The Halloween Special

And of course, it's a repeat! Sorry, still no Fall Guy or Elvira actually in this post. I didn't do any Halloween related posts this year, but just sit back and relive these horror-themed classics:

Need a name for a horror comic? Generate it with this post.
Ever heard the legend Spring-hilled Jack? Well here are his stats.
A different way of the thinking of Ghost Towns, from Weird Adventures, but usable anywhere.
And finally, a 2013 Santacore request unwittingly opens, "The Tome of Draculas!"

Wednesday Comics: Bronze Age Book Club: Monsters Unleashed!

The latest episode of the Bronze Age Book Club podcast is available, just in time for Halloween!

Listen to "Episode 8: MONSTERS UNLEASHED (1973) #2" on Spreaker.

It's also now available on Podcast Addict!

The Rolling City and the Devil Sun

This post is in response to a challenge from Anne at DIY & Dragons based on this post a the Githyanki Diaspora from 2009 suggesting an easy way to "Make Your Own New Crobuzon."

The Last City
Clacking, rumbling, the city moves. It rolls through the night on sixteen indestructible rails carved from the bones of dead gods. The shanties on its ziggurat steps rattle; it's bristle of towers sways. The city never stops for long, and it always stays ahead of the dawn. It's being chased by a vengeful god, the Sun.

The Devil Sun
There is a face in the green Sun, and it looks down on the world it hates with grinning, idiot malice. It chases the city across the face of the blighted world, through the ruined cities of the elder days. Where its morning light shines, its energy creates cancer jungles and fleshy masses of monsters. Even these wither and die under the force of its noon regard, leaving only blasted desert in the dying light of evening. The Devil Sun would destroy the clanking redoubt of the city, too, but it moves too slowly across the sky to catch it. For now.

Three Minor Humanoid Races
Xixchil once had their own city, but it was lost, and they bought their passage on the last city with their art. It was the Xixchil surgeons that developed the Warforged. The Xixchil are mistrusted because they live in enclaves of their own and practice secret rituals they do not allow others to see.

The Warforged were made to be the city's soldiers. There are many fewer now than there once were. They are officially accorded respect for their service, but many former refugees blame them for the loss of their old homes.

Athasian aarakocra live in the precarious high towers of the city. They are scouts and foragers.

Three Monsters
Clockwork automata serve in every level of the city, particularly performing jobs around the engines or on the city's undercarriage where living things can't go. Some damaged automata become rampaging clockwork horrors.

Obliviax is cultivated in some labs in the city for it's various memory uses: to fashion an anti-senility drug, to steal memories, or simply to make people forget. It has escaped and grows wild in some lower levels.

Arcane oozes sometimes crawl up the cities exterior. The gorge themselves to a torpor on the divine magic that powers the city. Sometimes they become a hazard and must be removed.

Weird Revisted: The Secret Life Stages of Elves

This post from 2016 is more recent than my usual revisits, but I had forgotten about it, only coming across it while looking for another post and thought it was worth a reshare...

What humans mistake as different tribes or clades of elves are actually different stages in their millennia long, perhap endless, lives.

Wood elves are elven adolescents. They rebel against their parents and go to live in bands of others of their age. They throw racuous parties in the woods and experiment with intoxicants. They are capricious, emotional, and cliqueish. Their tribes run the gamut between Woodstock and Lord of the Flies.

High elves are elven adults. They interact most with other species and are responsible for the maintenance of elven civilization. It is in this age cohort that the immortality of elves begans to take its toll, however. Elven brains are not structurally that different from humans. They do not have the capacity to hold countless centuries of memories. Their initial compensatory mechanism is monomania. Elves develop a strong interest that narrows the array of factual information they must recall and provides constant reinforcement for the things they find important. Some become swordsmasters, some master artists or craftsmen, some archmages.

For some elves this is enough, and they grow more skilled, more focused, and stranger, until they become almost demigods in their chosen vocation. These are the Gray.

Others, though, are not able to maintain such focus. Something akin to dementia sets in. They become forgetful, and paranoid. As they begin to lose their past--lose themselves. They find only intense linger long. These are the drow, the dark elves.

Dark because of the darkness that consumes their minds; dark for the deeds they commit to hold on to self and not slip into endless reverie. They go to live in the dungeons of their kind to pursue intense pleasures and horrors or simply howl or cackle in the darkness. These elders are feared by other elves. They avoid them and will not reveal their relationship to them to non-elves.

A Premise for Opposing Planes

I'm planning on expanding on the version of the Outer Planes posited by these two posts.  In brief, the planes are reframed in a sort of gnostic background wherein Law and Chaos relate to competing ideas about how best to restore unity with the Godhead. I like this idea because it gives a structure to hang both Law and Chaos on and the other various flavors radiating out from these "poles."

Good and Evil don't carry quite the same weight. Instead, they are shorthand for approaches for dealing with the opposing side. Lawful Good seeks accommodation with Chaos and peaceful conversion where possible; Lawful Evil feels there is no compromise with Chaos and force is always an option. This is not an idea new to me. It's hinted at the the Planescape material, and I've seen if discussed on forums. Adding the layer of competing visions of the Godhead adds something extra.

Anyway, more to come.

What The Clockwork Princess Said

Our 5e Land of Azurth campaign continued last night (now in its fifth year!) with the party trying to get some information from the the tree-like mass of gears and wires that bore the face of the former Princess of Yanth Country, Viola. They couldn't make much from her comments.  Was she merely repeating words from their questions or genuinely answering? They did think they got the phrases: "Not trust", "Queen Desira", and "Find. Now." Those may or may not have been related thoughts.

Suddenly, there was a flash of light in the hallway, and a mysterious stranger in a long coat with a flying-V guitar slung across his back stepped into the room. For some reason, the party immediately assumed this was "Future Kully," though the Kully of this time was supposed to be dead. The stranger seemed flustered by their questions about his identity, noting that he wouldn't have worn a bandana over his face if he wanted it to be known. He told them they needed to return to their own time, and quickly, because "the forces of darkness" were coming. He invoked concerns about effecting the future were he to answer any of their quite reasonable questions. He would say of his own origins: he was from "their future, but also from the distant past." He left the room playing his guitar and disappeared in another flash.

The stranger's words soon proved true, as the castle rocked as if struck. The party decided it was time to escape. A giant, insectoid creature of clicking metal and whirring gears broke through the wall, but after favoring them with a scream like an approaching train, turned and stumbled its way in the direction the party had come from.

They made it down two levels. The crazy gnomes were now fleeing with them. They exited the front door and saw two dragons blacker than the night sky, smoky and insubstantial around their extremities, circling like hawks overhead.

The party featherfall-ed (featherfell?) to the ground below. They saw black-armored riders on weird, loping steeds like hairless dogs with monstrous, human faces. They sprinted out of the clearing into a nearby stand of trees. Two riders peeled off from the many body and trotted over to the wood. Keeping a distance, one shot an arrow high. It transformed into a mass of arrows burning with green flame. The volley fell upon the party, seriously injuring Kairon and Shade. Again, the party ran for the deeper woods.

There, Phosphoro (finally) appeared, expressing regret for having forgotten to bring them back to their own time until now.

Back in Rivertown, the party discovered there have been some changes in their time away. A new palisade is around most of the city and there is a greater guard presence. They return to the Dove Inn and find their rooms are still intact, but they have back rent to pay.

When they see the innkeeper slip a note to a young boy, Waylon follows him through the streets. The boy goes to the house of Inkwell, the former bookkeeper to the former mayor. Inkwell returns to the inn looking for the party and asks them to meet him at his house this evening--and be careful of being followed.

That night, Inkwell tells them what has passed in the year they have been absent. Drumpf was elected mayor and used both his wizardly family and alleged aid from the land of Noxia to the North to enforce his rule in Rivertown. Gladhand, the former mayor, is in hiding, but Inkwell says he will offer the party a share in a large treasure if they will help him use the money to hire mercenaries to help drive Drumpf from the city. The party agrees to meet Gladhand.

Art by Jason Sholtis

From Pole to Pole

While doing some research of the origins of the Ethereal Plane as a concept, I came across what I believe to be the origins of the Positive and Negative Energy Planes. The writings of "Christian Rosicrucian" Max Haindel describe the etheric regions composed of four different ethers. Each of these has a positive and negative pole. Though these bear little resemblance to the positive and negative planes (beyond the positive being associated with generativity and vitality) the planes are positioned over the Prime (and the Ethereal) in a manner than would suggest poles.

Of course, it's entirely possible that these were independent creations, but given that Theosophic publications seem to be the primary source of the Ethereal Plane, it doesn't seem like a stretch that that other esoteric writings of the same era might have provided some inspiration.

Printing the Prime Material Plane in the Ether

This was an idea I posted on Google Plus (may it rest in piece) and mentioned it again earlier this week on Discord, so I might as well preserve it here, too.

The idea of Elemental Planes existing outside the Prime Material Plane seems strange, when the elements are presumably fundamental building blocks of matter. That is why they are called elements, after all.

I think a better analogy for the relationship of the Elemental Planes to the Prime would be CYMK printing. The Prime is "printed" on the ethereal medium by overlay of patterns of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. The elemental planes (branes is probably more appropriate) maybe not be center over the prime, perhaps they have poles or sources they emanate from, but they could be.

The arrangement could be represented diagrammatically like this:

Wednesday Comics: Star*Reach #1

A new episode of the Bronze Age Book Club Podcast is here! This time, we talk about "ground level comics" and Star*Reach #1 from 1974.


Listen to "Episode 7: STAR*REACH #1" on Spreaker.

The Psychonauts of Gyre

The Psychonauts, also known as the Alchemists, are a policlub in Gyre who believe that most intelligent beings are incapable of perceiving the true nature of the multiverse and the Godhead (if such a thing exists), but the appropriately altered state of consciousness can unlock these hidden secrets. To this end, the Psychonauts engaged in personal experiment with a variety of chemical substances are neurologic modifications of their own devising. To fund these experiments they are also the primary suppliers to Gyre's illicit drug trade. They also supply many of the legal mood altering drugs many a citizen of Gyre and provided the experimental research central to much corporate subliminal media.

Psychonaut club members are always eager for more subjects (willing and unwilling, in some cases) for their experiments. They also will at times pay handsomely (or more likely over drugs or chemicals in trade) for exotic psychoactive substances from the Outer Planes.

Weird Revisited: Do You Have Alignment or Does It Have You?

Recent discussion of alignment on discord brought to mind this post from 2014...

What follows is some brainstorming on a conception of alignment that probably just over-complicates things, but hopefully will be of some interest to somebody.

As we all know, alignment is derived from Moorcock and Anderson and is suppose to provide some moral and ethical structure to--well, the universe--and to provide a behavioral check on certain character types, but any attempt to relate it to actual moral quandaries, leads to discussion of baby orcs. Some people (myself included) have suggested at times the obvious solution of just viewing the sides as teams or opposing armies free of a moral dimension, but mostly it seems like people just ignore it. While I'm still advocating for a bit of blue and orange morality here, I want to suggest another wrinkle.

I recently finished the third of Hannu Rajaniemi's science fiction novels, The Causal Angel. One of the futuristic societies, the zoku, tend to form group minds, but individuals joining one or more zoku (Japanese for "clan") related hobbies, interests, or vocation. This process involves "entanglement," a sort of co-mingling of though and desires. The higher one's rank (i.e. the longer one is a member or the more "good" they do for the group) the more entanglement the individual becomes and so the more their thoughts and desires are reflected in the group consensus and action, or "volition." This effect is reciprocal, though, so the higher rank, the more one's on thoughts and actions are shaped by the zoku volition.

Maybe alignments could be a bit like that? Joining up with a fundamental metaphysical power of the universe means getting benefits (positive reaction, access to power) but also means you lose a bit of your individuality (or at least have that individuality altered). for someone powered by alignment (a paladin, a cleric), the higher level you become the worse it gets. A high level Paladin would be unlikely to worry about straying from their alignment; they would become one with it, or at least part of it.

This would make adhering to any alignment sort of like bartering your soul for magical power. The only difference is, with bartering your soul you are still quite aware you've given something up. With this approach, it would get harder and harder to ever imagine yourself doing anything differently.

This of course means that gods and other beings of great power and strong alignment allegiance have probably become more or less avatars for the consensus overmind/soul of the alignment.

B/X Mars is Upon You! Who Will Save You Now?

Michael "Aos" Gibbons released his long-awaited B/X Mars this week. As the name suggests, it's based on the Moldavy/Cook iteration of D&D. It is also inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, but that's only the roots; Mike's Martian tree grows in much more of a "Dying Earth" direction, with more than a little Kirby and perhaps a bit of Heavy Metal attitude in there.

In addition to the basic rules, it covers the society and culture of Mars, numerous factions, monsters, and equipment. It's also got a gazeteer of the Zerzura area ready to start a campaign.

Of course, it's profusely illustrated with Michael's high contrast black and white art that is at ERB accurate in terms of nudity and decidedly unlike any of the famous Barsoom illustrators of the past. The cover's above, but here another taste:

Go get it!

Jacked into Etherspace

This is a follow up to this post about the data etherspace of Gyre.

The natural Ethereal Plane is the substrate that underlies material spacetime, and is continuous with it. The artificial ether network of Gyre is surrounded by an astral bubble, a firewall, that keeps it from being accessed without the use of specific nodes. The legitimate and illegitimate users of etherspace most employ stables of proxies or individual avatars constructed from etheric stuff. Artificial subtle body avatars are sometimes called "subs." Ethernauts can construct them in any form they wish, limited only by the available resources. The subs are controlled via technology and a neural interface.  Not only does a sub allow the creation of a secondary identity, it also insulates the user from the dangers of etherspace. If the sub dies, the users consciousness returns to their body, unharmed. Usually.

Proxies are programs that have many different names depending on their use. They are simple etheric creatures for the most part; mindless, engineered etheric fauna and flora that have a specific data function. Sometimes these programs slip their chains and go feral in the network. Most starve or waste away without a way to perform the function they were built for. Rarely, some can undergo evolution to more free-living forms and become vermin. They may prey on legitimate programs or gnaw holes in data conduits, but they are perhaps more of a danger to rogue ethernauts lurking in the shadows, so aren't as vigorously hunted as they might be.

Wednesday Comics: Vermillion

Vermillion was a series from DC's Helix science fiction imprint created and written by the science fiction and fantasy author, Lucius Shepard. Like all the Helix line save one title, Vermillion was short-lived, lasting along 12 issues, published 1996-1997. (The one that had staying power was Transmetropolitan, which moved over to Vertigo.) Vermillion is a science fantasy about an eponymous endless city that is the entirety of its universe. Vermillion came after our universe and was created through the machinations of dark gods, the survivors of the universe prior to ours. Only Jonathan Cave remembers what came before and fights against the entities to restore his world. It bears some resemblance, perhaps, to John M. Harrison's Virconium (and maybe prefigures his Kefahuchi Tract, a bit). It is definitely not typical comic book science fantasy, even for the Vertigo 90s.

Vermillion has an interesting set up, but the stories read like they were written by a prose writer rather than a comics writer. The art in the first arc is by Al Davison and is firmly of the 90s "the writing is the important thing" camp, so it can't come to the rescue. Shepard hits more of a groove in the second arc, and John Totleben and then Gary Erskine improve the art side, but it is perhaps too little too late.

Still, the setup up and universe is interesting, and Shepard gives us a sort of complicated protagonist for a comic in Cave. It has never been collected, but if you run across the issues for cheap it is worth picking up.

Weird Revisited: Gill-Man vs. Wolf-Man

This post was originally presented in October of 2010, part of a series on the Universal Monsters.

The gill-man and the werewolf. Both are zoanthropes, and perhaps as such, both represent fears of nature or man’s own animalistic side, though at that point the similarity seems to end.

The gill-man is elusive. His appearances in media are more rarified, no doubt due to his proprietary, rather than folklorish, origins. In addition to the Creature trilogy, stand-ins make appearances in The Monster Squad, and Monsters vs. Aliens--where interestingly he’s grouped with decade-appropriate monster stand-in colleagues rather than the Universal monster old guard.

The proto-gill-men of Lovecraft’s "Shadow Over Innsmouth" have miscegenation fears in their DNA, which seem absent from Universal’s creature--unless his attraction to human females is a hint at this. In some ways, the Lovecraftian angst underlying the Deep Ones makes them more interesting than a fish King Kong. That’s part of the reason D&D’s Kuo-toa (more Deep One-ish in character) have always been more interesting to me than the other evil fishmen, the Sahuagin (Gill-Men).

I guess Dr. Who's Sea Devils and Silurians might be mined for gill-man inspiration. Anything might help. Gill-man’s got a good look, but little else to give him real monster memorability.

Neil Gaiman has a short-story called “Only the End of the World Again” where Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, winds up in Innsmouth and tangles with Deep One cultists. This may be as close as media has given us to a Gill-man-Werewolf bout.

Werewolves seem to have what it takes for urban fantasy fiction. Werewolf sex probably seems even naughtier, I suppose, than lovin’ the living dead. In fact--Teen Wolf aside--there’s always been something a little “adult situations”--maybe even exploitation--about werewolves. They don’t just strangle like the mummy or Frankenstein, or give a killer kiss like a vampire--they rend and tear and chew. Werewolves are as much serial killer as wild beast.

Is it any wonder that werewolves are almost as likely as vampires to get the grindhouse treatment? I would suspect only “almost” because vampires maybe give more excuse for nudity, and blood effects are cheaper than wolf prosthetics. But the wolf man gets by, and whatever budget.  Paul Naschy’s got a whole series of werewolf movies where the werewolf's origin involves being bit by a Yeti, and he fights Templars--how’s that for game inspiration! Then we’ve got a werewolf biker film (Werewolves on Wheels), a werewolf women in prison effort (Werewolf in a Women’s Prison); and, if Rob Zombie had his way, a werewolf Nazi-ploitation film--Werewolf Women of the S.S.

Werewolves: the most gameable of monsters, whatever your genre.

Collated Gyre

Since they don't have a specific tag, I figured I should collate the the Gyre-related posts so far for folks who might have missed any. So here they are, in no particular order:

Ain't No Gods in Gyre
The Silver Metal Face of Gyre
Three Policlubs of Gyre
The Monster Makers of Gyre
The Etherspace of Gyre
The Highway Across the Outlands
The City at the Center, Reprise
The City at the Center

The Etherspace of Gyre

Gyre, the city at the center of the multiverse, has a ghost. It envelopes the city like an invisible fog or unseen shroud, bunching and gathering in centers of commerce, thinning out in the lonely, post-industrial stretches. In its unfathomable complexity, it is more solid--more real--than the city to which it belongs. It's only ether, but ether is more tangible than ideas, after all.

The ghost is a network arising from the interconnected computers of Gyre. It's a bubble of ethereal space floating in the Astral Manifold, somehow built around the city. Like most things about Gyre's construction, no one remembers at all how it came to be there. Inside this etherspace, the data of Gyre takes on an emergent if abstract form perceivable by human minds, but not constructed by them. It's a memory palace without an architect.

In addition legitimate users, rogues slink through the pale mists, between the bright-edged, corporate data-monoliths with their constellations of vibrating, platonic solid programs, glowing like neon wrapped in fog. In the shadows, they snatch will-o-wisp secrets and pick the fractal locks to chest full of ones and zeroes that become gold in the real Gyre.

The Ethereal Plane proper has no access to Gyre's etherspace, nor do any of the Outer Planes. Officially. There are persistent rumors that hackers based in any number of planes have created backdoors, dug ether tunnels, into etherspace for their own purposes.

Wednesday Comics: The Joker

A new Bronze Age Book Club podcast is up: The Joker #7.

Listen to "Episode 6: THE JOKER #7" on Spreaker.

If that's not enough Joker for you, then check out The Joker: The Bronze Age Omnibus that collects the entire series this issue is from.