Weekly Book Recommendations (July 26)

This week's reads: 

The Collected Fantasies, Vol 1: The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith: I have been wanting to read this for a long time and it finally popped as a birthday present from my denuded Amazon list. So good. From the first sentence of the first story he had published Smith is revealed as a singular voice in weird fiction. Not everything in this is a banger, and there's a decent amount of casual racism in the first half of the 20th century mold (mostly of someone having the distinctive physical characteristics of x or y "race" as a means of personality shorthand) but offhand I (as cis het white guy) didn't see anything too egregious. Yes, the queen of the hidden African tribe immediately falls for the white explorer who enters their confines, but he also falls for her and it does appear to be a love match of equals for their time together so; and yes, he repeats the trope in another story but there the white explorer counts upon his natural superiority to the locals and the women and gets a delightful comeuppance from it. Many of these tales end in the classic Weird Tales fashion of shocking reveal sudden stop, while others come to more traditional endings and even some narrator codas; he switches up perspectives from first to third person, his narrators feel distinct enough to not come to a sense of sameness... it's all solid stuff. Good enough that I'm pulling concepts from it for my upcoming parallel to New Salem: Renaissance view of how to do supers in an ACAB world

The 1983 Annual Worlds Best SF edited by Donald A Wollheim: Earlier this year I read the 1981 volume and there wasn't enough in it for me to recommend it. This one, however, has enough solid stories to justify a recommendation. I'm never sure on these because SF is always as much about the "now" as it is the future or past, and at 1983 it's an almost unbridgeable gulf in zeitgeist - and I lived through it! in this volume the Scourge (James White), Pawn's Gambit (Timothy Zahn) and Swarm (Bruce Sterling) are solid tales of first contact puzzles approached in very different ways; A Letter from the Clearys is a good enough tale from Connie Willis about families post the apocalypse hanging over us all in the 80's that felt a little Eudora Welty to me (compliment!), and Written in Water (Tanith Lee) and Souls (Joanna Russ) are powerfully emotionally evocative, and the latter kept me up much too late so I could finish it before turning off the light. I don't think I've read enough Russ and need to rectify that. Since I only say positive things on this here blog (most days) I'll say the rest are fine to meh, but there's more good than bad in this one. 

Astro City Volume 1 and Volume 2: Potato chips, team. Once you start you have to keep going till there ain't no more. Volume 2, Confession, is just outstanding. And I have a signed issue in that run!

New Salem: Revolution - module retrospective on Marvel Super Heroes modules

I know these aren't connected to V&V, but I feel like I'd be doing this project a disservice if I didn't do a little compare and contrast on what competing products were being published. So here are the three Marvel Super Heroes adventures I have on hand. (I also have some DC Heroes adventures that I'll look at next week.) These are for the Basic version of the game and all came out in 1984. I know I owed the first 5 of the adventures but my copies of Breeder Bombs (for the X-Men) and Murderworld (For the FF) are lost to history. But if memory can be trusted, they don't bring much different to the table. 

Hot Damn do these look pretty, but when you can get John Byrne to do your cover art
in the 1980'syou have hella more resources than FGU...

The three modules are Time Trap (Kang pretends to be Immortus to get the Avengers do undo their own history), Lone Wolves (AIM is planning several attacks on the city and Daredevil/Black Widow/Heroes for Hire stumble on a thread of the threat), and Cat's-Paw (Alpha Flight deal with the Leader's complex plan, and things past that). Each of these is designed to look and feel like the adventures of their target heroes, which since it's MSH is to be expected. I go back and forth on playing existing heroes, but generally if you're playing Marvel Super Heroes of DC Heroes my experience is the game runs better if you're playing existing characters. YMMV

But the question is are these any good? Ehhhhhhh.....

Time Trap is GREAT when it comes to tying in existing Avengers lore. All of the sequences link to certain moments in Avengers history, and in one you can point to the actual damn issue where the PCs are messing with their own timeline. As a comics nerd this is just golden - I used the skeleton of this adventure in my own X-Men game as an "annual" where the current PCs got to team up with the original team where Kang was manipulating them (plus Scarlet Witch, who was on site) into undoing the Avengers. Wonderful, so much fun. 

The module as writ is a straight line railroad of nothing but fights: Immortuls (secretly Kang) shows up, explains a "problem" and sends the PCs off to fight Mimic. Win or lose he whisks them back, and then sends them to fight Drax. Then Super Skrull, Then Grey Gargoyle. The the real Immortus shows up and sends them to get a dohicky to undo this. Then they fight Kang and Dragon Man. Yay. There's no space for the PCs to breathe, no role playing, no detective work, just fight after fight. It's a mess. 

Lone Wolves does feel like a crossover of 2 issues, or two annuals, of the Power Man/Iron Fist and Daredevil (working with Black Widow) of the mid 80's. It's still VERY linear, with AIM/MODOK having hired Kraven to run a field test of their rage-toxin, and Kraven using Sabertooth and Vermin to front line the event. The book acknowledges the heroes have Contacts, and the general data those contacts give, and then a lot of possible clue trails for them. The module sets up how those clue trails lead to Kingpin as the last information source, but that the Punisher is also murderously running this to ground and several places where he and the heroes can fight. The assumption is that the PCs will get Kraven's hideout from Kingpin but you don't have to. I really think it's better if you don't. 

Having used their actual in character skills to get to Kraven the PCs have to break into his predator infested base and defeat him (and Sabertooth and Vermin if either got away) to find out who hired him and created the rage toxin. This gives the name MODOK, and now the PCs have to do a bunch of detective work to find the AIM base, which again loops back to Kingpin and a much more in keeping "I'll tell you where MODOK is if you stop this crime being perpetrated by one of my rivals" quid pro quos that feels VERY 1980's street level Marvel. Once they have AIM's address it's a sneak/fight into the base and deal with Taskmaster and MODOK. 

There is a lot to like here, in that it feels like a Feng Shui module of set piece fights held together with investigations. The GM is given various options, the players can use various paths, and as long as you edit out the first Kingpin instance (though the PCs might go there for questioning) it's no more or less railroady than a classic Call of Cthulhu adventure. Yes, there are strong assumptions that the PCs will get involved (too much verbiage in how the riot in scene one gets ever out of control until the PCs do something) but not the abuse of PC stuff that we saw in some of the contemporary modules. Rereading this now, I kinda want to run it. 

Cat's-Paw opens with the PCs being sent on a mission by their government contacts; an old manor house that contains high tech equipment guarded by Sabertooth and Constrictor. Yeah, Sabertooth again. This was before his X-Men Days, but at least he and Constrictor have worked together in the comics (Power Man & Iron Fist) and in Canada (in Iron Fist's solo book). Win or lose the heroes find one clue that leads them to the James Bay Hydroelectric Dam, where they are caught between two different villain groups - Mauler and the Raiders, and a pair of Synthetic Hulks - and a just introduced NPC gets kidnapped no matter what the PCs do. Interestingly, if someone is playing Sasquatch he might also be teleported away and the PC provided a different Alpha Flight hero. That's an interesting comic book twist. 

In any event the only trail leads to Justin Hammer's base, where they fight a bunch of his revamped tech villains before he hologram monologues at them about "The Other", the person responsible for the synthetic hulks. But there are no leads until a new villain shows up, created from the NPC inevitably captured 2 fights ago. This gives the heroes one clue to get to the Leader's base, to fight him and find that he is being manipulated by a new Great Old One, the big bads in the Alpha Flight comic. Cue big fight. There's even a "how the NPCs solve the problem if the players fail twice to make sure this doesn't end the world." 

Yeeeah, this one I have no interest in running or modifying. Yes, it has some Alpha Flight elements in it, but the plot is completely linear, the players have nothing to do with solving the mystery, and the collection of opponents makes very little sense. 

What do these adventures tell us? Tune in soon, true believers!

Emirikol Session III recap

 Here we really see the advantage of having seeded and built out the setting from the adventures – was able to seamlessly move from the conceptual data in Last of the Iron House (the actor pretending to be the high ranking cleric who worked against pirates) to the Lurkers in the Library to the tunnel complex of Last of the Iron House to the warehouse sequence that I just made up on the spot as the PCs chose which threads to pursue inside the city. And at the same time drop some information that slowly advances the mystery of Hightower Tor from A Dark and Stormy Knight. 

Because actions have consequences that they didn’t decide to bend all their energies to chasing Reme after the ambush he was able to follow through on his plan to kill the Cardinal of the West and frame Sebastian for it, entirely “off screen” because there was no possible mechanism for getting the PCs involved. They only learned about it the same time everyone else did, with the morning broadsheets. Their not spending the day tracking down more on Hightower Tor just left that thread sitting fallow as Alejandro is still searching for the book that didn’t turn up in the delve and there’s no reason for the PCs to know about that either. 

What they did do was earn a TON of credit with the library and the Loremasters, and if they didn’t stop the full extent of Reme’s actions they uncovered in advance what the outlines of the plan were, which will help them going forward. Again, the trick is to have lots of possible things happening that may or may not advance if ignored, and the PCs can follow up on them or not. After the fact it will look like a coherent narrative but it’s not cutting into the players agency at any point. 

The introduction of Hero Points did exactly what I wanted: the PCs could magnanimously hand over the lesser magic items to the Paladin Order for the Hero Points that they spend later in the game just as if they had sold them and then bought potions of stealth or climbing. It removed so much of the economic bookkeeping from play and got me the feel I wanted for this sort of campaign. 

Jim, Melas’ player, wasn’t able to make this session or the next one, so we instead did a PBEM sequence over the two months to track what he was up to. This nicely advances both his family machinations and the pirate/hag plotlines. The next 6 weeks of blog posts are that PBEM before we get back to session 4 (which Jim/Melas is also not present for). 

Weekly Book Recommendations (July 19)

This Week's Reads

Astro City Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5, Volume 8: These are like potato chips; you can't read just one. Busiek and Anderson have such a singular voice on this series that if you like it you generally adore it. There's a stretch in some of these were the stories are downers (a couple "I'm willing to do good but super heroics/intersecting with superhumans is too damn dangerous") that are weakened by being right on top of each other, but otherwise this is all really good stuff. 

Another in my occasional "Not Recommendations But I Need To Talk About It":

Miracleman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham: I, like so many people, was looking forward to the completion of this story, halted in 1993 by Eclipse comics implosion. When the shenanigans settled and the creators could finish the book with Marvel in 2023 I was interested, but didn't track it down until this week. I was ultimately disappointed. I'm sure the time lapse - even if Gaiman had the scripts completed back then they were doubtless edited some, and Buckingham's art style has changed over time (of course it has!) - which gives the book a bit of a disjointed feel. 

Spoilers ahead

Quick Art Recap on Alone Into the Night

I commented in yesterday's post about the Zircher art in the Alone Into the Night module, where two of the three spalsh pages for the short one hero adventures are kinda bangers. 

Both of these really catch the tone of the adventures in question, drawing on specific elements from them. Just fun stuff that you can easily see as the the cover of that months issue.