More details to come on the specifics, but the map of the exploration so far is below.
Plans for 2024: Creation of an NSR setting for super-heroes; My D&D 3E campaign as an example of sandboxing via published adventure, and likely more.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Castle Mordha, the 13th Age, sessions 1-2
More details to come on the specifics, but the map of the exploration so far is below.
Castle Mordha: the start of the 13th Age
Whereas the last campaign sprawled across the peninsula with several major battles against slavers, drow and liches, this one was smaller, urban and much more inspired by Thieves’ World and Lankhmar than what had come before. Shankill was a big city at this point (I was enamored with the ideas in the “Lankhmar – City of Adventure” book that TSR put out, even if I didn’t want to have the specific wizarding restrictions). The players were gamed out of high heroic noble heroes and descended gratefully into the port city’s underbelly or the island’s steamy jungles.
(It turns out a large swath of Shankill Isle was unpopulated jungle filled with family crypts, abandoned forts, mad hermits and wizard’s enclaves; all the real wealth came from its harborage and trade routes and the always sparsely settled interior of the island had been mostly abandoned over the decades. I would love to say that my younger self had planned all this out in advanced but it was all pretty much on the fly. It sounds much better here as I dredge it from memory and filter it through my adult gamemaster sensibilities. I just wish I could remember the names of any of the PCs)
Jesse’s PC was the first to play and made use of a piece of pure rules manipulation: he played a thief character solo (though Mike might have been there for some of them) for a few weeks to get him to 2nd level, then used to the stolen money to pay for a magic-user apprenticeship. We picked up the story a few in game years later with said PC now a 2nd level thief/first level magic user under the old AD&D human dual-classing rules, and the PC had sufficient disguise skill to make himself look like a half elf. For some reason it was important to Jesse that no one be able to pin down the character’s background, and I remember Dylan being driven to distraction one night trying to figure out how Jesse’s PC worked mechanically. Every time he struck on the idea of dual-classing Jesse brushed it aside with “but half-elves can’t dual class”, which was true, and the idea that the PC was just a skinny man with fake pointed ears never occurred to Dylan (and why would it?) The character was a rogue, second story man and con man, with a high enough dexterity to eke every last bonus out of his level limited thief skills.
Mike had two PCs in this game: the first was a straight up thief, a magsman and lock expert. One memorable night Mike and Jesse ran a Violin Scam (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ViolinScam) on a hapless young fighter, convincing him that only the most powerful magic weapons didn’t glow when drawn or radiate magic. I had said fighter mentioned a few more times as being a successful adventurer since the placebo effect of his ‘magic’ sword made him more daring, but Jesse and Mike just wanted his money (they eventually found the poor sap petrified outside a basilisk’s lair – I recall Mike thanking him kindly for the warning and the group deciding to just skip entering that cave; they might even have taken the sword back). Mike’s other PC was a more noble paladin type whom the rest of the PCs would contact whenever their latest caper involved something to do with evil or the undead – said PC was being directed by a coutal who claimed he had a grand destiny if he helped these diamonds in the rough. This was very likely true, but it was mostly an excuse to have this Paladin occasionally help out our ‘rogues with hearts of electrum’.
Dylan, deeply inspired by Cook’s Black Company books, was playing a former army/mercenary wizard who was taciturn to the point of silence. (One night Jesse had had quite enough of that and started badgering Dylan until he said something, anything, and then started proclaiming that he had “cured this poor mute!”) I think Graham was playing a fighter type who was from the same company as Dylan so the two worked together. These days I would have found things to do with the shared mercenary backstory, but back then it was stated and forgotten.
Pat was playing a half-ogre fighter who spent adventures on end saving up money for some ogre sized plate armor; he had it for maybe two sessions before I introduced a rust monster into the next crypt in, what I can admit in retrospect, was a pure dick-move as a GM. Sorry Pat. Even still the PC had an enormous two handed sword that let him intimidate the hell out of everyone and a 19 Strength that made him a pure terror in combat. Steve was playing a fighter-thief of some sort, if memory serves, but I couldn’t tell you anything about him.
Greg and Peter might have played a couple of sessions with these PCs, but if so have no recollection of it.
Back to the seedy underbelly: these rogues found ways to sneak into the walled off ‘gold gate’ part of the city and rob the houses of the wealthy while refusing to join the thieves’ guild. They took questionable jobs from disreputable sorts in seedy bars to act as bodyguards, thieves and tomb robbers – but drew the line at being assassins. When one of said disreputable patrons was killed they broke into his house and stole his collection of papers and maps to scour for hints of other old ruins and tombs on the island. OK, they also avenged his death on general principles but they also wanted to cut out the middle man on the tomb robbing stuff. Either avenging that death or some other antic got the thieves’ guild to sic an assassin on Jesse’s PC; our heroes caught rumors of the hire and split themselves between pre-emptive revenge on the guild and guarding themselves from the assassin. A good third of Shankill’s shantytown was torched when Jesse unleashed a flaming sphere against the assassin while fleeing from him across the slum’s rooftops. The gang war got so out of control the army came in and Jesse’s PC had to fake his death to give the thieves’ guild a face saving reason to stop the war before the army crushed both groups.
Our heroes split town after that for a bit – there might have been smuggling involved? – but by then these PCs stories were wrapping up. To give you an idea of the difference between the games the end of the last one was an epic quest to slay a demi-lich. In this one it was an informal competition with a thieves’ guild group to loot the ultimate ruin on the island, a long-abandoned wizards’ school (stolen from a Dragon Magazine module, possibly “Into the Forgotten Realms”) where the headmaster had become a lich and was completely bonkers. They learned about the lich from a lemure (a slug like minor demon) that was claiming to be a polymorphed young wizard and who spent the adventure riding on Jesse’s shoulder and advising them in a high screechy voice; eventually someone detected evil on the thing and whacked it in half. Knowing the lich would slaughter them the PCs started pretending to be students, got the lich on their side, sicced him on the thieves’ guild group and scarpered with whatever they could lay their hands on. We played that session from 7PM to 7AM, and I remember the fresh daylight streaming through the window behind with at least one player asleep on the floor of my room. That is the only all-nighter I have ever pulled as a GM and IT WAS AWESOME.
And that leads us to the current 13th Age game...
(It turns out a large swath of Shankill Isle was unpopulated jungle filled with family crypts, abandoned forts, mad hermits and wizard’s enclaves; all the real wealth came from its harborage and trade routes and the always sparsely settled interior of the island had been mostly abandoned over the decades. I would love to say that my younger self had planned all this out in advanced but it was all pretty much on the fly. It sounds much better here as I dredge it from memory and filter it through my adult gamemaster sensibilities. I just wish I could remember the names of any of the PCs)
Jesse’s PC was the first to play and made use of a piece of pure rules manipulation: he played a thief character solo (though Mike might have been there for some of them) for a few weeks to get him to 2nd level, then used to the stolen money to pay for a magic-user apprenticeship. We picked up the story a few in game years later with said PC now a 2nd level thief/first level magic user under the old AD&D human dual-classing rules, and the PC had sufficient disguise skill to make himself look like a half elf. For some reason it was important to Jesse that no one be able to pin down the character’s background, and I remember Dylan being driven to distraction one night trying to figure out how Jesse’s PC worked mechanically. Every time he struck on the idea of dual-classing Jesse brushed it aside with “but half-elves can’t dual class”, which was true, and the idea that the PC was just a skinny man with fake pointed ears never occurred to Dylan (and why would it?) The character was a rogue, second story man and con man, with a high enough dexterity to eke every last bonus out of his level limited thief skills.
Mike had two PCs in this game: the first was a straight up thief, a magsman and lock expert. One memorable night Mike and Jesse ran a Violin Scam (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ViolinScam) on a hapless young fighter, convincing him that only the most powerful magic weapons didn’t glow when drawn or radiate magic. I had said fighter mentioned a few more times as being a successful adventurer since the placebo effect of his ‘magic’ sword made him more daring, but Jesse and Mike just wanted his money (they eventually found the poor sap petrified outside a basilisk’s lair – I recall Mike thanking him kindly for the warning and the group deciding to just skip entering that cave; they might even have taken the sword back). Mike’s other PC was a more noble paladin type whom the rest of the PCs would contact whenever their latest caper involved something to do with evil or the undead – said PC was being directed by a coutal who claimed he had a grand destiny if he helped these diamonds in the rough. This was very likely true, but it was mostly an excuse to have this Paladin occasionally help out our ‘rogues with hearts of electrum’.
Dylan, deeply inspired by Cook’s Black Company books, was playing a former army/mercenary wizard who was taciturn to the point of silence. (One night Jesse had had quite enough of that and started badgering Dylan until he said something, anything, and then started proclaiming that he had “cured this poor mute!”) I think Graham was playing a fighter type who was from the same company as Dylan so the two worked together. These days I would have found things to do with the shared mercenary backstory, but back then it was stated and forgotten.
Pat was playing a half-ogre fighter who spent adventures on end saving up money for some ogre sized plate armor; he had it for maybe two sessions before I introduced a rust monster into the next crypt in, what I can admit in retrospect, was a pure dick-move as a GM. Sorry Pat. Even still the PC had an enormous two handed sword that let him intimidate the hell out of everyone and a 19 Strength that made him a pure terror in combat. Steve was playing a fighter-thief of some sort, if memory serves, but I couldn’t tell you anything about him.
Greg and Peter might have played a couple of sessions with these PCs, but if so have no recollection of it.
Back to the seedy underbelly: these rogues found ways to sneak into the walled off ‘gold gate’ part of the city and rob the houses of the wealthy while refusing to join the thieves’ guild. They took questionable jobs from disreputable sorts in seedy bars to act as bodyguards, thieves and tomb robbers – but drew the line at being assassins. When one of said disreputable patrons was killed they broke into his house and stole his collection of papers and maps to scour for hints of other old ruins and tombs on the island. OK, they also avenged his death on general principles but they also wanted to cut out the middle man on the tomb robbing stuff. Either avenging that death or some other antic got the thieves’ guild to sic an assassin on Jesse’s PC; our heroes caught rumors of the hire and split themselves between pre-emptive revenge on the guild and guarding themselves from the assassin. A good third of Shankill’s shantytown was torched when Jesse unleashed a flaming sphere against the assassin while fleeing from him across the slum’s rooftops. The gang war got so out of control the army came in and Jesse’s PC had to fake his death to give the thieves’ guild a face saving reason to stop the war before the army crushed both groups.
Our heroes split town after that for a bit – there might have been smuggling involved? – but by then these PCs stories were wrapping up. To give you an idea of the difference between the games the end of the last one was an epic quest to slay a demi-lich. In this one it was an informal competition with a thieves’ guild group to loot the ultimate ruin on the island, a long-abandoned wizards’ school (stolen from a Dragon Magazine module, possibly “Into the Forgotten Realms”) where the headmaster had become a lich and was completely bonkers. They learned about the lich from a lemure (a slug like minor demon) that was claiming to be a polymorphed young wizard and who spent the adventure riding on Jesse’s shoulder and advising them in a high screechy voice; eventually someone detected evil on the thing and whacked it in half. Knowing the lich would slaughter them the PCs started pretending to be students, got the lich on their side, sicced him on the thieves’ guild group and scarpered with whatever they could lay their hands on. We played that session from 7PM to 7AM, and I remember the fresh daylight streaming through the window behind with at least one player asleep on the floor of my room. That is the only all-nighter I have ever pulled as a GM and IT WAS AWESOME.
And that leads us to the current 13th Age game...
Castle Mordha: the end of the 12th Age
Back in 1984 I started my first real D&D Campaign - The Shankill Isles:
A peninsula where each island had a slightly different culture, dungeons and problems, with the PCs living the island city state of Shankill, a major port city on the largest island. While everyone lost a few PCs early on Jesse, Mike and Steve got PCs up to 3rd level and with that increased durability their triumvirate of the paladin Cathoris of Haven, the magic user Elf (he never shared his name for mysterious reasons) and the monk Rasputin became the core of the party. Johnathan played a succession of ill-omened fighters, Peter had a cleric (until he switched to a psionicist due on a Dragon Magazine article that no one ever entirely understood) and Greg was playing a fighter not because he wanted to but because he wanted to have a bard and in AD&D that required 5+ levels of fighter and 5+ levels of thief, so he was slogging through those on the weeks he made it to play. Alas, PCs names escape me in my dotage.
The group had some fun: They dealt with a Sumatran rat plague and the undead spawning it. They cleared an island of giant ants and ankhegs that were devouring the livestock of a new colony. They tackled a vast slave trading consortium from the TSR Slavers modules and my own design (cribbed from the Guardians of the Flame books). I discovered that players really, really, hate having their stuff taken away from them at the start of module A4. They worked their way through part of White Plume Mountain, secured Blackrazor and then went home, only to lose the sword shortly thereafter when Cathoris determined it was very truly evil and threw it into… something. The sea? A volcano? I don’t recall.
Cathoris hunted and slew a dragon that had been menacing trade routes but then had to hand the horde over to a clan of dwarves that claimed it was theirs, leading to Jesse’s refrain of ‘short little ugly little greedy little stupid little…’ muttered under his breath whenever dwarves turned up. Mike insisted that Elf also wanted to be a Bard but couldn’t due to race restrictions on the class, and so he content himself with making up self-aggrandizing ditties on his ukulele. (“Elf is back and he’s better than before! Hey la, hey la Might Elf! With spells and power and magical lore! Hey la, hey la, Mighty Elf! Hey, what a great and powerful guy, yeah, he can touch the sky! Hey la, hey la, Mighty Elf!”) Rasputin had several run ins with an evil monk leading to a three part macguffin quest across the islands – I’d like to think we had the good sense to make John’s fighter a sailor for some spotlight time, and we might have, but I really don’t recall – that culminated in a spiral mountain dungeon containing an artifact gemstone that took over Rasputin’s body, leading to an epic Paladin vs. Monk battle to free Rasputin’s soul.
One stop on the MacGuffin quest was a Drow Giant tree Fortress (also from Dragon Magazine) which they survived by holing up in a storeroom to have Peter’s psionicist heal everyone, then foray out, kill stuff, run back and repeat. That got them into contact with the Drow, which led to the players insisting I run the Drow modules, which I had just purchased. We got a little bit into D1 but no one really wanted to do the logistics that went with such an expedition, so they made some tentative raids into the underdark and then pulled back. Jesse told me later he really wanted to finish the series but I don’t remember ever actually running it. I do remember running D1 on the back porch at Steve’s house and them facing one of those floating eye spores and not getting much further. Everyone preferred shorter adventures that worked for days people couldn’t make it, so I developed more ruins, lairs and evil towns/slaver outposts for them to battle.
The last thing I remember running for those characters was Tomb of Horrors. As with the Drow module the players found out I owned it and insisted on tackling it. Greg’s PC, who had made it to Fighter 6/Thief 5 I think and was in spitting distance of his goal of Bard-dom, stepped on a pit trap 70 feet in, fell onto poisoned spikes, missed his save three times and was stone dead 10 minutes into the module. Again, I’d like to say we elevated one of the henchmen to PC status and got Greg back in the game but no, he was upstairs reading and playing computer games for the rest of the night. 25+ years on and I still feel guilty about that.
Anyway, the other PCs dragged his body out, stripped it of key magic they might need and left it with some henchmen for revivifying later. One ‘borrowed’ magic item was Greg’s sword which, unbeknownst to him, was a Luck Blade with one wish left. Cathoris had it slung over his back in case something happened to his own weapon. The group hacked, schemed and spelled their way through to the false lich/actual mummy chamber with its illusionary earthquake. During the course of things Cathoris’ shield had been eaten by acid so he was fighting two weapon style, holy sword in one hand and the luck blade in the other. Seeing how bad things looked Jesse/Cathoris said “I wish we were at the end of this!”
BAM!
And there they were in Acereak’s chambers, facing the soul-eating floating skull, trying to find some way to kill it. Johnathan’s fighter (he was on his 3rd or 4th for the campaign, or perhaps had been resurrected a few times, or both) was quickly dispatched, and Pete’s psionicsit/cleric followed. Cathoris managed to resist the effect once, but everyone knew time was against them. Their salvation came from a historical oddity: Rasputin, having been nearly consumed by a soul sucking gem once in the past, was now immune to such attacks. It said so right on his character sheet from something that happened a year before I even read Tomb of Horrors! That protection gave them just enough time and wherewithal for Rasputin, Cathoris and Elf to triumph and shatter Acereak’s skull, banishing the deli-lich’s spirit.
With two of the regular PCs permanently dead, all of Cathoris’ equipment disintegrated, Elf at the elven Magic-User level cap and Greg just a little peeved that his gear got to save the day when he was upstairs bored, I decided it was a good time to end the campaign. The players agreed. Cathoris used a share of the treasure to pay for reviving Greg’s PC, gave the rest to him to found a bards college and then retired with Rasputin to that worthy’s monastery (claiming he was dressed only in the magic scrolls recovered from the tomb wrapped around him as a loincloth) and Elf sailing off for the “Elf lands far away”, having earned his place among them.
I don’t recall Greg, Peter or Johnathan playing D&D after that. The next set of adventurers in Shankill was to be very different.
A peninsula where each island had a slightly different culture, dungeons and problems, with the PCs living the island city state of Shankill, a major port city on the largest island. While everyone lost a few PCs early on Jesse, Mike and Steve got PCs up to 3rd level and with that increased durability their triumvirate of the paladin Cathoris of Haven, the magic user Elf (he never shared his name for mysterious reasons) and the monk Rasputin became the core of the party. Johnathan played a succession of ill-omened fighters, Peter had a cleric (until he switched to a psionicist due on a Dragon Magazine article that no one ever entirely understood) and Greg was playing a fighter not because he wanted to but because he wanted to have a bard and in AD&D that required 5+ levels of fighter and 5+ levels of thief, so he was slogging through those on the weeks he made it to play. Alas, PCs names escape me in my dotage.
The group had some fun: They dealt with a Sumatran rat plague and the undead spawning it. They cleared an island of giant ants and ankhegs that were devouring the livestock of a new colony. They tackled a vast slave trading consortium from the TSR Slavers modules and my own design (cribbed from the Guardians of the Flame books). I discovered that players really, really, hate having their stuff taken away from them at the start of module A4. They worked their way through part of White Plume Mountain, secured Blackrazor and then went home, only to lose the sword shortly thereafter when Cathoris determined it was very truly evil and threw it into… something. The sea? A volcano? I don’t recall.
Cathoris hunted and slew a dragon that had been menacing trade routes but then had to hand the horde over to a clan of dwarves that claimed it was theirs, leading to Jesse’s refrain of ‘short little ugly little greedy little stupid little…’ muttered under his breath whenever dwarves turned up. Mike insisted that Elf also wanted to be a Bard but couldn’t due to race restrictions on the class, and so he content himself with making up self-aggrandizing ditties on his ukulele. (“Elf is back and he’s better than before! Hey la, hey la Might Elf! With spells and power and magical lore! Hey la, hey la, Mighty Elf! Hey, what a great and powerful guy, yeah, he can touch the sky! Hey la, hey la, Mighty Elf!”) Rasputin had several run ins with an evil monk leading to a three part macguffin quest across the islands – I’d like to think we had the good sense to make John’s fighter a sailor for some spotlight time, and we might have, but I really don’t recall – that culminated in a spiral mountain dungeon containing an artifact gemstone that took over Rasputin’s body, leading to an epic Paladin vs. Monk battle to free Rasputin’s soul.
One stop on the MacGuffin quest was a Drow Giant tree Fortress (also from Dragon Magazine) which they survived by holing up in a storeroom to have Peter’s psionicist heal everyone, then foray out, kill stuff, run back and repeat. That got them into contact with the Drow, which led to the players insisting I run the Drow modules, which I had just purchased. We got a little bit into D1 but no one really wanted to do the logistics that went with such an expedition, so they made some tentative raids into the underdark and then pulled back. Jesse told me later he really wanted to finish the series but I don’t remember ever actually running it. I do remember running D1 on the back porch at Steve’s house and them facing one of those floating eye spores and not getting much further. Everyone preferred shorter adventures that worked for days people couldn’t make it, so I developed more ruins, lairs and evil towns/slaver outposts for them to battle.
The last thing I remember running for those characters was Tomb of Horrors. As with the Drow module the players found out I owned it and insisted on tackling it. Greg’s PC, who had made it to Fighter 6/Thief 5 I think and was in spitting distance of his goal of Bard-dom, stepped on a pit trap 70 feet in, fell onto poisoned spikes, missed his save three times and was stone dead 10 minutes into the module. Again, I’d like to say we elevated one of the henchmen to PC status and got Greg back in the game but no, he was upstairs reading and playing computer games for the rest of the night. 25+ years on and I still feel guilty about that.
Anyway, the other PCs dragged his body out, stripped it of key magic they might need and left it with some henchmen for revivifying later. One ‘borrowed’ magic item was Greg’s sword which, unbeknownst to him, was a Luck Blade with one wish left. Cathoris had it slung over his back in case something happened to his own weapon. The group hacked, schemed and spelled their way through to the false lich/actual mummy chamber with its illusionary earthquake. During the course of things Cathoris’ shield had been eaten by acid so he was fighting two weapon style, holy sword in one hand and the luck blade in the other. Seeing how bad things looked Jesse/Cathoris said “I wish we were at the end of this!”
BAM!
And there they were in Acereak’s chambers, facing the soul-eating floating skull, trying to find some way to kill it. Johnathan’s fighter (he was on his 3rd or 4th for the campaign, or perhaps had been resurrected a few times, or both) was quickly dispatched, and Pete’s psionicsit/cleric followed. Cathoris managed to resist the effect once, but everyone knew time was against them. Their salvation came from a historical oddity: Rasputin, having been nearly consumed by a soul sucking gem once in the past, was now immune to such attacks. It said so right on his character sheet from something that happened a year before I even read Tomb of Horrors! That protection gave them just enough time and wherewithal for Rasputin, Cathoris and Elf to triumph and shatter Acereak’s skull, banishing the deli-lich’s spirit.
With two of the regular PCs permanently dead, all of Cathoris’ equipment disintegrated, Elf at the elven Magic-User level cap and Greg just a little peeved that his gear got to save the day when he was upstairs bored, I decided it was a good time to end the campaign. The players agreed. Cathoris used a share of the treasure to pay for reviving Greg’s PC, gave the rest to him to found a bards college and then retired with Rasputin to that worthy’s monastery (claiming he was dressed only in the magic scrolls recovered from the tomb wrapped around him as a loincloth) and Elf sailing off for the “Elf lands far away”, having earned his place among them.
I don’t recall Greg, Peter or Johnathan playing D&D after that. The next set of adventurers in Shankill was to be very different.
Monday, March 7, 2016
Earth 10: Timeline and Time Travel
With the player set so far we have one PC and one team
member (Superman and Flash, respectively) with time travel, one PC and one team
member with immortality (Vigilante and the Hawks, respectively) and one PC as a
legacy hero with heroics going back 90 years in her family (Zatava). This means
I have to give some thought to the timeline and key events both past and
future. So here we go.
Note: many of these plot ideas come from things in the Best
of Fenix anthology, which is just wonderful.
The first rule of time travel is that it’s relatively
easy to get to a period about 512 years ahead or behind of the current day –
this is what 0 AP of Time Travel gets you. Each AP after that lets you get half
again as close to the current day and twice as far away. Superman has 2 AP of
Time Travel, which means he can get as far back as 2048 years from now (or 0 AD
more or less) and as far forward as 4060 AD. He can also get as close as 128
years ago (about the Reconstruction era, as close as 2140 AD. The more powerful
a time traveler you are the closer you can get to the absolute now, which is
where the real power is in possibly being able to effect things. The further
away you are the more likely the time steam will wash over the changes or break
off a separate stream rather than change absolute now.
9 to 23 AD – Wang Mang’s China
The period when Wang Mang was emperor of China, this is
the far edge of how back Superman can go with his time travel. Wang Mang is one
of Superman’s most bitter foes, seeing him as the embodiment of everything that
is not classical China. Once Wang Mang lears of his existence and, by
extension, the events of the next 2000 years he puts into place a two millennia
conspiracy to restore proper culture to the world.
64 AD: Nero’s Rome
When Jimmy Olsen puts Superman in contact with a
historian looking for specific critical information on the early Roman empire
Superman agrees to bring Jimmy back to ‘get the story’ – there they uncover a
plot by ancient Egyptian cult of Ammut, the crocodile god of dreams, to replace
Nero with a homunculus. When Egyptian magic reduces his power Superman is
forced into a gladiatorial bout as Jimmy manages to reveal the faux Nero. The
last remnants of the Ammut cult are destroyed in the fire and the proper Nero
returned to power. Superman recovers his power enough to return Jimmy and
himself to the 21st century.
1174: Between the Second and Third Crusade
In the chaotic period between the second and third
crusades, as the crusader states are intriguing against one another in the wake
of the second crusade and Saladin is gathering his power in the East, a small
group of crusaders following clues from an ancient Chinese scroll accidentally
wake a huge red dragon. One of the survivors of the dragons first attack on a
small crusader unit was Etienne of Navarre, as he and Isabo were travelling to
Jerusalem in hopes that the True Cross could break their curse, and survive
only because a red and blue angel appeared to defeat the dragon. 830 years
later the Hawks relate the story to Superman after their first team up, and the
Man of Steel travels back to fulfill the time loop, barely defeating the
enraged magical beast. He strongly suspects this was a planned assassination
attempt on him by Wang Mang. (Note that the Hawks don’t have their flight gear
yet, as it was Da Vinci’s design)
1770: Revolutionary Dating Triangle
Because part of me adores the old silly stories of
Superman time travelling, there definitely has to be one where Superman travels
back to the pre-revolutionary war period and gets into a romance triangle
between the forceful and passionate Mary Ludwig (future Molly Pitcher) and the
beautiful Elizabeth Phoebe Griscomb (future Betsy Ross). Is this entirely
illogical? Well, no, both women were alive and unmarried in 1770, but other
than that yeah, it’s totally absurd. We are therefore doing it anyway. I think
we tie this to a fictitious precursor event to the revolutionary war (the
Boston Massacre is on March 5, the Golden Hill Incident is January 17, so it’s
right in that time period). Two possible options are that this is a story of
Superman when he was a boy and young Betsy Ross sews the first Superman costume
for him to wear while preventing another massacre, or it’s another one of those
wacky “Jimmy Olsen convinces Superman to time travel and they end up double
dating Molly and Betsy” stories. I could go either way.
1881: Rockets in the West
Nikolai Kibalchich, a Ukranian engineer and anarchist, built
the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II. He later escaped from prison, and then
the Russias, with a solid fuel rocket of his own design. Making his way to the
American west he perfects his designs and tries to use them to foment more
anarchy in the US but is defeated by a team up between Vigilante and the Hawks.
(The Hawks now have their glider wings, but don’t yet have the full flight
capability because they haven’t yet been upgraded by the Wright Brothers.)
1927: Arthur Conan Doyle
Towards the end of his career Doyle became deeply
involved in the Spiritualist movement even as he perfected the art of modern
detective work. He wrote about the latter in his fictitious Sherlock Holmes
stories, and the former in his non-fiction accounts of discussions with his
spirit guide and the completion of final novels by other writers who had passed
on. In 1925 he predicted an enormous upheaval of earthquakes and floods in
1927, but later told people he was wrong because he and his spirit guide were using the wrong calendar! The truth is
that this was the first rumbles of the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012, forestalled by
the combined work of Doyle, Vigilante (who was there learning detective
techniques) and a young Zatara (who was mastering his ability to speak with the
dead).
1931: New York City
The construction of new towers allows the ancient gods
shadowy access to Manhattan, influencing people, manipulating effects, forming
cults and otherwise trying to alter the world. Only the works of Zatara prevent
moldy Babylonian gods from appearing in Central Park West to tear up the city.
2130’s: the Arctic Circle
A series of enormous solar flares has shut down much
electromagnetic technology and communications, and combined with existing
warming trends to melt the polar ice and reveal a whole new landscape to the
North. This is exactly Ken Hite’s “wild west in the future arctic circle”
article from Fenix, it takes place at closest future timeframe Superman can
access and Vigilante is, of course, right in the thick of it because it’s a
Western. A whole arc of the “Vigilante as immortal in other times and places”
comic “Legends of the Vigilante” takes place here.
26th Century
500 years in the future, the only thing I know from here
is that it’s where the Reverse Flash comes from. Yes, we have a Reverse Flash
because shut up Reverse Flash that’s why.
31st century: Legion of Super Heroes
With the conclusion of my X-Men PBEM my next likely play
by email project will be a rebuilt from the ground up Legion of Super Heroes.
If that’s the case they will totally be part of this timeline, explaining part
of where Superman was between developing his powers and going public as
Superman. It’s a full on bright Gernsback future where a group of teenagers use
their non-human powers to emulate the super-heroes of the 21st
century.
Monday, February 29, 2016
Earth 10 Rogues Gallery 6: the Question
The final rogues’ gallery is, much like Zatava’s, not
really a rogues’ gallery at all. Instead they are the outcroppings of the 6-7
issue conspiracy arcs that the Question has uncovered in his travels.
The initial story arc has to do with Hub City, and how
the city’s political structure is corrupted on a purely human level. He manages
through the course of the first film noir arc to deal with one aspect of that,
installing a new police chief in Isadore ‘Izzy’ O’tool, restoring some sense of
justice to the city, but the city itself is still monstrously corrupt. The only
real supernatural element in this arc is a voodoo priest, just called Hogan, who
appears across two issues.
The second story arc is such a radical departure that you
might be wondering if you’re reading the same book – the Question goes to New
England where he is investigating the disappearance of one of his old contacts.
This kicks off a bizarre conspiracy concerning Cotton Mather’s stolen notebooks
of supernatural events, the new appearance of a truly evil witch cult and a
hidden city in rural New England made up of clockwork puritans whose outcast
members reveal that some of the blue blood of the Brahmans is in fact gear lubricant.
The third story arc is back to hub city, where the
Question starts tracking down the Mikado, a serial killer hunting the evil men
of the city and killing them in ironically or philosophically appropriate ways.
While Vic Sage might agree with the list of targets, the Mikado’s hilariously
horrific means can’t justify the ends.
The fourth story arc has the Question in Machu Pichu, unravelling
a decades old conspiracy of silence around the city’s discovery and what was
really under the ground there. The long term ramifications of this will turn
into the Calendar Man arc in the Justice Alliance, which will be the first the
faceless occultist works with the world’s premier super-team. (But that’s a
couple of years in the future).
The fifth story arc is back to Hub City, where the ghosts
of the Mikado’s murders have to be put down using Orgone generators, Hindi
magic and bare knuckled courage.
The sixth story arc is another assault on the conspiracy that
runs the city, as the Question is now armed with knowledge ripped from the
ghosts of the Mikado’s villains using tellurically powered Ouija board
interrogation. This further reveals the corruption of the city and actually
opens the door for possible improvements with the appearance of a federal task
force. This arc also guest stars a well-known federal agent in Adam MacTaggart.
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