX? We live in a time where cyberpunk is mostly considered a "retrofuture" genre thanks in large part to design that harkens back to cyperpunk publications of the 80s? How much is it a retrofuture as opposed to an alternate present?

GRIDSHOCK 20XX's apocalypse was a reality-warping event that took place in 1986, and its present day of 20XX is set several decades after that. I'd say it's an alternate present, since one of the conceits of the setting is that the existence of superhumans changed the course of history more significantly than it did in your typical "mainstream" superhero universe. The GRIDSHOCK universe's 1986 looked quite different from ours, with things like clean energy and various forms of super-science gadgetry introduced by heroes (and salvaged from villains) in widespread use. So, GRIDSHOCK 20XX's alternate, post-apocalyptic present includes elements from its alternate, pre-apocalyptic past that could be described as retrofuturistic.

In terms of aesthetics, I alluded earlier to having a more retro vision for GRIDSHOCK 20XX that changed as I and my collaborators worked on it. The original over-the-top, exaggerated 80s feel had been toned down a little by the time I published the zines, but that Trapper Keeper retrofuture aesthetic is not completely gone. The 1980s are viewed by some of the setting's factions and characters as a lost golden age, so there's still a good deal of big hair, shoulder pads, and laser grids in the setting. I think those elements help the setting feel toyetic in a way that I hope encourages players and GMs to think big in terms of what do with it.

In creating something and sending it out into the world, it seems to me there's always a bit of difference between what you liked about it and what others do. Is there some aspect of GRIDSHOCK 20XX you really like that you feel maybe folks haven't latched on to or recognized to the degree you would like?

I think those who have picked up GRIDSHOCK 20XX really like the look of the zines. That's gratifying to hear, because the aesthetics were always a focus for me. While I've had people tell me they think that the setting is awesome or interesting, so far, I haven't heard much about specific elements of it that they particularly enjoyed. 

This is my first foray into writing for tabletop RPGs, so I'd love to know which parts of the zines readers liked most (or maybe didn't like as much) so I can make more of what works well for them. For example, I'd be interested to know if people enjoyed zine 3, Regions, as much as I do. I think it presents a lot of interesting, gameable material in a small package, but did others feel that way? Did they love the landscape format of that booklet or hate it? I'm not sure yet. 

Hopefully you'll get some of that feedback! Last question: Where do you see GRIDSHOCK going (or where would you like to see it go) in the future?

There might be additional GRIDSHOCK 20XX zines, including adventures, adversaries, or new regions to explore. I think games often live or die based on whether they've got some solid adventures ready to go, but I'm not especially skilled at writing them. I've considered working with other creators to make that happen. 

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1982 (week 3)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 18, 1982.

Brave & the Bold #187: Boatner and Aparo present a Batman/Metal Men team-up with a continuity deep cut. The Metal Men are being destroyed one by one and Batman tries to protect the remaining ones from harm. He fails at that, but he also discovers they all have lost their memories of a previous member of their group he recalls. Batman asks Doc Magnus about that and learns that the Doctor is responsible for erasing the Metal Men's memories of "Nameless" after their first reconstruction. Magnus rebuilds them and Batman convinces him to give them their memories back.

It turns out Nameless is at the root of the attacks, as is Platinum Man (one of a group of now-destroyed gender-swapped Metal Men). Once their neglect of Nameless is explained as due to Magnus' actions, the vendetta by the snubbed robots halt. Tin and Nameless can resume their relationship and they decide to get "alloyed," but the ceremony comes to a tragic end when a rogue Missile Man attacks them and Nameless sacrifices her existence to save her friends. She dies with the new name Tin had given her: Beautiful.

Legion of Super-Heroes #288: Princess Projectra and Karate Kid are about to be executed by her usurping cousin, but a squad of Legionnaires shows up just in time. Karate Kid and Projectra best her cousin, and Projectra ascends the throne. Meanwhile, the spy squad and Saturn Girl are lost on an icy world after an attempt to infiltrate Khundia--necessitating Saturn Girl returning to her pre-disco outfit. Back at HQ the remaining Legionnaires are trying to figure out what to do.

Green Lantern #153: Wolfman/Mishkin and Cohn and Staton/DeCarlo present the solution to last issues mystery.  Jordan realizes that all beings on M'Brai - the Savages, the Cormm, and the Queln - are part of the same species evolving cyclically: every individual progresses from single-celled organism all the way to Queln and beyond, and then repeats the cycle, without retaining any memory of it. So if the Queln use their devolving ray to get rid of the other factions, their entire race will become extinct. Hal uses a meteor to destroy the satellite and stop the Queln plan. He figures out that the meteor shower is in collision course to the planet, and it could disrupt its entire life cycle. Hal deviates the meteors, succeeding in his mission.

In the backup by Kupperberg and Infantino, Jeryll attempts to stop the invasion on Glirell peacefully as she had been commanded. But when a group of children is killed by the invaders, Glirell's people explode into violence in outrage. Realizing, that this is her burden not her people's, Jeryll stops the suicidal charge of her people and goes on to destroy the invasion fleet. In the aftermath, the Council tells her that she is forgiven, and won't be banished. However, Jyrell bids farewell to her people and leaves voluntarily, feeling she betrayed the peaceful ways of her people. 

House of Mystery #305: The first story by Cavallieri and von Eeden has a derivative artist trapped in a world populated by characters from famous art works after he tries to unleash his potential. "The Rings of Kur-Alet" by Jones and Carillo is tale set in ancient Egypt of time traveling magic rings and a Pharoah and his jealous wife who met their ends using them.

The Jones/Colon "I...Vampire" story takes an odd turn as a cure for cancer is discovered. Also, Vampires across the world begin dying mysteriously with no marks. Bennett tracks into the Egyptian desert. He finds her helpless and dying, where she reveals that the cancer cure has made humans poisonous to vampires! In her weakness she's reverted to the personality he fell in love with, losing her evil. She tells Andrew about the magic rings from the previous story this issue, so they can use them to travel to a time when they are still human and be together. Andrew helps Mary reach the rings, but she betrays him and travels back alone. He travels back in time after her.

Sgt. Rock #365: The main story is another one of those introduce a new character to Easy Company who dies heroically. In this case, it's a kid who makes jigsaw puzzles. It also has the common Sgt. Rock story trait of reviewing how great the recurring members of Easy are.

The other two stories are oddly both science fiction. In the first, by Harris and Mandrake future warriors find out that their ultimate weapon which supposedly allows them to take control of enemy soldiers unleashes their enemies' primitive instincts. In the last story, two operatives who can't get along are united in death on an alien world.

Superman Family #219: Kupperberg and Mortimer have the Master Jailer show up and put the Girl of Steel in quite a predicament. He uses a device to put her in a sort of phantom state so she can observe, but not interact with the world. Playing clever by using a Supergirl robot only backfires on Kara as it leads to the destruction of the device she needs to change back to normal. In the Bridwell/ Schaffenberger Mr. and Mrs. Superman, Supes is perplexed when the Flying Tiger identity he created last issue, starts committing crimes. Lois comes undercover again as his sidekick "Kitty" to ferret our the perpetrator who turns out to be Funny Face.

Jimm Olsen, star reporter for the Metropolis Eagle, is given the assignment to discover Superman's secret identity. In reality, this is all a dream implanted by Brain Storm to trick Olsen into uncovering Supes' ID when he wakes up. In the O'Flynn/Oksner have Lois meeting another Lois Lane, a blonde fan of hers who runs into trouble when a thief attacks her boss. The characterization may not be quite right (though it isn't bad) but the Teri Hatcher Lois Lane of the '90s is a pretty much exact visual representation of Oksner's version of the character in the early 80s, much more so than the Margot Kidder version.

Warlord #58: I detailed the main story in this issue here. In the Kupperberg and Duursema Arion backup, the three beings representing the balance are mocking Arion and his powers seem as nothing to them, but then it turns out Calculha was still around, just waiting for Arion to show humility. He dismisses the three beings and reveals that Arion was born in the stars from cosmic forces. Then, he sends the sorcerer and his pals on their way back home.

Mythic Exalted

Back n 2001, I heard White Wolf was releasing a fantasy game. I was interested when I heard (I don't remember where) that it was going to have a Sword & Sorcery vibe and was inspired by CAS's Zothique and Tanith Lee' Flat Earth series. Still somewhere near the height of my old school Sword & Sorcery mania in those long-ago days, and impressed with the White Wolf products I had, I was bound to check it out as soon as I could make the purchase. 

I was a bit disappointed with what I found. Tanith Lee's series was namechecked (and the world was flat), as was other intriguing inspirations like the Old Testament, the Ramayana, and Greek myth, but the world failed to deliver anything close to that flavor to me. Some of that was the anime and video game aspects. Another was how the World of Darkness related-framework was implemented.  None of those things were bad, just different than what I had thought I was going to get. Maybe as Grabowski said: "it's not just Ninja Scroll the RPG, it's also a pulp fantasy revival game that happens to have anime parts," but the pulp fantasy elements seemed pretty low in the mix for me.

Mainly, the world of Creation, just didn't seem very flavorful. One of the original writers was of the opinion that the made-up words/names common to fantasy are silly to modern audiences. I've seen later writers support that view. Whether that was true (and whether it remains true post the success of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and The Witcher), I was and am a fantasy fan, and it doesn't reflect my preferences.

Over time, I got over my initial disappoint and came to appreciate Exalted's Creation for what it did do well: providing a sort of fantasy supers in a world with a background conceptual complexity not unlike the other "deep settings" of rpg lore: Tekumel and Glorantha. I recognize the little bits of cool worldbuilding that existed side by side with what I had seen as an unevocative initial conception.

But I still sort of wonder what the setting would have looked like had it leaned heavier or Sword & Sorcery and Sword & Sandals and ancient myth instead of fighting anime, the requisites of White Wolf splat book based line-development, and magitech.

So, I think I may spend a few posts thinking about that.

Gnydrion

Tom Kidd

I finally decided (well, at least decided for the time being) on a name for a previously nameless science fantasy setting I've blogged about a few times over the years. The planet will be named Gnydrion (with a silent "g", I think) inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's original name for Zothique, Gyndron.

Here's a selection of a couple of posts in the setting:

Science Fantasy Hexcrawl Inspirations

Two Towns

And the post where I collated more of them can be found here.

GRIDSHOCK'D!

I had a conversation with my friend Paul Vermeren recently about his 80s-veneered, post-apocalyptic superhero game, GRIDSHOCK 20XX available on drivethru in pdf and in hardcopy from Exalted Funeral. Here's the first part of that conversation:

What's the secret origin of GRIDSHOCK 20XX?

GRIDSHOCK 20XX was born from my then-local gaming group's attempt to return to playing Rifts, a game we had loved as teens, 20+ years after we had left it behind. Though we knew there were things about Rifts that were going to be difficult for us to work with, we still had a lot of enthusiasm for the world and our characters, and we wanted to give it another shot as adults. We eventually ended up replacing the Palladium rules with Fate, and then ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying (when we wanted something Fate-like that could handle all the crazy powers and characters). While we enjoyed it for a while, it eventually fizzled out. Despite all the elements in Rifts that didn't work for us anymore, I felt strongly that there was something worth exploring further. 

For me, the genius of Rifts was that it's a post-apocalyptic game which still seems to include every single thing its creator thinks is cool, sort of like Dungeons & Dragons is a hodgepodge of every variety of fantasy. So, I decided I should try to make my own "spiritual successor" to Rifts. I stumbled at first, but it began to take shape once I realized that rather than starting with the real world as the starting point, I could create a post-apocalyptic setting that included all of the elements I wanted if the world was a superhero setting before everything went wrong. Since the superhero genre already contains elements of every other one, I could include whatever I liked.

As I tinkered with what I was calling GRIDSHOCK, it became less of a Rifts tribute and more of its own unique thing - though the influence of Rifts is pretty clear if you look for it. After several years of tinkering, it dawned on me that I could keep on tinkering forever, so I decided (on the spur of the moment) to publish what I had written as a set of small zine-style booklets, using ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying for the system. Lo and behold, GRIDSHOCK 20XX was born.

As currently conceived, is it in your mind more a "post-apocalyptic superhero setting" or "post-apocalyptic kitchen sink setting?" Essentially, is it more like Rifts where anything goes and it can be played in different ways or is it more focused and aimed as supers?

I've occasionally called GRIDSHOCK 20XX a "post-superhero" setting. It's a superhero world that went terribly wrong in 1986 is very important to understanding its present day, 20XX. Many of the player character templates (called Vectors in the setting) riff on established superhero archetypes. In its current booklet incarnation, it uses a superhero RPG system, because ICONS is relatively light but can handle the full array of powers and characters the setting includes. 

The game can played in many different ways, but the default mode of play in GRIDSHOCK 20XX assumes that you're heroic characters standing up to a villainous status quo. That's not usually the case in the traditional superhero genre. 

If you called the world of GRIDSHOCK 20XX a "kitchen sink" or even "gonzo" setting, I'd say that's probably fair. Those terms are often used to describe Rifts, but while Rifts was apparently a cyberpunk-esque world when its apocalypse happened, GRIDSHOCK 20XX was a comic book superhero world. As a result, I've put a good deal of work into unleashing many of the wilder elements of the superhero genre in ways that I think make for an interesting post-apocalyptic, kitchen sink setting where civilization has been radically reshaped, if not destroyed. 

Are there any particular superhero comics you'd point people to for inspiration?

There's a whole page of inspirations (seinen manga, European comics, British comics, movies, video games, toy lines, cartoons, etcetera that were on my mind in addition to American superhero comics) listed on the back inside cover of the fourth zine, Reference.

But to your question, the "Days of Future Past" storyline from Uncanny X-Men #141-142 is the first exposure I had to the idea of a superhero world gone disastrously wrong - though since it does have all those other influences, GRIDSHOCK 20XX is perhaps not quite as grim. It's still something I would recommend. GRIDSHOCK 20XX also has things in common with "deconstructed" superhero comics like Watchmen or Squadron Supreme, and with "alternate future" stories like Earth X, Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, and maybe even "Age of Apocalypse."