A few unrelated updates

A few quick updates that are all completely unrelated to each other. First, I've completely finished my review of the Dark Fantasy X ruleset document and ensured that it was completely de-OGLed and de-SRDed. Honestly, there was very little that I changed to accommodate that need; a few word changes that were more about having an abundance of caution than actual need, to be honest. I did, however, use it as an opportunity to re-edit, clean-up and fix a number of errors, mostly small. I also got rid of the Hardcore Mode stuff, since I'll never use it, and got rid of my original magic rules, replacing them with what had been the alternate system. I've uploaded the new versions to my Google Drive, but I'll probably have one more pass after a few days, and see if I missed any more errors before I print it and stick it in my report covers. Once I do that, I'll consider it a finished product and will look to other things to spend my time on. Quite honestly, I've tinkered with the thing too long as it is.

Secondly, I've noticed that my views have dropped precipitously recently. A couple of months ago, I'd have posts that had hundreds of views, over a thousand even in some cases. More recently, I'm lucky if I get more than 20-30 views per post. Now, I don't care about this; I'm doing this blog more as a personal hobby stream-of-conscious journal for my own benefit than for anyone else, but it is a curious fact nonetheless. It's possible that someone removed my link from their blog roll that was driving a lot of the traffic, and it's also possible that I've somehow come to the attention of some SJW or AI at Google that is deprioritizing my blog in search results. Like I said, I don't particularly care and I'm not going to do anything to chase views, or anything like that, but it is curious nonetheless, and I'm not sure what it means.

Thirdly, as I've started to get serious about reading again, I'm mostly turning to older books in my collection that I haven't read in a long time. I'm in the middle of The Halfling Gem by R. A. Salvatore; the third in the Icewind Dale Trilogy (not a very good name for it, actually, since really only the first book takes place in Icewind Dale). When I was laid off but had managed to secure plenty of interviews and offers and wasn't feeling very stressed and had more free time, I read the first two. After starting work, hitting the holidays, and my daughter's wedding, I was really busy, so I hadn't picked it up in a good six weeks, or maybe even two months. I've now picked it back up again and am determined to finish it by week's end. It's only 315 or so pages, and I'm already on page 80 or so after picking it back up (and mostly re-reading whatever sections I had read, since my bookmark fell out somewhere in there too.) These R. A. Salvatore novels are in some ways better than I remembered, but in some ways less so. I've long had a complicated relationship with D&D fiction, and this current re-read after many years is doing little to uncomplicate it. 

I started reading these again in part because I also bought an omnibus of the prequel Dark Elf trilogy a number of months ago that I'll want to read too. I have it off my shelf and on my little reading table, along with a decent-sized pile of other older books. Most of those I've read before, but not in a very long time. Also included are a new copy of The Lord of the Rings that my daughter bought me, a really nice copy of Dracula (again, that my daughter bought me), the original Riftwar books by Raymond Feist (in the originally published format, not the "director's cut" that's been released more recently in newer printings. The editor actually improved the product, in my opinion, so I'm glad to have been able to track down copies to replace my own missing ones here.) Anyway, there's more, but I'm trying not to let the pile get out of hand; I don't need to keep pulling stuff off my shelf and putting it on the reading table when I can just read what's on the table and get stuff down off the shelf later as needed. 

One little series I'd like to put on the table are the Callisto books by Lin Carter. Carter isn't a great writer; he's more famous as an editor. However, he wrote a bunch of stuff, most of it unabashed pastiche of something better and more famous; he has series that blatantly rip of Lovecraft, Tarzan, Conan, Barsoom, Pellucidar, and more. (He was clearly a big Edgar Rice Burroughs fan.) Callisto is one of his Barsoom rip-offs and as Barsoom rip-offs go, it's probably one of the better ones. For whatever that's worth; sadly, Barsoom rip-offs aren't usually very good, and I've read very few that are even a fraction of the value of the Barsoom stories themselves. Even Burroughs' own attempts to recreate the Barsoom vibe were pretty poor compared to the original, in spite of some fun ideas here and there on Venus, the Moon, and beyond the farthest star. 

Probably one of the reasons I've thought of that is because while looking at my 5x5 material, of course I'm constantly reminded that MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES takes its title format from one of the Callisto novels, Mind Wizards of Callisto. I've only read the first three Calliso books, and Mind Wizards is the fifth, so all that I know about it is based on scanty summaries I've seen here and there. My own work won't borrow anything from it, since I know nothing about it, except for the label of Mind Wizards itself. My actual inspiration for what a Mind Wizard is is also blatantly ripped off, but from another source. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, it comes from Cathulo, of Robert E. Howard's Skull-face. There are eight books in total in the Callisto series, with (according to the executor of Carter's estate) an additional seven planned volumes that had at least working titles. Sometimes these pulpy titles are inspiration enough in their own right, as the Mind Wizards example shows. So, for the heckuvit, here's the full list of books—the first eight were published and the remaining seven were never even written, as near as I can tell.

1. Jandar of Callisto (1972)
2. Black Legion of Callisto (1972)
3. Sky Pirates of Callisto (1973)
4. Mad Empress of Callisto (1975)
5. Mind Wizards of Callisto (1975)
6. Lankar of Callisto (1975)
7. Ylana of Callisto (1977)
8. Renegade of Callisto (1978)
9. Sword-Master of Callisto
10. Xara of Callisto
11. Warrior Girl of Callisto
12. Ice Kingdom of Callisto
13. Kaldar of Callisto
14. Lost Prince of Callisto
15. Zamara of Callisto

I already like a lot of those concepts; I can see myself doing something with a Black Legion, a Renegade, a Sword-Master, an Ice Kingdom and a Lost Prince in Dark Fantasy X without thinking too hard about it already. I even have a Warrior Girl iconic character. Which brings me to...

My fourth unrelated update is that I've spent a fair bit of time working on iconic characters for Dark Fantasy X. The iconics were an idea that I hadn't ever seen before until the release of 3e. They represented the artwork and names in the PHB that were iconic (of course) for the classes and races (many characters doing double duty there, of course.) Artwork throughout the entire run of 3e and 3.5 often used these same characters, as did many of the little italic fiction vignettes that were a few paragraphs long that started many chapters in subsequent game books. On top of that, these iconics even got their own tie-in novels, although I don't believe that they are considered very memorable or good. Still... they did exist, which is something. Paizo also came up with a series of iconic characters, mostly for illustration purposes, back when they had the Dungeon and Dragon Magazines under their belt. When they split from WotC and started the Golarion adventure paths, they came up with all new iconic characters, which they still use. These were not only used for illustrations and vignettes, but they also had pretty extensive backstories written for them, and they were also included in many of the earlier adventures as pre-generated characters that you could play with. I'm not aware of them appearing in any novels (although it wouldn't surprise me to find that they did) but I do know that they appear as characters in the radio plays of the adventure paths.

I came up with iconic characters just because I thought it was cool to have them and have recurring characters that I could refer to if I never needed any. (Curiously, the characters from my examples of play in the game itself are not these iconic characters. Oh, well.) They'll work well as possible fiction characters if I ever get off my butt and write any of the fiction I've been wanting to do for years. I also find them useful for the 5x5 episode, so I'm glad that I went to the trouble of creating them. See, it's really a 5x6, because I do the equivalent of a whole column devoted to character specific plot hooks. I've actually come up with most of the work for this column, and I'll be posting it later today or tomorrow. But I've decided that because I have plenty of iconic characters, I'm going to have a different 4-PC group for each of the three 5x5s. The CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER group is done, and is probably the most iconic, of first among equals, maybe. For each character, I'll have a bit of backstory and context, a Hero Forge image, and an iconic nemesis, mentor, or other important plot-hook-like NPC associated with them, as well as a plot hook. This plot hook will be pretty high level, and it may be a while before I figure out exactly how it would play out. 

Of course, I don't intend to insist that anyone else play my iconic characters, so they're given more or example purposes rather than to offer material that I'd actually use. But look for that to show up very soon. Still, I expect mine to have a bit more depth than the Pathfinder ones, since there are actually hooks associated with each that will force character development moments. The Paizo characters actually got a fiction treatment in the form of the radio plays, but they were still pretty shallow because nothing about the plots was related in any form to the actual characters themselves. 

Fifthly, Clown World proceeds apace. While loads of people in the D&D sphere are running around saying that the developers and designers at WotC are good people, and it's the "suits" who are responsible for the OGL change, this is nonsense. I've seen the twitter feeds of most of those designers and developers. They are spiteful, hateful, toxic, woke people with very few exceptions (Jeremy Crawford, for instance, actually seems to have a professional twitter feed, and only occasionally mentions off-hand when it's actually relevant that he's gay.) Also, I notice that even in WotC's "backpedal" not only do they not retract the "hateful speech" clause—which everyone who's not a woke zombie already knows means that anything white, traditional, or normal will be harassed and deplatformed—but they've doubled down on it. And I also notice that Paizo already has a similar clause in their own "open" license, and while I don't know (yet) of any case where Paizo has disallowed any product, it's clear that that's a sword of Damocles for anything that isn't in lockstep with their SJW death cult. Long before the OGL crap hit the fan, I was already seriously over both Paizo and WotC for their delusional, offensive, anti-white hatred and SJW dogma. They are terrible, evil people, and not just in a generic sense; they have literally declared that normalcy is their enemy and they want to do whatever they can to eliminate it and anyone who practices it. (As an aside, "Linda Codega", the "woman" who wrote these i09 and Gizmodo articles, is actually a delusional man pretending that if he only believes it hard enough, he can be a woman, or at least force everyone else to treat him like one. His twitter feed is full of hate, spite, anger, and paranoid delusions about normal people.

These people are not your friends. Maybe (and that's dubious, honestly) they've got your back on the OGL issue, including Paizo, Kobold Press, even certain employees of WotC, including whomever it is that's leaking this stuff to the media. But the scorpion does not change its nature, and it is not fitting or prudent that normal people should play the role of the frog, allow the scorpion on your back, and make yourself vulnerable to them while crossing the river. For those who are happy to dash immediately over to the ORC license and start playing Pathfinder in place of D&D, you might want to think about doing something else entirely.

Personally, I've been frustrated with both WotC and Paizo for years. I only ever looked at the Pathfinder game on their PRD, and I only bought the books that I bought for 1) the monster art, mostly, and 2) reading the adventure paths to loot and plunder any good ideas out of them. The same with any of the 4e and 5e products that I've acquired or read, often from the public library or on Scribd so I didn't have to buy them. I haven't played any version of any of these games since 3.5, and frankly, I was irritated with 3.5 by the time I was done. 

Go your own way. Don't rely on any license. Don't rely on any grace that they "grant" to you, which they can (and have shown that they will) rescind as soon as it is no longer convenient for them. Don't build a livelihood on expecting it to be there. It's a foundation of sand. The essence of the hobby has always been DIY anyway. Gary Gygax famously said, "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." Whether he really said this or not, and in what context he did so, I don't know. But the sentiment is correct nonetheless. Not that you don't need rules to play the game, which a lot of midwits seem to think that means, but that you don't need TSR to publish official rules to play the game; creative Gamemasters can do all of this on their own, and they can do it better than some corporation. If it was true when Gary was at TSR, it's even more true when we're talking about the bloated mess of rules that's come out of Paizo and WotC, and the complete change into SJW dystopian fantasy that they're trying to promote, from traditional Eurocentric fantasy that Gary made the game famous on. 

I've gone completely DIY for a long time, and although I started off using the OGL as a courtesy and a "just in case" I don't need to and I no longer do; especially since I'm not publishing my game anyway, it's just sitting out there in my personal Google Drive as a homebrew project. I know plenty of people will not want to do that, but there are so many options for how to play already, and so many things you can find in print or make up yourself, that you literally don't need anyone to ever publish anything ever again and you'd still have a lifetime of gaming material to use. And, again, whether or not Gary actually ever said that, that's certainly a "secret" that WotC isn't going to popularize anytime soon. Quite the opposite. 

Sixthly, although I've run plenty of games before without having this stuff, my "elite" GM's kit is about done. Oh, I'll keep tinkering with it as I acquire bits of pieces of stuff over time, but I've got more than I need—or at least I will when my final delivery of something that I've wanted for a while comes in tomorrow sometime. The full kit includes:

• A vintage canvas backpack large enough to carry all my stuff. Keep in mind that I don't play with a battlemat or minis, although I do still have a battlemat and a number of minis tucked away somewhere here in the house. But I've moved on from a paradigm where I'd ever use them again.
• A homemade dice tray, using a shadowbox I bought at Michael's, some pleather, some Minwax wood stain and some runes created with a sharp-tipped roller ink pen. Because the shadowbox was a very soft wood like balsa or something like that, I didn't have to to anything but press down while writing them and the runes came off great.
• A whole ton of dice. Seriously; probably fifty sets, in several bags. I actually have one more set arriving tomorrow too, but I've got way more dice than I should ever need. I even have a bunch of sets of metal dice, which is why I needed a dice tray. Don't want to damage my kitchen table!
• A fancy dice cup to roll with, made of solid wood bound with brass. 
• My pirate coins to use as Heroism Point tokens.
• A whole bunch of cool leather-bound journals to keep notes in. I even bought these cute little buggers to give one to each of my players to take notes in, although I'd keep the journals with my gaming stuff myself. I have bigger nicer ones for myself, including two that I bought at Spirit Halloween that are actually D&D branded journals. I know, I know... I haven't played actual D&D in years, and I'm not happy with the brand right now. But I still recognize the place that older D&D has in the hobby overall even so.
• This cool GM screen. I will need, however, to create inner panels with exactly the material I want to be able to look at on it. I spent some time this afternoon digging up my older homemade GM screen from years ago (just laminated cardstock with nice printouts, and taped together with clear packing tape. This new one is much nicer.)
• I actually need to buy this to be complete. I do have some portable options, but they are either too big and too entrenched in my set-up on my computer desk for me to want to move them, or they're older and not blue tooth enabled. It's pretty cheap; I should just pull the trigger already and buy it. Although I've mentioned it before, I should probably do a more dedicated post to music and the gaming session, and my favored philosophy. There's a lot of ideas that folks have out there, and I've got my philosophy too. I'll talk about pros and cons and why I settled on how I prefer to do things. In any case, I mostly run at my house, where having a portable speaker isn't as important anyway; I actually put my music on the stereo and let it play. But a blue tooth speaker near the table and my phone as a remote would be even better.
• Of course, I've got plenty of pens and pencils, but how cool would it be to have some really nice pencils in a nice pencil case for writing notes and stuff?
• I always want more dice, but I won't link to the sets on my Amazon wishlist, and I wouldn't mind buying another dice cup option just for the heckuvit, or if I wanted to let everyone at the table have their own cup.
• Something topical to drink out of? Is that too much? I haven't bought this yet, but one of these days I will...
• I don't have these yet because I just found them today, and they wouldn't be part of my kit anyway, because I'd wear them, not bring them in my bag, but did you know you can get Amazon brand t-shirts that have the actual Larry Elmore Basic and Expert covers from the BECMI set on them? Professor Dungeon Master may like to run with a button down shirt, tie, and tweed vest or jacket (although I suspect that that's his "costume" for his videos, not for his games) but I'd love to run the game wearing a t-shirt with shirts that have two of the most iconic D&D images on them. I'd love the vintage AD&D players handbook cover too, but it's monotone orange and black rather than full color, and frankly, I have more nostalgia for the Larry Elmore BECMI covers anyway. Which is weird; I've never played that edition. But seeing those boxes in the hobby store in the 80s—nothing screams D&D more to me. Sadly, they only have Basic and Expert. I'd have loved to at least get Companion too. That was always my favorite cover of the set.

Star Wars and Planetary Romance

Planetary romance, or sword & planet as it was also called in the 60s, is—arguably—the original subgenre of science fiction. The trail was blazed in terms of what planetary romance was by the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the original "pulp era" there were a number of successful series here; ERB also wrote a Carson Napier of Venus series, for instance, and later one that took place on the Moon. Otis Adelbert Kline wrote a number of series taking place on the Moon, one on Venus and one on Mars. Other writers dabbled here too, but those are the ones that seem most remembered from the original run. Curiously, probably the best known of these types of stories comes from another medium; when King Features Syndicates wanted to do a John Carter comic strip, they weren't able to get the rights, so they just "pastiched" it; wrote one of their own that is in the exact same genre and features similar scenes a faire. This is Flash Gordon. 

You'll also notice that the genre fades imperceptibly into traditional space opera. John Carter is transferred to Mars by some kind of mystic process that is never explained. In the Kline Mars and Venus stories, there's some handwavy pseudo-science about telepathic transference of consciousness, or some such. But Carson Napier and Flash Gordon (and later other characters in ERB's Mars books) travel by normal space ship to an exotic planet. They usually then get stuck there, and adventure on the planet, rather than zipping around in space ships between planets—which seems to be the only significant difference between this genre and early space opera, such as the Leigh Brackett or C. L. Moore stories featuring Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith, respectively. There are a lot of other forgotten authors who wrote in this genre; in fact, Brackett and Moore (and early Ray Bradbury) famously were among the frequent contributors to Planet Stories; a pulp magazine that ran from 1939 to 1955 and which specialized in this kind of early space opera that was only a tiny bit removed from planetary romance.

After old fashioned space opera had itself started fading, curiously planetary romance came back into style for a while, and people like Lin Carter and others wrote planetary romance stories in the 60s, immediately preceding George Lucas' own Star Wars early drafts. By this time, the genre was often called sword & planet, but it was deliberately—even almost slavishly—imitative of the earlier wave.

Anyway, while I was running around doing one of the grind chores for tauntaun mounts in SWTOR last night, while my character was traveling across the landscape of Hoth on a speeder to get to the various tauntaun nests and feed fruits to the taunlings in hopes of luring a tauntaun parent to the nest—which isn't a disagreeable task, but which is a bit time-consuming and repetitive—I was considering one of the funniest aspects of Star Wars; the single environment planet. Tatooine is the desert planet, Endor is the forest planet, Hoth is the snow planet, Dagobah is the swamp planet, Alderaan is the mountain planet, Coruscant is the city planet... and so on and so forth. Of course, Star Wars wouldn't really be all that different if instead of being based on early space opera it was based on planetary romance. What if instead of planets, those environments were just regions on a single planet? What if instead of space ships, they had speeders. Han Solo could still have been a smuggler hotshot pilot if the Millennium Falcon was an airship instead of a spaceship. The Death Star could have been a gigantic floating fortress, like a supersized helicarrier from the Winter Soldier movie instead of a space station. There could still have been dogfights and a trench run to destroy it, without them having to go into space.

Now, going into space allows for more varied, exotic and strange landscapes. Or, at least, you can have weird things like the gigantic red disk of Yavin in the sky, and the asteroid dogfight between Jango Fett and Obiwan is unlikely to play out well on a single planet. But other than a few scenes, which could be easily reworked if needs be, Star Wars is really not much different as a planetary romance than as a space opera.

Although, I will own to the fact that it would seem odd for there to be all kinds of weird aliens all over the place on a single planet. But planetary romance is certainly famous for having exotic races of humans with blue skin or red skin or green skin or whatever. Barsoom has the thoroughly alien "green men" of Mars, the mostly human red men of Mars, the white-guys yet bald Holy Therns, the jet-black alien First Born, the lemon-yellow polar men, and of course, there are lost valleys, cities and whatnot with all kinds of weird aliens scattered here and there. It starts to get silly after a while. But Star Wars only throws a handful of aliens in important roles; most of the aliens are just background color. As I'm fond of pointing out, Star Wars as a menagerie of weird aliens is an artifact of later Star Wars; the original Star Wars (the entire original trilogy) is largely the story of people in space. Not just any people, but people who are recognizably normal Americans and British people, in fact. In SWTOR, most of the aliens are just funny colored people, with some contact lenses and a few minor make-up attachments, that an amateur could come up with using supplies from your local Halloween store. Like my most recent alien SWTOR characters, for example.

Kinda emo-looking space biker red-skinned dude

I don't know if it really makes any difference if Star Wars is space opera or planetary romance other than the bigger potential scope of space opera kind of captures the imagination. However, in terms of actual execution, that bigger potential scope is hardly ever actually used. Like I said, the entire Star Wars original trilogy could easily take place on a single planet, or even in a single large country the size of the US. The same is (mostly) true of the prequel trilogy with the exception of the asteroid, as mentioned above. The same is pretty much true of the sequel trilogy too, I think—not that anyone cares one way or another about that. And the same is true of the Mandalorian. The Book of Boba Fett not only could take place on a single planet, but it actually does. (So far. With the caveat that I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet.) This opens up some interesting possibilities when it comes to treating these stories slightly differently, and giving them a more grounded, down-to-earth (literally, in this case) feel that space opera doesn't always have.

Anyway, just some musing while I've been going about a relatively relaxed set of crafting and selling and gathering and stuff; all less stressful and low-key stuff that I've been spending a fair bit of my SWTOR time engaged in lately. (I've also been attempting to level up my reputation on a few factions. And next week, I'll need to be at least a little bit engaged in gathering rakghoul cannisters so I can spend them on new crystals.) Other than that, I'll be slowly creating my new characters over the next couple of weeks or so, for my recordings, but I'll also be slowly moving them forward. Including a replacement Jedi Sentinel that will replace the terrible quality videos that I have for Taul Kajak. Ugh. I'm frustrated that that didn't work out very well, and it sucks to have to do it again. But there's worse things.

As an aside, I'm considering switching two of my characters' races. I think maybe a Darth Maul style zabrak as a Jedi Knight and an Imperial Agent as a Mirialan might sound more compelling than the other way around. In fact, I'm thinking of not only making him look like Darth Maul, but dressing like a Sith Lord and using red lightsabers. I think it'd be a little amusing to have a visual Sith playing as a Jedi. 

Red vs Blue science fiction

I found the following nugget on Tumblr while looking at some images.  This perfectly encapsulates why science fiction, which had been tremendously popular with mainstream audiences, suddenly became a nerdy ghetto in the 50s and 60s.  I'm not sure exactly who to pin the blame on, Asimov, Campbell, or someone else, but most likely it was beyond the means of any one person anyway.  L. Sprague de Camp is exactly the kind of person who emerged in the "blue" science fiction movement, who tut-tutted the popular red science fiction, and therefore is at the very least a highly visible symptom of the problem.

If you’re a fan of John Carter of Mars, you should read L. Sprague de Camp’s very humorous take on the world, Sir Harold of Zodanga. It shows what a “scientifically accurate” Barsoom would really be like (also, read his Planet Krishna books, which are humorous spoofs of Barsoom too - de Camp had a wonderful sense of humor).  

It may actually have my favorite characterization of John Carter of Mars, who was always just an alpha male man of action hero. In L. Sprague de Camp’s take, John Carter is actually despised, not admired, by the conservative Barsoomian elite and upper classes (with the obvious exception of Dejah Thoris) because of his Yankee notions of equality and egalitarianism, and what’s more, yes, even though John Carter is good at swordfighting, his greatest skill is actually his aptitude as a diplomat and politician, able to make allies out of enemies who had been feuding for generations.  

Okay, sure, he makes John Carter a blowhard who loves to brag about his swordfighting skills (ever notice that the stories where John Carter fights a hundred men in an arena or something tend to be his first person accounts of what happened? Imagine someone told that to you at a bar, would you believe them?) but overall, he was portrayed as a reform minded egalitarian who was a tremendously skilled at diplomacy and peacemaking. 

How exactly anyone at all saw that as more attractive and interesting than Edgar Rice Burroughs himself, I do not understand.  As an aside, do not expect to find de Camp humorous, unless sly, snarky, cowardly, self-congratulatory passive-aggressive insults are funny to you.

Some more, from Infogalactic, which certainly highlights this bitter, butthurt, beta attitude of de Camp, which permeates his work.

De Camp began his education at the Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years attending the Snyder School in North Carolina, a military-style institution. His stay at the Snyder School was an attempt by his parents, who were heavy-handed disciplinarians, to cure him of intellectual arrogance and lack of discipline. He was awkward and thin, an ineffective fighter, and suffered from bullying by his classmates. His experiences at the school taught him to develop a detached, analytical style considered cold by all but his closest friends, though he could, like his father, be disarming and funny in social situations. He would later recall these challenging childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical story, Judgment Day (1955).

Sigh.  Never-healed scars mar his work decades later.  That intellectual arrogance was never cured, although maybe the lack of discipline was.

De Camp was a materialist who wrote works examining society, history, technology and myth. He published numerous short stories, novels, non-fiction works and poems during his long career. 

De Camp had the mind of an educator, and a common theme in many of his works is a corrective impulse regarding similar previous works by other authors. A highly rational and logical thinker, he was frequently disturbed by what he regarded as logical lapses and absurdities in others' writings. Some, like Asimov, felt de Camp's conscientiousness about facts limited the scope of his stories; de Camp was reluctant to use technological or scientific concepts (i.e., hyperspace or faster-than-light travel) if he did not think them possible. Thus, his response to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was to write a similar time travel novel (Lest Darkness Fall) in which the method of time travel was rationalized and the hero's technical expertise both set at a believable level and constrained by the technological limitations of the age. 

In like fashion, he reimagined space opera and planetary romance in his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, and the prehistoric precursor civilizations characteristic of much heroic fantasy in his "Pusadian series". When he was not debunking literary conventions he was often explaining them. For example, in the "Harold Shea" stories co-written with his longtime friend Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956), the magical premises of some bodies of myths and legends were accepted but examined and elucidated in terms of their own systems of inherent logic. The imaginative civilizations in The Compleat Enchanter, for example, are built upon a cultural and technological reality based on scientific formulas. Characters may be transported to these different worlds, but the magic contained within those worlds is only feasible to the extent that it coincides with the technology of the day (i.e., the combustion engine). De Camp's explanatory tendency also carried over into his non-fictional writings, including advice to science fiction writers on handling the different states of languages in future worlds.

Again; I struggle to find how anyone who isn't a bitter, butthurt beta would ever find those premises more interesting than the works that he's "correcting."

Throwaway line

A chapter ending from Almuric; Robert E. Howard's foray into Barsoom pastiche:

"And so began my third captivity on Almuric, in the black citadel of Yugga, on the rock Yuthla, by the river of Yogh, in the land of Yagg."

I don't know why, but that list of outlandish, kind of Lovecraftian sounding names, just really hits the spot for me.

Michael Whelan's Barsoom covers

I mean, he's no Frank Frazetta.  On the other hand, he did a better job than Frazetta did of actually following the descriptions in the books.  He just didn't make them nearly as exciting.  But Michael Whelan is a highly regarded and prolific book cover artist in his own right, who's done a ton of covers that are highly recognizable and should be.

In order: A Princess of Mars (1912)

The Gods of Mars (1913)

The Warlord of Mars (1914)

Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916)

The Chessmen of Mars (1922)

Master Mind of Mars (1927)

A Fighting Man of Mars (1930)

Swords of Mars (1935)

Synthetic Men of Mars (1939)

Llana of Gathol (1941)

John Carter of Mars (combines novellas John Carter and the Giant of Mars (1941), attributed to ERB's son, and Skeleton Men of Jupiter (1943)

D&D S&P

Glancing at my stats, I see that an old post of mine about using D&D to play sword & planet has had a strange spike in views.  Let's revisit this concept somewhat, and maybe even create a D&D S&P tag to explore it as an alternate setting.   Here's a few of my past posts to review, before we start (I just read them.  You can, although of course if you don't, that's fine too.)

• Using D&D for planetary romance
• Planetary Romance
• John Carter of Mars

Maybe that last one is a bit superfluous.  The real stuff is especially in the first one; what if you wanted to use D&D elements, but adapt them to sword and planet (or planetary romance) instead of sword & sorcery?  That post talks a bit about what to change, but I'm going to be just a bit more conservative, and attempt to create planetary romance out of existing D&D elements rather than rewriting them more radically.  This means trawling through D&D races, removing the ones that are fairytale and fantasy races, and seeing if I can specifically focus on ones that are planetary romance-like.  Classes is maybe a bit more difficult, because class variety between editions of D&D is more marked than race differences.  But I'll see what I can do.

"But Mr. Desdichado!" you may be saying.  "Aren't you just going to do what you always do anyway and whip up an m20 game for this, so that the specific classes don't really matter that much?"  Well... probably.  But I'll discuss some classes and their suitability to the game.  For ease of use, this will probably focus on either 3.5 or Pathfinder classes, because I'm more familiar with the former, and the latter are open content and readily available for anyone to read.  Plus, I like the notion of using archetypes to better align them the genre and/or setting.  The same can be said, to some degree, of D&D races; what are the D&D races?  There aren't a ton of choices in 1e or B/X that will really work, but in 3e (and 3.5), and 4e, and 5e and Pathfinder, we get a lot of choices.  And then, of course, there are monster races that are usable as PC races... sorta.  

So, what will I need to specifically post as I develop this series over the next... however long it ends up being?

1. RACES: I'm going to try and focus on the more familiar rather than the more esoteric.  I won't be able to be completely successful at this, I don't think, because I'll have to dig a little bit to get ones that really work.  Either that or I can use the races as is, but rename them.  This would certainly be applicable to m20 races, but given the more detailed mechanical description of D&D races in most editions of D&D, probably not.  The Psionic Handbook races might feature heavily.
2. CLASSES: We'll need a wide variety of swashbuckling action classes, plus some kind of psychic powers or psionic mind-wizard type characters.  Honestly, this may more closely resemble the classes from a d20 Star Wars game than D&D as its normally constituted.
3. MONSTERS: Just a brief discussion on adapting existing monsters and what to look for.  
4. WEAPONS & EQUIPMENT: For the most part, S&P is all about both swords and rayguns, and they both have to coexist comfortably.
5. AN m20 RULESET: Yeah, I'll probably do one.  It'll end up being a hybrid of FANTASY HACK and AD ASTRA, I imagine, so it won't really need a permanent tab.
6. SETTING: If I do all of this and I'm still interested, I may whip up a setting lite.  

All in all, the end result shouldn't be, I don't think, more extensive in nature than the IRON LORDS OF JUPITER campaign from Dungeon 101 Polyhedron 160.  In fact, a collection of posts with about that same level and degree of content is about exactly what I expect as a side-effect in the end.

Given what I've done with ODD D&D and DEMONS IN THE MIST and some other games I've done in the past which also replaced most of the races with less overtly high fantasy D&D races and also replaced magic with psionics (mostly) you may be forgiven for wondering how this will differ from those except in details of setting.  That's... actually a legitimate question, and probably correctly noted; they won't actually differ too much.  Except, of course, that this will be revised into m20 before I'm done, which I did not do with either of those settings.  Those other games were all specifically 3.5 houserules.

Finally: if you're not already familiar with this genre, what should you research?  First off, if you've never read the first three Barsoom books, you absolutely should.  They're free, because they're old enough to be public domain.  A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars all by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Then, if you've got access to it through like your public library or something, watch the first season of the old Filmation Flash Gordon show.  Or maybe the old Buster Crabbe Republic serial.  Get a hold of that issue of Dungeon and read IRON LORDS OF JUPITER or find any DARK SUN material that you can, which is more D&Dish than I'd otherwise recommend; but still with a strong sword & planet "vibe" to it.  Listen to Les Préludes by Franz Liszt.  In a pinch, watch the 80s Flash Gordon with the Queen soundtrack, I guess, or the John Carter movie from a few years ago, although know that neither is really all that good.

Finished Flash Gordon

Well, I finished watching all 16 episodes of the Flash Gordon cartoon.  As much as the ideas were really cool, the implementation of them really wore me down after a while.  The silliness of the dialogue and plot, the over and over again repetitiveness of the animation sequences, just made it start to get painful after a while.  For its era, it's a pretty good show, but the era in which it thrived was one in which being good wasn't really a requirement.  Based on that, I'm going to ditch (or at least postpone) any attempt to watch the Tarzan or Thundarr shows.  I just can't do it anymore, especially so soon after doing Flash Gordon.  Instead, I'll check out the History Channel's Vikings on DVD.

This is not true for adventure cartoons today.  Although my own kids have pretty much moved out of the window where they're looking for cartoons to watch (my youngest is finishing 8th grade) as I went through that with them, I found at least some shows that had high enough quality that I actually enjoyed them quite a bit, and consider them among the more entertaining shows on TV—in spite of the fact that they were animated.  Now, granted, maybe I just happened to have seen the best ones and avoided the rest (in fact, I'm quite sure that this is so—I've seen other stuff going on in the background that my kids watched that was painful.  Although this is mostly the comedy animation as opposed to the action/adventure animation.)

I wonder what has driven this massive shift in quality of animation, quality of screenplay, maturity of themes and characterizations, etc.?  Is it competition with Japanese animation? (Probably plays at least some role.) Is it the change in the market where they at least to some degree are marketing to older audiences, and hoping to get cross-over appeal with sci-fi adult fans and whatnot? Probably also a role here; similar factors have influenced the market for comic books, for example—competition with manga and a shift to writing for older, even adult oftentimes, audiences.

So, of the cartoon shows of the last decade that I've enjoyed enough to recommend at least part of, I think I can maybe scrape up a half dozen or so recommendations, with some caveats.  They focus heavily on superheroes and space opera, which is not surprising since I've just always been a fan of both of those trope-baskets.  Let's go through them real quick:

• The Spectacular Spider-Man.  This is actually probably the best representation of the character as he was originally meant to be seen.  He's a bit nerdy, definitely a teenager, out of his depth, but with a kind of under-dog charisma that makes him a likable character.  The screenplays are tense, the characters have chemistry with each other, the voice-acting is top-notch, the animation is simple yet very effective.  Sadly, the show fell victim to corporate politics; it was licensed to Sony Pictures Television, and broadcast initially on the CW.  Even moving to DisneyXD wasn't enough for Disney after they bought Marvel, though—they wanted in-house created shows, and this got the ax after only two seasons.  The third season was in the works and would almost certainly have been even better than the second one.  Highly recommended.  Only caveat is that I think this is the show that first "blackwashed" Liz Allen from a blonde, blue-eyed girl to a black character.
• Ultimate Spider-man.  The show that Disney came up with to replace Spectacular was this one.  It started off relatively well.  It takes place in a pseudo-Ultimate setting (unsurprisingly) where Spider-man is being mentored by Nick Fury and given some gizmos and gadgets from Shield. It also offers lots of opportunities for crossovers and cameos of various Marvel characters—and Spidey is teamed up officially with Nova, Power-man, White Tiger and Iron Fist, also re-imagined as teenagers here.  I was initially wary, but the first season sold me on it after a while.
  
  Sadly, it has some serious structural issues.  The character of Spider-man himself was grossly distorted and got more and moreso with time; from a wise-cracking guy with a lot of charisma (in spite of being nerdy) Peter became a bratty, entitled, arrogant jerk that became literally painful to watch at times—and it's clear that the writers didn't actually understand that they were doing this.  They thought that Spidey was still likable, funny, and a good interpretation of the classic tropes of the character.  Something is really wrong with those writers.  I wonder how much success in actual social interactions with actual real people they have sometimes.  Recommended with caveats—watch the first season or two, be very, very wary of the third and fourth seasons.  In spite of the fact that it was covering more interesting storylines in the later seasons, I gave up on it because it was simply not fun at all to watch anymore.  The show has just recently been cancelled and a new Spider-man show is slated to replace it, starting this summer.  I don't know if this is because of falling viewership or reactions to this show, or not, but I'm even more wary of this new show than I was of this one when it launched.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.  This, like Spectacular above, was contracted out (to Film Roman) and like that, it was absolutely great.  Revisiting much of the classic Avengers storylines of the past, including sojourns to Asgard, clashes with Dr. Doom, the Skrull infiltration and invasion, and ending with the attack of Galactus on Earth at the end of Season 2, it had, again, a simple yet evocative animation style, great plots, great screenplays, and lots of callbacks for fans of the comic book runs.  Sadly, it also only lasted two seasons, and was replaced with Avengers Assemble which was specifically designed to be more in harmony with the Marvel Cinematic Universe rather than the original Marvel Universe.  And as with Spider-man, it's better than the show that it's replaced with.  But Avengers Assemble at least doesn't actively turn you off, as later Ultimate Spider-man does.
• Avengers Assemble.  I've only seen the first two seasons of this, and they're actually pretty good.  They do some interesting things; Red Skull gets a hold of an Iron Man armor suit, and with it, as Iron Skull, is a credible main villain, who organizes a number of other villains to be a recurring thorn in the side of the Avengers.  There's some chemistry with the characters, as there needs to be on a team ensemble show.  Thanos makes an appearance.  Hyperion plays a significant role, which is kinda fun—and he's later joined by the rest of the Squadron Supreme in the third season.  For whatever reason, I've always been fascinated with alt-Justice Leagues.
  
  Season three just ended, so I'm looking for it to show up on Netflix shortly.  Season four has some worrying signs (anytime Thor-girl makes any appearance for any reason whatsoever, I see that as a major red flag).  I fully expect that this will eventually go the way of Ultimate Spider-man because I think the structural flaws are related to the people in place at Disney.  But as I last saw it, it hadn't done so quite yet.  Recommended.  At least the first two seasons.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  Of all of the cartoons I've watched over the last ten years, this is clearly head and shoulders above any other.  Completely CGI, with graphics that improve as the show goes on, it really feels like exactly the kinds of stories that the old Republic serials would have told—except modernized in terms of technology and graphics.  The plots are good, the characters are good, there's a lot of chemistry between them (for the most part) and it is a significant and substantial addition to the Star Wars canon.  This is the benchmark that all action/adventure sci-fi TV shows should aspire to, whether animated or not.  But because it's animated, it's doable—a think as live-action it would have been way too expensive to ever actually have been made.  There's actually relatively little about it that is kid-focused.  That doesn't mean that it isn't kid-friendly, but that it isn't any more kid-focused than the original Star Wars movies were (in spite of the fact that George Lucas has retroactively said that the show was always aimed at kids, that's very obviously not true.  It later became more focused on kids—to its detriment.  And it was popular with kids, without being aimed specifically at them to the exclusion of adults.)
  
  Still on Netflix, and should be watched by everyone.  Sadly, it also fell victim to corporate politics, although we did end up getting an abbreviated "6th season" with some of what would have come out had the show continued.  Highly, highly recommended.
• Star Wars Rebels.  Although it's largely the same team as Clone Wars, this show has not grabbed me as much.  The animation is arguably better, but there are other problems.  The structure has become much more episodic, which is much less engaging.  We don't have quite the same degree of character chemistry and charisma.  There aren't really any heroes; there's the liberal-feminist earth-mother figure in Hera the twi-lek ship captain, there's the reluctant Jedi with self-esteem issues, which makes him much less admirable and likable as a hero than even Luke or Anakin were.  There's the smart-aleck, arrogant, bratty apprentice who is a lot like the distorted and unlikable version of Peter Parker noted above from Ultimate Spider-man.  All in all, it feels like it's been partly developed by committee, and the committee has a lot more SJWs on it than the team that made Clone Wars.  (Plus, Kathleen Kennedy is a raging feminist-narcissist—a seriously worrying sign for the future of the franchise overall.)  All in all, the decline from Clone Wars to Rebels as well as the disappointing Force Awakens has made me fearful of the direction the Star Wars franchise is headed.  But luckily, there are enough people on the teams that aren't terrible that the decline will be (hopefully) slow and punctuated by moments of brilliance here and there (like Rogue One). Recommended, but not until you've seen all of Clone Wars first, which is far superior.
• Young Justice.  This is what superhero TV shows really should be like.  Absolutely brilliant.  Great animation, great characters, lots of chemistry, a mostly serious attitude, and a great deal of respect for both the audience and the source material.  The only thing that's odd is that it comes in two seasons, and the two seasons are separated by about five years, making for a surprisingly incongruous break.  But the show is quite serious and well-done, with tight screenplays, a lot of chemistry, and very mature themes and concepts (and by "mature" I don't mean "adult", of course.)
  
  This can be seen as a re-imagining of the Teen Titans show, maybe—certainly it's based on the same Wolfman/Perez 80s run of the New Teen Titans comic book where the characters are young (but not high school young) and which competed credibly with the classic X-men run led by John Byrne and Chris Claremont.
  
  That said, although the older Teen Titans show which ran from 2003 to 2006 or so, although not always serious, was a pretty good run too.  Both are highly recommended.

I haven't watched more than an episode or two of Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. which has Hulk and a bunch of other Hulky characters stranded on a space ship and traveling through the galaxy as a kind of superheroic space opera.  You'd think it'd be right up my alley, but I didn't find the characters or their chemistry very engaging, and like I alluded to earlier, I'm not super sold on the really episodic type shows.  It also has a lot of really kind of dumb stuff; I have to think that some committee decided that it needed to be more overtly targeted towards kids rather than making intelligent shows and trusting that kids can keep up, even as older audiences are also entertained.  You'd also think that the Guardians of the Galaxy show would be right up my alley, but I haven't watched it at all.  If they ever put it on Netflix, I'll probably give it a try.

Given that both come out of the same movement that gave us greatly reduced efforts; mediocre shows that replaced good or even great shows, I'm not really expecting too much, though.

Dark•Heritage as... Mongo?!

On a whim, I cast the dice with my nostalgia and got some old cartoons that I used to like as a kid.  Now, sure—I recognize that cartoons are kids' shows, and that was certainly 100% true in the late 70s and early 80s, which means probably trite dialogue, poor plotting, and cardboard characters for the most part.  It also means cheap animation, lots of repeated sequences, etc.  Even before I started this, I didn't have high expectations of the shows that I was planning on revisiting.  What I was hoping to find was that at least the high concept and some of the ideas were worthwhile to mine again... and maybe to find that what I used to like as a little kid wasn't quite as dumb as I was afraid it might turn out to be looking at it now as a grown man of 45 years.  My wife walked up and saw what I was doing, and certainly took a pessimistic approach—that I was certainly wasting my time and setting myself up for disappointment.  However...

I wasn't actually disappointed.  The expectations I had for the animation and plots and whatnot were mostly true.  Repeated sequences got old only five episodes in.  But the story and the setting, and the feel, behind what I was watching was still worth it.

Now granted; it's not like I was watching The Smurfs or something like that.  I'm talking about shows that are topical for this blog.  I identified four that I could potentially try out.  I may not watch all of them, and certainly not every episode for all of them, but I want to at least explore them a bit.

Three of the four shows I identified were by Filmation, and the fourth by Ruby-Spears.  The first one I dived into (five episodes last night) was Flash Gordon, often later retroactively titled The New Adventures of Flash Gordon to distinguish it from other efforts. Originally a season of sixteen episodes broadcast in 1979, this first season was well-received as remarkably faithful to the original Flash Gordon subject matter and the whole planetary romance genre overall, and one of Filmation's best shows.  It was hoped that it could capitalize on post-Star Wars space opera demand, which I think it did quite well.  The second season, on the other hand, was poorly received, as a number of structural and other elements were dictated by committee, who wanted more episodic rather than serial story-telling, and a cute pet side-kick.  I may skip this second season entirely... but I'll probably finish watching the first season before I stop.

Parts of it are really quite remarkable.  Not only is the story and setting very faithful to the whole original Barsoom-rip-off Flash Gordon and Mongo (curiously, when Flash Gordon was created, to compete with the very successful comic strip Buck Rogers, they wanted to buy the rights to John Carter of Mars first, but couldn't get Burroughs to cooperate.  Which explains why they got someone to basically "borrow" the entire concept.)  I've actually had quite a bit of fun just watching the interplay of sword-fighting with robots, dog-fighting in space-ships with giant hawk-riding warriors, slave pits full of degenerate beast-men, Ming's scantily clad harem that makes Leia's slave girl outfit look rather modest, and a band of bald Robin Hood lookalikes who shoot arrows that freeze whatever they hit, flying cities, and for that matter, an entire flying planet that is approaching Earth to screw it over with gravitational weirdness and then conquer it.

The men are quite masculine, and the women are extremely feminine.  In spite of the format and the short time frame, I wasn't rolling my eyes at the idea that Ming's saucy daughter Aura was immediately infatuated with Flash, or that she basically betrayed her father several times to rescue him.  I was amused to see Flash negging Dale Arden by joking that she seemed jealous around Aura, and Dale merely turning up her nose in faux offense, but mostly being mad at Aura, not Flash.

Thun the Lionman king is kind of like Flash's Chewbacca, except with a real Debbie Downer whiny attitude, that Flash counters with a plucky, American can-do saying and a bunch of good luck.  Dr. Hans Zartov is kind of hapless; he is immediately imprisoned and put to work my Ming as a scientist, although he seems to have the run of the palace when he needs to.  Dale is a pretty classic damsel in distress, and it really begs the question why she came along on this trip to begin with (in the classic planetary romance storyline, our hero falls for a local princess usually.)  Ming himself is quite the dastardly fellow, and true to his original incarnation, he has all of the appearances of a Yellow Peril despot, which rings much more true than the politically correct attempts since then to either make him more alien or worse: a white peril.

So... first attempt at exploring this stuff: success.  What's next?  Finish off the first season of Flash, then have a look at Filmation's Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (which aired before Star Wars even came out) and which is also considered one of the most faithful adaptations of its source material, including a lot of the real weirdness of Tarzan: lost cities of jungle Vikings, the Lost Cities of Ivory and Gold respectively, which have a very Opar-like feel, lost cities of knights, a robot duplicate of Tarzan, UFOs, yetis, woolly mammoths, Pellucidar, and more.  Then on to Thundarr the Barbarian, a post-apocalyptic sword & sorcery series that's famous as much as anything for highlighting locations that are obviously famous places that have fallen into disrepair and been occupied by mutants or weird sorcerers or something like that in the meantime.  Meanwhile, a guy who's pretty much Conan the Cimmerian but with a light-saber, a hot sorceress chick sidekick who has the hots for him (but who he friendzones hard) and a fake Chewbacca sidekick ride around on horses across fallen North America saving good old fashioned, melancholy and hapless salt of the earth peasants from the depredations of wizards, pirates, and monsters.  The last show I targeted was Filmation's Blackstar, but I might have a harder time getting my hands on episodes of that show, so it might not end up happening.

(As an aside, you can probably see that since I was eagerly devouring Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and Thundarr the Barbarian at ages 7-9 or so, it's hardly any surprise that I was just as eagerly devouring the actual works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard when I discovered them in the public library at about age 11-12 or so—when I moved pretty much permanently from the upstairs kids section of the library to the downstairs adult science fiction shelves.)

In the meantime, watching Flash Gordon and its intriguing storyline of Mongo approaching Earth (and Flash and Zarkov and Arden all flying in a rocket to somehow stop it from crashing into Earth—not quite sure what they thought they were going to do, but whatever) I think I may well have solved an ongoing problem with my DARK•HERITAGE Mk. V.  I was never completely happy with thinking that my British Dark Ages Crusader states or colonist kingdoms, or whatever you want to call them, transplanted to the New World from the historical Old World—except that the New World was a fantasy analog, not the real thing.  And I wasn't sure exactly how or why there couldn't be continued commerce back and forth from the Old and New Worlds.  But... what if instead of a new continent, they actually literally went to a new planet; one that came flying out of space, threw the moon out of whack and then replaced it and then sat there like a new double planet from then on out?  And what if some kind of bridge, a Bifrost of some kind, were established up in the north near Britain or Scandinavia that connected them?

The chaos, both social and otherwise that this would cause is sufficient reason, I think for the Pope to call a Crusade for any to cross and go deal with the New World and its interruption of their peace—and because of the location and the social events going on in the late 1060s and early 1070s, it explains why I would especially have displaced Anglo-Saxons and Celts and Vikings who made up the majority of this Crusade—and who therefore founded the colonist kingdoms with their own culture and peoples.

And then the Bifrost broke, or otherwise failed.  Two generations after the establishment of Crusader state colonies on the new world, they've emerged as independent (by necessity) since the only contact that they can have with the Old World is to look up at it in the sky and remember that their grandfathers came from there.

I won't get into the super-science of typical planetary romance stories here—if there are any flying ships or rayguns or anything like that, they'll be extremely rare and unique, but it does give me a great excuse for being a little bit more free to be gonzo in what I put out there in DARK•HERITAGE after all, rather than almost alternate history.  That said, my concept of this is that it's a kind of mirror-earth—it has similar geography, for instance, and is otherwise quite similar to the real earth, which explains why they're on the eastern seaboard of a pseudo-North America.

As an aside, my favorite #lolwut moment so far came when Flash Gordon defeated a robot trooper by throwing a big tub of water on it.  Not sure how good these robot troopers will be if a little water causes them to short, spark and basically catch on fire... and I'm also not sure where that tub of water came from—one moment it was nowhere to be seen, the next moment it was in his hands and he was dumping it on the robot to save hawkman king Vultan's life... but it did make me chuckle.

Using D&D for planetary romance

Since Jeffro has pointed out that it might well have been expected in the mi-70s that you use D&D to run games that aren't necessarily a vanilla thud and blunder hybrid of sword & sorcery like game-play in a setting that looked like a vanilla extruded fantasy product high fantasy...  I wonder what using D&D to play sword & planet, or planetary romance would be like.

Clearly, D&D has borrowed a lot from sword & planet stories over the years.  The Dark Sun setting was specifically designed to be similar (in some ways) to Barsoom.  Creatures like the gorillon are quite explicitly the same as Barsoomian white apes.  The Pathfinder setting book Distant Worlds is clearly designed to be the Leigh Brackett solar system, complete with Barsoom-like Mars and Amtor-like Venus, turned into fantasy (it's actually a bit more science fiction and less planetary romance than I expected.)  Other, non-D&D games have explored the territory even more thoroughly; Space: 1889 has a strong planetary romance angle, Hollow Earth Expedition has a Mars add-on that's just like Barsoom (given that normally the setting is just like Pellucidar, it's fair to say that Jeff Combos is a Burroughs fan...)  Lizard wrote what may be the most popular (if my own completely unscientific observations about it and people asking about it online are any guide) of the d20 mini-games in Iron Lords of Jupiter.

White ape of Barsoom?  Or gorillon of D&D?

But what about seriously using D&D to run an unapologetic sword & planet setting; not a sword & sorcery setting with some sword & planet influences?  How would that be done?

I said a few days ago that sword & sorcery and sword & planet are already almost indistinguishable save for the rather arbitrary distinction that the former uses magic, and the latter uses pseudo super science to essentially do the same thing.  This was a rather facile over-simplification, so let's have a look at what is really different, shall we?

1) First off, the races.  While you could conceivably come up with some way to make fantasy races fit into planetary romance (Pathfinder's elven kingdom on Venus actually works pretty well, for instance) you're better off changing them.  The classic sword & planet setting has humans—although of some exotic ethnicity unlike any on earth, usually, and then a bunch of really kind of gonzo non-human races.  The Green Men of Baroom, for instance, are ten feet tall, have chameleon-like eyes, huge porcelain tusks, and four arms.  Lin Carter's Yathoon on Callisto are giant insect people.  Barsoom also has kangaroo-like hopping people, and gigantic head-like spiders that ride headless humanoid bodies as steeds.  Amtor has bird people, fish people. people that grow as buds from plants, and people that reproduce via mitosis, etc.  Look for some really gonzo, unusual races, mix that up with regularish human people with green skin and blue hair or something like that, and your racial selection is good to go.

2) Secondly, classes: A lot of D&D classes (at least in most editions) are related to some kind of magic; either divine or arcane.  While I can imagine a planetary romance that uses magic, normally it does not.  Curiously, psychic (or psionic) powers is not at all out of place; in the first John Carter novel, Burroughs goes on and on about the telepathy that is common on Mars (although it's rather conveniently forgotten and rarely mentioned again later; kind of like midichlorians that way...) and on Callisto, the Mind Wizards are another example of weird psychic mind-readers and mental manipulators.  Some of the more colorful tricks of a psion in D&D are essentially indistinguishable from magic, other than the mechanics and the pseudo-science names attached to the powers.  I think something a bit more toned down than actual wizards is desirable.  Something more like the Jedi would work.

3) Many fantasy stories, even sword & sorcery, don't really emphasize the "pulp aesthetic"—things needs to be gee, gosh, exotic, exciting, over the top: gratuitously exciting in a boy's adventure tale kind of way.  One fascinating feature of planetary romance (actually, Burroughs, who created the genre, did this in most of his other books too) is that just over the next rise or hill, just on the other side of the next sea, or whatever, is always some really bizarre, unguessed, exotic location.  Although the action is fast and furious, there's also a sense of the travelogue about these books; it's also about showcasing the imagination.  Quiet little villages and farmlands are never as exciting as abandoned cities protected by illusion-projecting primitives who everyone assumed were extinct, or valleys filled with weird cyclopean carnivorous plant people, or a sea made of red mist instead of water, or... y'know.  Whatever.

4) To be really true to the genre, you might think about being the PCs be Earth people stranded in a strange land.  While it's not required (there were Barsoom, and other settings, books that featured native characters from time to time) it's customary.  Burroughs did it, Carter did it, Resnick did it, Kline did it, Akers did it, Moorcock did it, Howard did it, Norman did it, etc.  With a pedigree like that, you've got to give it some serious thought.

5) While there certainly are super-science elements to a sword & planet campaign, your scientific stuff can't be so effective that it eliminates a) big, angry, primitive monsters that are basically equivalent to alien dinosaurs, or b) the effectiveness of hand-to-hand combat with swords and stuff.  Make sure that your rayguns (or whatever kinds of guns you have) aren't so good that naturally everyone will switch to using them exclusively as their weapons of choice, for example.

Along those same lines, while it was really only (mostly) Barsoom that had naked people running around, this is supposed to be a swashbuckling kind of genre.  Plonking around in heavy armor doesn't seem to really be the way things are done.  D&D has some optional rules for scaling armor class (as to hit scales) without needing armor; I'd either adopt these, or find some others that do more or less the same thing.

6) In a swashbuckling combat game, lots of dungeon-crawling doesn't really seem appropriate.  While certainly John Carter or some of the other guys occasionally got into a fight with someone or other in a cave, the entire paradigm of dungeon-crawling seems highly inappropriate for this genre.  Zipping across the planet in a flying ship, sneaking into an enemy city at night to rescue a supremely hot space princess or eliminate a political rival—that I can see.  There's lots of politics, gladiatorial games, mass combat of mounted and/or flying troops, and the discovery of strange and exotic cultures, races or terrain while lost out in terra incognita.  If there's an old school model that you need in order to run the game, the hex-crawl makes a lot more sense than the dungeon-crawl.

Planet Stories

After my unexpected mini-hiatus, I'm trying to get my arms around what to blog about next.  A few things are on my mind, in general.

First, of course, is DARK•HERITAGE, supposedly the main topic for this blog.  At the moment, I don't have anything new for it, however.  I'm working on digitalizing my big poster-board map of the setting, but in the process have decided I'm going to basically redraw the entire thing.  A lot of places need to be renamed, and because I did the posterboard in pen, by hand, I'm going to do the new map completely digitally.  Most likely what I'll do is scan the map by portions, stitch them together digitally, wipe out all of the labels and names, and retype them using a font on the computer, so I can have a consistent look.

Not sure if I'm going to bother coloring it or not.  Color naturally looks nice, but my "gold standard" in fantasy maps remains Christopher Tolkien's black and white ones of Middle-earth, which I first saw on my original copies of Lord of the Rings--y'know, the ones with the Darrel K. Sweet covers that were on sale during the 80s.  This same map, "aged up" in Photoshop or whatever, was used in the Peter Jackson movies during the voice-over intros, and an example of this version of the map can be seen here.  Although, like I said, the original that I saw, in the books, was black and white.  As are most fantasy maps, since many are, of course, published in novels that feature only black ink on white paper.  Only in the realm of Photoshopped fan versions or roleplaying game material are color maps commonplace. 

However, this particular project is not imminent.  My free time at home in the evenings is, if anything, even more scarce than my free time during the day, which is a sad state of affairs, and not likely to change in the immediate future.

I'd also like to make some updates to my ODD D&D series of posts.  Although I've already described the setting in nearly as much detail as I'd like, I'd also like to whip up a quick and dirty map of this, describe a "home base" from which PCs could embark on adventures, and do a few "campaign threads" type examples of what I think a campaign in this setting would look like.

What has been an awful lot on my mind, when I can spare the mental effort, is space opera, however.  The original Barsoom stories of John Carter remain among my favorite books ever (beat out, really, only by The Lord of the Rings itself).  In my lifetime, space opera has been really defined by Star Wars of course, and because the new movie started filming just a few days ago or so, I've had it a lot on my mind.  I'm also playing, of course, in a Star Wars post-Jedi campaign at the moment, which I've discussed here before several times, although our play schedule is extremely sporadic, and I had to miss the last session anyway.  I've also got my own houserules to m20 that specifically cater to my own preferred playstyle.

But Star Wars is only one iteration of the genre.  Another one that I've enjoyed quite a bit over the years is the Marvel version of space opera, which incorporates a fair bit of superheroic action--hardly a surprising development.  But the three "super powers" of the Marvel space universe, the Shi'ar, the Kree and the Skrulls, have universally been interesting stories.  Groups like the Starjammers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and characters like the Silver Surfer, Warlock, Quasar, Ms. Marvel, Nova and others have established quite a lot of interesting super-hero colored space opera for us to digest.  Villains like Blastaar, Thanos, Vulcan, D'Ken, Galactus, the Celestials (who aren't necessarily overtly villainous, but... y'know) add to the mystique. We'll even get big-budget big screen treatment of the so-called "cosmic Marvel" in this summer's imminent Guardians of the Galaxy film, and all indications are that when Avengers 3 hits the big screen, we'll finally have the true debut of Thanos as villain.

Although I've focused my space opera more on my Star Wars "one thousand years after Jedi" setting, I'd like to also try my efforts at an original space opera setting.  Perhaps one that even feels more like a Marvel space opera setting within a setting.  For this setting, I'd also like to use m20, but maybe not the Star Wars m20, since Knights are such a specific Star Warsian application.  Although I haven't yet decided that such is the way I want to go, here's a link to an m20 Superhero ruleset to peruse.  I've only had time to glance through it at the moment, and it's probably not exactly what I want, but there could be stuff in there I can borrow. 

I did find it amusing that the document linked there refers to its obvious Thor analog as Norse Storm Hammer Guy.  Thor is, of course, as a mythological figure, in the public domain. 

And here's another Microlite superhero ruleset. 

As I develop this... yet another... series of blog posts, I'll be using the tagline AD ASTRA, Latin for "to the stars" (and famous as a motto of various organizations, where it was largely cribbed from Virgil).  I don't know that that's what I'll call the setting, but heck; it beats Odd D&D, doesn't it?

John Carter

Saw John Carter this weekend.  In fact, I saw it twice.  Given that A Princess of Mars is among my favorite books of all time (topped only by Lord of the Rings--which I "cheat" and count as a single book), it's hardly surprising that I dragged my wife in on Friday afternoon.  After we "vetted" it, we went back again with my younger boys (the older kids saw it separately with friends.)  Everyone loved it.  A few points:

• The soundtrack, which I already mentioned earlier last week, is beautiful.  It's got a touch of exoticness, great excitement, a stirring main theme, and a romantic theme with sweeping strings that are reminiscent of some classic John Barry soundtracks--in fact, I was particularly reminded of the soundtrack from High Road to China at more than one point.

• The production design and the scenery of the movie are phenomenal.  The only very minor complaint I have is that I was a bit distracted when I actually recognized a scenic element and kept thinking to myself, "hey, that's the Fisher Towers in the background!" instead of paying attention ot the action in the foreground.  Whoops.  Curiously, the "Arizona" part of the movie and the Barsoom part of the movies looked very similar, and were filmed in locations at the same place--southeastern Utah.  The credits reference the field office for the Bureau of Land Management in Moab, Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, Arches National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park and Blanding, UT.  There was obviously some digital grading and digital removal of a few plants and whatnot for the Mars scenes--but probably not all that much was needed, really.  Southeast Utah already looks an awful lot like Mars to begin with.

• Lynn Carter did a good job, but after being raised on Frazetta, Krenkel, Manchess and even Whelan versions of Dejah Thoris, there's really no way she could possibly have competed.  The same is largely true of Taylor Kitsch.  He was better than I thought in the role, but how could he possibly have been as good as the Frazetta painted version of the warlord in my head?  And although my kids joked about, "put some clothes on, geez!" costumes in the movie, to my mind, they were a bit more heavily clothed than I expected.  Heh.  Barsoom in my mind's eye is I guess as skimpily clad as the Frazetta versions of the characters too.  I never really expected that Frazetta type costumes would be at all practical, though.

• Yes, my wife did say that Dejah Thoris sounds like the name of a dinosaur.  So.  Wrong.  On the other hand, her favorite part of the movie was when Powell tried to give that speech to Carter and he kept fighting to escape every few seconds, so at least she appreciates the comedy inherent in senseless violence.  She's still a keeper, even if she makes fun of "the most beautiful woman in two worlds."

• The story changes--mostly the blending in of a number of elements from Gods of Mars along with two or three innovations that the script writers brought, actually worked fairly well, and I didn't find that they were as bothersome as I feared they would be.  Making Dejah Thoris a scientist/warrior instead of just a damsel in distress was expected and predicted (by me, anyway) so at least it wasn't too discordant.  Making the therns a parasitic eternal race that fed on the entropy of planets in destruction, and wandered from world to world was a bit odd, but it did actually serve to offer a somewhat plausible (or at least acceptable) explanation for how John Carter traveled to and from Mars in the first place--something that probably would not at all have flown as written in a movie made today.  And the notion of John Carter being "damaged goods" with a tragic backstory that he had to get over before he could care about Dejah Thoris or Barsoom or anyone else was a rather tired cliche, in my opinion, and suggests that nobody in Hollywood understands what a man is anymore.  But again; that's a bigger problem than this movie; given the constraints Hollywood writers seem to be operating under, they did a relatively decent job, I suppose.

• The marketing was abysmal.  Not only that, the title changes to the movie couldn't have helped.  And settling on John Carter without even any reference to Mars at all?  Huh?  As one reviewer joked--audiences who don't think it's about Noah Wiley's character from ER will probably think its about the president before Reagan.  Although I have to admit, I'd totally go see a movie called Jimmy Carter of Mars.

• Despite a disappointing opening weekend, it was actually better than predicted.  It looks like Disney already decided to write this movie off and didn't properly promote it.  Given the huge production budget (rumored to be $250 mil), a $100 mil opening weekend take--with only $30 mil of that domestic--it seems unlikely that the obvious set-up for a sequel will actually happen.  The movie also got mixed reviews, but appears to have gotten good word of mouth, which picked up the take in the later days of the weekend from what early estimates were predicting.  I know I personally know several people who saw it this weekend and not a one of them didn't love it.  The critics mostly didn't know what they were talking about (literally, in some cases.  One of them talked about the red men vs. white men metaphor of Zodanga vs. Helium--even though the freakin' dialogue in the movie itself refers to their war as red men vs. red men.  I rather thought the red uniforms of the Zodangans vs. the blue of the Heliumites was the more likely metaphor--although it's spoiled somewhat by the fact that the therns also dressed in blue.  Good thing, actually.)

• Some critics thought the barrage of foreign sounding names was a detriment.  Others were glad the movie wasn't "dumbed down" for them by removing them.  In general, the critics reactions--and I read quite a few reviews on Friday before going--were shockingly ignorant and insipid.  Maybe not terribly shocking--I've read critics for a long time now, after all--but because I know Barsoom quite well, I suppose I was a little shocked that the critics couldn't be bothered to spend ten minutes with Google or Wikipedia to do a bit of research before writing their articles which were going to be nationally syndicated and immortalize their ignorance for all time.  How does the proverb go?  "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Anyway, unless you're an ERB purist who will see any deviation from the Holy Text of his original novels as a heresy, I can recommend this movie and encourage you to see it.  For that matter, I think it's important that genre fans come out in force, as much as possible, and spread the word through grassroots.  I'd love to see this movie become a sleeper hit.  As far as I'm concerned, it was better acted, had better dialogue and plot, and offered better spectacle than Avatar or Star Wars either one--yet unfortunately, it'll most likely be consigned to the bin of "vaguely similar expensive flops."  Hardly seems fair for a movie adaptation of the book that basically "started" science fiction as we know it.