Multiverses of Madness and the Comics

 

Growing up a comics kid, with a focus on Marvel, I of course loved even the C level heroes. And Dr. Strange was certainly that. But he had a certain popularity with college students, due in large part to the great Steve Ditko's psychedelic take on Salvador Dali. Doctor Strange travelled realms of crazy abstract backgrounds. 

And Strange regular cameoing in other titles got his exposure. Just like in the most recent Spider Man movie, Spidey and other heroes would sometimes seek out the wizard for advice with supernatural situations. Doc also led his own minor league hero team, The Defenders, that went on to have a long history, often without Strange appearing. But now, in the MCU, Doc Strange takes front and center. He actually seems to be the heir apparent to Tony Snark (even cracking wise at an accelerated rate). 

So as a kid the offbeat elements stood out. The crazy interdimensional backgrounds, Ditko's signature finger-bending hand gestures and body postures (made famous in early Spider Man). And Stan Lee gave Ditko credit for the character, a rare moment of generosity about character creation. 

So, the weirdo backgrounds and even the classic hand gestures made their way into the Marvel films, and the dimensional architecture as well, In spades. 

In the hands of Sam Raimi (among my top 5 favorite directors), the world of Strange just seems right. His style fits right in with the classic Ditko style. The backgrounds, the demons, the crash edits and Dutch angles. Sam brings all his best tropes into the MCU. Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell all seem like influences here. 

Scarlet Witch is the big bad, a plotline left over from her Disney series. All she wants is her kids, but since she can't have hers, she will settle for taking over the body of a counterpart of hers from another dimension. Or something. 

I remember her pretend kids from comics in the 80's. Some of that had Al Milgrom as artist, who I absolutely hate, so I didn't read much. I don't know if Wanda using actual magic was a thing back then, or a modern invention. In my day she was a mutant who could alter probability in a random fashion that she could not fully control. She might turn a hail of bullets into butterflies with a hex, or create a shield of ice from fire hydrant water to block them. She never really knew. 

Now she is a powerful wizard in her own right, and more powerful (because of the Darkhold?) than even Doc Strange. Anyway, I don't really need to get into plot specifics. It didn't matter much to me. It was the insider elements that tickled me. 

The Darkhold stuff took me back. That book, Marvels Necronomicon, was in many titles I read as a kid. I remember it factoring into the early Werewolf by Night issues. And apparently the book was responsible for the existence of vampires. So nice to see it getting love these days. 

But its the multiverse that tickles me. As a kid it was Marvel, and to a lesser degree DC comics ("not a dream! Not an imaginary tale!"), whose mid century "Imaginary tales" eventually evolved into alternate dimensiona explanations. Earth 616 and 219 and 411 or whatnot. 

By the 70's both Marvel and DC dug deep into alternate universe stuff. I mean, I guess What If...? was the penultimate love for the concept. And its great to see it happening in the movies. in the case of DC films, it's an evolution of the company trying to salvage the poor reception of early film fare such as Batman vs. Superman and such. I mean, its giving us a chance soon to see the Michael Keaton Batman alongside the more recent Batfleck, and that tickles me to no end. 20 Years ago me being told by a visitor from the future that this would happen would have made my head explode. Even the last Spider Man film did it. Molina Doc Ock and Defoe Green Goblin? Yes please. Though I have to admit, that movie did not hold me for long. I have yet to watch enough of it to see all the Spider Man film actors together. But that has more to do with not really being a fan of the recent Spidey films. But shit, I'm glad its all happening. 

I love alternate universe stuff, and I look forward to seeing what they do with it. But especially in the case of DC. I'm unashamedly a fan of the films, even the derided ones. Batman V Supers and Suicide Squad 1 weren't quite the films I would have hoped (worst Lex Luthor ever), but I still find plenty to like in them. And I absolutley adore the Snyder Cut Justice League. I like the dark Snyder touches over the Marvel films heavy reliance on Tony Stark Snark, and essentially every character being a comedy gagster (that really should have been Spider Man and Deadpools schtick only).

So I should add you get to an alternate version of Reed Richards. I'm chomping at the bit to see what they do with an FF movie. And this is a little glimpse (I half expected Ben Grimm to come smashing in). And Fox's Doctor X played by Patrick Stewart was fanboy giggle worthy. The Illuminati. Wow. They even stuck in Black Bolt from the poorly received Inhumans show (I have yet to see it), and he was awesome. The only thing missing was Prince Namor. That would have been sweet. 

Anyway, Multiverse Madness. Can't wait to see more madness. Uh, in the Multiverse.

Oh, one final spoiler. Doc Stranges gal pal from the 70's, Clea, shows up in a credits sequence. That was a deep cut, and I almost spit out beer. And they don't explain anything, so nobody except way out in the weeds old school fanboys like me even get the significance. Awesome. 

Games - to Display or not to Display?

 My geek cred is pretty strong. It started around age 8 or 9 when my parents, avid swap meet and garage sale patrons (like a lot of immigrant types), would occasionally bring me stacks of comics. That started a collection that by adulthood had grown into several long boxes of mostly silver age stuff. 

My next intro to things geeky was probably an old copy of The Hobbit one of my older bros (non-geeks to be sure; oldest brother was a local biker-like badass, and my next oldest was all-city in several sports) left lying around. By the time I discovered D&D around age 13 I had read the LOTR trilogy a couple of times (plus a little Conan and others). So things comics, and things D&D were my main hobbies (besides playing sports myself - a local sports hero's younger brother is going to be forced to dabble). I surfed from around age 14-21, but as I grew up on the beach that was more of a lifestyle than sport or hobby. Comics and RPGS were the lifelong loves, though I pretty much stopped buying comics on the reg by age 25 or so. 

When you are young you love to display things you like. But for me coming up in a time when D&D and other games were more or less underground despite TSR's soon marketing to the general teeming masses, I treated it like a secret society. When I went to the secretive D&D club ("The Fantasy Role Playing Association" - sheesh) after football practice I snuck there with the James Gunn theme playing in the background so as not to be seen by my non-geek friends.

 It was an odd hobby, and I kind of dug the furtive nature of it then. I always stashed my gaming stuff away in drawers and closets in case my sports pals came over (or my earliest girlfriends - though by around 17 years old or so some girls I met were into D&D). Things I displayed were the usual rock posters and such. My D&D buddies were less furtive; they had minis and books and all kinds of stuff all over their rooms. 

I'm still not much of a hobby-displayer. I'm always kind of trying to minimize my life. When I left my hometown for a new city a few short years ago I pretty much tossed out about half my life. Clothes, furniture, and a lot of collectibles. Some action figures, fandom books (including things like my decades old Star Trek technical manual) and other things that were not exactly mint on card. I currently own exactly ONE small bookshelf, and its more for holding a few favored books and gifts from friends. Well, not exactly displayed. More like just tossed on there to keep them off the living room table...

My D&D stuff still stays stashed in a closet, more to get it out of the way than out of embarrassment. But with my current main hobby (outside of video gaming, playing music, and a couple other things) is boardgames. 

Above: me indulging in other things with non-gamer pals 

in Northern Cali...

As I mentioned in other posts, my board gaming passion only started around 3 years ago. My only real boardgame love for decades was Talisman. But I discovered Will Wheaton's Tabletop show and was dazzled by the incredible games being played there. I moved to a new town where I didn't know anybody. I made some friends at the local comic/game shop, but then I found some of the personalities in the local gaming community, especially that of board gaming, kind of boring, outside of my soon to be besties B and L and some of their local friends.

We teamed up to turn non-gamers
into gamers. Nice, eh?

 So with good friends eager to play I started collecting games I had seen on that show (or just saw at a store and had to have). My collection grew exponentially in the last couple years...

Have a couple of editions, but the one with
the phallic standee is a classic.

I'm probably leaving one or two out, but it doesn't take a lot of boardgames to make quite a pile. They outgrew the couple of lower shelves, and I pretty much had them stacked on the living room floor. But with my best friends being out of town for a few months in the earlier parts of the year (they travel to warmer climes to avoid the snow and such we get here near the Sierras), this is kind of my board gaming downtime. So, with pre-spring cleaning they go from the living room into some boxes in the office upstairs until such time as boardgame "season" comes back around.

My board game collection as currently displayed.

In some ways it's kind of a shame. These modern boardgame boxes are beautiful to look at.  I've seen some huge collections of boardgames displayed, and they look amazing. The hosts of my latest D&D campaign must have a hundred boardgames, and they are displayed around the house on a half dozen shelves. And there is a brew pub in town that had hundreds of games available to play. I've played a few games there with B & L, or other local friends, and it's a great atmosphere. I've even gone in there by myself on a quiet Sunday to have a couple ales and just stare at the walls...

So lonely...but fuck, look at all those games!

But honestly, in the spirit of minimalization, I have to resist the shelf thing. As I have for years, I get my artsy display ya-ya's out by hanging stuff on the walls. Mostly things with some personal importance.

More of a religious thing really, 
but counts as a display

Given to me over a decade ago
when Pearl Jam was a client 
at my office. 

Both an art and activity. I like to 
switch different comics in and out
of the frames from time to time.

Just as an aside, there can be a great display out of the box. I gave my pals a beautiful little game that they like to play (it's a two-player game so I don't have it) on their travels, but also keep it out as a nice model display...

OK, so as for my collection of board games, I am going to try and keep it down to the three boxes. But these boxes are pretty much full. There are at least a couple more games I'd like to own, so to fit I will need to eliminate a couple. The most likely choices for elimination are...

Really loving that box art.

OK, well, Munchkin can be fun, but honestly two things turn me off from playing it after the first couple tries. Basically, for what you get out of it, it takes too long. It can take over an hour. Both times we played it was closer to an hour and a half. For a game that is almost all whimsy, it should really be like other whimsical games I like such as King of Tokyo and Epic Spell Wars. A game should take a half hour or less. To me this is the big turnoff. A game that takes upwards of an hour and a half should have a bit more real meat on it. 

As for the Gloomhaven spin-off, well, I have some reasons there that I will save for a later post as the reasons I got it are quite specific. 

But long and short here and to wrap this post up, I will for the time being be keeping the games in the boxes, and my artsy side will just have to stay up on the walls. Out of the way. 

The Deadliest Night of My Life

I’m no stranger to shamelessly ripping off ideas from other mediums to use in game scenarios (I use the somewhat harsh term “ripping-off” because I didn’t always reveal where I got my ideas from to my players).

One example is when I was at the height of my Champions campaigns around 1990. One of my regular players, Gaz, liked to do a little “powder” on a Friday night at his pad in Santa Monica. Gaz was not a drug dude by any means, nor particularly skeevy (just a plain ol’ geek). He just had some friend who gave him blow now and again, and he liked to hang out on a Friday, no party or gathering or anything, and watch MTV and do a few lines. Cocaine was never my thing, but Gaz would invite me over for a few beers, and since I was a ten minute walk away I would cruise over to watch videos and sink a few, and wish I had something else going on in my Friday nights. During that period I was working full time at both the Southern and Northern Renaissance Faires , each lasting more than two months’ worth of weekends, the Northern Faire involving weekend drives each way all the way to Mendocino County that took almost 8 hours (nowadays the I-5 highway has a 70 mph speed limit and the drive would be around 6 hours, but back then, as Sammy Hagar lamented, the limit was 55 anywhere in California). So especially right after Faire season it would take a bit of time for me to get back in the swing of normal socializing outside of the recreated Elizabethan country village. So a relaxing night at Gaz’s drinking beers then staggering back home was a decent, causal Friday to me (Saturday nights I still tried to do things un-geeky, like trying to date non-Faire chicks and hang out with non-Faire people. Going out to local bars and such).

So anyway, with us having so much fun with my Champions settings with my regular group, Gaz suggested we do some solo stuff on the Fridays seeing as we were getting looped anyway. Nowadays I’d rather take a kick in the nads than try to do solo gaming with somebody, but at the time it didn’t seem like a bad idea. So he created a character, Jessie Steel, who was a non-costumed hero, sort of a genetic super soldier who worked as a hero for hire. So what I did, in between many trips to the bathroom (the blow Gaz got from his friends was heavily cut with baby laxative, it seemed), I ran couple of hour sessions for him. And his character was perfect for what I had in mind. What I did was basically put his Jessie characters through little detective adventures based entirely on old episodes of The Rockford Files. It was my favorite show as a kid, and I had many of the best episodes memorized. Rockford, looking for some rich guys missing wife, gets knocked unconscious, framed for murder, and chased by the Mafia, so I just did it all to Jessie Steel, but pumped up with a bit more harrowing combat and martial arts (Gaz was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so most detecting elements he solved had to be handed to him on a silver platter by NPC’s). Gaz was not a real Rockford fan, and I don’t think I told him about my inspirations for those little Friday night games that winter/spring until the mid-90’s or so. He didn’t seem to mind.

Although I came up with tons of original stuff for my games for the most part, there were pleny of examples of homage in my games. There is one example that is my favorite “rip-off.” That’s the Daredevil comic book shown above. It was written by Sci Fi guy Harlan Ellison when current scripter Denny O’Neil was sick in hospital and asked his pal Harlan to fill in for a few issues. These were great comics.

“The Deadliest Night of My Life” had Daredevil following a suspicious little girl who was running around the city streets alone late at night, and she led him to a large mansion in a walled off estate. Turns out the father of one of DD’s old foes who died built the place, and automated it to draw DD in and kill him with any number of traps. Snake pits, shark tanks, electrocution chambers, flame thrower hallways, etc. It was all pretty cool. Daredevil ends up in a room with a big TV, and the deceased enemy “monologues” to him and says why he is doing all this. DD manages to escape at the last second when he figures out the whole place is set to blow as soon as the guy on tape stops talking. Excellent issue.

So I adapted it for a D&D game I was running for my group in the later 90’s. In my game, the mansion owner was a high level mage whose family had been brutally murdered by thieves while he was away. Now hating all thieves, he lured in the characters who were set on looting the place (I was doing a Thieves Guild campaign) and put them through the Daredevil stuff, but all run by magic instead of automation. I think a character died that game, and the rest got out before it blew to hell.

The players loved that game. None of my players were big comic book fans, at least of Daredevil, so I got away with my “homage” scott free. My D&D games tended to be sort of weird (yes, “weird fantasy”) and offbeat, so it seemed like a scenario I would come up with. Some time later I told at least a couple of players in casual conversation about that game, and one of them even asked to borrow that comic (she said something about the game being better than the comic, which while I don’t personally think was true, felt pretty good).

So taking ideas like these, while not my stock in trade or anything, usually turned out quite well. I mean, most old school D&D’ers go to many sources for their inspiration, or outright adaptations. The game itself started as sort of a mash-up of mythology, Tolkien, Leiber, and Vance fantasy, and ancient history. So why the hell not?

I kind of get the feeling I’m not alone in this either. So many great ideas out there to steal!

Powerful Little Women

Normal size women who display super strength are nothing new. Even before Elly May Clampett and Granny were seen picking up fallen trees and flinging full grown men around the room, the voluptuous chicks of L’il Abner were running men down, throwing them over their shoulders, and schlepping them off to the Sadie Hawkins dance. In the case of Elly May and Abner’s girls, it was that hard livin’ mountain life that instilled tensile, long muscled strength. Of course for Granny it was her moonshine (a potion which also appeared to give her super speed), also known as “rumatiz medicine.”

I was always especially fascinated by women who were much stronger than they look. Actually, anyone who is way stronger than they look is pretty interesting. I think it started with Marvel Comics for me, where a little skinny dude like Spider-Man could bend girders and punch through brick walls. Even Daredevil, who could (according to the Guide to the Marvel Universe) bench press the same weight as a gold medal winning Olympic weight lifter, was fairly normal of build. And the super strength of werewolves, vampires, and other creatures of more or less average build who could lift grown men over their heads with one hand were always cool.

I think it is that comic book background that has me giving people a break as far as how muscular they look with their strong characters in my AD&D or Champions games. Very often you get somebody who has a 16 or higher strength character, but they envision that PC as being fairly normal of build, sometimes even thin. Sure, even in real life you get wiry dudes who seem to be able to perform great feats of strength.

One of my older brother’s friends when I was a kid was this fairly short and not especially muscled dude, and I remember him getting in a fight and literally picking up a guy who was bigger than him over his head and throwing him into a wall. From what I was told that was not unusual for him. I heard stories about him getting in bar fights, where he would slam a guy onto the bar and then slide him across it face first like in a saloon from a cowboy movie. Now, my big bro is a 6’5” former football player, and not only have I seen him do things like that in the distant past, he looks like he could. At 6’2” and only having bench pressed a max of 275 in high school football (probably the pinnacle of my pure strength), I might have been able to lift a man over my head. I never tried though, much preferring to go for the immediate take down on any past opponents over pluck n’ throw. The point is in our cases we looked like the strength we had. Big dudes doing big things.

But it does seem to take a little suspension of disbelief when there is a female character with a 17 or higher strength, and she doesn’t look like one of those beastie chicks doing the caber toss down at the highland games. For example, my player Terry has a female fighter named Helena who she started with a 17 strength. Far from looking like a beast, Helena is around 5’7” and although maybe a little lean and hard-bodied she just does not appear to have that kind of strength. Or does she? She is a broadsword and shield fighter, so you can imagine her developing decent upper body strength; muscle long on the bone.

I don’t really oppose that, and I let characters look like whatever the player wants them too. Sure, it gets a little nutty when somebody with an 18/50 strength wants to look like Kate Moss or whatever, but it is a fantasy game after all. A woman can be as strong as an ox, and not look like one if that is the player’s preference.

MY “APPENDEX N” (hold the applause)

MY “APPENDEX N”

OK, the rage this last week was listing books that inspired your D&D ( or other gaming), so here is mine in a nutshell.

Comic Books – probably the most influential media in terms of my love of gaming, and not just my long-running Champions games from the 90’s. I have always tried to inject the drama and descriptiveness of comics into my games, D&D or otherwise. I think it is one of my greatest points as a GM. Without going too much overboard, my humanoid villains often came off a lot like Marvel Comics villains. I do try to go light on the corny dialogue, however. Offbeat, genre-slapping comics like Watchmen, Dark Knight returns, and Marshal Law also taught me to turn clichés and expectations on their ear a bit in game terms.

The Hobbit/LOTR – Natch. Nuff Said. Oh man, my mind is still on comics. Tolkien was my greatest gaming influence in the earliest days, just as it was for D&D in general.

Conan – I was in my early teens when I started devouring the first several Conan paperbacks. REH’s mood, passion, and swift and blinding violence transported me to that dark prehistoric place where Conan tread in his sandaled feet. Marvel’s Conan comics, especially Red Sonja, helped color my world as well.

Tarzan/John Carter of Mars – My dad read me the first Tarzan book when I was a kid. Years later I would jump on the rest and be transported to those awesome jungle places. And the sweeping adventure of JC of Mars really set my gaming blood on fire. I so wanted to have dashing sword fights like those in my games. Edgar Rice B. has such a terrific sense of adventure, and such a great sense of love and honor.

H.P. Lovecraft – Ok, I didn’t read HP before I got into D&D, but when I started in the early 80’s, it lead me to one of my favorite D&D alternatives: Call of Cthulhu. It was hard to talk my D&D players into trying it when I went for a full campaign in the early 90’s, but they soon fell in love with it, even the girls. It was always a great break from D&D.

Lankhmar – of course of course of course. The big guy and the little guy and their crazy city came in second only to Tolkien for my game inspirations. I could not get the most out of Judges Guild products like City State of the Invincible Overlord or Hargraves’ Arduin until I got into Leiber's great (and ahead of their time) books. This was one of those rare series that let you know how limitless the possibilities were in a fantasy world, as opposed to how limited. Somehow, the world of Fritz seems an amalgam of all the reading material I have listed above.

SUPERHERO 2044:My first non-D&D campaign

Hell yeah it was over 30 years ago that I first ran Superhero 2044. I had discovered D&D sometime around 1976 or 77 (maybe even a little earlier), and was in the process of building my little fantasy world “Ardor,” my AD&D game world that I use to this very day. I loved comics, and being able to have superhero types running around instead of fantasy arch-types sounded like a no-brainer to my young no-brain.

I think within a year or so of discovering Superhero 2044, Villains & Vigilantes came out, and I’m pretty sure I ran consecutive campaigns at some point: 2044 was set in the future, and V&V was the current real world, with my players playing themselves as heroes (like that book suggested you do). It would be a few years before I had a disastrous session with a blatant 2044 rip-off called Supergame, an RPG I would actually help playtest for the creators not long after my little 2044 campaign. I didn’t start a Champions campaign until the early 80’s, so besides the aforementioned Villains and Vigilantes, 2044 was my comic book RPG.

A rather cheaply put-together product, it was the cover, front and back, that was the main eye-catcher of 2044. The sheer number of gaudy costumes, especially the few that were obviously inspired by classic Marvel characters, just made my young gamer heart soar with the gaming possibilities.

I used the setting as presented in the book. It was an independent democratic island nation, Shanter Island (we mispronounced it “Shatner” on purpose), but with all the trappings (language, customs, race) of the U.S. A world wide nuclear war had previously devastated much of society, creating the need for The Science Police. Sci Pol existed to put the brakes on nuclear power and other technology that could be used for evil – or another World War. The futuristic independent island nation concept, and the Science Police, were two things that I would carry over to my long running Champions campaign setting.

Your main island map of Shanter shows the city, the air and space port, and industrial locations. A large part of that map is made up of the “Outback,” miles and miles of forest and mountain areas. This area is not uninhabited – thanks to the pro-superhero government of Shanter Island, a law has been passed letting hero-types make “land grabs” for caves and hilltops to build secret HQ’s on. Nice! This combined with the 1970’s “futurisms” (moving sidewalks downtown, monorails in the city, aliens walking amongst us, etc.) gave the proceedings a really nice cheesy feel, even back then.

I had three or four players for those first few games, but I only really remember two characters from the game that were played – both of them “Doc” Winslow’s. One was a man in super strong, super invincible power armor, based on a figure from the old Gamma World line. Seeing as the rules didn’t give you much information on what kind of powers you could have, or even what those powers might do, the players were pretty much free to get whatever they wanted outside of points assigned to stats. You could probably read about how the rules worked in more detail in some online review, but suffice it to say that the rules on superpowers were obscure enough that a player could totally take advantage. This power armored guy was just devastating to most of his surroundings, and he would smash his way down the street, crushing bank robbers and costumed villains in droves.

Although a lot of the world’s framework is left up to the GM, some background is provided in the way of descriptions of previous superhero events, and a couple of characters. The Freedom League, a former superhero team, was mostly destroyed in recent years by Dr. Ruby, the premier super villain. The only hero to survive was “Mr. Banta,” but only his brain lives on housed in a cyborg shell. Mr. B runs a major superhero equipment/costume shop. This shop is made up of all the leftover gear from the deceased League members and their personal trophies from defeated enemies, so this is one of the things in the book that makes your imagination go wild. This is pretty much the place the character can buy anything that he wasn’t able to put together with points or choice of super powers. The GM can use this shop as the source of all kinds of plot devices and McGuffins. Although assumed by the general public to be dead, there are a series of somewhat humorous drawings in the margins of the book detailing various ways that Doc Ruby might have survived.

Probably the most interesting (and frustrating) feature of the rules was the strict patrolling procedures that each character had to follow. Sheets were given so the player and GM could plot out the characters movements throughout the city, his hours spent patrolling and what part of the island he did the patrolling in. The GM would then suss-out how many crimes were stopped, and how many criminals apprehended. The GM would also have to “handicap” the characters performance parameters occasionally, so as to be able to figure out how many points to give for the time spent patrolling. That meant at least running an actual encounter and fighting on the game table, rather than working out the statistics of this police department style patrolling system. It even included rules for all the lawsuits that get filed against the hero for damage caused during patrol. These rules only really worked for solo play, and although we used the patrolling rules for awhile, we soon abandoned them in order to get some actual role play and important encounters going on more consistently.

In my earliest days of hanging out at the local game shop, I got the chance to help playtest a new superhero RPG called Supergame around the time I was still running 2044. It was created by friends of the shop owner, and that is the main reason it eventually saw a published form. Because I was there for some of the original playtesting of that system, and because of my own disastrous attempts to run a session of it at the shop, I think I’ll save that tale for another post. Suffice to say that, outside of the system itself, The creators of Supergame had blatantly drawn more than just inspiration from Superhero 2044, and I would go so far as to call many of it’s elements a rip-off. But then again, 2044 had a lot of unique qualities, especially the setting, that inspired me to eventually create a superhero game world of my own, strongly based on that little independent island nation called Shatner. Uh, I mean “Shanter.”