Sometimes Just Stop Typing

So I am like rebranding a whole RPG system that I never published into a 13-Page World (mini-game/setting for Red Bat) . So at 3:30 AM I am in the middle of a paragraph and I can't do it. I start going through the handy print copy of base rules. Still not much help, my imagination racing more than my note taking fingers can do. And then...

Plan out the Character Sheet! WALLAH. Six pages done.

Not one of the everything you need on the Character Sheet things, but really helpful at a roadmap for progression.

'The Boys' Totally Ripped Me Off

Pictured above is anyone raised by 1990s comic fans.

I am talking about the TV series. I couldn't tell you about the graphic novel. I am just not into reading comic books that are basically for people that hate comic books. But on the great 3 by 5 media, I can take the subgenre of dysfunctional super-powered heroes and misunderstood villains. That is only an episode at a time, if they are as great as this show. Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing turned into an Atheist that needs to feel guilty about sex and liking fantasy, just a degree less than the protestant world just wanting to hate everyone else... I digress.

Now I don't go around composing anti-superhero themes when doing superhero themes. I instead sit around and come up with the why and how of superhero worlds that aren't based on bad interpretations of Greek mythology and mediocre art (looking at you 90s comic fanboys). So I am not saying the show ripped me off about that. Now when Giancorlo Esposito, loved his work since The Usual Subjects, as Stan Edgar talks about the founder of Vought Industries, I ran downstairs to my blue filing cabinet and found my three-key lock had been broken into. Rifled through was my files from the Scrap Pile superhero RPG world.

In my fictitious world, around 1890, an Austrian mad scientist came up with the formula of MUT-8. This Professor Johann Von Rohung was the inventor. His formula would at first be closely guarded as he'd try and enable all the wrong side of history with super-powered edges over the forces of goodness, freedom, and the North American way. By the middle of WWII, Doctor Wrong, as he liked to be called, realized that the totalitarians were just not as capable as the democrats. So he started selling his product with a select few, mostly autocrats. Those dictators would of course be indebted to gangsters so they'd share the secret sauce as well. 

Now the developed nations of my world noticed what was going on as early as the 20s. Their law enforcement agencies, as well as their military complexes, needed to get a handle on these super-creeps and monstrosities wrecking havoc on their hometowns, so they started their own "super serum" usually derived from obtained samples of MUT-8. Unfortunately though like most of Wrong's victims, most people undergoing the infection could not overcome their basest and petty instincts once they had "super powers" making them at best uncontrollable but more often diabolical. Still once in a while a hero or two would emerge.

Ironically it was when, in my game universe,  MUT-8 made its way into the more indigenous population of areas, there would be an increase of people being able to resist becoming selfish-degenerates. Many becoming what would could be called superheroes to fight the super-villains around them. These capable individuals would have a normal person's distrust of other people's authority and be resistant to organizations trying to control them. This would be the rise of the vigilante super-powers from the 40s onward. Most recently, the Scrap Pile groups from the Lake Mohawk cities (namely Beta City up to Tripod City), have arisen as super groups that utilize both deputized supers and the vigilante elements to combat super-criminals.

So you might not see the connections immediately but trust me they are there. Still the show is awesome. The Boys talks about the compound being spread throughout the world. I just take my frame a little further back and the situational "Superhero" starts to fall into place, given a generational shift every time.

It works.

A World a Week: The Gonzop Saga

 In this past year's tradition, after a couple of days at work where I have some time to write, I come home and throw an RPG session at the players. This time around it is my Million and Half A.D. campaign, now entitled Gonzop. In this FFFFRPG (Far, Far Future Fantasy RPG), the players get to explore being a Kindred, or a species from the time: the Nimby, the Imby, the Baggers, the Bods, and the Mods. I left out the Roons (walking raccoons), Boons (walking baboons), and the Squiditch (land exploring squids) because I knew they would be too cute to resist for whoever showed up.  Only Iron Curtis and Peryton showed up, which is not a bad thing. The three of us have gelled into the experimental core of our gaming clique, while the hardcore but slightly more fans of this or that type of RPG setting show up often enough to make the roll-call. So we explored playing out:

The Nimby- kind of the "masters" of the world some 1.5 million years from now. The species is not the toughest or smartest of all the species around, but they are tougher and smarter than most nearby them. Working as family-communal bands they form nations and hold the best territories for their themselves. Hence the name derived from "Not in my backyard".
Curtis played and elderly one, a "drag", named Tequila. Mature beyond the sexuality of earlier Nimby incarnations (doll, dryad, and druid... drag), but something of a brave, kick-ass ninja-monk. He's 111 years-old in an expect two century long life.

Mod-Skeezer- Mods are my nod to hybrid species of the ultimate, if prototype for post-human RPG, Gamma World. Mods are deliberately modified humanity gene pools for long lost reasons from over a million years ago that are still kicking around. I had a whole list of weird mutants and at the bottom almost as an afterthought, I listed mosquito people. An homage to China Mieville, I guess, or a subconscious means to shooting myself in foot because once Robin (Peryton) heard that option she had to have it.
Oh Pery has a way with names, I actually love this one. Zzazzri  is mosquito-head version of a Luke Skywalker. That is if Luke was a she, lived in a swamp that had the climate of the Mississippi basin around Tennessee, and was the worst hated species in the known universe. Still she comes from an established Plastic-Cooking plantation, complete with blood slaves and not too many robotic plastoids, family in the Big Swamps, and wants to see the bigger world.

We roleplayed out a starting scenario. Tequila got to survive a dirigible crash but at the cost of losing precious cargo. The cargo was being transported from the Dome-Gnome abodes of Dome Home back to his homeland of Worlock in the High Valley. Zzazzri got her swamp person on and established the Skeezer accent-- it sounds like Star Trek Discovery "Klingon" (We call them Space-Prunes) which means speaking behind a bad make-up mask. There was some gritty blood-thirsty related violence occurring between the PCs (Robin CRIT-Failed an SR) but they got over it quickly. Now it's time to find the lost manifest.

Gonzop is a place where six months out of the year is March in the American Midwest, three months August, with a February period thrown in for the rest. While an ice age has covered up the worst of the Anthropocene, the bits of it are not too far from the surface. Technology is advanced, but the species of humanity, because they all are humans (humans that often eat those not of their direct species), are only a few thousand years out of that ice age. On top of that other species are starting to gain sentience as well.

Are the variant off-spring of humanity the wave of the future or echos or a species family about to go extinct? I have no idea. I doubt the campaign will come close to answering that. I just wrote the sentence to spice up my concluding paragraph. But this setting is going to rock.

A World A Week: the Islands of Stragea

 

 This setting is nothing new, just refined and still cool. So on the world of Elder, about ten days travel, eastward, with favorable winds, from Athebes, are the islands that make up Stragea. Made up of thousands of islands, with sixteen of them being very large. They are a mixture of a group of oceanic islands and corral islands thrown together. Marine biology aide, it they occur in a spot of the world that has been rather hard to get to by the humans of the Marshoom and Akog continental conglomeration over the last three millennia so here be the odd stuff for fantasy roleplaying.

Now like many a GM/Author, I have been working aquatic adventures for a time now. Unlike most, my little housebrew of rules work awesomely. I have been working on this stuff for a while now. Meanwhile in other scenarios I have been working on scenarios dealing with other atypical environments for the average FRPG-minded adventure gamer tabletop. That means places like aerial spots, high mountain, active volcanoes, and swamps. I suppose, I have covered cliffs, ravines, and beaches in what I think of as my "Gravity Salad" pieces (ask my T&T crew about those). Overall,  I love PC discomfort. 

In case you, seated reader, haven't noticed, I also like species. Kindred, races, costume-suggestions, or what has one, I dig the non-human sentient beings. As more of a fan of Larry Niven than Tolkien, my folks are fitted into these differing sorts of environments. I like to think that once again, I really enjoy PC discomfort. When it comes to Stragea, I move from my other love of just putting weird heads atop human bodies to going.. well, just alien. Giant squids that can walk on land and like to make themselves look as humanoid as possible because, they want to fit in. I won't even go into my fantasy kin tribute to tuna fish; the fishes not the canned meat. At the same time, there are plenty of aerial and treetop dwelling creatures that can use some coverage in fantasy adventure works as well.

From the Middle then Up-and-Down-wards.

The Otgan- Okay, otter-people. Why try harder when you're hit perfection?  Seafaring humanoids that are equipped to live in water. From temperate to warm waters they travel in tribes and to places where the fishing is easier for them it is than sharks.

The Kuda- These barracuda-styled humanoids only come to bother surface and surface-breaking peoples when they are forced to. When they do though, they are something to be feared. The basis for my Kodoan spacefaring species.

Muckra- Incorporeal intelligence that can assume forms made out of swamp muck to fight against or adventure with humanoids.

Gremlins- Semi-corporeal beings that resemble goblins when young and then turn moth-man style entities when mature. They enslave harpies and other flying species using their telepathic powers.

So while the Islands of Stragae evolved into the perfect underwater scenario over the years, they have resumed being my Petri dish of all sorts of things. I don't want to go too much into detail here as this world is this close to publication and usual creator paranoia creeps in, but the various bits have been published before in my works as well as others where I am credited.