Introductory Adventures for Tabloid! (spoilers)

Art by Newton H.Ewell

 

Interspersed throughout the Tabloid! rulebook are ersatz articles written by some TSR regulars.  “The articles are the 'background' of the TABLOID! world,” we are told.  Furthermore, the rules explain:  “Use the articles as inspiration for your own adventures – they are there to give you ideas.”  The list of articles follows:

Karen S. Boomgarden

• Chainsaw Heals Injured Auras
• Renowned Scientist Claims Atlanteans Made Crop Circles
• Rosicrucians Contacted Aliens! Ancient Link Established by Scientist’s Hoax!
• Stonehenge Mystery Creator FOUND!
• Aliens Prefer College Grads!
• Startling Research Reveals Aliens Built Ark! Holy Ark of the Covenant Designed by Visitors from Beyond; New Theory Links Ask to Coso Geode, Nazca Lines and Great Pyramids
• Knights of the Crap Tables The King Part of the Secret Cult!
• France: UFO Landing Fields?
  

 Anne Brown

• Shocking Secret Revealed! Docs Turn Backs on Human Torches! Dozens of People Up In Smoke and No One Seems to Care!

 Jeff Grubb

• Suppressed Manuscript Reveals Shakespeare Was a Woman!
• Hitler’s Brain-Powered Death Machine
• Mad Millionaire Wants to Build Dinosaur Park in Congo
• Moon Flag for Sale Minnesota Farmer Hosts World’s Oddest Auction

Roger E. Moore

• The Monster LIVES! Frankenstein’s Creation Discovered at North Pole; Escapes Vowing Vengeance Against Hapless Humanity
• Hitler’s Terror Children Cannibal Nazi Vampire Dwarfs Turn Amazon Into Green Hell; Line Dancing, NAFTA Encouraged by Fourth Reich
• Ghost Riders Plague Information Superhighway! Spirits Take a Grave View of Cable Placement; “Dead Ends” on the Information Superhighway!
• Russians Battled Evil Atomic Space Aliens 30 Years Ago! American Space A-Bomb Tests Created Van Allen Horrors; Cosmonauts, Rockets Attacked By Ruthless Radiation Monsters, Soviets Retaliate With Doomsday Device
• The Triangle of Terror Aliens, Atlanteans Battle for Captives off Bermuda Coast!
  
• Giant Piranha “Not a Problem” Says Governor Boaters and fishermen protest handling “of nature gone mad” in Wisconsin lakes & rivers; giant beavers here, too

(The 'piranha' article quotes a resident of Lake Geneva and references Gamma Lake.  Said lake receives run-off from a nearby nuclear power plant, thus mutating its denizens.)

The articles are one or two pages each, except Moore's 'Russians' article (3 pages) and Brown's article on spontaneous human combustion (4 pages).  The headlines tend to take up more than one-half page each.  In all, the articles account for 20% of the book's page count.  A handful of articles would have been more than sufficient; perhaps a sidebar detailing apparent cases of spontaneous human combustion and another with a list of planes and ships that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle.

“The Wedding of the Year” is “the first of two funtabulous, fully authorized and mostly realized TABLOID! adventures designed specifically to get your TABLOID! campaign to a running start.”  In this adventure, “your favorite actress” marries a “crime boss heir.”  The player characters are assigned to obtain photographs of this private event.  There are two days before the wedding and most of the six page adventure is a discussion of obstacles the characters face and the results of potential strategies the players may attempt.

The second adventure, “Faux Pas,” is a more scripted affair.  It asks the question,  “What's buried in Grant's tomb?” – a play on the riddle “Who's buried in Grant's tomb?”  The basis of this adventure is that a Canadian professor, Anton Sacka-Weejie, has announced that “Ulysses S. Grant was really a space alien!”  The player characters are required to introduce the professor in person.  This entails traveling to Yellowknife.  The author dedicates a few paragraphs describing how Canadians talk and admitting his ignorance about Yellowknife.  The player characters encounter a wendigo which, for purposes of this adventure, is an alien being.  “In another adventure,” we learn, “the wendigo might be something else, depending upon the conspiracy involved.”

Since the player characters only have a P.O. Box address for the professor, “they must go to the post office and bribe some mail clerk into looking the address up.”  Suggested complications include:  (1) The Canadian Postal Service is on strike – again, (2) Ultra-Patriot is working the desk today, and (3) The entire staff is Quebecois.

Eventually, once the player characters find the professor, he relates that...

[T]here is an evil conspiracy of ancient proportions that has been working for centuries to control humanity for its own evil ends.  According to him, some time in the 1800's THEY perfected the secrets of cloning and behavioral conditioning.  This allowed THEM to clone world leaders and then condition those clones into absolute loyalty to THEIR conspiracy.

The professor knows this because alien beings told him so.  These same aliens “taught THEM the secrets of cloning a long time ago” without realizing “THEY would use these secrets to evil ends.”  Said aliens show up and confirm this information.  We learn, “Grant was really an alien, planted by the good guys to try to undo some of the damage caused by THEIR clones...”  However, the good aliens “don't want their involvement known!”

No adventure is complete until the players submit the story.  To facilitate this, the game provides an “Instant Copy Generator,” a Mad Libs type template (shown below).  “No thought required,” the book assures us.

 

 

Not Quite Gamma World

Art by Martin King

In 1987, TSR published the board game GAMMARAUDERS, “a wahoo brawl of world conquest and spiffy weapons with fins!”  Inspired in part by the Gamma World franchise, GAMMARAUDERS takes place in the post-apocalyptic Gamma Age.  As the above quote suggests, the premise was not entirely serious.  In the game, players control giant, cybernetic animals called bioborgs.  The bioborgs fight one another as well as more conventional military forces (known as 'popcorn').  Cryptic Alliances are also part of the game; functioning as factions.  However, the GAMMARAUDERS Cryptic Alliances are not the same as those in Gamma World.  Included with the game was a twenty page booklet “of bioborg background, Cryptic Alliance news, and world history.”  It was an interesting decision to include twenty pages of unnecessary background details for a board game.  It's almost as if the publishers had additional plans for the setting.

Given the reasonable assumption that a significant amount of overlap exists between comic book readers and RPG enthusiasts, DC Comics published a few official Dungeons & Dragons titles in the late 80s.  Also published was a GAMMARAUDERS comic book, initially written by Peter Gillis.  How many comic books have been based on board games?  Anyway, the early issues included rules for The GAMMARAUDERS (Extremely Tiny) Roleplaying System authored by Zeb Cook (or, as he introduced himself, Major Zeb of the Gammarauders Science Patrol).  So, we have a role-playing system published in a comic book based on a board game partially inspired by a role-playing game.

Included in the first issue was an essay by Jim Ward explaining role-playing games.  The essay began:  “We at TSR freely admit we do not have all the answers on what role playing is or isn't.”  He also offered:  “Role Playing at its simplest is putting yourself in someone else's shoes.”  Naturally, Ward took the opportunity to plug various TSR games.  Cook also made an effort to “explain what roleplaying games are all about.”  In his words:  “It's simple – roleplaying games are make-believe.”  He continued, “The rules are supposed to tell you who shot whom and settle arguments and the like.”

The GAMMARAUDERS (Extremely Tiny) Roleplaying System (hereinafter GETRS) version of a Game Master is called the Boss in the first installment, but the Keeper thereafter.

Each Player Character is a bioborg handler with five abilities.

Abilities are the things that tell you what your Character is like.  Each ability is rated 1 to 6.  A 1 means you're just not very good in that area.  A 6 makes you about the best there is with that ability.

Science – “your understanding of things – well, scientific.”
Style – “your ability to make an impression on others, the way you want it to be made.”
Rumble – “your skill in a fight.”
Bod – “your muscles and size”
Control – “your ability to keep your cool commanding your bioborg in the heat of action.”

Roll 1d6 (ignoring rolls of 6) for each of five ability scores, assigning those scores as desired.

Each player chooses a Complex for his or her Character:

It can be anything you want.  Perhaps he can't abide the color red.  Maybe she is touchy about her height.  He can even loathe his own bioborg, forever envious of the fine creatures other handlers have.  Choose something you can have fun with.

Roll 1d6 to determine the severity of the Complex.  Finally, “Decide all the other stuff, like appearance, dress, accent, and anything else that seems interesting.”  (A handler's name and gender are decided upon before any other step.)

Player Characters “are assigned bioborgs according to the whim of the Keeper...”  Similar to abilities, bioborgs have “numerical stats.”

Bod – “measure of size and fighting ability.”  (Roll 1d6 and multiply by 10)
Brains – “general smarts of the bioborg...(roll 1 die and divide the result by 2, rounding fractions up).”
Control – “the bioborg's willpower to ignore the orders of its handler and even make him do things he doesn't want.”  (Roll 1d6)
Armament – the number of weapons the bioborg can have at one time.  (Bod / 10)
Power – “the number of pods the bioborg can eat without becoming seriously ill.  Pods are the all-important fuel source for the bioborg's weapons (and 'most everything else).”  (Roll 2d6)

Bioborgs also have Complexes.  “These are secretly decided by the Keeper.”

The Gamma Age is populated by “factoids” that look like CRT terminals with robotic feet.

They answer every question – completely and literally.  Never, never ask a factoid what's new.  It will follow you for the rest of your existence, displaying every new thing on its screen.  Attempts to find out where they come from have proven equally futile.  It is quite possible that factoids know everything in the universe.  The problem is finding the right questions to ask.

In game terms, “A factoid will be able to answer any question on a die roll of 1 - 5.”

GERTS uses “the scientific principle known as Fistsfulls of Dice.”  When a character “tries to do something difficult,” roll a number of dice equal to the appropriate ability.  If the result of at least one of the dice equals the ability score, the character succeeds.  Easier tasks increase the number of dice to be rolled; harder tasks reduce the number of dice.

With regard to fighting, “You can do just about anything reasonable (and some things unreasonable).”  However, “You can only do one basic thing (shoot, run, shoot and run, etc.) in a turn.”  Initiative is determined by rolling against Control.

The person who makes the most successful rolls (i.e. rolls his Control score) goes first and so on until everyone has a chance to act.  If no one rolls his score, the person who rolled the most dice goes first and so on.  If it is a tie, those characters do everything all at once.

A weapon inflicts damage according to the results of a number of dice indicated in the weapon's description.  For instance, a “Handy-Dandy Blaster Pistol” inflicts two dice of damage.

When punching, kicking, or otherwise using your body, you do 1 point of Bod damage for each successful die roll you make.  If your Bod is greater than your Rumble, you add one to this result.

When a character's Bod is reduced to zero, that character is “out of play (until the next Big Scene Change).”  (Cook neglected to discuss the topic of scene changes.)

To determine a handler's running speed (in yards) for any given span of thirty seconds, roll a number of dice equal to the handler's Bod score and multiply by ten.  “Bioborgs use the same method to determine how far they move, but multiply the result by 50.”

Handlers enter into Contracts.  Small Contracts have a value of 1 to 6, “good Contracts are 7 to 12, big Contracts are 13 to 18, and Whoppers are 19 or more.”  The value of a Contract is representative of “its difficulty or length of service.”  A handler must fulfill a contract before he or she can enter into a new Contract.  “The Keeper will have fun negotiating contracts with the players.”

If a handler purchases an item, his or her current Contract value is reduced by the item's cost.  When the value of a handler's Contract is reduced to zero, “he's broke (a common situation).”  (The aforementioned “Handy-Dandy Blaster Pistol” has a cost of 1 while “Laso-Binoculars” cost 2.) 

In GERTS, there are two types of equipment; handlers have Personal Equipment while bioborgs have Fittings.  “Both types of equipment are governed by one basic rule:  You have to make things up.”  Each bioborg Fitting is either a Weapon or Defense.

In creating a Fitting:

Give the item a great name by combining meaningless phrases to make something that sounds really powerful.  Choose one term from each of columns A and B, and combine these with the appropriate Weapon or Defense name.

Weapons are assigned “a number of dice of damage (from to 2 to 12)” and a range “from 0 (hand-to-hand) to 1000 yards.”  A defense “confers complete immunity to one type of weapon” and “reduces the damage done by other attacks by a set number of dice, from 1 to 6.”  Every Fitting has a Pod Use Number ranging from one to three.  Whenever a Fitting is used, roll dice equal to the Pod Use Number.  If the result of any of those dice equals the Pod Use Number, “one pod carried by bioborg has been drained of power.”  The cost of a Fitting “is equal to the number of dice of damage or protection plus one die roll.”

Art by Martin King

Omegakron (spoilers)

A post-apocalyptic Mod Squad

Art by Dave Billman

Have you ever wanted to use the history of your home town as the basis of a rollicking RPG adventure?  Neither have I.  Yet Tom Moldvay, not being me or you, took the idea and ran with it until he couldn't run any further.  Had Moldvay come from Chicago or San Antonio, this probably would not merit mention; however, he hailed from the Buckeye State... specifically Akron.  Lacking the élan of Cincinnati or the gravitas of Cleveland or even the je ne sais quoi of Toledo, Akron might not be the most marketable of Ohio's cities.  Maybe it was home town pride, maybe it came about because of a dare; regardless, the third (and last) of the Lords of Creation adventures features the (former) Rubber Capital of the World.  Toss in a dead abolitionist and – in Moldvay's estimation – you have suitable components for a commercially successful role-playing romp.

“Omegakron” refers to the greater Akron area two centuries after a world war using nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.  The result is a combination of science and savagery populated by intelligent animals, street gangs, mutants, cyborgs, and androids.  The player characters can arrive at this future setting via the dimensional gate from the conclusion of The Yeti Sanction, but “the Game Master can choose any means he wishes...”  On page 3 we read, “The simplest method is to have the characters mysteriously appear in the city.”  The setting of Omegakron was “an obscure probability branch diverted from the main time-flow.”  Instead of leading to the Imperial Terra setting, the main-time flow 'now' leads to Omegakron due to a temporal shift.  “The characters entrance into Omegakron was a way of nature seeking to restore the proper time-flow.”  Of course, the player characters don't realize this at the start of the adventure; they just “mysteriously appear.”  However, before arriving, the player characters “see a vision of Prometheus” and receive a 31-line poetic message.  “Even if the characters have never before seen Prometheus, they will recognize him as friendly.”  Naturally, the “cryptic message...holds the key to the success of the adventure.”  The adventure consists of several missions.  “Each time the characters succeed at one of their ten missions, the old town bell will mysteriously ring.”

Omegakron is dedicated to three TSR alumni:  Mark Acres, Jim Ward, and Steve Sullivan.  Given the time travel aspects of Omegakron, Acres makes sense due to his association with TIMEMASTER.  Given the gonzo post-apocalyptic nature of Omegakron, Ward makes sense due to his association with Gamma World.

Various factions exist in the Omegakron area, some of which are races of intelligent, mutated animals.  There are anthropomorphic raccoons who ride semi-intelligent buffalo, anthropomorphic woodchucks who ride semi-intelligent wolves, and anthropomorphic squirrels who ride mutant rhinoceri.  Although not anthropomorphic, there are also intelligent tigers and bears.

Player's Aid #1 is “A Short History of Akron,” a pamphlet with eight pulse-pounding pages of canal building and rubber litigation.  This pamphlet “contains clues woven into the manuscript which will help the characters solve most of the mysteries in the vision of Prometheus.”  The player characters are meant to find this pamphlet early in the adventure; however, the location of the pamphlet is considered sacred to the intelligent animals.  When the intelligent animals catch the player characters violating their shrine, they give the characters three options.  The first option is to fight against a hundred animal warriors and undoubtedly die.  The second option is to submit to a trial in which “one character chosen at random will be killed.”  The third option is to endure an ordeal that will allow the characters to become tribal members, thereby absolving them of their trespass.

The ordeal consists of running along a path to the Cuyahoga River while avoiding booby-traps and fending off animal warriors.  In game terms, the ordeal “has been designed abstractly.”  This means the characters will have 41 - 60 chances for encounters in the course of the ordeal.  For each chance, 1d10 is rolled; a result of '1' indicates an encounter and a table is then consulted.  So, 1d10 is rolled up to sixty times.  The adventure even acknowledges that “it can become boring for the players to watch the GM roll dice.”  Why not just have 4 - 6 encounters?

One of the factions in Omegakron is Novos Akros.  It has a high level of technology, including longevity treatments and “a small intergalactic spaceport.”  Novos Akros has a small 'Manager' class that exerts Orwellian control over the 'Worker' class.

A 12-hour work day is still common in Novos Akros.  Education stops at age 12, when the youths join the labor pool. Workers are kept hopelessly in debt. Any rebellious attitude is immediately crushed.  Offenders are kept in a state of drugged obedience.

To maintain the sophisticated technology of Novos Akros, there are “about 1500 technicians on loan from Old Akron,” a democratically ruled faction established at the University of Akron.  Old Akron has a level of technology roughly equal to the late twentieth century.  For reasons not explained, Old Akron helps a tyrannical regime maintain a technology superior to that which Old Akron enjoys.

The Akros Rangers are the police force for Novos Akros.  Rangers are recruited from personnel not native to Novos Akros.  The player characters are enticed into Novos Akros so they can be drafted into the Rangers.

While drafting the characters might appear to be an underhanded trick at the time, it is actually a way of helping them succeed in their ultimate mission.  As Akros Rangers, they can go anywhere in Omegakron with reasonable safety.  Even the street gangs and intelligent animals hesitate to attack Akros Rangers...

Noted radical John Brown was once a resident of Akron.  This association is all Moldvay needs to bring John Brown's ghost into the adventure.  We learn from Moldvay's pamphlet that “John Brown was one of the world's foremost experts in appraising wool.”  However, he was financially ruined when people refused to buy his overpriced wool.  (If people don't pay the price you set, can you really be considered an expert at appraisal?)

Anyway, the player characters encounter the ghost of John Brown who wants to liberate the “wage slaves” of Novos Akros.  (“For the adventure to work best, it is suggested that the GM make sure the characters join the Akros Rangers before meeting John Brown.”)  The player characters can successfully foment a worker revolt in Novos Akros only if they steal a copy of the Bill of Rights from Old Akron.

By completing all of their missions, the player characters “opened the way” for the Time Adjustors, “a mysterious group of individuals who strive to maximize the time flow.”  (Maximizing the time flow entails the preservation of the branches of time “which lead to the most successful of all possible futures.”)  The Time Adjustors explain to the player characters about such concepts as time flow, temporal shift, and probability branches.  The Temporal Adjustors can recruit the player characters to seek out the reason for the temporal shift that redirected the main time flow toward Omegakron.  This would have lead to the fourth, unpublished Lords of Creation adventure, The Towers of Ilium.  Moldvay claims “the GM should be free to use his impression of the Time Adjustors” and thus provides little detail about them.

Art by Dave Billman

The Ultimate Role-Playing Game . . .

Art by Dave Billman

a game of science, fantasy, science fiction and high adventure that explores the farthest reaches of your imagination!  Splendid adventures take place throughout time, space and other dimensions.

So reads the first portion of copy from the back of the Lords of Creation boxed set.  The first sentence of the Introduction further states, “LORDS OF CREATION is a role-playing game of science fantasy, fantasy, science fiction and high adventure...”  The difference is the mention of 'science fantasy'.  Lawrence Schick, in his 1991 Heroic Worlds, categorizes Lords of Creation as a Science Fantasy game – along with such games as Gamma World and Space: 1889.  The back-of-the-box copy continues:

LORDS OF CREATION allows unlimited voyages via your imagination through time and beyond worldly dimensions.  Journey into magical realms ruled by swords and sorcery . . . battle bizarre aliens and killer robots on mysterious planets in distant galaxies . . . venture into the worlds of mystery, horror and wonder hidden beneath the surface of the present everyday world.  Experience thrilling adventures as you become a valiant and courageous hero!

Lords of Creation, published by Avalon Hill in 1983, was written by Tom Moldvay.  Since this is Moldvay's birthday, it is appropriate to begin our exploration of the game.  Moldvay contributed an essay to Heroic Worlds explaining Lords of Creation.  Not surprisingly, Moldvay and his friends were enthralled by “Original D&D.”  According to Moldvay:

...we had played every twist and variation D&D could offer.  We wanted more.  We experimented with extra rules; we tried to expand to other genres.  After a while it became obvious you can only stretch the D&D rules so far before they snapped.  So I made up a set of rules to suit our needs.

Much like a universal system, Moldvay's rules had to accommodate the possibilities inherent in essentially every role-playing game genre.  Yet Moldvay did not offer Lords of Creation as a universal system; instead, he intended a genre-mixed campaign arc with a definite end game. 

          The idea was to have characters start in a familiar setting – that of our own time and place.  They would begin as “ordinary” people; strange things start to happen to them; they undergo unusual adventures.  Gradually, the characters find that there are realities other than their own.  The characters discover they have innate powers they could once only dream of.  As they gain experience their adventures become more bizarre.  They travel throughout time and to far-flung planets.  They burst the bounds of normal time and space and journey to otherworldly dimensions and universes with unique physical laws.
          The Lords of Creation who give the game its name are extremely powerful individuals who can build whole new worlds and design dimensions with differing physical laws.  Yet all of them were once “normal” people, like the player characters.  If a character survives long enough, he or she becomes one of the Lords of Creation and learns how to build new worlds.

Page 43 of the Rule Book states, “New GMs should first run the adventure included in this game, THE HORN OF ROLAND.”  Unfortunately, The Horn of Roland was sold as an “expansion module” and not included in the Lords of Creation boxed set.  While the Rule Book provides ample advice on creating adventures, Lords of Creation suffers from not providing an introductory adventure to enlighten the Game Master (and players) as to Moldvay's vision and how the characters fit into the super-setting.

The contents of the boxed set included a Rule Book and a Book of Foes – both 64-pages and both with paper covers.  Also included were 1d6, 1d10, and 1d20.  Contemporaneously with selling Lords of Creation, Avalon Hill was also selling James Bond 007.  The soft cover, 160-page James Bond Basic Rules sold at $9.95; the boxed set, which also included character sheets and dice, sold at $12.95.  Although The Horn of Roland has 52 pages and includes play aids in its boxed set, a different introductory adventure could have – and should have – been included with Lords of Creation.  In fact, the Rule Book could have been 48 pages and the campaign material otherwise in the Rule Book included in a 48 page Campaign Book with an introductory adventure.  A 48-page Rule Book, a 48-page Campaign Book, and a 64-page Book of Foes together equal the total page count of the James Bond Basic Rules; Lords of Creation could have been packaged similarly to James Bond 007.

Moldvay also stated in his Heroic Worlds essay, “Sources of inspiration can often reveal more about a game than a long explanation.”  In this regard, Modvay listed the main inspirations for the game:
(1) mythology, legends, and folklore in general;
(2) an unpublished novel [Moldvay] wrote entitled Tom of Bedlam;
(3) the science-fantasy works of Philip José Farmer (the “World of Tiers” and “Riverworld” series) and Roger Zelazny (the “Amber” series, Jack of Shadows, Lord of Light, etc.);
(4) Dr. Who, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and The Avengers;
(5) science-fiction stories and novels in general, especially the “classic” SF of 1946 to 1959; and
(6) supernatural horror stories, particularly the kind written for the famous Weird Tales magazine.
Sadly, this 'Appendix N' for Lords of Creation was not included with the game.  By the way, why list as inspiration an unpublished novel you wrote?  If you're trying to inform people, listing something that cannot be referenced is pointless.  Was there any external inspiration for the novel that did not also inspire the game?

Also on the back of the box are the following claims:

• A combat system including 53 different types of weapons ranging from swords and spears to proton beamers and blasters.
• More than 450 foes to challenge the most daring of role-players.
• 100 different non-combat skills and 53 combat skills that characters can learn as they gain experience.
• 60 different powers that characters can gradually gain.

These claims are essentially true.  There are 53 weapon types, each associated with a combat skill.  The Book of Foes details more than 450 foes if we break down the concept of 'foes' so that orc (average), orc (soldier), and orc (leader) count as three foes.  Also among the foes are famous individuals (such as Marco Polo) and deities (such as Freyja).  I am uncertain as to whether Marco Polo can reasonably be categorized as a foe.  Technically, there are twenty non-combat skills, but each skill has five levels and each level confers a different talent.  For instance, the five levels of 'bureaucracy' are:  Record Keeping, Record Tracking, Bribery, Infiltration, and Futuristic/Magical.  (Most skills have a Futuristic/Magical level.)  Finally, there are twelve power categories. Each category has five powers and these powers must be acquired in ascending order.  For instance, the five Sorcerer powers are (from least to most powerful):  True Sight, Fascination, Illusion, Enchanted Sleep, and Animation.

MacGuffins, Plot Devices & Bric-a-brac

Plate 10 from The Book of Talismans, Amulets and Zodiacal Gems

When 'incarnated', an Advanced Man, Myth & Magic character receives an inheritance.  I suppose only the first incarnation receives an inheritance given that equipment is retained when a character is reincarnated.  However, there is no rule that addresses this and a new inheritance that somehow shows up with each incarnation is no stranger than the MM&M 'reincarnation' process itself.  By rolling percentile dice, the inheritance table “will tell you which of your ancestors remembered you and how much you receive.”

There is a 4% chance that your grandfather has bequeathed to you a:

7 pound piece of fallen star (meteorite); [worth] 300 Lbr.)[sic](If piece is melted into sword it will have a plus 15 to damage).

Whether or not this grandfather is maternal or paternal is not stated.  However, the table lists another grandfather who provides (also at a 4% chance) a silver helmet complete with horns (worth 100 libra) and a ruby (worth 500 libra).  It seems both the maternal and paternal branches are included, but not specified.  One of your aunts might give you “Seven vials of rare spices (150 libra each).”  Your other aunt – perhaps the crazy one – might leave you 200 libra and a leopard skin.  If your father really loves you (1% chance) you will get “10,000 Libra and the Emperor's Seal.”  Otherwise, there's a 4% chance he will give you a suit of legionnaire armor (complete) and 200 libra or (another 4% chance) 500 libra, a broadsword, a dagger, and a Greek helmet.

The 'ancestors' on the inheritance table are related to the character (Older Sister, God Mother, etc.) with the exception of Livia the Poisoner, a non-player character from a couple of the adventures.  (I guess she could be a relative, but the familial tie is not given.)  There is a 4% chance that Livia will leave you:  500 libra, a blowpipe, one hundred darts, and – true to her epithet – a bottle of cobra venom.

Yaquinto's The Egyptian Trilogy was marketed as “A TRIPLE Adventure Module for use with Man, Myth & Magic.”  It is also a 'system expansion' or sourcebook.  The setting of the MM&M rules is AD 41 (or thereabouts), but The Egyptian Trilogy module takes place in 1375 BC.  As such, the book provides nationalities, classes, rules, etc. appropriate for that era, including an inheritance table.  The 'ancestors' include the relatives from the original table (other than godparents), but also includes 'ancestors' such as Ex-Lover, Childhood Friend, Tribal Hetman, Priest, and Hunter.  Your uncle might give you sixty ounces of silver, a bow, a quiver of thirty arrows, and a vial of five applications of curare.  Your other uncle might give you a copper poleaxe, an iron-tipped spear, and a bronze helmet.  There is a 4% possibility that your ex-lover will leave you a leather kilt and a lethal dose of hemlock.  (I wonder if that's supposed to send some kind of message.)

The MM&M inheritance table provides characters with starting equipment and/or money.  The items can also be plot hooks.  What was your uncle doing with an “African Ju-Ju Bone”?  A spool of golden thread is worth 500 libra, but first you need to find someone who will buy it.  Why would “the Hunter” leave you his magical bow and magical charm?  What's the story behind the silver chalice your cousin left you?

In the recently released D&D Basic Rules we see a similar 'plot hook generator' with the 'Trinkets table' (which I find reminiscent of 1E Gamma World's 'Treasure List').  The table takes up two pages, with more than half of the second page blank.  Surely, the Trinkets table is not necessary for the Basic Rules; they could have used those pages for a couple of additional backgrounds or a detailed example of play or an index or more passages from that literary genius R. A. Salvatore.  While not necessary, the Trinkets table does something important – it connects (however faintly) the character with the setting in a unique way.  It shouldn't be the only connection, but it may be the first.  Anything that spurs the imagination is worthwhile.

The Trinkets table “can help stock a room in a dungeon or fill a creature's pockets.”  The problem with this is that some trinkets are more appropriate as contents for a monster's pocket than as possessions of a player character.  Why would a player character walk around with a “rope necklace from which dangles four mummified elf fingers” (Trinket #9) or a “glass jar containing a weird bit of flesh floating in pickling fluid” (Trinket #20)?  Why would you keep a “small idol...that gives you unsettling dreams when you sleep near it” (Trinket #8)?  Some things useful for dungeon room/monster pocket stocking should be in a Dungeon Curios table and not a 'player character possession' Trinket table.

Most of the Trinket table items are unusual, but some are not.  Trinket #41 is a “scrap of cloth from an old banner.”  That's an example of a trophy from the Soldier background; it shouldn't be a “trinket.”  On the other hand, perhaps there should be a separate Trinket table for each background.  (I'm ambivalent about Trinket #29, “A pair of old socks.”)

I notice possible product placement with trinket #46, “A dead sprite inside a clear glass bottle.”  (Get it?  A bottle of Sprite!  Haha!)

Trinket #99 is “A wooden box with a ceramic bottom that holds a living worm with a head on each end of its body.”  I wonder if this is an allusion to one of Sherlock Holmes' “unsolved” cases; namely, “that of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science.”  (“The Problem of Thor Bridge”)

Interview with Donald Saxman

Recently, I have been in correspondence with Don Saxman, whose claim to fame – at least for purposes of this blog – is the creation of Superhero 2044, the first commercially available superhero role-playing game.  Given the 1977 copyright date, it is undeniably old school.  For anyone claiming enthusiasm for “old school” RPGs, Saxman's experiences should prove insightful.  As such, I asked Saxman for an interview and he kindly consented.

If you have your own questions for Mr. Saxman, please ask them in the comments section and he may reply.

Thoul's Paradise:  Not only was Superhero 2044 an early role-playing game, it was – as you say on thesestrangeworlds.com – “the very first comic book superhero RPG.”  In the 21st century, we have certain concepts as to what a “tabletop” RPG should entail; in the mid-70s, when you created Superhero 2044, those concepts had not yet crystallized.  At the time, RPGs were very much associated with wargames.  In fact, I don't think you use the phrase “role-playing” anywhere in Superhero 2044, instead you reference “wargames” (as well as “improvisational theater”) in the introduction.  When you wrote Superhero 2044, did you make a distinction between RPGs and wargames?  In your opinion, were RPGs merely a 'special case' of wargames?  What were your perceptions and what were the differences?

Donald Saxman:  I wrote and playtested Superhero 2044 between early 1975 and 1977.  Actually, there were two editions with significant differences.  The first (Superhero 44) was printed by myself at the Indiana University media center in early 1977 and the more common color edition (Superhero 2044) was printed by Lou Zocchi's Gamescience about a year later.
       At the time, I don't think the term “role playing game” was in common usage, especially in the context of a table top game.  Those were “touchy feely” days and “role playing” was typically used more in the context of psychology and interpersonal dispute resolution.
       I think the first time I heard the term “role playing game” was in high school, maybe 1970 to describe the Model Congress and Model UN (collectively known as the “World Freedom Club.”)  These were live action, I guess, so they would qualify as LARPS now, but the goal was political awareness and not competition. I tended to “play” them to win, much to the chagrin of peace and consensus-loving fellow students and faculty advisors.  In one scenario I was the UN ambassador of the Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) during an attempt to wind down a growing war in the Middle East.  I looked at the scenario, my country's “goals” and my “assets” and quickly came to the conclusion that the best thing for Madagascar would be prolonged war and the interdiction (or ideally destruction) of the Suez Canal.  The result wasn't pretty, especially to anyone downwind of the eventual fallout, but I “won” and thereafter ships moving between the Atlantic and Pacific often stopped at the new Madagascar Free Trade Terminal.  Great role playing there.
       In 1972 when I went to Indiana University, I quickly joined the Society for Creative Anachronism and the Science Fiction Club.  In both cases, I was soon immersed in live action role playing. So by the time I joined the “Conflict Simulation Club” my idea of a role playing game was very different from todays.
       Basically when we played miniatures, or cardboard and map board games, and then eventually Chainmail and then D&D, we weren't thinking “RPGs.”  We were thinking “campaigns,” i.e. something that lasted more than just one session and we were thinking “fantasy wargame” i.e. something with explicit combat and something not rooted in reality.  So we made a distinction between D&D and, say, Tractics and Boot Hill and En Garde:  Those were all wargame campaigns but not “fantasy wargame campaigns.”  And we made the distinction between one day miniatures reenactments or Avalon Hill's Gettysburg:   Those weren't campaigns and arguably they weren't very realistic role playing either.
       To (finally) answer your first question, when I wrote Superhero 2044 I thought I was writing a “campaign” and I thought I was writing a “fantasy wargame.”  That was even my tagline:  “The Campaign of Superpowered Crimefighters in the Year 2044.”
       At the time, the term we used was “persona.”  You would adopt the persona of a wizard or Klingon or even a Malagasy ambassador.  Your persona would have different powers and abilities and equipment.  But they would also have different motivation and goals or victory conditions.  This is how a bunch of spindly college students could spend the evening pretending they were “breaking into a monster's home, killing them, and looting their bodies.”  Not a motivation or goal any of us had in “real life” but an easily enough achieved persona.
       This idea of “persona” loomed large when I was designing Superhero 2044.  One of the main motivations for my doing the game was the release of Tactical Studies Rules' Warriors of Mars game book.  I thought they had messed it up big time and that I could do better.  I wasn't just upset that they consistently misspelled “Martian” or that they had failed to get permission from the Burroughs estate (some of whom I knew).  It was that John Carter and other Barsoomians just were not heroic enough.
       So I set out to make a platform for the heroic persona.  There would still be combat – lots of it – so it would be a wargame, but the role playing would emphasize fighting evil.  And it would be science fiction-type fantasy.  And it would be a campaign. (BTW, the second edition rules for playing villains were written by one of Mr. Zocchi's staff writers, not by me.)

TP:  If Warriors of Mars was one of your “main motivations” for Superhero 2044, what were your other motivations?

DS:   A big part of it was the desire to create.  One of my best friends was Mike Ford, an increasingly popular science fiction writer who published as John M. Ford.  During playtesting he decided to begin wiring full time and he was a tremendous inspiration. In the mean time, he was a great D&D Dungeon Master who would occasionally toss in the stray displaced superhero into his fantasy campaigns.
       Although Mike's growing creative successes were a motivation, it wasn't D&D, or even Mike's superhero/D&D house rules that greatly influenced Superhero 2044.  Rather it was an entirely different RPG:  En Garde by Game Designers' Workshop.  En Garde was one of the first true role playing games that didn't rely heavily on miniatures combat.  En Garde was a simulation of 17th Century nobles, gentleman, and soldiers.  Amazingly, the game remains popular with very few changes to the core rules.
       Of course, another inspiration and motivation was the comic book.  For the record, I was (and still am) an avid comic book reader – specifically DC (or National back then).  The comic book series that most influenced Superhero 2044 was Legion of Superheroes.  The idea of a team of variously powered heroes working together in a future setting was especially appealing.   I went so far as to incorporate LSH staple “the Science Police” in the rules (I even won a science fiction convention costume party in a Science Police costume).  So the whole concept of the “unique” super-powered superhero was based on the Legion of Superheroes (especially the Jim Shooter and Win Mortimer and then Cary Bates and Dave Cockrum eras).
       BTW, in subsequent treatments of 2044 I replaced the Science Police with a (not owned by DC) organization called CURBIT (Confederacy of Urban Regions, Bureau of Illegal Technology) or “Tech Cops.”

TP:  With regard to the three character types:  Ubermensch have a net Prime Requisite modifier of +60, Uniques have a net modifier of +20, and Toolmasters have a net modifier of -10.  Other than modification of Prime Requisites, what are the differences among the character types in terms of game mechanics?  Why would I want to play anything other than an Ubermensch?

DS:  One of the weakest parts of Superhero 2044 is the character creation system. My original plan was to do three more or less equally sized game books:  the existing one, one entirely devoted to character creation (including a couple dozen pre-gen characters), and one with more background and some sample scenarios.  When I sold the right to Gamescience, I also pitched this and included some material that would have gone in the second and third book.  Lou Zocchi went ahead and added some of the pregens in the first (and ultimately only) book and the other ones never got completed.  However, a couple years ago I resurrected and expanded on some additional character generation material and it went into the “halfway to 2044” edition that Mr. Zocchi sold at game conventions.   I have been in the process of expanding even more for a new game, Strange World.
       As for your question, the basic prime requisites describe the physical and mental situation for each player, but are largely silent on their “powers and abilities” and “extraordinary tools.”  So you're right, an Uber looks powerful compared to an Unique or Toolmaster if you just go by prime reqs.  This is sort of like saying “Hawkeye or Black Widow could easily take out Tony Stark or Bruce Banner... But they would have a much harder time against Iron Man or Hulk (let's face it... they wouldn't last a minute).”
       Personally, I always liked playing Ubers, with a few relatively weak Uniques and Toolmasters and a lot of powerful NPC Uniques as background.  Conceptually this is a lot like playing a “fighter class” in a world of magical “wizards” and “clerics.”
       Of course, the whole division into three classes is pretty unrealistic, even in a world of superpowers. In comics, Batman (an Uber?) has access to very powerful cars, a utility belt, and the whole Batcave...so should he really be a Toolmaster? And how to handle heroes like Green Lantern?  Unique or Toolmaster?  There are lots of hybrid superheroes in the comics...Spider-Man, Thor, etc.  At the time, I was certainly influenced by the three character classes in D&D.

TP: Perhaps the most interesting thing about Superhero 2044 is the setting. You carefully designed circumstances which made the existence of super-powered crime-fighters plausible (or at least more plausible than otherwise).  Is there any fiction based on this setting?  Do you maintain rights to the setting?  For that matter, do you maintain rights to the game itself?

DS:  When I first wrote Superhero 2044 the setting was original and as unique as I could make it.  I wanted a situation where there was very advanced technology, so I picked a setting in the future.  I wanted a setting where there human mutations had resulted in super powers.  Unlike many comic book writers, I understood how mutation worked...exposure to radiation might result in profound changes...but not to the individual exposed.  Rather it would be the offspring of the irradiated.   This narrowed down the specific date.  It had to be about two or three generations after a nuclear war that took place in 1990.  Why 1990?  I was also writing a post-nuclear war RPG called “Ruinwar 90.”  So if we'd have adult super-powered humans I figured it would be about 50 years after the end of the 1990 war, i.e. 1994 plus 50 years.
       Next I picked some key technologies that would allow advanced weapons, vehicles, and other gear.   I assumed the key invention would be a “super battery.”
       Finally I wanted a self-contained environment so I created an isolated island where civilization had largely survived the war.   I wanted the environment to be in transition so I created the Freedom League...and then destroyed them so that there was an immediate and pressing need for brand new heroes. This is where the players come in.
       Then I began to populate the environment with non player characters, organizations, and supervillains.  As I previously discussed my plan (never realized) was to provide a lot more background in a follow-up game supplement.
       The main reason this never happened was that after a relatively small run of “Superhero 44” I sold the rights to the franchise to Lou Zocchi and Gamescience.  This was the right decision for me at the time, and the right thing for the game, which got much, much more exposure than it would have if I'd continued to self publish.  But for better or worse the game turned out to be a one shot.
       A lot of this background sat around twenty years.  It then got recycled into my “Strange World” online game and ultimately into the five-part “Strange World” series of short novels.  These are currently available for the Amazon Kindle (just search for Donald Saxman on Amazon and ignore all the boring-looking non-fiction).  You can also get them from my website www.thesestrangeworlds.com.
       The scope and setting of the online game and the novels is not the same as Superhero 2044.  Like I said, I sold the franchise.  But much of the flavor and a few of the characters remain.  For instance, the year 2044 remains, the post-war superhero setting remains and even a version of the “Inguria” setting remains in the form of New Miami.
       On the other hand, the superhero portion of the setting is just a small part of the overall environment. Anyway, feel free to decide for yourself.  Pay particular attention to the super-powered teenager “Cobra.”
       So my future plans?  I'm about a third of the way through a massive 400 page RPG based on the Strange World multi-dimensional setting.  I tried the Kickstarter route and failed miserably to create the necessary buzz, but the game will eventually be completed.
       Or will it?  It's been suggested I should refocus the Strange World RPG and turn it into a new version of Superhero 2044.   That's a possibility.  I'd have to reacquire the right to the franchise from Mr. Zocchi.  He's never particularly been enthusiastic about this but who knows?

TP:  The aliens from Formalhaut (which I assumed to be Fomalhaut) are an important part of the background and (in my opinion) deserve more detail.  How did you 'design' this species and has anyone made a depiction of one?

DS:  There's actually a story behind that.  When I arrived at Indiana University in 1972, I went to the student union for “orientation” and met a couple of upper classmen who were starting a science fiction club.  One was Leif Andersen, and he was a graduate student in planetary geology.   Mind you, humankind knew very little about this science at the time.   We'd landed on the moon, and had what we thought was a reasonable understanding of what was happening on Mars and Venus.  The Jupiter and Saturn moons were still a mystery.  The whole idea of extra-solar planets was, well, science fiction.  Leif knew if it became known he was a big SF fan it would impact his career, so I think he wanted to found the club so he could benefit from it while keeping a low profile.  Alas, he passed away before the Saturn and Jupiter flybys, which was a tragedy on so many levels.
       Anyway, I wanted an alien race for Superhero 2044 and I wanted it to be someplace new, and I initially picked Fomalhaut.  I had a pretty complex back story for them.  Back then, there was no Wikipedia and no easy way to research this kind of thing.   Anyway, well into playtesting Leif noticed what I was doing and let me know that Fomalhaut was a singularly unlikely place for life of any kind to inhabit.  For one thing, it was a triple star.  Who knew?  So the Triple star system of Fomalhaut became the imaginary Formalhaut.  The Fomals became the Formians.   Funny thing though.  The Hubble telescope found one of the first extra-solar planets orbiting one of the Fomalhaut suns.  And there are now planetary evolution models that allow for a life zone in such a system.  It's still a singularly unlikely place for intelligent life to evolve, but not an impossible place.   I wish Leif was around to discuss.  I spent a lot more time designing the culture than I did the Formians themselves.  Most of this didn't end up in the game.  I did provide more detail in the previously-discussed Strange World novels and they will be featured prominently in the eventual Strange World game.
      Here's a backgrounder from the novels:  The Formians are a relatively low tech level race native to Formalhaut 2.  In 2032, human radio astronomers detected a plea for help from this dying race.  Formia was a heavy (1.4 Earth normal gravity), hot world with a high oxygen content.  Industrialization increased global particulate levels and resulted in a planetary ice age (ironically designated “global cooling” by humans).  Worse than the cold, climate change turned much of the planet's free water to ice.  As population increased, and farmland decreased, more and more coal was burned to produce fertilizer and operate greenhouses.  Planetary ecology was on the brink of collapse.  The most advanced Formian technology was approximately that of AD 1900 Earth.   The age of steel was well established and electrification was beginning.  Nuclear power (and weapons) were being conceptualized.  Formians dreamed of space travel, but the best they could do was helium-powered blimps.
       Formians are quadrapods with two legs and two arms, each with five prehensile fingers.  They are about the same size as humans, with shorter legs and longer backs and arms.  Formians are mammals but lay eggs and are completely covered by grey hair that closely resembles penguin feathers.  Male Formians each resemble one another.  Female Formians are somewhat smaller and with somewhat more variation in body shape.  Formians live several hundred years.  They are approximately as strong and fast as humans and are very durable and difficult to injure.  They are very heat tolerant and not very cold tolerant.  Formians must use oxygen masks if they venture above about a mile over sea level.  Formian intelligence is variable.  Formians have photographic memory so “intelligence” often equates to experience and access to education.  Formians have the ability to mimic most sounds they hear, including human speech.  Formians are carnivorous but can't eat Terran food and generally rely on “artificial” food grown in tissue vats.  Formians must take allergy pills while on Earth.  These expensive allergy pills are illegal for humans to possess because they are addictive and hallucinogenic.
       The evacuated Formians prospered on Earth, either forming enclaves or integrating with human culture.  I have some sketches of Formians but hope to eventually have a professional tweak them into something more attractive.  In a case of independent evolution, the closest I've ever seen them come to realization in mainstream art is the intelligent platypus in much lamented My Cage comic.

TP:  Although you did not publish a supplement, Judges Guild published Hazard, an “official game aid approved for use with Superhero 2044.”  I assume it was “approved” by Gamescience.   Did you have any contact with the author, Robert Bingham? What are your thoughts about that supplement?

DS:  As you say, Judges Guild did Hazard and this was approved by Gamescience, but I was not involved.  Their depiction of the world outside of Inguria was fine, but not at all what I had envisioned.  It was very popular and no doubt served to make the game popular too, so who can complain?  I understand a lot of people used it in non-superhero role playing.  As an example of an interesting “parallel universe,” my version of “the world outside of Inguria” was actually the subject of an entire game.  I wrote it as “Ruin War 90” and sold it to Gamescience, and it was published in a very short run as “Nuclear Survivors.”  It was to be a prequel to SH 2044 set in 1990.  There was even a sequel game planned...a space opera set in the 2100s called “Hundred Suns.”  By the time Nuclear Survivors was published Gamma World was popular (as it is to this day) and I think that many would-be buyers thought NS was a rip-off of that game.  Actually, it was written before Gamma World, but even I admit GW was better.  It did however center on the 1990 nuclear war that sparked (literally) the mutations that eventually resulted in Uniques.  As you might imagine, I've recycled many of the concepts from this post-apocalypse game into the Strange World novels too.
       Hazard wasn't alone.  There were other supplements, including one in Different Worlds by Brian Wagner (Issue 5, Dec/Jan 1980, “Super Rules for Superhero 2044”).  Then the 1982 (issue 23) of Different Worlds has a supplement by me called “Part Time Superhero.”  I was planning on doing additional articles for Different Worlds but for one reason or another they never happened.  I also did a tabletop encounter that was demoed and sold out (all 50 copies) at the DeepSouth Con/River Con science fiction convention in the early 1980s.  It had rules for a group of five superheroes fighting five supervillains.  It's so rare even I don't have a copy anymore!  Lots of good stuff in all these if you can find them on eBay.

TP:  What really happened to Dr. Ruby?  Dr. Ruby is a geologist; your educational background includes geology.  How much character identification is going on?

DS:  Dr. Ruby was named after and somewhat based on Indiana University professor of Geomorphology Dr. Robert Ruhe (he passed away in 1993).  He was a real character and a pleasure to learn from and joke with.  At the time the Geology department offered a “Screwball Award” to a professor each Christmas.  This award was based on student voting and the main criteria was overall zany behavior.  Campaigning was always fierce.  I think he won it the year I was writing SH2044 largely because of his threat to flunk anyone who used the word “dirt” in his soils chemistry class.  “In this class, we don't use 'dirt.'  We don't even use 'dirty.'”  He continued, “We say soiled.”  This got into the school paper and even in the Indianapolis mainstream paper.
       Anyway, Mike Ford (who did the part for the “what really happened to Dr. Ruby” series based his drawings on life and pretty well nailed him I think.
       What happened to him?  I have two versions.  During the 1990s when I was running the first Strange World online game, Ruby managed to get into the tunnels that led to different parallel universes and found there was a universe where each of the illustrated outcomes had occurred – except the “really dead” option.  He learned that if he ever returned to his home universe he probably wouldn't survive.  He ended up a kind of traveling supervillain.
       However, that outcome came later.
       It was my original intent that the “lava suit” outcome was the real one.  In fact, I started a “choose your own adventure” type game that explored this.  I never finished it and the original (handwritten) manuscript is either lost or at the bottom of some 40 year old box in Public Storage.
       It's doubtful it will ever be revived but just in case I should put the obligatory spoiler warning about now.
       The adventure starts when a hideously burned man in a space suit is discovered dead in Battery Park.  The authorities decide it was one of the asteroid miners testing out an experimental spacesuit designed to survive re-entry.  (This is somewhat based on an old “Superman” TV show where a drowned man in a deep sea diver suit is discovered in an alley in Metropolis.)  The player/superhero thinks otherwise and eventually tracks down Ruby to his subterranean lair (protected by lava moats).  If they survive they just might manage to prevent Ruby from destroying the island's geothermal power station.
       The adventure also reveals a good deal of background about Dr. Ruby.  In his younger says he had experimented with protection against lava but his partner died in an accident.  Ruby blamed the Science Police for the accident (with a certain degree of justification as it turns out).  He went on to perfect the lava suits and realized that they would also protect against high intensity radiation.  He eventually ended up in London, where he hoped to loot the radioactive, half melted remains of the British Museum.  While doing this, he discovered the notes and journals of Professor Moriarty including “Dynamics of an Asteroid.”  This started him on his path of revenge.
       Using instructions from “Dynamics” he deflected the orbit of a large asteroid to impact on earth.  The Science Police formed a rare and tenuous alliance with the asteroid miners to place a nuclear device on the asteroid and break it apart and deflect its path.  Recall that one of the reasons the Science Police was created was to keep all forms of nuclear power and nuclear weapons off Earth.  Ruby then stole the bomb and returned the asteroid to its original orbit.
       He then devised a plan to nuke Science Police headquarters (and a good deal of the surrounding city).  Instead, the superheroic Freedom League attacked and were nearly all killed when the bomb detonated in an uninhabited area.  Ruby was widely thought to have died too, but he had escaped to his lair to sulk and plan.
       And who was the original man in the space suit?  A kidnapped biologist forced to clone a frozen Tyrannosaurus Rex (Ruby had also looted a map for the monster's Arctic resting place from London).  How much identification is going on?  Well, if I was a supervillain, I wouldn't have left the heroes in the dinosaur cage where they might conceivably escape. I'd have just dumped them into the lava moat.

TP:  That doesn't seem very sporting.  Regardless, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.

Inspiration: The Wilderness Sea

In 1987, DC Comics published a 48-page 'special' (with no internal ads) called Talos of the Wilderness Sea.  Prominent creator Gil Kane wrote and illustrated the book.  Writing credit was shared with Jan Strnad, but the premise was entirely Kane's.  Kane intended Talos to be an epic saga that would span twelve issues.  Sadly, the special is the only portion that was published; evidently, there was insufficient reader response to warrant additional issues.

Kane considered Talos distinct from the usual sword-and-sorcery material:

It's not another one of those...In those stories, the barbarian is seldom if ever part of any ongoing environment.  He's always the single heroic figure, but it doesn't matter what background he's placed against.  There, the background is not really important, the secondary supporting characters are not really important  The barbarian becomes just this phantom cowboy dragged in to face a set of difficulties which rarely have anything specific behind them.  There's little to suggest that it's a special kind of world.

The Wilderness Sea is part of “the disrupted environment of a post-holocaust world” – specifically, “a future America after a nuclear holocaust...The oceans in this time would be lower, there would be pockets of heavily radiated areas, mutated life, and so on.”

The story of Talos is “structured after the Book of Exodus in the Bible.”  In an irradiated forest, “beastpeople” dwell; the 'civilized' people of Totthmain raid their settlements and conscript them into slavery.  Due to their greater tolerance to radiation, beastpeople are put to work in the radioactive mines.  (Ore from the mines is “critical for the production of weapons and temples.”)

The ruler of Totthmain is Zar Totth and his queen is about to give birth; however, her past three pregnancies have resulted in stillbirths.  On each occasion, the Zar caused the midwife to be put to death.  The mate of the current midwife is the chief slave-taker and, on a raid, he comes across a beastwoman giving birth.  Strangely enough, the beastbaby appears to be human and the slaver takes it.  (You see where is is going?)

Anyway, the slaver brings the baby into the royal household via a secret passage and, sure enough, the queen delivers another stillbirth.  The slaver and the midwife are successful in making the switch.  (“Look my queen...the child lives!”)  The baby, 'Carn Whitemane,' is raised as the Zar's son.  Characters are introduced which – had Talos survived as a series – would doubtless play important roles; however, for purposes of this summary, we need not mention them further.

Eventually, Carn grows into a young man and must “face the will of the gods” (i.e., partake in a rite of passage).  The rite requires that he enter the irradiated forest – without bringing weapons or other supplies – and spend a month therein.  However, crafting weapons once in the forest is not prohibited.  During his stay, Carn encounters a large, white panther-like animal that saves him from a pack of wolves.  The two form some ill-defined metaphysical connection and Carn names the cat “Star.”  Carn encounters the “beastpeople” and his birth-mother informs him of his true heritage.  Carn accepts this claim without proof (although the slave-taker eventually verifies this) and the “beastpeople” accept him as the incarnation of Talos – the one foretold in prophecy who will take them to a better existence.

Talos (as he is now called) leads his people in combat against an expedition of Zar Totth's legionnaires.  Victorious, Talos ends the book (“The end of the beginning...”) with some observations about fulfilling his destiny.  Had Talos become a series, our hero would have brought his followers “down the continental shelf, down through the Wilderness Sea, in search of a 'promised land.'”

So, in conclusion, submitted for your approval is an Old Testament/Gamma World mash-up from twenty-five years ago.  Inspiration abounds – it's just a matter of keeping your eyes (and your mind) open.

Cataclysm

Hans Hofmann     Cataclysm     1945


Last week I indicated that Year of the Phoenix (hereinafter Phoenix) is a post-apocalypse game.  The rules refer to the apocalypse at issue as the ‘cataclysm.’  According to Chapter 10 of the Adventure Guide:

          North Amerika was engulfed in a cataclysmic disaster over a century ago.  The exact nature of it is uncertain (letting the gamemaster tailor the facts to fit his or her campaign), but the results are all around.  World population is drastically reduced, culture has been altered, and the Zoviets rule North America.
          Two different versions of a possible holocaust (the Third World War) are included:  one at the beginning of this chapter, and the other at the end.  The first one stipulates that everyone knows what happened, while the latter assumes that portions of the world entered a 'Dark Age,' from which they are only now emerging.

The section on slang indicates that ‘Zoviet’ is the “[e]volution of the twentieth-century term, ‘Soviet.’”  ‘Amerika’ is “a rebel word, to distinguish themselves from the America the Zoviet government represents.”  Yes, the first paragraph of the quoted section above begins with “North Amerika” and ends with “North America.”  I assume that author Martin Wixted intended a consistent spelling.

In the ‘full-disclosure’ version of the cataclysm, the entry for the year 2007 begins:

          Testing of a new Ion Propulsion engine by Japan American Corporation in space leads to disaster for Earth as the magnetic effects wipe out many computer systems monitoring life support, water, sewage, and power use.  The polar ice caps begin to melt as Earth is ripped asunder.  The Van Allen belt disrupts the Ozone Layer, admitting vast quantities of ultraviolet radiation.  Earth's fault lines convulse and nuclear power plants around the globe suffer chain-reaction meltdowns.

The geographic upheaval of the cataclysm affected the continents in terms of coastlines and ecology.  A map of ‘North Amerika’ will have to wait for a future post, but I like to think that Wixted was inspired by the original Gamma World map when creating his setting.  Otherwise, here is a portion of the world map from the back of the box:

Most of the rest of the map is covered by a text box; however, for those interested, Australia seems to be Non-Zoviet.

Among the more drastic changes, page 7 of the Adventure Guide says...

          The North American continent settled, dropping many areas below sea level.  These areas were eventually reclaimed when the nuclear winter increased the polar ice caps...
          The great Mojave desert has all but disappeared, thanks to the shift in the weather and the increased size of the Great Salt Lake...
          No new mountain ranges sprang up as a result of the cataclysm, but most have changed in height to some extent, with several volcanoes active along the Northern West Coast.

Anyway, “The Soviets are hurt badly be the catastrophe, but gamble that the rest of the world is completely helpless.”  Despite the fact that “the comparatively undamaged Asiatic Conclave surges into Russia,” the USSR makes gains in Europe and successfully invades North America.  Nuclear weapons are used and “Disease begins its insidious spread as radiations sickness [sic], rabies, and cancer tear through the innocent populace.”  By the time 2197 rolls around, the Soviets Zoviets still occupy much of Europe as well as the (former) United States and Canada.  Also, the Asiatic Conclave “remains a deep thorn in the Russian side.”

The ‘Dark Age’ version of the cataclysm consists of flavor text on page 17 of the Adventure Guide on a graphic that is intended to represent a tattered document.  Beneath the document, the bottom of the page reads, “Discovered near the Blasted Heath, and translated by Sister Emmanuel Luth.”  ‘Blasted Heath,’ the slang section tells us, “Refers to any radioactive zone.  Originally meant a specific radiation-soaked area in the Southwest.”

The document is titled “St. Augin's Book of Days:  The Third World War” and consists of seven numbered, biblically-styled passages (20-23 and 57-59).  One supposes that “The Red Death,” “the Thing,” and “Evil” are synonyms for communist forces.  In passages 20-23, God commands “the ruler of the greatest nation which opposed the Thing...to go forth and end this plague.”  The ruler and his “war chiefs” travel “across the great sea” whereupon the ruler “led the holy crusade across the length and breadth of the land...”

The last three passages tell us...

          On the twelth year of this task, it is written that God again came unto him.  In his vision the Lord spoke thusly, “Great soldier, your faith is steadfast, and your mission here is finished  Return now, to your homeland, and bear all of life’s misfortunes well.”  “It shall be done as you command,” the man spoke, and returned home.
          Ill was his heart at the words of God, and his foreboding was not misguided.  The Evil One had indeed fled from sight – and had struck at the ruler’s own family, rending their home asunder.  The ruler fell to his knees in dismay, crying, “Lord my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
          God heard his plea, and pitied him.  “It is your holy quest to destroy this Evil, to seek it out wherever it lurks and rid it from the face of the earth.  Once the world is again pure, you may live in freedom.  Your flock is gone, so that you may well heed my message and raise a new people who must obey my word or perish.”  The ruler accepted this mission and went forth into the daylight to fulfill the Holy Word of God.

Sort of like The Book of Job meets Twilight: 2000.

Wixted provides one last bit of ‘flavor’ regarding the cataclysm.  In the slang section, there is an entry for ‘By the Day of Great Blood.’  It is defined as “An oath to swear upon, ‘By the Day of Great Blood I do swear to uphold this treaty.’  Refers to unspecified past event, having to do with the cataclysm.”

Intelligent (Non-Human Type) Races in Metamophosis Alpha

Before engaging upon today's topic, your humble host would like to inform (or remind) his esteemed audience that the 1976 edition of Metamorphosis Alpha is currently available as a print-on-demand product from Lulu.

Gamma World enthralled me as a young lad for various reasons; more for what it didn't say than for what it did – the unaddressed details. This, of course, spurred my imagination to “fill in” those details (which, I suppose, was the intent of Ward and Jaquet). The most obvious example was the map that came in the boxed set. It had just enough details to be recognizable as a post-apocalyptic United States, but mostly it was a blank canvas onto which we could project a personalized Gamma World. Civilization had collapsed, but there were efforts to rise up once again, including a minimal number of cities. What was society like in those cities? That's what I wanted to know. Of course, there were the cryptic alliances, but there were also races of intelligent beings – the two-headed Orlens, the reptilian Sleeth, the translucent Fens, etc. I thought it was a shame that these couldn't be player character races, but they would likely be unbalancing.

Similarly, there are intelligent races on the starship Warden and with intelligence comes some form of society. No provision is given in the rules for allowing player characters to be members of such races; however, there is no rule expressly forbidding such. Within the “Mutated Animals” section starting on page 17, there are six intelligent races of mutated animals proper, two races of intelligent “flying types,” no intelligent insect races, at least two (and perhaps as many as four) intelligent races of plants.

The following are the intelligent mutated animal races: metaled ones, cougaroids, bearoids, jegets, thief beasts, and wolfoids. Metaled ones have “a high order of intelligence” so I suspect that they have the intellectual capacity for communication and they possess telekinesis which suggests some level of manipulatory ability. Regardless, there is no indication of a society of metaled ones. Cougaroids have “the intelligence of a human” and “manipulative paws.” The illustration page 11 shows a quartet of weapon wielding cougaroids, so they definitely have a society. Per their description, they have “an attraction odor that prevents [them] from congregating in any number.” According to page 14, attraction odor “makes the mutant smell very edible to any meat eating creature.” (emphasis from original) I'm guessing this means that cougaroids will resort to cannibalism. Bearoids have “intelligence” and “manipulative paws.” They have telepathy to facilitate communication as well as several other formidable mental mutations. Jegets are “very intelligent” and have telepathy; they also have “manipulative paws” and telekinesis. Perhaps their size (2 feet) prevents effective tool use or perhaps they have no need for tools. Like their cougaroid cousins, jegets have the attraction odor mutational defect. Wolfoids are “fully intelligent” and have “manipulative paws.” They wear clothes, use swords, and they “have been able to master many of the mutated beasts and use them as guards and protectors.” Thief beasts seek out, study, and use technological devices more than any other mutant animal race on the ship. Like some of the other races described above, thief beasts are “highly intelligent” and have “manipulative paws,” telepathy, and telekinesis (as well as other mutations). Unlike the other intelligent mutant animal races, thief beasts lack any defects and do not seem to have any drawbacks. By all rights, these guys should be the dominant race on the Warden.

There are two intelligent “flying type” races, hawkoids and imitators. Hawkoids are “fully intelligent” and have “appendages...ending in hands” which make them capable of using bows and throwing rocks. Their capacity for communication is not mentioned. Through the vagaries of fate, these birds have the levitation mutation; I guess its useful if they get tired of flapping their wings. The description for the imitator says “it is fully intelligent but does not have the manipulative appendages to take advantage of it.” However, once a month, the imitator is able to “completely shapechange into any creature within 25 feet of it” which makes the imitator “resistant to the powers of that creature.” The shapechange lasts as long as desired, so I don't see the problem. Shapechange into something with manipulatory appendages and stay that way. In the “Example of Ship's Level 11” on page 26, there is an imitator that will assume the form of a party member and attempt to covertly replace that person, doppelganger-like. It uses a blowgun, so I assume that, before changing into the form of a party member, it maintained a form that could use (or at least carry) a blowgun.

There are two plant races that are obviously intelligent, singing vines and sword bushes. Also, there are two plant races that are arguably intelligent, dark fungus and death growth. The singing vine is a “fully intelligent plant [that] is able to move and converse with any creature, as it is telepathic.” It has “an unusually large amount of knowledge” as well as “the best set of manipulatory vines.” Somehow, “it is able to use sonics to cancel all violent action on the part of any possible [intelligent] enemy.” The sword bush is mobile,“fully intelligent,” and “has 3 manipulative tentacles.” It uses devices, including color bands. In the “Example of Ship's Level 11” on page 26, specifically keyed encounter M, a sword bush responds to every command of the “lone human female.” This strongly suggests a capability for communication. Although the dark fungus has an “intelligent state” (a concentration of at least ten pounds) with telepathy, “its only concern is increasing its mass” so a sophisticated conversation seems to be out of the question. The death growth “forms a symbiotic attachment to any warm blooded creature.” Presumably it is intelligent because it can “command” the host creature.

In the course of preparing this post, I came across a reference to “artificial sun” (not necessarily an artificial sun). Accordingly, I have updated my prior post that discusses sunlight in Metamorphosis Alpha.

Oh, by the way, where's Dave?