seneschal

Wait, wait! I could have played an Ent??? Quote: "I am Groot!" GM's major complaint: Player's wooden delivery Disadvantages: Fear of Japanese beetles I see your point with Balrogs, however ... "No, Azaroth! You may not help staff the party's fireworks stand."

About 1,500 years ago the Nazca Indians created giant geometric pictures in the Peruvian desert that can only be seen from 200 feet in the air. One (totally unsupported) theory is that the Nazcas viewed their handiwork from hot air balloons. I can totally see a group of pre-Columbian Jules Vernes becoming untethered and drifting across the Americas and beyond.

Where are the Fifth Dimension now that we need them? 😉

Well, I have to admit that I cut my role-playing teeth designing Traveller starships and Champions superheroes, building stuff comes naturally to me. If you need cheap, quick and dirty the BRP Quick-Start is a good way to go. If you want to throw Imperial stormtroopers at your sword and sandal types, GORE is free in the downloads section and has the sci-fi gear ready. 👽 Plus GORE has the rudimentary magic system that the Quick-Start lacks.

To me, the toolkit aspect of BRP is a feature not a bug. Hercules-like PC demigods? No problem with super powers. Need a custom space alien or interdimensional monster? You’ve got the whole Chaosium magic and power suite to work with. Combat too lethal for D&D-ers? CON+SIZ for better hit points. You aren’t locked in to a particular rules-mandated play style.

That has been the pattern in every region of the globe.

Glad it all worked out and that your group had fun. What a soap opera of a plot!

Oops! Spoke too soon. In Sensation Comics #6 Wonder Woman goes home for a vacation. I’ll have to see what transpires. And it seems the Amazons begin to pop up more frequently in future stories.

So far, in the early Forties stories I’ve read Wonder Woman is on her own once she reaches the United States, no help from home. However, she gets plenty of backup from plump college girl Etta Candy and her spunky sorority sisters from a nearby university. The plucky, adventuresome co-eds tackle gangsters, spies, paramilitary groups and mad scientists armed with nothing but their feminine wiles and youthful athleticism. After all, the bad guys are mere men. Later in her career, in comics from the 1970s through the 1990s, Wonder Woman has lots of adventures with her fellow Amazons. But the point of the early stories is apparently that, inspired by Diana’s example, American womanhood is unstoppable. It is interesting to compare Wonder Woman’s early attitude compared to that of her later incarnations. In 1941 she is very young, very feminine. She wears a modest skirt rather than bikini bottoms (although her open backed top is scandalous to some of the women she meets). She pines for Steve Trevor’s attention and follows him everywhere, is jealous of his secretary. Battling villains is as much a lark for her as it is for Etta Candy and company. By comparison, more recent and more mature versions of her are grim and imperious.

So many of these look aquatc. If they operate in an atmospere do they stand and move via telekinesis? I can’t see them getting around on those delicate cilia in regular gravity on land.

And then they put the computer in charge of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. 🙀

Don’t forget the grandaddy of all summer blockbusters, the silent film Metropolis.

Don’t neglect the adventures of Anthony “Buck” Rogers (novels and newspaper strip) in the 25th Century. It began as a post-apocalyptic war saga with ancient Han invaders living forever in a few domed cities while defeated Americans skulked in a North America returned to primeval forest. Only after a second invasion by the Tiger Men of Mars (!) did it gradually morph into an outer space story. Both Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Beyond Thirty” and H.G. Wells’ “Things to Come” had the Great War dragging on for decades and civilization restored by airmen bringing law and order back to a post-apocalyptic society. “Things” featured a moon rocket but “Buck Rgers” and “Beyond Thirty” and “The Skylark of Space” and other novels assumed you’d need some sort of antigravity technology to escape Earth’s gravity well. Rocketry was in its infancy and few people imagined yet that you could shove a payload into space by brute force. Burroughs and Buck Rogers had rockets to push their ships around in an atmosphere because it was cool, not because they thought it could get their heroes off planet. Rocketships for interplanetary travel become a thing in thr Thirties.

A little bit. Its approach is to present several full samples of vintage science fiction in a given sub-genre (usually short stories) and extrapolate rules and campaign guidelines from there. So far there are eleven sub-genres fleshed out. It is all HTML, so no physical book, just electronic pages to download or print out as best you can.

Check out Forgotten Futures, a game covering several genres based on Victorian fiction. Good for inspiration and original sources. Vacuum tubes, giant bus bars, slide rules but no computers. With the tech level, bigger really is better, more capacity and power. http://www.forgottenfutures.com/

That Cutter is just too intense. Dude has Leetah on his arm and still can’t crack a smile. Put Treestump in charge and take a day off, man!

Got the Warp Graphics original first issue many moons ago at a comic book convention. Never dreamed it would morph into a sprawling soap opera saga. Too bad the game designers didn't have more background material to build the setting, but that stuff was still being dreamed up and written by the comic’s authors. It would be like coming up with a Fantastic Four RPG with only the first issue to work with. Could you use the rules as is with an omnibus volume of the comics as source material?

Heh, I read that issue!

Failings/powers are a good way to build characters or villians with a little more omph even if they aren’t obviously superpowered. Enhanced senses, outrageous skill levels, awesome kung fu can be paid for with disadvantages the character might have role-played anyway but now those flaws have mechanical support.

Clearly we’ve got to differentiate ourselves from the competition: LEGO Dark Shadows — Barnabas Bites Boston! 😁

It’s fun reminiscing about a favorite show but for our purposes here I guess the question is, is there enough going on in the world of Collinsport apart from the Barnabas saga to support an enjoyable RPG? What would PCs be doing while the Collinses and their retainers went about their various shenanigans? Is the Dark Shadows universe big and varied enough to let players do their own thing?

Poor Barney. Done in by virtue! All that backstory was revealed gradually in a time travel arc where the governess protagonist found herself both in the 1970s and in the days of the early American republic where young Collins’ problems began. The show switched back and forth between timelines.

But they did do a theatrical version: House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971). The much vaunted Dallas didnt get a pair of feature films (which is undoubtedly a good thing).

Because the original was a daily serial, the slow-moving plots had plenty of time to build suspense and dread. The big budget Dark Shadows remake with Ben Cross seemed overwrought as the writers threw every horror trope and cliche at the viewer, including the kitchen sink. That’s probably why the Johnny Depp movie was a comedy; Collins had become the Wile E.Coyote of vampires.

Dark Shadows took the Peter Parker route. Sure, Barnabas Collins is a formidable undead being but he has to suffer all the usual indignities of being a soap opera character. The girl he has the hots for and his jealous ex both show up in nubile reincarnated form at the same time. He wants to become human again but his doctor’s experimental cure ages him suddenly just when things were heating up in the romance department. Meanwhile, the doctor has developed her own crush on him. He has to maintain a secret identity as his own great-grandson while rivals and vampire hunters try to expose him. Dracula never had to put up with such nonsense! You almost feel sorry for him, or you would if he weren’t a malign predator.