Meet My Special Little Snowflake

This is Senator Throx.
He is a Rodian--that's a Greedo to you (and to me 2 days ago before I looked up "Rodian" on Wookiepedia).

He has some cyborg parts coming out of his face because...because when you're making a Star Wars guy you want to somehow take advantage of the fact it's Star Wars but then if you're like me, on the other hand you don't just want more of the exact same Star Wars.

He represents Barhok, a planet Jez invented where mind-controlling Serpent Queens eternally fuck with each other.

(Jez's best planets are just their own thing, really, no more Star Wars than Dune or any other "Imperial" sci fi. But saying "it's Star Wars" provides a very quick and easy backdrop-download. Even if we never run into anything unique to the movies.)

How you end up as a Senator from a completely nondemocratic planet I don't even know but me and Jez decided he's like playing a double game: pretending to loyally represent the serpent queens to the Empire and vice versa but secretly loyal to neither and working for the Rebellion.

And I haven't played session one yet.

Hell he doesn't even have stats yet.

I have mixed feelings about Senator Throx, he's got a lot of shit going on and he could yet be dead mere hours in. A little wad of wasted plot. Plus he'll be fighting for attention with various hammerheads, walrusmen, murder robos and whatever other cantina of freaks everyone brings to the table. Trying not to get attached. But I like him already.

Such are the risks we take, I suppose. If I didn't care it'd be less fun.

Alan Moore's Superhero Warbox

Not everything called Twilight is all sparkly. One of the things called Twilight was a never-used pitch by Alan Moore for a war-of-the-superheroes comic.

If you have not read it and take nothing away from this blog entry other than that you should and can read it, then the sun has not set on this day without me having done a good deed.

As Moore says in the proposal:

"This central idea... that of a war and all its spectacular ramifications, makes it ideal material for a role playing game... perhaps the ultimate superhero role playing game. "

Now thems sound like bloggin' words to me.

I am not going to do up a whole thing like I did with the similarly contorted and sandboxable factional narrative in The Wire because:

1. I think it takes much less work to see how you could turn Moore's outline/proposal into an RPG set-up than a whole TV show with a plot and all, and

2. I prefer to leave it kinda generic so that I can later lift the skeleton into another genre or campaign if necessary

3. What am I, made of time?

Though that would be cool and I'd be all made of living sand like the Time Trapper...but I digress

So what I've done here is:

-Made a quick visual guide to who is where in the US... (assuming the Titans are in their Bay Area Tower rather than their NYC one just to spread things out)

-outlined Moore's plot events in order (that is: how things would go if the PCs didn't interfere), and

-added some notes on the bottom for changing the superheroes to other settings.

None of this will make sense if you haven't read Moore's original thing, but if you have and want to lift the set-up, this stuff might help you keep it all straight in your head.

Click on the pic to enlarge...

That little purple arrow is a note that Sinestro is on the moon with the Green Lanterns but my computer screwed it up. It's just a note so I figure no biggie.

Events (in order):

First two hooks:

1. Superboy to marry Mary Marvel (people worry)
2. Locked-door mystery in the ghetto

Contingent on event 1:

3. House of Titans and House of Justice and House of Secrets consider alliance
4. Blackhawk recruiting more Blackhawks for apocalyptic scheme
5. Constantine contacting every faction
6. Constantine pulls the lighter trick with Manhunter/Marvel

(Somewhere around here: Constantine acquires Moebius chair & melts down Gold)
7. Houses of Titans, Justice & Secrets attack Steel & Thunder at wedding

Contingent on event 7:

8. Aliens invade
9. Capt Marvel revealed to be Manhunter (Contingent on events in game)
10. Constantine arrives w/humans in gold armor
11. Constantine tells aliens the weaponers of Qward are showing up on the aliens' home planets

NOTES:

-Converting most superheroes to post-apoc mutants for RIFTS or Gamma World is trivial. D&D takes a little more work, but not much...

-House of Thunder: these can be lightning wizards or Thor types. Mr Tawky Tawny can be a Rakshasa, Mr Mind an evil psyworm. Same deal in a post apocalyptic setting.

-Superman etc are harder: he is kind of a crappy out-of-scale concept in a D&D context. Just some heavy Paladin? Man of Steel?

-Everyone in the House of Secrets has an obvious D&D version, they're wizards and demons and whatever.

-Green Lanterns=space magic=Lovecraftian cult?

-Moore's remaining Titans have a bird motif (Nightwing, Raven, Hawk). Maybe they are bird people. Cyborg is half golem, Changeling/Chimera fits right in.

-Joker is an evil jester/clown, Luthor and Sivana are crazy wizards, Catwoman is, y'know, a catwoman, Grodd is just a smart ape or monkey. The villains are really easy to D&Dify, let's move on...

-Blue Beetle=a bug guy, Captain Atom is a hideous mutating freak(?), the Flash is a quickling. The rest of the House of Justice is trivial to convert.

-The House of Tomorrow is cool, a bunch of time wizards with time-clones of themselves hanging around.

-The barrio can be Vornheim (House of Steel its ruling class?) or any Lankhmar rip-off. Constantine is a wizard, duh, Phantom Lady is an ex-spy, Doll Man is pretty much as-is only a curse victim rather than ex-shrinkhero, Uncle Sam is tough to translate--insane cleric?, Blackhawk is a kenku, Plasticman is a changeling, Congorilla another intelligent monkey, Black Canary an opera singer, Adam Strange a dimension-hoppping wizard, Batman is a vampire. The rest are trivial to convert.

-The House of Mystery (wizards) doesn't do much in Moore's story. They could easily be the PCs or their patrons if need be.

"This Is How A Hippie Turns Into An Awesome Hobo"

...that's Connie's analysis of this illustration from Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.

Watch me fidget a lot

Interview about game stuff.

Also: Trigger warning, brief discussions of necrobestiality and related topics as well as a great deal of me going "It's like, y'know...".

Tentacle Pterodactyl Mushroom George Medusa etc

They were in a mushroom place and then pterodactyls attacked and killed some halflings and then tentacles came out of the halflings because of radiation or something and then the tentacles attacked the pterodactyls.

Frankie decided, I guess, that this game moment had what they call in the business "compelling visual potential" she drew it while we played.

Then they found this place...

This here druid of Stoya's came a save-or-die away from death. Nice and tense.

Her wolf's name is George? Was George? Can't remember: long Comic Con weekend plus a week of intensive leisure is doing things to my long-term memory.

This is what they got so far...

Orientation

At Comic Con.

Woke up with dog bites, cheesecake smeared across the north wall and three strippers in the bathtub. Can't find my watch.

Anyway:

Over on the right under "Greatest Hits" I added a link called "Orientation", since a lot of desperately confused people have recently been linked to this blog.

That is all.


_

Cobalt Reach Player's Map So Far + Image Dump

This is the Cobalt Reach players' map so far. They are traveling east to west.
This is me scrubbing my hard drive.

Pretty Pretty Lumps of Tin/Lead Alloy

I don't collect miniatures but I do kinda accumulate them. Especially since Reaper drove a dumptruck full of them up to our house so we could use them in the TV show.

Anyway, I find a good mini really helpful for thinking up adventure seeds. Even ones I don't own.

Some of Rackham Miniature's human and elf stuff is too swirly tribal-tattooey for me, but a lot of it-especially the goblin stuff--is just kinda perfect. All these guys are somewhere in Cobalt Reach or Gaxen Kane...


That guy's pretty neat, swirljob aside. And this Madball/towergolem thing is wonderful...

Meanwhile, in fake Hungary, I got a vampire war I gotta throw together...

"Valued customers, Gamezone apologizes for being too busy blowing your mind with awesome Albrecht-Durer-esque equestrian miniatures to think up a decent name for our company"

Fuck yeah warboar.

Monsieur Ultraforge Plague Demon is giving me some wonderful ideas about radiation poisoning.
This thing is insanely expensive but hey lets look at it anyway:

The ones below are from the Old School fetishists at Otherworld. Their humanoids tend to be too stiff for my taste but some of their beasts have a stubby, Kirbylike vitality to them--I love how the one frog's tongue is all sticking out.


The same goes for inscrutable French radbongfun merchants at Fenryll: they make goofy people, but awesome monsters.

COME HERE I HAVE TO GIVE YOU THE WORST HUG!

This guy below's for something called Kobolds Ate My Baby. The size and diversity of D&D-related fandom is evidenced by the fact that I have no fucking clue what that fucking is. I do want to kill some PCs with whatever it is, however.Enigma has some pretty impressively sculpted minis--mostly in a kind of tattery gothic style.



These freaks are from Ammon...


Aaaaand some relatively new releases from Reaper...
(You can tell they're sneaking because their ears are down.)

One of the nicest Jabberwocks I've ever seen. Kinda Fin Fang Foomish...
Evil Dr Fate ...

"What do you mean my weapon is useless for both piercing and slashing?"

This rockfist guy looks like he has spiky kung fu...
Interesting how cleanly Wayne Reynolds' style translates to three dimensions...
"Are we sure we want to do bad things?"

(in unison) "Yyyyeeessssss!"

This guy reminded me of Dwarfland...