Weekly Geekly Rundown for May 25, 2003: Role Playing Games, Comic Books, Film Reviews, and a Classic Film Recommendation

 

On the Independent Fantasy RPG Front

Jason Vey has long been a part of the OSR community. He was a part of the OSR community before there was an OSR community, back when it was people making house rules for Original D&D and trying to figure out how to use Chainmail as the combat system. Using Chainmail for combat was my first Substack post because I always attempt to be super topical. Over the years Vey has created a number of variant rules for Original D&D and has even released his own fantasy heartbreaker, a heartbreaker that was successful enough that Vey has built a community of fans and expanded his design efforts. I’m among those fans and not only did I purchase Spellcraft & Swordplay, his OSR fantasy heartbreaker, I backed his modern horror rpg Night Shift on Kickstarter (you can buy Night Shift at DriveThruRPG or at the Elf Lair Games website).

Vey is currently designing a new fantasy role playing game called Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age that includes an interesting setting and, in true Grognard fashion, allows players to use both of the rules sets he’s designed (O.R.C.S. and O.G.R.E.S.) each of which captures a slightly different feel of fantasy and both of which I enjoy. In an industry dominated by Hasbro, but which has plethora other options to choose from, I recommend checking out Vey’s game.

Sorry, No Math Video This Week

I will however be doing a video where I analyze the Ben Milton’s claim that B/X D&D uses a 5% increase in ability per level rule. That will have regression analysis in it, so if you like math that’s going to be the one for you.

Comic Book News

On the Fantasy Comic Beat

This July will see the release of The Hunger and the Dusk by writer G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel, Wonder Woman, Poison Ivy) and Chris Wildgoose (Batgirl: Rebirth, Batman: Nightwalker). It looks to be an interesting take on traditional fantasy conflicts where the two archetypical D&D style rivals, humans and orcs, must work together against a greater foe.

In a dying world, only humans and orcs remain, mortal enemies battling for territory and political advantage. But when a group of fearsome ancient humanoids known as the Vangol arrive from across the sea, the two struggling civilizations are forced into a fragile alliance to protect what they have built.

As a gesture of his commitment to the cause, the most powerful orc overlord, Troth Icemane, sends his beloved cousin, Tara, a high-ranking young healer, to fight alongside brash human commander Callum Battlechild and his company of warriors. With a crisis looming, the success of this unlikely pair’s partnership and the survival of their peoples will depend on their ability to unlearn a lifetime of antagonistic instincts toward one another…and rise above the sting of heartbreak.

Two Classic Marvel Series Getting New Omnibus Editions

Marvel recently announced that they would be publishing a ROM the Spaceknight Omnibus in January 2024 and a Micronauts Omnibus in April 2024 that will reprint the original series from the 1970s and 80s for a new audience. ROM has long been a personal favorite and the most recent Ant-Man film featured one character from the Micronauts. I wish that the film rights weren’t as complex as they are because I would have loved to have seen the full Micronauts team in Quantumania.

On another note, I think that Marvel would be well served to follow in the footsteps of DC Comics when it comes to Omnibus reprints. DC recently released Absolute Swamp Thing collecting Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s iconic version of the character. This collection was painstakingly recolored by José Villarrubia who is on a personal mission to color correct reprints of older comics to recapture the artistic intent in those older issues. If you look at the promo artwork for the upcoming Micronauts and ROM omnibus editions, you will see that they look extremely saturated. The colors are very bright. As Villarrubia has argued and demonstrated on hundreds of occasions, the art in the 70s comics was much more muted due to the newsprint used. The artists new the limitations of the medium, imagine that, and colored with intention that included that knowledge. I’m including one of Villarrubia’s many examples of how something should be colored below. You can see how subtle the older colors were and how they accentuated the line art in a way that is lost with the more saturated effect. I highly recommend buying the Wein/Wrightson Absolute Swamp Thing and I’ll be checking out his new series Dead Romans.

Original on the Right, Villarrubia Middle, New Reprint Right from Villarrubia’s Facebook

Weekly Luke Y Thompson Review Cavalcade

Those of you who watched my first YouTube conversation video know that Luke Y Thompson is a critic and a friend. He’s been covering the geek beat for a long time and has some great insights and strong opinions. I plan on having him on my YouTube channel once a month for his insights and for the good conversation. It’s not often you can talk with someone about Truffaut, Freddy Krueger, and He-Man, but when you get the chance you take it (ed: We have not yet talked about any of those things on video). I’m including the video below and a rundown of his articles this week.

• Traveling Light (2023) — Review for Cinegods

• Tonic (Review for Cine (2023) — Review for Cinegods

• Yellow Bird (2023) — Review for Cinegods

• Shazam: Fury of the Gods (2023) — Review for SuperheroHype of the 4K (includes reviews of the extras)

• A Discussion of Jason Statham’s Appeal to Audiences — An Article for A.V. Club

• The Machine (2023) — A.V. Club Review

• Lego Pac Man Classic Arcade Cabinet Set — A Review for SuperheroHype.

• McFarlane Toys New Flash Movie Toyline — A Review for SuperheroHype.

Classic Movie Recommendation

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

This week’s episode of Ted Lasso featured a clip from Nora Ephron’s highly endearing film You’ve Got Mail and it reminded me that I need to do a video review of it and one of the films that inspired it (separate reviews of course), The Shop Around the Corner.

In addition to my day job, and blogging for a hopefully growing audience, I am an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Boise State University. In typical “attempt to be cool” professorial fashion, and because I am obsessed with pop culture, I frequently make film and tv references in class. Unlike many professors though, I don’t limit myself to the films of my youth. I reference things the students are currently watching and I drop a lot of classic film references. I end every semester with an Ask Me Anything session with the students.

At the end of the fall semester, one student (who knew my favorite genre was Romantic Comedies) asked what my favorite Romantic Comedy was. After a brief rant, okay not so brief, about how we are in a downcycle of Romantic Comedies (there are some good ones, but we aren’t anywhere near a peak cycle in terms of innovation/heartstring pulling/humor), I said that I don’t have a favorite. Naturally the student pushed back and asked me to give a meaningful answer, to which I replied that I think The Shop Around the Corner is one of the best and most important Romantic Comedies ever made. Not only was it remade, by the same director, as In the Good Ol’ Summertime (also excellent), it served as the inspiration for You’ve Got Mail. It’s a compelling story on many levels and one that has layers of subtlety beyond the core romance if you are willing to look. It’s a film I watch every year at Christmas time, since it is a Christmas film…even more so than Die Hard.

SENTRY FORCE #0 Provides an Entertaining Glimpse at Tiny Supers' "Gallantverse"

Gallant Knight Games ran the Kickstarter campaign for their Tiny d6 based super hero role playing game Tiny Supers in July/August 2018. I've chatted about Tiny Supers on the Geekerati Podcast, but haven't done a full review of the game. The tl;dr version is that the system has quickly become one of my top 10 super hero rpgs ever. It's easy to learn and very flexible. I loved the system so much that in the blog post for the Tiny d6 episode of the podcast, I did quick conversions of two members of the Fantastic Four (The Human Torch and the Invisible Woman).

I'll do a full review of the Tiny Supers game later this week, but last week Gallant Knight Games' own Alan Bahr sent Kickstarter backers a copy of Sentry Force Prime #0, the first (and hopefully not only) comic book based in their in house Gallant-Verse super setting. I've had a chance to read the comic, several times and in a couple of formats, in order to give it a thorough examination. Before I get deep into the weeds of my analysis of the book, I'd like to give you my overall impression of the book.

TL;DR/Overall Impression

I like it a lot. It's not perfect, and suffers from what I call "pilotitis" when discussing television shows, but it is a fun and engaging book. I love the illustration style and I am impressed with Alan Bahr's attempt at writing a "team origin story" for his first ever comic book script. The short and sweet? Buy it and make sure you read the pdf in "2-page mode" in order to get the most out of Nic Giacondino's art work.

The Good, the Bad, and the Awesome

There are two things that are essential in order for a comic book to "work, you need good writing and good art and in that order. Sentry Force has both. They aren't perfect (as will be discussed in "The Bad" section) but they are good.

When I was an undergrad I took a couple of creative writing classes with an award winning Science Fiction and Fantasy author. Over time, she became one of my most supportive mentors and I am eternally grateful to her. One of the most important lessons she taught me was that "writing a novel is hard, but writing a short story can be even harder." What she meant by this is that readers of novels will allow the writer to meander, but readers of short fiction demand tight, lean, and compelling prose. The medium itself demands it. While comic books may have the benefit of beautiful art, their word count is small and if you are writing a fully contained origin story for one-shot title, you've given yourself quite a writing challenge. There's a reason that the Avengers comic book was written after the characters had their own stand alone books, and there's a reason the Marvel movies started with solo stories rather than jumping right into the first Avengers film. It's easier to create one compelling protagonist at a time than to try to connect readers with multiple protagonists in one go.

It's a difficult challenge to meet, but author Alan Bahr manages this task. The Sentry Force is filled with an interesting array of characters that fit a nice array of super hero archetypes while retaining a touch of their own personality. Velocity, the techie "Iron Man" proxy and the hero who assembles the team, is presented as a man desperately outmatched in a city on the edge of collapse as new villains emerge. He's running as fast as he can to keep the city safe, but he cannot do it alone and what heroes there are in Sentry City have yet to work together in any meaningful way. Velocity wants to help, but all he can do is triage. A fitting metaphor as in his secret identity, he runs a medical supply company. The character is a nice balance of arrogance, vulnerability, and desperation. He might also be, as is revealed in the comic's "voiceover," one of the causes of the rise of meta-humans. Bahr crams in a lot of backstory without a lot of exposition. That gives depth to the setting, but it also leaves room for interpretation and development. Did Velocity's tapping into the Tachyon Bridge merely result in the creation of his Velocity armor, or is it a partial explanation of the emergence of meta-humans? I'm guessing it's just the first, but the second possibility could be developed into some fun story lines.

The first Gallant Knight Games product I backed on Kickstarter was the Powder Mage Roleplaying Game based on the excellent book series by Brian McClellan. It was a very good attempt at adapting McClellan's fictional world to the Savage Worlds rules set. It was especially rich as a Black Powder Mage Universe world guide. In another world, that might have been the only Gallant Knight Games product I purchased, but that would be a world where Alan Bahr didn't work with great artists. From the first time I saw concept art Michael Leavenworth put together for the 2nd Edition of the Tiny Dungeon Role Playing Game, I knew I had to back that game. From their, Bahr introduced me to a number of talented illustrators who's work was different than that being used by other role playing game companies. Of the Gallant Knight Games pool of artists, one stands apart from the others in my esteem. Nicolas Giacondino is the Jack "King" Kirby of the Gallant Knight Games stable. His work is consistently evocative and fun and brings to mind many of my favorite comic book artists. When I see a Giacondino page, his work brings to mind the layouts of Keith Giffen and the art of Matt Wagner, Chris Sprouse, Ty Templeton, and Mike Wieringo. All of these artists have clean line work and demonstrated that the 4-color illustration style of the Silver and Bronze age of comics could be as sophisticated and dynamic as the best of the Iron and Digital Age illustrators.

You can see the influence of these artists on Nic's work in many places, but one place I wanted to examine briefly is in how Giacondino approaches page layouts. Take a look at these three pages with art by Matt Wagner, Keith Giffen, and Nic Giacondino. It should be noted that I intentionally chose one of Giacondino's "least interesting" pages in order to make this quick demonstration, but it should also be clear from even this basic page that Giacondino understands how to tell a story graphically. Each of these pages is a riff on the classic "9 panel page." Two of them are expressly 9 panel pages. Giacondino's page uses the structure of the Giffen (center) page, but uses narrative techniques demonstrated in both the other comics. Notice how Giacondino starts at a wide anger and zooms in one step at each step of the conversation. He's playing with point of view and demonstrating the increasing intensity of the argument between the characters. It's similar to what Wagner is doing in the panels from MAGE #1, which alternates from mid-shot to close-up to match the information being transmitted in the dialogue.

One of the things that stands out in the Giancondino piece, though this really should wait for "The Awesome" section, is that he hand inked the pages. Inking by hand and not digitally or by color coding gives his illustrations a nice depth of space more closely aligned with the Wagner illustration on the left than the more flat-space dominated Giffen art from LEGION OF SUPERHEROES in the middle. Even in a "boring" Giacondino panel, you see variety and texture. We'll see more of his work as I move through "The Bad" and "The Awesome." I do have one small quibble with the page and that is with the lack of window frame behind Camila Cantor. The yellow space behind her is a paneled window and those panels are shown on the next page and add needed background to the page.

Which brings me to "The Bad" elements of the book, none of which are too bad but all of which need to be discussed honestly if I want you to trust my opinion about comics and other media. I really liked this book, but has roughness around the edges.

The first patch of roughness comes in the use of exposition. Bahr doesn't use a lot of it, but there is one case where it needed significant tightening. In presenting Velocity's backstory on page 3, Bahr has the following two sentences back to back. "We were exploring tachyon physics to cure muscular disability and illness, but we stumbled onto the Tachyon Bridge..." and "I had to shut down the research, lock it up, and control it, because what we unlocked with the Tachyon Bridge was bigger than anything I'd ever dreamed of." What is striking here is the repetition of the term Tachyon Bridge. The second sentence could easily read, "I had to shut down the research, lock it up, and control it, because what we unlocked was bigger than anything I'd ever dreamed of." By eliminating the repetition of "with the Tachyon Bridge" it reads quicker and cleaner. There are a couple of small things like this. They aren't deal breakers by any means, but they demonstrate a writer learning to write in a new medium. Comic book story telling needs to be tight and this is a little loose. To be fair to Bahr, I've been reading some older Gardner Fox books (his CROM comic book if you must know) and Bahr's work here is significantly better than Fox's on that title. Let's just say that when you're work is better than Fox's, at any point in his career, you're doing fine.

The second patch of roughness comes in the art work. I know I praised the art earlier and I'll praise it more because Nic is AMAZING, but he's not perfect. Let's take these two pages of action. Where Velocity foils a bank robbery by the villain Darklight. We've got great action flow on the first page, but then WHOAH! What's happening? That top panel on page 5 has me wondering who's PoV we are seeing from. It's not the guy Velocity saved. We can see him on the top of the panel. Who is looking at the world upside down and why? It really pulled me out of the action. Which is too bad, because the action of the panel is fantastic if confusing at this PoV. I can see what Nic is attempting using the split faces on the top of the page, and that's nice, but a small modification really helps the page pop in my opinion.

Sentry Force Pages 4 and 5 (as Published)

What if we didn't feel it was necessary to keep the compelling split faces as the top of the page and instead let them go to the middle of the page? As you can see, since Darklight is in the upper left of the panel when we flip it right side up, we cannot put the face there. We have to have the faces on the bottom of the panel if the action is right side up. And look at that action! It's dynamic. Bullets are flying, Velocity is running to the action, and our hapless customer is falling. The scene has emotional appeal and it brings to my mind the combat panels from the interior of the 2nd edition of the Champions role playing game, and that's a good thing.

Page 5 Image Flipped and Mirrored

Let's add this flipped panel back to the original page and give it a look. To me this is an improvement, especially when viewed in 2-page mode. The action from page to page, and these pages are paired in Acrobat, look dynamic and there is no confusion of the action in my mind. Your mileage may differ. You may prefer the original layout on the page, but this works better for me. Regardless of which works better for you, the illustrations by Nic are a lot of fun.

Sentry Force Pages 4 and 5 (post Tweak)

And that brings me to "The Awesome." There is so much that is great about this book. It starts with a complete vision for the setting. Alan Bahr has stories he wants to tell and he wants you to experience them. Whether we get them as an RPG campaign or as a comic book, I'm sure we will see more of the Gallant-verse. Bahr is a font of ideas on a Walter Gibson (the creator of the Shadow) scale. He's always writing and publishes RPG products on a schedule almost unmatched in the industry. Bahr and Wiggy Wade-Williams are old school writers who pump out quality material on a schedule. I'm in awe of Bahr's abilities and his imagination. He's put together a great team and a compelling universe with characters ranging from the Magician Asher Solomon (a mash-up of Constantine and Dr. Strange who is now one of my favorite super-wizards), Bulwark (a "Brick" and a little more), the Eagle, many more, and...the super-heroine Gallant (the Gallant-verse's "Superman" equivalent). These characters are all discussed in detail in the excellent Tiny Supers RPG and Bahr has provided a fun Gallant-verse adventure in the back of Sentry Force #0 for you to play.

If I wanted to go into "The Awesome" as much as I wanted, I would do a page by page breakdown of all the interesting characters and detailed examination of Nic's artwork. It's really a lot of fun to look at, though I'd desaturate the colors a little to make the very strong line art pop a little more, and he manages a couple of "Perez Pages" where the panels are filled with a horde of characters who manage to be distinct and dynamic and for me the ability to do "Perez Pages" is the measure by which all comic book artists are measured.

Instead of doing all of that, I'll just leave you with the panel introducing Gallant. It's pretty darn EPIC. It has all the emotion and power I want from a character introduction.

Reviewing 1First Comics' ALIEN BONES (2019) by Doc Wyatt and Chris Grine

TL;DR

 

Alien Bones answers the question, "What's more awesome than dinosaurs?" with the perfect response. "ALIEN DINOSAURS!" Doc Wyatt and Chris Grines' Alien Bones is a kid friendly and action packed "dim dark" science fiction adventure that is fun for the whole family.

I interviewed Doc Wyatt about Alien Bones, and other projects, in Episode 165 of Geekerati.

 

What is Alien Bones?

 

Alien Bones is a middle-grade comic book of pulp and pop culture inspired science fiction adventure. The story centers on a ten year-old fossil hunter named Liam Mycroft, who is the son of a well-respected Xenopaleontologist. You read that right, he collects fossils of the "Alien Dinosaurs" that his father discovers various locations throughout the known galaxy. Liam's father mysteriously disappears on one of these digs, and it up to Liam, his friends Dianna and Rosa, and his trusty robot bodyguard Standard-5 ("Stan") to solve the mystery and save the day. Along the way, they bond closer as friends, encounter sinister traitors, battle space pirates, witness a major starship battle between massive armadas, and find the answer to one of the most dangerous mysteries in the universe, "What is The End?" In doing so, they discover a terrible foe that is an existential threat to the entire universe.

What Works? 

 

In addition to being the producer of films like Napoleon Dynamite, Doc Wyatt is a skilled television and film writer who has over a decade of experience writing on many of your favorite major action oriented cartoons. He's worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avengers: The Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Avengers Assemble, Batman Unlimited, Stretch Armstrong, My Little Pony, and that's only scratching the surface. 

Doc Wyatt demonstrates his expertise with writing kid-friendly action oriented tales, as well as a wide array of genre influences, in Alien Bones. He gets readers into the action quickly and keeps his characters in a near constant state of danger for all 176 pages. There is little room for the reader, let alone for the characters, to breathe as they are thrown from one peril to another. Wyatt follows the well established formula of many great pulp writers like Lester Dent:

1. Introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or a problem to be solved--something the hero has to cope with.
2. Shovel more grief onto the hero.
3. Shovel more of the grief onto the hero.
4. The mysteries remaining--one big one held over to this point will help grip interest--are cleared up in course of final conflict as hero takes the situation in hand. Final twist, a big surprise, (This can be the villain turning out to be the unexpected person, having the "Treasure" be a dud, etc.) The snapper, the punch line to end it. 

And when in doubt always make sure to have Raymond Chandler's rule in reserve. I doubt Wyatt was using Dent's formula, but his action adheres to Dent's advice almost perfectly and it provides for a wonderfully quick reading pulp inspired adventure that left my daughters and me hoping that there would be a sequel.

Chris Grine illustrates the breakneck action with a cartoony style that conveys the sense of adventure, hints at the horror of "The End," while remaining very kid-friendly. Grine's cartoony style maximizes the psychological effects of using minimal facial details on protagonists and more detail on antagonists and threats that Scott McCloud details in Understanding Comics. By having the young and diverse cast of protagonists have minimal specific features, Grine's art makes it easy for young readers to see themselves as the protagonists. His illustrations of antagonists, like Captain Scarbones, have more specific details which separates them in the readers' minds and signals their status as threat or other. 

In his attempts to demonstrate how dangerous various antagonist and beasts are, Chris Grine never illustrates details that would be frightening to younger readers. He instead relies on a more subtle technique to convey discomfort and a sense of danger, the color scheme. The colors that tend to dominate the book are pastel versions of brown, red, purple, and green. This is Stan Lee's classic quartet of villain colors. Grine's use of green in Alien Bones is similar to the use in The Wachowski's Matrix films, green lighting is used to signify danger and threat. From the mysterious unexplored city, illuminated in green, to the light illuminating a traitor's face, green is used to signify danger. Similarly pink is used to signify a sense of safety, no matter how temporary. Grine's keeps these colors in pastel, rather than saturated, form which signals the threat, but doesn't make it overly ominous. It's very effective.

Similarly, Grine's dinosaur illustrations keep the careful balance between monstrous and cuddly. One particular dinosaur initially looks very threatening, but through visual cues Grine transforms a potential carnivorous beast into a solar powered dinosaur version of a pug. It's one of my favorite sequences in the book. Grine easily stays on the side of dim dark and avoids wandering into grim dark, making it perfect for middle grade readers, but his ability to convey action and whimsy make his illustrations appeal to even more jaded comic fans like me. 

 

Critique

 

I have one minor critique of Alien Bones. I wish Wyatt had made a different choice than to have the adventure begin with the disappearance of a parent. It's a very common narrative device in middle grade and young adult fiction that simultaneously enables and requires agency on the part of the protagonist, but it's also one that echoed a little to closely to the opening of another dim dark tale of youthful adventure I read recently. That dim dark tale is Cavan Scott's Warped Galaxies: Attack of the Necrons story (and sequels) for the new line of Warhammer 40k books for young readers. I don't know what other narrative device could have been used as the inciting incident, but after reading both the Age of Sigmar and Warped Galaxies series, I would like to see some other trope used. The fact that my own, still being written story, also uses it only adds to the critique as I am now grilling myself seeking an alternative.

Final Thoughts

Doc Wyatt and Chris Grine have packed a lot of world building content into the 176 pages of Alien Bones, that reflects a deep catalog of inspirations. There are references to Star Blazers, Warhammer 40k, Doctor Who, Indiana Jones, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Lost in Space, Scooby Doo, Treasure Island, Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, Alien, Jurassic Park, and a host of other inspirations. I honestly don't know how Doc Wyatt managed to smash all of these things together while creating a coherent and engaging narrative that takes place in a beautiful and imaginative narrative universe, but he did just that.

I really hope we get to see more adventures in the universe of Alien Bones, whether or not those adventures include young Liam and his friends. There is a lot of space to explore and a lot of interesting characters are introduced. I'd like to get to know them all a little better, and even get the chance to pretend I'm one of them from time to time.

If you are a gamer and interested in "playing" in the Alien Bones universe, I've come up with some role playing statistics for some of the characters using the following systems.

• Tiny Frontiers

Role Playing Adventures in the "Alien Bones" Universe Part 1 (Tiny Frontiers Edition)

 
The Alien Bones graphic novel by Doc Wyatt and Chris Grine, released on October 2, 2019 and published by 1First Publishing, is a fun tale of "dim dark" adventure that introduces readers to a universe filled with alien dinosaurs, space pirates, intergalactic navies, and an existential threat called "The End." The universe is a wonderful mashup of Warhammer 40k, Doctor Who, Indiana Jones, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Lost in Space, Scooby Doo, Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, and a host of other inspirations. All of this makes it a perfect inspiration for role playing game sessions.

The first volume, and let's hope it's the first of many, focuses on the character of Liam Mycroft. Young Liam is the 10 year old son of a Xeno-paleontologist who has accompanied his father on a variety of digs where his father studies the bones of "alien dinosaurs." During one of these digs, Liam's father disappears without a trace, leaving young Liam alone. It is here that Liam's adventure begins. Joined by his friends Dianna Varlou and Rosa Ortega, as well as his trusty robot bodyguard Standard-5 ("Stan"), Liam embarks on a quest to find his father and in doing so discovers the secret of an existential threat that could destroy all life in the universe.

I interviewed Doc Wyatt on my Geekerati Media podcast and he has given me permission to generate role playing game statistics for several of the characters.

While I am tempted to describe the universe in detail, I am instead recommending that you purchase the book on Amazon (or at your friendly local comic book store) and providing gaming statistics for the main cast, as well as the statistics for one of the threats the young protagonists face.  (I'm also tempted to do stats for Warhammer Adventures: Attack of the Necron, a similarly dim dark story with delightful young protagonists).

Today, I'll be providing statistics for the excellent and simple Tiny Frontiers role playing game. Tiny Frontiers is a perfect system for novice and experienced gamers, making it a perfect fit for the first set of statistics for your gaming pleasure. In later posts, I'll provide statistics for the Savage Worlds, Star Frontiers, and Aliens & Asteroids role playing systems. I might even provide stats for The Expanse and Warhammer 40k role playing games, as both have elements that work well in the Alien Bones universe, but those systems are slightly more complex and Alien Bones was written for ages 4 to 444 and I wanted to have systems that younger gamers could jump right into.

Without further ado, here are the main characters of Alien Bones with statistics for Tiny Frontiers.

Liam Mycroft

Liam Mycroft is a 10 year old who is already on his way to becoming a Xenopaleontologist. His has great expertise regarding dinosaurs on all planets as well as knowledge of the ecosystems that produce these wonderful creatures.

Dianna Varlou

Dianna Varlou is Liam's best friend and steadfast companion. She is visiting Liam when his father disappears. She is the daughter of a respected Thermodynamicist, but her areas of expertise seem to lean more toward robotics and weapon design. She's kind of the team's MacGyver. When the team is faced with a new threat, she is the one who is able to weaponize Portal Crystals.

 

Rosa Ortega

Rosa Ortega is the class clown in Liam and Dianna's Holoclassroom on the Scholastic Network. While she doesn't seem to take things very seriously, she is a skilled computer hacker. She has an extraordinary amount of courage, which she clearly inherited from her parents who are both Generals in a Space Fleet stationed at Charon Base on the edge of explored space. Rosa has two sets of statistics. The first represents her as she is portrayed in the first half of Alien Bones, when she participates in the adventure only because she hacked a holoprojector. The second represents her as she is on a regular basis.

Standard-5 ("Stan")

Standard-5 is Liam's robot bodyguard or "Minder-bot/Nanny." Stan has many advanced skills that help him to protect Liam from a variety of dangers. Stan often seems over-protective of Liam, but can be convinced to allow Liam to take necessary risks. This can happen due to the use of an "Adventure Button" that Liam and Dianna installed*, or due to necessity.

The End

There are two main antagonists in Alien Bones. The first is the space pirate Captain Scarbones, but the long term threat is something known as "The End." It would be a bit of a spoiler to reveal exactly what The End is/are, but they are a foe on the scale of Tyrannids/Necrons in Warhammer 40k or the Sathar in Star Frontiers. They seek the destruction of all life and an end to the universe. Below are statistics for one of their drones. If you want to see what they look like, you need to buy Alien Bones. Chris Grines did a masterful job of illustrating an existential threat in a way that conveys the horror of the threat to adults while still being extremely kid-friendly.

I really enjoyed reading Alien Bones, and will be reviewing it later this week or early next week, and think it is a rich setting that I hope the author and artist will continue to explore.

Episode 165: Chatting with Doc Wyatt about Alien Bones and Super Dinosaur

Episode 165: Chatting with Doc Wyatt about Alien Bones and Super Dinosaur

We were lucky enough to connect with Television and Film Producer Doc Wyatt a couple of weeks ago to discuss a couple of his newly released projects. While Doc's producing credits include films like Napoleon Dynamite, our discussion focused entirely on his work in comic books and animation. 

His most recent comic book Alien Bones is an adventure tale in the emerging "Dim Dark" genre. Tomorrow's post will include a review of the book as well as role playing game stats for some of the characters, which should give a suggestion of what I thought of the book. HINT: I liked it and so did my daughters.

Doc's a busy content creator, who's work includes a wide variety of animated series. If you like super heroes and/or Star Wars, it's likely that Doc and his writing partner Kevin Burke have worked on your favorite show. He's currently working on a number of series, but Episode 165 highlights his work on the recent Super Dinosaur series, which is an adaptation of a comic book by Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead fame. Super Dinosaur is a mash up of Science Fiction, Super Hero, and Hollow Earth tropes that is currently airing on Amazon Prime.

I don't want to reveal too much of the interview here, but here are a couple of things we touch on during the interview. 

The Dim Dark genre and books like the new Warhammer Adventures series. Let's just say that if you like Alien Bones, you'll like Warhammer Adventures and vice versa.

The Spelljammer setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, a setting of wild fantasy adventures in outer space.

Season 20 of Doctor Who featuring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, and the Enlightenment storyline in particular.

The classic Vincent Price horror film Witchfinder General and the comic book of the same name by Doc Wyatt.

The short lived Jeph Hephner series Agent X that ran on TNT in the early 2010s.

The amazingly entertaining Disney Junior series Octonauts that my family loved so much I had to order toys from England as Christmas presents.

The old show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which is the live action adult equivalent of Octonauts, cool ships and all.

The Marvel comic book Death's Head featuring a character originally published by Marvel's British Comic book division in the 1980s.

 

It's a great conversation and we'd love for you to listen.

The Role Playnig Game I'd Most Like to See Published is... #RPGaDay2017 Day 2

Thanks to great services like Mythoard, I've been able to read a ton of old Judges Guild Journals and issues of Pegasus where there is a lot of early work by RPG Industry legends like Jennell Jaquays. I've also seen some wonderful advertisements for products of the early RPG era. Some of those products were published, but others faded into the ether never to be seen again. I would like to see most of those games published again in some form, and I'd love for most of the fanzine of that era to be scanned and sold by their original publishers on RPGNow, but the one I'd most like to see publication some day is Judges Guild's super hero role playing game. It was to be called Supra-Sentinels.

I wrote about this and a couple of other games back in 2014. At that time, one of the game's original authors said that they were looking into revising and releasing this game. I'd love to see it happen and would be among the first to buy it when it is released.

Over at The Acaeum, one of the original authors gives some clues to what the game would be like and it makes me all the more intrigued to see it:

1.  I'd like to think our game was pretty sophisticated for its time, yet less complicated than what we saw as our main (would have been) competitor CHAMPIONS.   It was a point-building system with dice for determining actions (ie. attacks, defense, etc.)   We'd studied the three or so systems out there around the early '80s and came up with what we thought was a pretty darn good game.   We were starting to worry that CHAMPIONS would eclipse us because it was taking so long for JG to get to the point of being able to afford to publish it.

2.   We were, indeed, very close to being in print.   The game would have been out probably 9 months sooner, had I not moved out of town for a job and my co-authors sort of...didn't do much with it to put the finishing touches on it while I was gone.   By the time I moved back into town and got to work on it again, JG was already getting shaky, financially.   The advertisement got us pretty excited.   Then, they went under just as it was about to go to press.   Took a while to get the manuscript back from them, as it had gotten buried under stuff at their location in Illinois.   (This was about 1982 or 83?)  To get that close to being a published author was one of the single most disappointing moments of my life.    It taught me a good lesson about how we all have them from time to time, though.

What Published RPG I Wish I Was Playing Right Now -- #RPGaDAY 2017 Day 1

For as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Super Hero role playing games. My entry into this particular gaming milieu was Hero Games' excellent Champions 2nd edition role playing game. I happened upon a copy and was amazed that game designers had even attempted to capture super heroes using game mechanics. At the time, I was only familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, Star Frontiers, Tunnels & Trolls, and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I had played all three of those games and their mechanical foundations did not prepare me for what Champions offered.

Unlike the other games with which I was familiar, Champions did not have randomly created characters and instead allowed players to build whatever they could imagine. The only limit to the character you could design was the number of points available at creation (100 points with 150 more possible if you took Disadvantages). Other than that, it was all good. During my initial Champions experience, I didn't have anyone to play the game with and spent all of my time making characters and doing some solo battles. My character builds were heavily influenced by the sample characters in the rule book and thus were typically of 200 total character points (100 and 100 from Disadvantages). This included my personal write ups for the X-Men. I was content with my view of the game, but this view was to be shattered in short order.

A couple of months after I discovered Champions my family moved to a new city, I finally encountered a group of gamers who played the game every weekend. Given that this was the Bay Area, and the game company was a Bay Area company, I soon discovered a rich and vibrant Champions community. I also discovered that how I interpreted character adaptations to the game was very different from others. Some of that difference, I maintain to this day. I personally believe that too many gamers inflate the stats of their favorite characters out of love for the character, rather than an examination of benchmarks and mechanics of the game. But these are things that can only be understood through play, and that was something I had not yet done with Champions. In playing the game, I learned how some combinations worked better than others and I learned that other players were much more likely than I had been to "grab" the "Obvious and Accessible" items some characters used in combat. Not that I designed a lot of those kinds of characters, I didn't, just that I had expected gamers to behave more like the characters in comics than like "tactical gamers" and that the rules treated gamers as tactical gamers while allowing them to behave like characters in comics.

Long story short, I learned that you can only truly judge the quality of a game by playing it. I still love Champions and think it is one of the top 3 or 4 super hero games out there, but my view is now grounded in experience of how the game works and how when some character building norms take over the game can slow down significantly and lose some of its charm.

Eventually, my love of super heroes and super hero games led me to purchase Villains & Vigilantes, Marvel Super Heroes, and DC Heroes, all of which have there charms. At one point in time, not that long ago by some standards, I could claim to own a copy of every super hero rpg published (at least in one of its editions). With the explosion of pdf based publishing, that is no longer the case and I'm sure I'm missing out on some great games, but I also have a HUGE backlog of games I'd like to play...see how I'm pulling this back to the question of the day?

Among that backlog is Jay Harlove and Aimee Karklyn/(Hartlove)'s early Supergame. It wasn't the first super hero rpg published, that was Superhero 44/Superhero 2044, but it was one of the first and predates Champions. Both the first edition and revised edition came out in 1980. I discovered the game as a "real" thing and not just something mentioned in old gaming magazines, when I moved to Los Angeles after graduating from college in 2000. I was looking for gaming stores and found a long standing game store in Long Beach that had a copy of the 1st edition. Later searches on the internet have shown me that I got a significant bargain on it, as I did with copies of Warlock and a couple of other games originally designed by the Southern California gaming community.

Supergame, like Superhero 2044 which predates it and Champions which comes after it, has a point based character creation system. It also has an interesting skill and combat system that I think has a lot of potential. Some of the stats are odd in how they are presented. For example, if a character has an Agony score (similar to Stun for Champions fans) of 10 or more they suffer no penalties to how they move or act. Given that scores start at 0, and that some sample characters have 0s in other stats implying that a score of 0 is sometimes the "average" score, it seems odd that a person has to spend points just to be a normal person in some areas and not others. Why not just have stats start at "average" and let people buy them down later? Or why not have Agony start at 0 with no penalties and allow negative scores to cause impairment? It's a small complaint, and there are a number of neat features like different defenses against different types of attack (pre-Champions remember). A thorough reading of the rules, both editions, and the supplements has convinced me that I need to play this game to evaluate whether the designed characters are effective at all in a way that would be fun. There are far more characters who have an Agony of 10, or a Physical (like Hit Points but with those with less than 10 being hurt), which means that if they suffer just 1 point of damage they will be impaired.

 I think there is a very good game buried in the Supergame rule books, but I think it is a game that needs a lot of play testing and rules tweaks to bring out that game. I applaud Jay an Aimee for their hard work on the game and their ability to get a game like this published in 1980, and this is definitely a game I wish I was playing right now. I have so many questions I'd like answered and I'd love to house rule this game into a more complete system.