Wednesday Comics: Ubermensch!

This post my be cheating a bit on the Wednesday Comics mission statement, but hopefully it will be of interest to the comics crowd.

I've generally found superhero prose lackluster, at best, and superhero themed prose anthologies are even more of a mixed bag that most anthologies. Even the Wild Cards series with its interesting alternate history universe has its share of clunkers. I can't vouch for the whole anthology, but Super Stories of Heroes & Villains includes one of my favorite superhero short-stories: Kim Newman's alternate fictional history story, "Ubermensch!"

As the name might suggest, "Ubermensch!" is the story of a German Superman, a Nazi Superman--and the Jewish Nazi hunter who comes to kill him. Along the way, it drops hints at an alternate history informed by German cinema and pulp fiction where Berlin is a futuristic city called Metropolis, and the Ubermensch's enemies are Graf Orlock, Dr. Mabuse, and Rotwang. There are annotations here--but read the short story first, lest you deprive yourself of the pleasure of discovering the easter eggs on your own.

There is also this award-winning short film based on it, though they remove a lot of the references that enrich the backstory:

Azurthite Bestiary: Moon Goon

Moon Goons get their name from their heads or masks, large, round, and faintly luminous like the Moon, and their vile behavior. The Moon Goons avoid the real moon, only striking when it is new. Their spindly, bone-white limbs are animated with odd gestures and faintly aglow despite the lack of moonlight. They are forever mumbling and conversing, but their lips never move and their speech is unintelligible.

They arrive in balloons--or what look like balloons--but their gondolas are slung from metal spheres with the appearance of lead. The spheres are hollow, and no one knows from where they derive their buoyancy nor what propels them forward. Perhaps the Moon Goons know, but they don't say. Each gondola carries 2-3 moon goons. They arrive in groups of 2-4 balloons.

They prey on small, isolated villages or farms. The items that interest them are often not particularly valuable at all--at least not in the strict monetary sense. Sentimental value seems the be the primary quality evident in the things they steal.

Moon goons try to put the humans they rob to sleep with the silvery metallic rods they carry. The slumber the rods produce is plagued by weird nightmares. Humans that prove resistant to their rods or harm one of the moon goons raiders, may find themselves on sharp end of their scalpel-like knives.

MOON GOON
medium aberration, neutral evil
AC 15 (natural armor)
Hit Points: 22 (4d8+4)
Speed: 30 ft.
STR 11(+0) DEX 13(+1) CON 12(+1) INT 13(+1) WIS 12(+1) CHA10(+0)
Skills: Stealth +6
Senses Darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 11.
Languages Understands any language but don't speak any of them

Magic Resistance. A Moon Goon has an advantage against spells and other magical effect.

Actions:
Rod. Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, one target in a 30 foot range. Hit: On a failed DC 12 Constitution save, the target falls to sleep.
Scalpel-like Knife. Melee Weapon Attack. +4 to hit, 5 ft. reach, one target, Hit: 1d8.

The Planetary Spheres

I posted this on G+ a few days ago, but I thought I should share it here, as well...

There are seven spheres whose aetheric densities allow them to be reached by the technology of Man. With the Earth as our reference point, the planets can grouped thusly:

The Postlapsarian Worlds, thither went the Nephilim and the Atlanteans following the Deluge:

Saturn: Ringed with the petrified and crumbling corpses of titans and monsters. A rebellious demiurge imprisoned in its litharge-colored mists.

Jupiter: The peripatetic court of the most convivial of monarchs in continual celebration. Visitors glide down from the several moons on bat wings to hunt giant beasts in a sea of endless, variegated storm clouds.

Mars: Empires clash, and machine brains compute the scientific perfection of eternal war.

There was once another world between the spheres of Mars and Jupiter, but the iniquity of its people destroyed it.

The Prelapsarian Worlds, closer to the Sun and the Demiurge that dwells within:

Venus: Torrid jungles and vast, shallow oceans. Strange and beautiful plant women.

Mercury: Blazing court of the heliocephalic Emperor, a Philosopher-King.

Luna: The pallid, coralline gardens and laboratories of the Fair Folk. The fae themselves, ashen, luminous, and moth-winged, and their insectoid Selenite servants.

Have You Seen These Aliens?

I had hoped I wouldn't be doing another Strange Stars update because it would be in your hands by now, but at least I cane report the final round of proofreading is complete, and Lester is making the requisite changes as I write this.

Assuming the submission process to rpgnow goes smooth (and for pdf, at least, it usual does), it is very close.

Here's one last page to whet your appetite.

Wednesday Comics: A Bronze Age Alphabet

Back in 2009, I did a series of posts for the blog of my friend Jim Shelley called "A Bronze Age Alphabet." Inspired by articles like "A Secret History Alphabet" by Kenneth Hite, it actually didn't deal with any actual Bronze Age alphabet, but instead an alphabet of the Bronze Age of Comics.

I should warn you that it's still incomplete. One day, maybe.

Part 1: A to G

Part 2: H to L

Part 3: M to P

Part 4: Q to U

Death and Time

Saturn moves in the furthest sphere from the Sun reachable by the starships of Man. Beyond, the Cosmos is more chaotic and the laws of Nature are strange. Saturn and those more distant spheres are remnants of a renegade cosmos that was or perhaps might have been. In that world, Saturn would have been the sun and a source of life instead of a graveyard and place of death.

Unique among the planets are Saturn's great rings made of the petrified remains of titans and monsters and the dust and remain made from their collisions in the void. The greatest of these pre-Creation monsters form the moons of Saturn. Men sometimes find treasure among these cold, sepulchral bodies, but ancient and malefic intelligence still lives in some, and there are tales of the dead becoming animate in their influence.

Some seek riches within Saturn itself, but its sickly yellow vapors streaked with dull gray can only be safely penetrated in thick, lead diving spheres that afford voyagers protection by alchemical affinity from both the crushing pressures and the saturnine radiations. Without them, living things petrify then turn to dust and other metals and materials corrode or decay. Travelers have recounted hearing the voices of souls, and ancient and damned, raging or crying in the dark mists, but whether these things are real, no one can say.

At Saturn's north pole, there hangs a great cube of stone like black onyx. Inside, dwells the Oyarses spirit of Saturn, long-bearded Aratron. He has made a great study of time and death, and is to possess a laboratory where he grows new physical forms for himself that he transfers his intelligence to him the old one succumbs to death. As well as being Aratron's palace, laboratory, and treasure house, the cube is said to be the tomb of the rebellious titan that created this world--or at least what is left of him. Though his giant, apparently-dead form has been accreted with stone, he is still well bound and meant to be for eternity.

The Sea of Stars and A Free Adventure

Fellow blogger Sean Holland over at Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal has launched a Kickstarter for The Sea of Stars Campaign Sourcebook for Pathfinder. the Design Journal blog is always a good read with spells and magic items that come with interesting and flavorful backstories making them at once integrated into Sean's setting, but also eminently usable in any setting. He also does write-ups of his campaign sessions that always sound like a great time.

If you're not already a fan of the blog--you should probably rectify that by checking it out--but you can also get a taste of what Sean has in store for us in the sourcebook with this handy sheet of introductory facts and this free 1st level adventure.

Check out the Kickstarter page for the artists Sean has lined up. Also, you'll not that stretch goals include companion pieces written by folks like Benjamin Baugh and Brandes Stoddard--and somehow I slipped in there, too.

36 days to go, but don't wait around. Go check it out.