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To-do List (last Minute Apocalypse Special) By Konstantine Paradias
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From the personal notebook of Jack Schmidt, sole victim of the events of December 21st, 2012:
-Pasta (2 packets)
-Hot peppers (1/2 kilo)
-Dishwashing soap the green one
-That fucking red wine she likes
-Rice basmati, long
-Mushrooms (not the brown ones, they give me gas) please get the brown ones, baby
-2 liter coke remember your diet, sweetie
-Fucking expensive lettuce it’s Romain. Get two
-12 plastic bags, the big ones
-One hacksaw
-24 cans of condensed milk, for no fucking reason whatsoever you seriously want to go out and shop just for that next time?
-Tomatoes (3 kilos) try to get the really juicy red ones, I love those
-12-litre Drain-O bottle
-Blowtorch
-Condoms (12-pack) try not to get the latex ones, they give me a rash
-A better fucking girlfriend
-An isolated place by the highway where I can bury her so nobody will notice.
-Spade.
During the 10-minute drive from Jack’s house to the nearest Save-Mart, the rogue planet that ASA had playfully named ‘Big Miss’ and was originally scheduled to pass a light-year away from our Solar System in a hundred years’ time, fell inside a spontaneous rent in the fabric of the space-time continuum and surfaced exactly a thousand kilometers away from Earth.
Jack Schmidt was busy flipping through his radio’s preset car stations, looking for the song that would ‘give him the strength to make it through another day of his miserable life’ (even though there were no indications so far that his life was, or had in fact been, miserable). As he was busy wallowing in his made-up sorrows, Big Miss moved another hundred thousand miles closer to the Moon and was now in the process of ripping it away from Earth’s orbit, by virtue of its massive gravity field.
By the time Jack Schmidt parked his car and was about to walk through the automated Save-Mart doors, the assembled masses of shoppers were already storming outside to look at the great black blot obscuring the heavens. As men, women and children fell on their knees and prayed to their respective gods, Jack Schmidt looked through the grocery department, searching for Romain lettuces, before finally settling for iceberg, thinking that Sophie would never really know (even though he knew she would not be fooled for even a second).
As Jack Schmidt, the world’s most oblivious, egotistical, downright miserable bastard on the face of the Earth at that moment (who was busy moping around in the little cobwebbed kingdom inside his own mind and painting with life with long melancholy-blue strokes), Big Miss had already torn a large piece of the Moon up and was slowly closing in on Earth.
The seas began churning and the earth itself split, spilling its blood on the skin of the world, burning forests down to ash, while the skies themselves blew with such terrible, uncontrollable rage, tearing at the works of man and threatening to reduce them to rubble. It was then, as the end times were tolling their terrible bell that Jack Schmidt realized that something was amiss. He had, up until that point, been engrossed with finding a manager so he could infect him just a tiny bit of his misery on that cold winter day.
But the customers and the cashiers and the greeters weren’t in their respective posts. They were gathered outside to look at the great hungry maw that slowly swallowed the sky, nibbling at the moon, its terrible visage a thing lifted straight from their ancestors’ collective nightmares. Jack Schmidt saw it reflected on one of the aisle mirrors, noticing first the gathered mass of praying and penitent humanity, then the great shape in the sky.
It was at that moment, with Earth facing total and complete extinction in the next few moments, that Jack Schmidt was finally and truly happy.
Gone were the thoughts of his parents’ suffocating methods (which was objectively neither stifling nor overly disciplinary). Gone were his memories of an emotionally painful childhood and his recollections of high-school misery. No longer was he plagued of his made-up lost chances at romance in college and his current thoughts of glory and riches that he was denied in his chosen occupation.
Jack Schmidt thought of everyone perishing along with him in the same instant of disaster and for the first time of his life, he felt truly, utterly happy. Grinning madly, he made his way to the liquor aisle, opened a bottle of the finest, most expensive champagne he could find, ripped a recliner off its exhibit window and sat by the cashier aisles, waiting for the apocalypse.
At that very moment, by sheer cosmic chance or (as it was later theorized by crackpot supporters of noetics) the released misery of Jack Schmidt himself, the Earth moved. It was only a few thousand kilometers out of Big Miss’ way but enough to narrowly avoid being caught up in its gravitational pull and suffering the same fate as its Moon.
On a cosmic scale, this near-impossible event took mere moments but on the human scale of understanding time, it took an entire hour during which NASA technicians wept, Holy Men confessed their crimes to high heaven for the world to hear and war criminals left their bunkers that had hidden them from the world for months and embraced the hired killers that had been hot on their trail for years. As the world was experiencing a deeply profound moment of peace and understanding, Jack Schmidt instead swallowed big mouthfuls of his expensive French champagne and waited and laughed, secretly hoping that the end would be quick, to that he wouldn’t have to suffer.
But as Big Miss swerved away and its gravity let go of the few chunks of the Moon it had not swallowed up into its mass, departing from the Heavens, Jack Schmidt heard the tiny little sound of his dreams being crushed under God’s vengeful heel and he let out a cry of such anguish that had not been uttered by any man in history, never mind one that had been legitimately wronged.
It was at that moment that a chunk of the Moon the rough size of a three-story building began its impossibly fast descent across the atmosphere, pulled against its will into the bosom of Earth. Like a matchstick, struck across a rough surface as long and as large as the world, it lit up and burst into flame, diminishing bit by bit yet still picking up speed.
By the time Jack Schmidt had ceased screaming and was hard at work having a rightly vengeful fit, the bit of Moon (now severely diminished, but armed with a singular purpose) broke the sound barrier three times over, crashed through the Save-Mart walls and smashed Jack two meters into the linoleum floor, killing him instantly.
What was even more remarkable than this scientifically ludicrous occurrence was that even though this was a disaster of such scale and magnitude that would later cause terrible social and geological upheaval, no-one actually died. Of course, some people got some cuts and there were some bruises, but no-one was crushed or drowned or burned. No-one was even eviscerated by shards of glass, propelled through the air in breackneck speeds, or stabbed in the process of looting.
During the 24 hours of the 21st of December 2012, the day that the Mayans had foretold as a day of great disaster and the end of human civilization, not a single soul on Earth did leave its mortal coil.
None but the miser Jack Schmidt.
Had he perhaps been more prudish in his ways and maybe a touch more light-hearted, he would have perished on the 22ndalong with everyone else, when the rest of the Moon collided with Earth.
Human Slaves Of An Insect Nation Part 2-campaign Setup
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Human Slaves of An Insect Nation, part 2: Setting up the Campaign Or Yes, Dave. It IS all about the story!
There’s a TON of role playing gaming articles that directly contradict everything I am about to write here. To be perfectly honest, I don’t blame them, since most of them have been written by gamers and are aiming for gamers who want to tread the middle ground and try to achieve an equilibrium between rules and micromanaging a campaign and narrating it.
Let me make one thing clear: rules are important.
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| Like ‘get gunned down by an attack chopper for breaking them’ important |
They’re the objective ingredient holding an entire campaign together and the only thing that stops your game from turning into ‘I shot you, Timmy!’ ‘Nu-uh, cause I like, got a…magic impenetrable shield that covers my entire body!’
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| I remember having this conversation with my mother like, a hundred times… |
So yeah: rules. Familiarize yourself with them as much as you can. No, you are never going to be good enough (unless you’re the fucking Rain Man, in which case good luck narrating, asshole), but you need to at least be able to handle crises that will certainly emerge regarding rules management.
One handy way to do this is by recruiting a rules-lawyer friend (at least until you feel confident enough to run everything on your own), as an auxiliary, rules-managing StoryTeller.
But don’t be a lazy bastard, unless you want to find your campaign out of your hands and into his for the obvious reason that if you’re too lazy to learn the rules, then you’re going to fuck up and you’ll deserve losing your campaign then.
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| Joo were my brother, mang. No matter what, joo’ll always be my brother. |
Of course, knowing the rules and managing them is a hard job in and of itself, but it’s something mostly based on the ‘buddy-non buddy’ system that I’ll go into detail in another article.
But now, let’s get into the story, shall we? This is…
SHAPESCAPES’ ROUGH AND RUGGED GUIDE TO SETTING UP A CAMPAIGN BASIS
STEP ONE: KNOW THINE GAMING GROUP
So let’s say this is you:
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| An average nerd with aspirations to becoming a good StoryTeller. |
You’ve got stories in your head, the kind that you don’t think are good enough to be on paper (and you might be wrong about that) but that you’d love sharing with your friends.
These are your friends:
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| From left to right: James (he’s into heroic fantasy), Simon (resident scifi expert), Neil (comic book sage) and Elton (keeps trying to play a Jedi in every game, regardless of setting) |
Each member in your group wants to play, wanting to hand over the StoryTeller mantle to someone else and they think that your try at a campaign is going to be wonderful.
Before you do anything, think about this: how well do you know these guys? Ask them: what kind of stuff do they like or do they want to see/do in your game? How much emphasis to character development do they require? Are they more the hacky-slashy types or the talky-solvey ones? Do they like getting to know a multitude of characters or keeping up with subtle political intrigues, machinations and a long-spanning plot or would they rather just kick doors down and shoot stuff in the face?
Then consider this: does your idea fit what they want? Is your original concept of them playing Infantrymen in the service of the Panhuman Empire in the year 4500 Post Contact, during the Great War appealing to them? Would they rather have a tongue-in-cheek retired Stormtroopers campaign or should you set your sights for vanilla fantasy?
Knowing your group is the most important step toward knowing whether this campaign is going to go anywhere in the first place. Go out for a beer with the guys before you roll characters and ask them what it is they want and talk about it.
Who knows? The end result might be way more interesting than you originally thought.
EXAMPLE: You have decided to run a science fiction campaign, where players start off as infantrymen in a great galactic war. Now, that means they’re just plain old GIs, fragile and helpless against the lonely void of space.
James, who’s into heroic fantasy, wants to be a badass commando instead. He wants to be able to meet new lifeforms and beat the living fuck out of them and take their stuff. You decide to allow the players playing as an elite unit that performs sabotage and assassination runs on hostile alien worlds on behalf of the Empire.
Simon, who is really stoked from the prospect of finally playing a scifi campaign, tells you that he considers the Empire’s mode of transportation to be ‘unrealistic’. Simon helps you come up with a slower transportation method and jumps with glee for getting the chance to contribute.
Neil tell you he’s also stoked, but this whole hard scifi is a bit too much for him. You talk it out with Neil and the scientific seriousness gets toned down a bit, for the sake of everyone involved.
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| Because nobody likes long debates on Klein Bottle mechanics and morphology. |
Elton asks you if he can play a Jedi. You ask Elton to very kindly shut the hell up, because this shit has gotten, like, way old.
STEP TWO: KNOW THINE SETTING
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| I love it how campaign maps get much less detailed the bigger the setting. |
So you’ve got a story outline and you’ve made sure no-one’s bitching. Now you need a setting map. There’s tons of premade settings out there (a few of them impossibly awesome ones, like Pathfinder’s Golarion)
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| Featuring a John-Carter style solar system, complete with huge tits and alien civilizations! IN D&D! |
Or Savage Worlds’ Slipstream
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Featuring old-school two-fisted action across space and time! |
And for you horror enthusiasts out there, there’s good Ol’ Delta Green
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| The setting equivalent of a 2-dollar whore, there to be used in every way you can’t imagine! |
Each of these settings is well-thought out and presented, with a TON of hooks for you to fit it to your narrative needs.
But let’s say you’re feeling masochistic and wanna create a setting for yourself, shall we?
First, don’t draw a map, unless you’re a cartographer. That’s because nobody except cartographers know how a map is supposed to work and besides you’ll probably get bored halfway and turn 50% of the world into desert or mountains about halfway through, going: ‘meh, they ain’t getting there anytime soon’
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| And then one of them gains access on teleportation capabilities and you suddenly find yourself very, very screwed… |
Instead, visit a map-making generator site, like let’s say donjon (#) or Where the Map Ends (#) for some pretty cool free stuff and tweak the generator until you get the kind of world you want.
Then look at the map, open it on Paint (or Photoshop if you’re a fancy little image wizard unlike me) and start working on it. Think about your original idea: what’s the world’s technology level? Is it based on magic or science? How much does your setting correspond to actual historical eras?
Once you’ve got that figured out, then think: How big is your world? Is it the size of dear old Earth (diameter 12,756 km, sphere surface area 511,185,501 sq km) or is it bigger? Perhaps it’s smaller because parts of it haven’t been discovered yet and you need to go map them and stuff!
| Also, kill the natives and take their gold and land! |
Just keep this in mind: a huge world needs way more detail and is much harder to handle, especially in a setting that supports fast and effective means of transport. If for example you fantasy kingdom has access to Dragonbuses, then that means that the world is suddenly much more easily accessible, news travels faster, etc.
On the other hand, if the epitome of transportation and communications technology is the wagon, then the world can much more easily be divided and managed. News doesn’t get around as fast and people from different cultures do not interact with one another as easily.
Example: Running your SciFi system generator, you create a Galaxy that’s pretty much the size of the Milky Way (100,000 light-years (30 kiloparsecs) in diameter, and is, on average, about 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick, because hey, you’re feeling suicidal!
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| Good luck filling that enormously enormous space with shit. |
You decide that the technological level of the Panhuman Empire is the equivalent of a Type-2 civilization (that is, they have mastered the technology required to harness the power of suns from colonized systems).
For reasons of narrative convenience (and because you can’t be arsed to micromanage every single fucking thing among the billions of things inside this gigantic setting) you decided that transportation technology is based on ships jumping through certain fixed wormholes in space, allowing ships to cross tens of light-years in every jump, but only through fixed routes. You also decide that communications technology, while considerably fast, does not allow for instantaneous communication through sectors and long-distance communication is either handled by mail (yes, mail. As in letters) or can be done instantaneously but is iffy at best.
This means that even though players can cross through systems and reach everywhere with relative ease, they still can’t go wherever the hell they want and to whatever they fuck they like, at least until you’ve gotten the handle of your setting.
STEP THREE: KNOW THINE ANTAGONISTS:
What’s lord of the Rings without Sauron? Star Wars without the Empire? The Batman without Joker? Dr Who without the Daleks?
Answers: A boring tour guide through a boring, mostly empty world. A trilogy of shitty prequels. Better off. Still fucking awesome.
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| All this positive bias and much more, coming soon! |
The antagonist is the single most delicate matter in a campaign. As I said in a previous article, this is not like writing a novel. Your characters won’t stay still and twiddle their fingers as the villain explains his evil plot and they sure as hell won’t spare them or resort to theatric, over-the-top resolutions.
If anything, your players are far more likely to shoot the motherfucker in the face with a machine-gun than even try to discern his plan. So what’s the solution?
Well on one hand know your players. Some people can’t even handle Sephiroth
| Considering him to be the epitome of evil genius and sinister characteristics |
While others want terrible, over-the-top bastards that are always one step ahead, in the likes of Doctor Moriarty
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| “Ah but you see, Bob the Paladin, had already foreseen that you had known that I had known that you were going to stab me in the face with your sword, which is why I invented this sword-disintegrating face spell!†|
One antagonist is not enough, especially considering that you’re pitting your one mind (no matter how well-honed and witty) against four other minds (that have nothing better to ponder all week than how to fuck up the antagonist’s plans). It’s entirely possible that you Doctor Evil Mc Mastermind will be shot dead as the players start unloading machine-gun cartridge upon machine gun cartridge the minute he introduces himself and leave you hanging, feeling dirty, cheated and very, very tired.
So how do you solve this?
a) Numbers. There are a lot of antagonists that want the players’ quest to fail or want to inflict harm upon them.
b) The antagonist is subtly introduced to the story. He might never appear until near the end of the campaign, or if you do a good enough job, he might never be picked up by the players until it’s way too late
c) The 14-year old StoryTeller method: The antagonist is 14 levels above the player’s current level and always leaves everybody with just one hit point after a single round of combat, because the players ‘amuse him’
c) The 14-year old StoryTeller method: The antagonist is 14 levels above the player’s current level and always leaves everybody with just one hit point after a single round of combat, because the players ‘amuse him’
Oh you know who you are… |
Option c is shit and you know it. Option a works best for starting StoryTellers and option b is a risky matter that requires finesse but feels…so…damn…GOOD!
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| “You mean that the guy who paid for our equipment and travels only did it so he could kill us when we were strong enough in order to win a bet?†|
Of course, option b requires always dropping hints to the players and giving them a chance to figure it out on their own, which is also its own reward.
So what’s your antagonist’s beef with the players? What the hell is wrong with him? What does he want with them?
Oh anything, really. Taking over the world, the kingdom, annihilating the Universe, becoming the next Great God or the servant of the next Great God. His motives will only be made clear after the players have decided on a purpose.
EXAMPLE: The team of uber-commando saboteurs from before find themselves facing increasingly difficult odds as they progress into enemy territory. They find their plans revealed and their ambushes expected. Someone has been feeding information to the enemy and the team has made it only by the skin of their teeth the last time.
Who is the mole? What the hell does he want with them?
There’s no one mole. They’re not the only ones fighting the good fight behind enemy lines or getting fucked every now and then. The intelligence network of the Panhuman Empire is way too large to be properly regulated and can obviously not be monitored by a single individual.
Or maybe it is. Maybe there’s a consciousness, existing as a hive-mind, imprinted in operatives scattered across the Empire, intending to destroy the intelligence network and sabotage the war effort by striking at the informational exchange system. Maybe the players find out one of the hive-mind’s hosts and fight it, finding out more.
But what if the host isn’t just an enemy of the Empire? What if it is some great alien evil, set out to annihilate the lesser races by perpertuating a war that will allow its hidden army, slumbering for millennia at the edges of time and space to swoop in and take over effortlessly?
Suddenly, your campaign is about four people leading a war against a malevolence that has outlived suns.
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| Cue Immediate Music. |
STEP FOUR: KNOW THINE OUTLINE
So you’ve got your players, your setting and your antagonist. Now it’s time to look back at your idea and re-arrange it so it better fits this greater whole. Maybe some tweaking is required, or maybe the entire premise needs to change altogether.
It is important that you make a very short description of the story. I do it by presenting the story to myself as a movie trailer and see if I like it. Pick the things, the events and the bits that you’ve been working in your mind and arrange them into a short video, lasting 3 brain minutes. Then show that video to yourself and see if you’d go watch it if it were a movie.
If you would, then you’re sold.
By compressing the story into a 3-minute (or 8-sentence) presentation, you have given yourself a very clear outline and are in the position to start working with the greater details. But here’s the catch:
You mustn’t dwell on it too long and you musn’t get too attached to you campaign. Why? Because there’s a thousand things that could go wrong. The guys might lose interest. Someone might move abroad. Everybody throws himself to his work and can’t find the strength to go through four-hour sessions once a week instead of going out for beers or watching TV with his spouse.
Anything can serve to mess up your game, assholes in the group notwithstanding. You need to be prepared and know that you might get your heart broken. But you know what? Ideas (especially good ones) are never lost.
Who knows? Maybe your scifi idea might turn into a book that you wrote in Greek and are currently in the process of translating to English. Maybe you can fit these ideas in another campaign altogether. Maybe you can break them in shorter ones. Maybe you can make a bitchin’ comic book about it!
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| Or a series of impossibly campy yet unbelievably entertaining Power Metal CDs! |
Either way, don’t fret over it. It’s not the end of the world. It’s a beautiful, beautiful hobby and you won’t regret weaving your own stories for your entertainment and your audience.
What I Think About Stuff-stuff I'll Do When I Grow Up: Rise And Fall (part Three: Meet The Underdogs)
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Stuff I’ll Do When I Grow Up-Rise and Fall (Part Three: The Underdogs)
So with the antagonists and the setting in motion, who or what is left there to pick up the pieces and keep on going? What are they fighting for? Who could possibly be ballsy (or mad) enough to go up against beings like Titan or Roland Vadus (or Hell, even the living city of Carcossa)?
To know that, we need to once again look into Rise and Fall’s history, but this time try to pay attention at the little things, the side-characters that have dwelt in the shadow of Sentinel and the movers and shakers of the world; at the people who, while superhuman, may barely make the cut.
I’m talking about…
The Frontliners
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| Dealing with whatever Sentinel can’t be arsed to deal with, since 1972 |
The Frontliners were created as a backup organization to the Sentinel, mostly consisting of reserve members, as members to be called upon in the event of a global crisis, such as another Cosmic Conjencture.
Unlike Sentinel, however, the Frontliners have neither ever caught the public eye or become a superpower on their own accord, or even threatened to bring about World War 3
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| There are rumors however, of a force of superhumans that served to halt the Gulf War, but such hearsay is completely unfounded. |
If anything, the Frontliners have always been considered the team that’s sent to pick up the pieces and deal with less-than-global threats. While this has given them free reign (in comparison to the Sentinel, who have been under constant diplomatic scrutiny since day one), it has also deprived them of a budget, headquarters and pretty much all the cool shit that makes a superhero team what it’s supposed to be
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i.e. bitches, bling and invisible trans-orbitalsatellites. |
The Frontliners have held their ground against cosmic threats and have made their way (in various incarnations) all the way to the present day. They are, also, the single surviving team of superhumans in this post-OverMan world, fighting the good fight in the shadows or somewhere just on the fringes of the limelight.
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| “And on a more lighthearted note, the city of Osaka was saved from a nuclear behemoth today, thanks to the Frontliners. Up next: Snippy, the terrier escape-artist!†|
It’s this lack of recognition that has caused most of the problems in the Frontliners’ setup and overall execution of their duties. Sure, some of them are in it for the guts, but there’s gotta be a little glory-bacon somewhere in that shit sandwich, right?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is: no, not just yet…
You see, the Frontliners (inglorious and publicly unappealing bastards as they are) are Rise and Fall’s protagonists. They’re superpowered gnats, set to stem the tide of change that is to come, for the good of their fellow men. Do they have a chance? Maybe, if narrative necessity so dictates. Are they making the right choice? Are they even on the right side of the tracks?
That’s for you, the reader, to decide. But for now, here’s the current make-up of the Frontliners, circa 2012:
The Keymaster:
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| They Keymaster, showing off his Mark VI Megatoolbox |
Jason Jones lived a boring, normal suburban life until his 8th birthday, when his Lil’ Helper microwave oven started talking to him. Once the screaming fit had passed, Jason realized that the dishwasher and his fridge were also trying to butt in. Without his knowledge, Jason had stumbled into his superpower: an inherent knowledge of the secret language of machines.
It was this knowledge that allowed him to learn the secrets that were hidden even from the original inventors and traverse into the mysterious world of metal, awash in electric lifeblood. He did of course maintain the façade of Jason Jones, boring old IT guy during the 70’s, but his real dream was to become a real, honest-to-God superhero.
Jason set up the Frontliners as a means to create a team that would draw Sentinel’s eye. Then, after the Second Conjecture, as a back-up global defense force. Then, as a last resort in case of an actual global catastrophe and finally, as a weekend superhero club that occasionally got to do stuff.
And that’s his other power: mind-boggling optimism. Jason has made many enemies, very few friends and a serious mistake when he decided to cheat on his college sweetheart and mother of his children Judy Jones, with his chief adversary, EMP.
This, of course, left him a lonely divorcee who has to take care of his kids while putting up with his ex-nemesis girlfriend, but what is he gonna do, give up on his dream?
Nope. Jason took on the mantle of a superhero and he’s gonna stick to it, come what may. So he doesn’t have any UN funding and is forced to work for a security firm, installing counter-superhuman security measures. Pfft. Long as it pays the rent, he’s golden.
Keymaster’s a dreamer. This wilting of the superhuman culture has hardly fazed him and maybe that’s why he keeps on trucking. Or who knows, it could just be plain old denial.
Brick the Zombie:
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| Brick the Zombie and his trusty sidekick; Balor, lord of the faerie. |
The very first human-engineered superhuman in the history of 1-Gamma, Brick is equally composed of parts German, American and French, with a brain extracted from a Swiss madman.
Originally dubbed project CHAMPION, Brick was composed of the harvested limbs and organs of dead World War One soldiers, reinforced with spare parts from disassembled British Mark V tanks. The process of reanimation was handled by Klauss Von Schrausswitz, who later became Brick’s principle nemesis, Dr. Mortuus.
Brick got his moniker during the initial military testing, when one of the soldiers described him as ‘a brick shithouse’. The name, despite any and all urgings by British Army Command, stuck and project CHAMPION came to be known as Brick the Zombie.
Brick began his career in 1918, as a covert operative for MI5’s paranormal prevention department, when he was sent in the Irish Ley Line reality Fault, entering a sideways reality where the court of the Faerie plotted the destruction of humanity. It was there that Brick (out of virtue of his single-mindedness and the fact that he was kinda dead already) beat the great lord Balor in dream combat and forced him to follow him as a hostage in 1-Gamma.
Since then, Brick has resurfaced as a member of the Frontliners, but has mostly remained in the shadows. It wasn’t until 1981, months before the Second Cosmic Conjencture, that Brick was enlisted by Jason Jones in the Frontliners.
Unyielding and a great listener, Brick the Zombie is the unbroken monolith that somehow keeps the Frontliners going.
Bjorn Olaffson, The Marauder:
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| Son of Erik Olafsson, pillager of Venus and Warlord of Saturn. |
Bjorn Olafsson was busy pillaging the coasts of Europe back in the glory days on his drakkar “Whale Bloodâ€, when a Sotharian space-ship abducted him and his crew for unauthorized testing.
Bjorn and his men, fueled by outrage and hateful of their four-eyes, spindly-armed captors, escaped and slaughtered the crew as it was crossing LaGrange space. Unfortunately, the ship’s reactor core had at that point been damaged by a stray axe, which caused the ship to be exposed to cosmic radiation.
Bjorn, along with his crew became infused with the strange powers. Tougher than a tank, stronger than two coked-up elephants and able to spit radioactive fire, the crew of “Whale Blood†took to pillaging the Solar System, locking horns with Sentinel during the 70’s.
But when superhumanity gave up, Bjorn found himself lost and without direction. Jason Jones is the only superhuman (in his eyes at least) with any spine left, who chooses to fight the good fight when his more prodigious comrades have given up.
Katja Wolfram, the Bastard:
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Born of Aleksei, father to the current Titan and a mortal woman, Katja Wolfram has always been considered the rotten branch of the family tree. Impure of blood, lacking in power (in comparison to her half-brother) and an impossible little scrapper, she’s always dwelt in the fringes of the superhuman community.
A valuable asset to the Infinity Squad, Katja always went the extra mile and stuck her head in impossible situations, if only to make up the disdain from the Titan family.
It wasn’t until the 80’s when her contribution to the Frontliners during the Second Cosmic Conjencture, that Jason Jones practically begged her to join the Frontliners. Loving her new position as a heavy-hitter for a superhero team, Katja has given the Frontliners her all.
Garag, Hell’s Pup
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| Garag in camouflage |
Exiled from Hell for as-yet-unknown reasons, Garag left the abode of his fathers before him to seek his fortune on 1-Gamma. He found Jason Jones during the 70’s, disguising himself as a cute puppy, escorting him in his adventures as the Keymaster’s best Bud.
It wasn’t until 1975, during a freak imbalance in Garag’s shifting humors due to onset of puberty that his true form was accidentally revealed.
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| Garag’s true form. |
Garag is the son of Cerberus, guardian to the gates of Hell and Jason’s best friend in the whole world. He’s the Frontliner’s most avid member and the fiercest among them by far. Sure, he might shapechange into a hobo and go off to God knows where for months on end, but he always comes back for Jason and the Frontliners.
EMP
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| Part villain, part hero, wholy harmful to machinery. |
EMP was always a strange case. Born on 5-Beta by superhuman parents, her powers involved a crude manipulation of magnetism and some capability with electrokinesis. Despite constant attempts to tame her powers during her teens, EMP failed to become accepte din any of her continuum’s superhuman teams and instead joined the Infinity Squad on their treks through the multiverse.
EMP entered 1-Gamma in the final days of the Second Cosmic Conjencture. Her powers proved immeasurably useful against the Von Neumann machines and she was offered a place among the Sentinel. It was through them that she met the Keymaster and their love-hate relationship began to blossom.
As EMP saw the Sentinel tear itself apart in the 90’s, she decided to join Kuan Yi’s side in the conflict and gave up on the team after the Georgia incident. She turned to villainy, working with Dr. Tyrannus and Roland Vadus for years, before she eventually gave up as well and decided to settle for a cushy job at a bank. It was there that she re-acquainted herself with the Keymaster (in more ways than one) and finally joined the Frontliners, both from an actual need to get back in the field and a little bit of romantic necessity.
EMP is the level-headed, slightly pessimistic bastard that counters and fills in the blanks that the Keymaster’s optimism plain old can’t. She fights dirty, but every superhuman team needs a borderline bad guy, right?
So what’s the deal, guv’nor?
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Why thank you, misquoted Groucho Marx… |
Well, the long and short of it is, as I said in the previous installments of the series, that a small group of superhumans wants to turn the whimper of superhuman irrelevance into a bang, in an attempt to become relevant once again.
But how could they achieve that, unless there’s a great enough catastrophe? They sure as hell ain’t gonna wait another ten years for that shit. So what are they going to do instead?
Why, generate a crisis of their very own!
Imagine, if you will, beings that are old, immeasurably powerful or resourceful and fatally bored. Imagine them seeking a way to return to the glory days, to the times of constant struggle and petty conflict across the Universes and the cosmos. But to do that, they need to first prove that mankind’s failsafes are impotent before a large enough threat.
And what threat would be as great as a Fourth Cosmic Conjencture?
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A disaster made by superhumans, for superhumans. |
It wouldn’t take too much: a careful planning and pre-set terrorist attacks by supervillain masterminds like Roland Vadus. A carefully leaked propaganda video or even a slight failure in the defense systems of Carcossa. Anything that would make human authorities realize that they are in direct peril.
Couple that with a few staged attacks and mock battles between superhumans and you’ve got yourself a plan that will get them back on the map! In six months’ time, it’ll be the 80’s all over again!
Or is it?
When Dr. Tyrannus visits Jason Jones in his humble abode and tell Keymaster of the Plan “me and the guys came up withâ€, he realizes that the world is about to be swept up in a conspiracy. Knowing that he cannot (will not) allow this to pass, no matter the cost, he assembles the Frontliners to put a stop to it once and for all!
Imagine, if you will, a 180-page epic, where the runts of Rise and Fall’s Universe clash with superheroes and supervillains alike, fighting to sway both public opinion and to cease the machinations of a group of bored gods.
Think of a story where an entire Universe is set in peril because of the hubris of the near-gods and where the OverMan fights against himself for the sake of vanity on one hand and justice at the other.
Imagine Space Vikings fighting Titan in orbit round Venus and the clash of the world’s greatest technical geniuses in a bout to the death.
And now imagine everything going wrong in every which way possible at the same time.
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| Remember kids: this could be your continuum! |
You know, it's odd and also liberating to have been able to put this thing down in any cohesive order. Rise and Fall has always been one of those things I wanted to write since I was young: a superhero story that was (more or less) entirely my own.
Maybe the details and plot points or the characters didn't blow your mind. But what's important is that you stuck through and you read through this and even if you hated it, you invested some time to read about some aspiring author's fever dream.
And for that, I thank you.
ON A RELATED NOTE:
http://www.blackcrossproductions.com/