Monster Attack!

Monster Attack!

Yeah, that's a pretty generic name. But this one was all about drawing and not about thinking. I don't know who she is or what they are. I don't know the setting. The entire story can be read from the visual clues:

A cute adventurer in inappropriate garb ends up in a tunnel/dungeon wherein things have died and monsters lurk. She is perhaps being chased by a green-skinned meanie who is stuck behind a pesky gate in the background. Did she slam the gate on it? Meanwhile, its partner, who I named Greenboy the Grinning Grabber (like, just this instant), has found an alternate route to the delicious meal-on-two-legs and is about to chomp down. Unless she's just a badass with that knife. Is it a magic knife? Dunno.

I've been in a pin-up art mood lately. Chainmail chicks, bikini armor, scantily clad damsels doing daring deeds, etc. Perhaps it's the corona getting to me. I just wanted something fun and light and rompy.

Why didn't I wear my Batgirl suit??

Sketch of Greenboy.

EDIT: I wanted to say something more about this drawing. A self-critique.

I like the figures just fine. I love how the girl turned out and I'm kind of stoked about the monster in the ceiling. I also love the hinted at monster in the background. I added the little detritus on the ground as an afterthought and I'm glad I did.

I don't love the purple hallway. The floor looks pretty good, I think. But the walls are kind of boring, aren't they? Maybe I should have went with a slightly different color for the walls or the floor, to contrast them.

Also, I think it needs more stuff going on. Like... more holes in the wall with green arms sticking out. Or a chest/barrel with something climbing out of it. Or perhaps our hero needs one or two companions. I'm not sure. I might do a revision of this and see what happens. Overall, I dig it. I'm moderately happy. But I could be very happy.

Pig in Space

Not sure how it came about, but I think it was Ed Heil on FB who said I should do a Miss Piggy pin up. So here she is in all her sexy glory.

Psi World Slam

I ran session three of Psi World tonight. The PCs are all Psis (but no precogs!) who have been drawn to the small town of Enclave after a teenager with psionic abilities allegedly blew up the heads of seven people in a hospital. Gerry Muntrell, the teen, is said to have "went crazy" and killed several of his friends and a few doctors during a perfectly safe and routine medical study.

But there's more to this story. The players decided Gerry was innocent and needed to be freed from his prison in the basement of the Enclave Memorial Hospital. Upon discovering a sub-basement level reminiscent of a James Bond villain's lair, their suspicions may be proven correct.

Tonight they busted Gerry out and nobody got killed. It was a stealth mission and was successful, with the alarms going off just as they made their getaway with the young man.

I am off-book a little bit with the setting. I set my game early in the timeline so that the PCs are basically among the first generation of Psis to come out. Corporations run the world through a quasi-government known as IPEG (International Protectorate of Economic Growth). Many corporations are at the heart of IPEG and one of them, the Ranseur Pharmaceutical Company, is somehow associated with the hospital. Is it possible that the "special services" wing of the hospital is conducting illegal experiments on people with psionic abilities?

We're going to find out.

So far the system isn't getting in the way. Many people said this game's mechanics were a nightmare. I agree they are obtuse, but they aren't impenetrable. I have yet to run into a situation where I need to make a ruling and I don't have the tools to do it. The Attribute Saving Throws alone pretty much ensure that won't happen. But, to be fair, the game has been mostly about investigation and dialog and lots and lots of analysis paralysis (my Monday night friends are really good at going over ideas and plans for what might be called a minute or two). We have had at least one real combat and a few uses of psi powers. But I think we've had more skill checks and ASTs that anything.

Enjoying this old game quite a bit. It was a sudden move to run it and I'm glad I made that move. Especially since the group is really into it and Dyson Logos is even working on some super secret sauce related to the game as a result. Hmmmmm.

Free PDFs, Fool!

I don't think I posted this yet on the blog, only on FB.

I made the PDFs of these three titles free on DriveThruRPG. Go play some games, shut-ins.

Explore the Howling Hill! A low-level crawl.

Get lost in the Ice Forest! A low-level forest crawl.

Be a beaver, fossa, or rat!

Musical Musings: Kreator: Coma of Souls

And here you thought this blog was just a place for RPG stuff. Nonsense!

(Well it's mostly that, naturally. But I like doing what I want, so...)

I click on a lot of random YouTube videos when I'm drawing. YouTube knows that I like metal, among other things. So I clicked on Kreator: Coma of Souls this morning. And... I was slightly pleasantly surprised.

Kreator is one of those early thrash bands that I just didn't like back in the day. I remember buying one of their tapes (remember... I'm 49 years old... when I say "back in the day" I'm mostly referring to the cassette tape era, though as a young man in the 90s I clearly bleed into the CD era as well). I put it in the deck and gave it a listen. I ejected it after a song or two. Like my reaction to Candlemass, I just couldn't hack it. Where Metallica, Megadeth, WASP, and AC/DC had killer riffage, this album seemed to be just rapid fire guitar banging with machine gun polka drumming. It was a little more on the Slayer end of the metal spectrum and Slayer was as far on that end of the spectrum I cared to go.

In fact, this band dead up sounds like a Slayer cover band to me, at least during the verses. I know that's not fair since Slayer was the big dog and anyone with fast tempo and somewhat screechy vocals could be compared to them. But y'know...

This album definitely has that polka-blast thing going on. But there are some tracks, such as People of the Lie, where a nice groove is established... a thrashy groove you can headbang to, not just a nuclear assault of speed.

The whole thing has that crunchy high register typical of the time period that is also a bit of a turnoff. It's a product of the late 80s, after all. But it's not bad. If you like thrash, this is not a bad album to check out.

That is the extent of my musical reviewing chops. I am a lifelong listener, but not an aficionado. I don't even know what the word "register" even means, in musical terms. I just know what tickles my earholes and I like to share it.

I would ask my dear readers if they want to see more of this kind of thing, but since I do what I want anyway it kinda doesn't matter, does it? You all are used to me going all over the place.

Next up: chainmail chicks!

Meme Me Merry Myrmidon #7

Yet more! And I seem to have run dry of messed-up RPG covers. I'll have to switch gears and post even randomer random bullshit for this very silly series. (cue laugh track)

Meme Me Merry Myrmidon #6

And for some reason this shit continues.

Musical Musing: Slift: Ummon

This album is so good. It reminds me of everything wonderful about 70s/80s sci-fi and sci-fantasy. It's prog, it's a bit metal, it's psychedelic. I hear tones of Pink Floyd, Hypnos 69, and even Donald Fagen (think True Companion).

The song "Hyperion" in particular is really heavy. If you listen to the whole album, this song hits you like a hammer. In context it is heavy as fuck. Of course, comparing it to straight up heavy metal songs it won't seem as heavy. But that's a really neat trick about albums: they provide contrast. They build soundscapes. I'm a huge metalhead, but I gotta say that most metal albums that try to be all heavy all the time fall flat because there's no story, no flow.

This album has a story. It is a journey.

Not to mention a sweet ass Caza cover.

So what is this album about? I've already said that the music is fucking unreal. But what about the lyrics? I actually have no idea. I haven't paid any attention. I just love the journey the music takes me on. So let's look together and see what is happening here. Is it gameable?

Here's Ummon:

Set the controls to the earth’s surface
From the night we have waited
Bring the fire to your sleeping brothers
From the night we have waited
Now we’re climbing through the ancestral stones
All the night we have waited
From the center to the earth’s surface!
A blade, a sword coming from the void
Titans, Gods, they’re coming from the void
A blade, a sword, it's coming from the void
FROM THE CENTER TO SURFACE!

Oh hell yeah. Gameable.

So it sounds like we have something massive coming from the center of the earth (possibly a void?) to the surface. An arising? An awakening?

Here's Hyperion:

From the deepest ocean to the highest mount
In the storm and nebula fury we hear now his name
He was born and raised where the chaos rules
He’ll be the thunder in the night when the lights will be gone
From the deepest ocean to the highest mount
In the storm and nebula fury we hear now his name
He was born and raised where the chaos rules
He’ll be the thunder in the night when the lights will be gone

Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time
Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time
Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time
Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time

So yeah. Gameable as hell all over the place. I like the there are very few actual lyrics on this whole album. It's poetic.

Mutant World

I went in on the Kickstarter for Richard Corben and Jan Strnad's Mutant World reprint. Got the hardback graphic novel that includes Mutant World and Son of Mutant World. In the forward, Strnad states that this edition was built from scans of the Fantagor prints, tweaked by Richard Corben.

I just finished reading the first 60 pages. It's the story of a poor dumb mutant named Dimento who just wants to find something to eat. During the course of these 60 pages he encounters an outrageous bunch of backstabbing, hunger-gnarled muties with names like Weasel and Dimlit. He also encounters a woman in a horse-drawn cart. The woman, whose name hasn't been given, is drawn in Corben's typical style. Large-breasted, full-bodied. But also, given Corben's origins in the underground comix scene, she is weird. Everything is weird in a Corben comic.

There's the idea of the male gaze that permeates pop culture. It is on display here, as it always was in the pages of Heavy Metal, 1984, and pretty much all the pulpy-styled comics of the 70s and 80s. Women are usually drawn with an eye to their sexual characteristics. Men are usually drawn as beefy, possibly ugly as well. Corben's style falls in line with this. His male forms, if not monstrous and misshapen, are muscular and beautiful. Even poor ole Dimento, bent and seemingly mutated, has an Olympian physique. The unnamed woman, who recurs throughout this part of the story, is busty and full and lovely. And she has a horse.

So anyway, everyone in this world seems to be mad and vile. Every single character Dimento encounters is less than stellar if not outright brutal. Not just to Dimento, but to each other as well. It's a harsh world, as one of the characters states. The woman helps Dimento at one point, perhaps for fun. Then she betrays him to save herself. Dimento, who is the nicest person in the comic, is prone to fits of anguish, rage, and sorrow, and he leaves her to her fate with some nasty mutants who rape her and beat her. The beating is on-screen, but the raping is not. It isn't pretty, nor is it titillating. I get the sense that even though Corben draws the woman in a slightly sexy way (again, the male gaze at work), he is sympathetic to her plight and doesn't try to capitalize too much on it. I don't know this to be the case, but given the fact that the story was written in chapters on a deadline and wasn't scripted out, Corben started off by just having a hottie show up and then, as the story evolved, he realized he didn't want to do a hottie comic. Her story unfolds brutally, and she is drawn less-and-less like an object to be looked at and more-and-more like just another brutal individual being brutalized in a brutal world.

Then again, maybe I'm lenient in my critique because I'm biased toward this genre of comic art. She is, after all, tied up much of the time. That could be read a certain way. Yet Dimento is also tied up much of the time. So... I dunno. Perhaps a person with a different perspective would find this entirely misogynistic. I couldn't argue too much with them, though I've seen far worse. All I'd have to say is that if I'm looking for prurient comic book art with hotties I wouldn't choose this. It is not for that purpose.

This part of the story is disjointed and random. It feels like random events in the daily life of poor Dimento. And as Jan Strnad points out in the forward, he was writing the episodes under deadline pressure one at a time. He hadn't plotted this thing out. And it shows.

I kinda like that. I like that it's raw and random. It is a hard read, though. I'm not a fan of bleakness or moral depravity. I stopped watching The Walking Dead because it felt like one episode of despair porn after another. It wore me out and I dropped it.

Mutant World is a bit like that, but in shorter bursts. It's a comic about a fallen world in which people - mutant and human alike - trick, beat, rape, and brutalize one another to survive. And through it moves this truly pitiful figure. Dimento. Poor, dumb Dimento (as he calls himself).

Regarding the art itself, it is classic Corben. Rich and lush and also ugly and crude. Nobody does misshapen like Corben. When I read comics like this, which are richly painted and detailed, I cringe at just how much work must have went into them. Comics are fucking hard work, people. You spend days, weeks, months, fucking years on a comic book that someone can literally "read" in five minutes, then promptly forget. I can't tell you how many hours I labored over comics in my youth. I loved it, mind you. I was totally into it. But at some point the endorphin rush I felt at having created a nice comic page just wasn't enough to justify the labor. Hats off to Corben and any comics artist that can and does endure.

It's weird that I hadn't actually read this comic before. I know I own some old Fantagor books and I have been a lover of Richard Corben's style since I first laid eyes on it in the mid-80s. I know I've seen this comic in the past, yet somehow I failed to actually read the damn thing. Reading it now is like reading a mildly-horny teenager's stab at Gamma World fanfic. There's a lot of good inspiration in here for post-apoc gaming, so if you're into GW or Mutant Crawl Classics and you haven't checked it out you should do so. Just be aware that it was intended for adults and it doesn't pull many punches. Also, it is not a sexy comic. That is, I would not classify this as being pin-up in nature whatsoever. It is raw and ugly in the underground comix manner and I really love the shit out of it for that reason alone.

Dimento is a lonely soul.

FOLLOW UP

I finished Mutant World, which was only a few more pages than I had read when I wrote the original post above. Spoilers ahead.

So basically Dimento and this normal dude are set free by the weird post-apoc military facility and both end up with a clone of the woman from the story. In both cases the woman is wearing a tight top showing her nipples poking through and wearing shorts. In both cases she has been sent by the post-apoc scientist dude to, I suppose, see if he can get them to breed. The comic ends with Dimento scoring with his clone (he has no idea she's a clone... he's only 6 years old, after all, being a genetic experiment himself). He seems happy in the end with his large-breasted woman in their post-apoc ruined trailer.

Next up: Son of Mutant World! I'm guessing, given the setup here, we're going to meet Dimento's offspring. I seem to recall a bald female being on the cover.

What Am I Doing??

We are in a global pandemic, it is entirely possible we Americans will re-elect a psycho reality show clown as President, and I turn 50 this year (if I live long enough). Yes, it's mass fucking chaos everywhere. Not cool, universe. Fuck off.

So in the midst of all this mess what exactly have I been doing? In terms of creativity, of course. Nobody wants to know what I'm eating for breakfast or what I do at my day job.

I've been keeping busy. I recently did a character sheet for The Other Side Publishing, I did a special Virtual Gary Con shirt design, I'm working on a GM-screen thingie for a client, and I did a cover for a future issue of Phantasmagoria. I have also turned down some recent offers because I am working on personal stuff and trying to keep my bandwidth under control.

What started out as a serious attempt to finally write my sand and sorcery game Dead Wizards, which changed to Sand in the Bone, morphed into a completely different game idea about a month ago. It is called GOZR (pronounced GO-zur). It is based on the same game system as Sand in the Bone but is entirely different in tone. Where Sand strikes a more serious tone, GOZR is balls-out sci-fantasy in the vein of early 80s romps like Heavy Metal and Wizards. It is an entirely visual game too. Meaning... I'm hand-lettering the whole fucking thing. And it's taking forever but I'm loving it. Something about doing hand lettering is relaxing and fulfilling to me. I don't purport to be great at it. I'm not a master letterer. But I have fun with it and I'm practicing the craft, hopefully getting better at it.

The game itself is an experiment. There's been no playtesting yet and I'm composing a lot of the rules, such as they are, on the canvas as I go. But it's a simple game without a lot of moving parts so I feel confident it will work. After all, there's not much new to the idea of rolling a d20 vs. a target number, is there? We kinda already know how that mechanic works.

The game is presented visually and is table-heavy. In fact, it's pretty much all tables. When it's all said and done you will be able to use this slim volume at the table even with little or no prep and run a fun romp of a game for a bunch of goofy bastards playing goofy bastards.

There is a The Pool element to the game. I made a few posts talking about Sand in the Bone's sand mechanic and GOZR, being more-or-less the same system, also has this mechanic. Here it's called GOOZ but it does pretty much the same thing. Spending your GOOZ lets you influence the game-story by adding facts or controlling outcomes, with a bit of a risk/gamble mechanic involved. I think this will be fun at the table.

I plan to run some GOZR for the Monday night group the next opportunity I get. This will definitely be before I finish it, so I can make tweaks if playtesting suggests it.

So that's what I've been doing, for those who are curious. More later.

Oh, I should caveat here. I have a long and proud history of getting heavily into an idea and then abandoning it. I make no claims that GOZR will actually be finished. However, I do tend to muscle through and finish things after some critical mass has been established. I have pumped many many hours into this thing so far. I have several finished pages that took a long time to complete. Plus this is a sci-fantasy romp... and I tend to greatly enjoy doing those. What I have a problem with is the more serious, dry projects. I am not good with that. So odds are this will actually see the light of day.

(Man, I'm so god damn honest when I'm blogging.)

Richard Corben... definitely an influence on GOZR.