Swords and... your guys

[Lord Liaden]

17 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

On a less literary note, the old Sinbad films with SFX done by Ray Harryhausen are chock full of fine evil magicians who could easily be reskinned for use outside of their Hollywood Arabian setting.  I'm particularly fond of Tom "Doctor Who" Baker's Prince Koura, whose magic is just the right level of "this clearly isn't healthy for the user" to explain why magicians are so rare.  The fact that Caroline Munro is also in the film might make me a little biased, though.   

 

Free on YouTube. Full movie, good quality.

 

 

[DShomshak]

18 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

On a less literary note, the old Sinbad films with SFX done by Ray Harryhausen are chock full of fine evil magicians who could easily be reskinned for use outside of their Hollywood Arabian setting.  I'm particularly fond of Tom "Doctor Who" Baker's Prince Koura, whose magic is just the right level of "this clearly isn't healthy for the user" to explain why magicians are so rare.  The fact that Caroline Munro is also in the film might make me a little biased, though.   

It's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and yes, it is excellent!

 

EDIT: Oops, should have checked the next page before responding. But it's still a wonderful, and wonder-full, movie.

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited November 17, 2023 by DShomshak

[Cancer]

A concept I used in a campaign (which ended before the nature of the enemy became completely apparent) is the incursion of old evils (evil gods' cults, archdemon slaves, the less human the better) coming in, not because they were always around, but because the old regime/dynasty/whatever as things were coming apart for them cut deals with whatever they could get to listen to get the magical power they needed to try hanging on to temporal power.  Now, despite the deals (too little, too late) that regime was ended forcefully and rendered fully extinct.  But, since the evil powers had had sense enough to require collateral of actual land, landmarks, neighborhoods, etc. when they made the bargains, those bargains remain valid and the evil things are showing up to collect their payment.

 

So the players (and whatever alliances they form/join) have a multi-level task in front of them.  First, they have to recognize that it's not just one big evil bad guy; it's half a dozen or disparate bad guys, each with their own calling cards, themes, modus operandi, preferred l00tz, etc., despite having crudely similar but completely disparate goals in their incursions.  Then comes something of a desperate hunt through the ruins of the Bad Old Days to see if any records of the old regime's deals still exist, and to make clear that the bad stuff happening now is not just evil entities trying to reestablish the old defunct regime, which is an easy conclusion to jump at.  The campaign got into the transition from the first stage to the second, but broke down before getting further.  The next stage never got underway, which was trying to compose a unified countereffort to stave off the not-actually-united evils trying to break into the realm and consume their own parts of it (parts which, from a purely legal view, they did have a legitimate claim to).

 

That multiple-evil-influences let me grab whatever cool-looking bad stuff I happened to read, and slap it into the campaign without worrying about any integration into a coherent plan: it's just another infernal debt collection coming in and there was no coherence to it.  ("If you have no plot, you can't have plot holes.")

 

How could it all be resolved?  Well, I didn't worry about that too much; the evil creditors varied from pretty punky as cosmic evil things go, up to things that (once fully awakened) could eat entire kingdoms.  I was explicitly hoping for creativity among the players in building solutions to the individual problems.

 

 

Edited December 30, 2023 by Cancer
clarity

[Rich McGee]

55 minutes ago, Cancer said:

How could it all be resolved?  Well, I didn't worry about that too much; the evil creditors varied from pretty punky as cosmic evil things go, up to things that (once fully awakened) could eat entire kingdoms.  I was explicitly hoping for creativity among the players in building solutions to the individual problems.

The "Constantine Solution" (aka Take A Second Mortgage For Evil) seems like a good ploy if you can manage it.  Negotiate and re-negotiate wherever you can so multiple mutually-hostile BBEG factions all wind up with conflicting claims on the same asset and get them fighting each other, or at least denying each other's claims for the foreseeable future.  The Apocalypse is held up in court awaiting appeals and all that.  

[Lord Liaden]

But even Constantine eventually found that what MCU Mordo said was true: "The bill always comes due."

[Rich McGee]

22 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

But even Constantine eventually found that what MCU Mordo said was true: "The bill always comes due."

Johnny-Boy is the DC's master of making other people pay the bill.  His friends and relatives suffer tragic fates without fail, but the worst it ever does to Constantine is make him angsty for a bit.  Supposedly he's got cancer killing him again after fighting some absurd newbie villain named after a dessert but if he goes out like Mar-Vell and actually stays dead I'll eat my metaphorical hat.

 

A further mockery, because it deserves it:

Spoiler

Gad.  "Upside-Down Man" would have been a dumb name even in the Golden Age.  Adding it to the canon in the 2020s is sheer insanity.  The guy ought to have made a single appearance 80 years ago in a three-page story where he gets blown up by Dynamite Thor or something, not fighting A-Listers in a modern comic. 

 

"Beware, I am the Upside-Down Man."

"Not exactly menacing, that.  So what are your powers again?  You some kind of martial arts guy who only fights while doing a handstand?  Or maybe you can turn things upside-down through sheer force of will?  No, wait, the Incredible Inverter already does that schtick."

"I am a entity of cosmic horror.  You cannot comprehend my power."

"Uh huh, sure.  Look, you're not frightening.  You can ass-pull more powers than the Silver Age Martian Manhunter and you still won't be scary.  Let's see what you've actually accomplished in your brief career....[reads the fandom wiki]...your major accomplishment seems to have been melting Detective Chimp, and that didn't even last.  Well, news flash, simians sell comics.  Your sorry upended ass does not.  I think Editorial can do without any more of you."

"You cannot threaten me, mortal."

"You are literally named the Upside-Down Man.  It is your defining feature.  The key to your existence.  The only thing that differentiates you from countless other overpowered horrors with  pretentiously silly names created by writers who think they're being original.  Your weakness is as glaring as the Bat-Signal.   Let me introduce you to my friend, the aforementioned Incredible Inverter."

"Wait, what?  I thought that was a joke." 

"Ooh, if there's one thing he hates it's being called a joke.  Do your thing, Inverter."

"Noooo...."  [ sound of a cosmic horror ceasing to exist, not to be confused with a bunch of bicycle horns being fed into a wood chipper]

"What a surprise.  There wasn't much room for an Upside-Down Man, and there's none at all for a Right-Side-Up Man."

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

The series, Stranger Things has made "The Upside-Down" a prominent element of pop-culture cosmic horror. I'm not saying I think that's appropriate to translate to another setting and medium, but the name and its associations are firmly entrenched in the public consciousness, so it was bound to happen somewhere sometime.

Edited December 30, 2023 by Lord Liaden

[assault]

I'm on a bus so I can't look up how to spell the word describing the Bad Things from Demon, Servants of Darkness.

 

Anyway, the Upside Down Man would fit in quite nicely there. At a certain point, horror becomes weird.

[Lord Liaden]

On the level of traditional symbology, there is also a superficial resemblance to the Hanged Man, one of the major arcana of the Tarot:

 

 

 

33 minutes ago, assault said:

I'm on a bus so I can't look up how to spell the word describing the Bad Things from Demon, Servants of Darkness.

 

Anyway, the Upside Down Man would fit in quite nicely there. At a certain point, horror becomes weird.

 

Which Bad Things? That book has a lot of them.

Edited December 30, 2023 by Lord Liaden

[assault]

2 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Which Bad Things? That book has a lot of them.

 

The ones starting with Q that I can't spell without looking it up.

[Lord Liaden]

Now, the mention of DEMON brings to mind a Morbane of that organization described in another book, Champions Worldwide. The Widdershins Man suffered from a flawed summoning ritual which transposed his hands and feet to the opposite sides of his body, e.g. his left hand on his right arm. This poses some difficulties with everyday tasks, but on the plus side, his hand positions allow him to cast certain spells with even greater facility than he did before.

 

In the Fourth Edition of DEMON (from Classic Organizations), one of its Inner Circle, Damon Harrington, had deliberately cut off his right hand and grafted a demon's hand to his arm, and replaced his left eye with an enchanted crystal. To me that seems likely inspired by Michael Moorcock's fantasy hero Corum, whose hand and eye were lost but later replaced with organs from lost gods; and which itself inspired the Eye and Hand of Vecna for Dungeons and Dragons.

 

These precedents suggest a magical villain who has had his body grotesquely altered in some way, either accidentally, or deliberately in order to gain greater power.

 

17 minutes ago, assault said:

 

The ones starting with Q that I can't spell without looking it up.

 

Ah, the Qliphoth. A concept Dean Shomshak borrowed from Kabbalah, and modified to be the source of horrors reminiscent of those created by H.P. Lovecraft and his collaborators. D:SOD is actually a bit thin on what the Qliphoth is. You get much more detail in The Mystic World.

Edited December 30, 2023 by Lord Liaden