This week’s best cover is Alter Ego #72. It honors the first appearance of the JLA in The Brave and the Bold #28.
Fall of Cthulhu #6, Boom Studios. New Storyline, New Horrors.
Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters #1, DC Comics. I’m giving this a look-see, as I’m an old fan of Sam.
Marvel Zombies: The Book of Angels, Demons, & Various Monstrosities #2, Marvel Comics. It’s an evil handbook to the Marvel Universe that includes the Zombies.
Army of Darkness: From the Ashes #3, Dynamite Entertainment.
Magazine: Alter Ego #72, Twomorrows Publishing. I’ve been waiting for this retrospective on Captain Carrot!
Game Book: Conan: The Roleplaying Game 2nd Edition Mongoose Publishing. This core rulebook is published in black and white not color like the previous addition but it’s thicker. Content over esthetic I guess.
I had a weird dream the other night. It started out with Conan the Barbarian (not the Arnie one, but the John Buscema one from Marvel Comics) and me battling our way through some ancient back alley. We were probably in a Turanian city like Aghrapur or Zamboula as there was sand everywhere. I’ve been readin’ a lot of Conan lately, could you tell? Anyway, we were fighting some nefarious, robed rogues on a dark street, with me mostly bobbing and weaving so Conan could do his slaughter thing, when our surroundings changed. The sword and sorcery street morphed into a modern version and the thugs were gone.
The two of us looked at each other with befuddlement before we jogged to the end of the street to get our bearings. When we rounded a corner we ran into a group of what looked liked beggars. They had tattered; dirty clothing and a few were deformed. I quickly noticed that they weren’t actually begging but bartering with each other, using all manner of junk from makeshift wagons. I paused, looked at Conan and then looked around and noticed that we weren’t in a modern city but in the remains of a modern city. Recognizing this to be some sort of post-apocalyptic world, I grilled an old man (it’s always and old man isn’t it) for details. He told me that a huge battle was raging outside the city between the forces defending the city and a group of super-mutants. …Super-mutants?!
Well, being the protagonists of my dream, Conan and I set out for the desert. The rest of the story is kinda’ hazy, but we immediately linked up with an armored group of what looked like the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout. Their commander showed me a small device that had a digital readout, showing the progress of the battle via a hex grid. It looked a lot like a computer strategy game. I don’t really remember the rest, but I think Conan and I left for the “front” to engage the super-mutants with me feeling a lot more useful in this world than in Conan’s Hyboria. At this point I woke up and realized: “Hey, I had a Conan / Fallout crossover. It’s strange because I don’t usually have such direct dreams about pop culture. Usually, if they’re interesting at all, my dreamscapes have to do with creepy investigations, beachfront environments or urban excursions. This particular dream is the first time I’ve ever “interacted” with any kind of comic book character, like Conan. I’m thinking it must be because another collection of the Conan comics is on the way (here). Dark Horse has been doing an excellent job reprinting the old Conan the Barbarian series with new coloring. Also, a possibility is that Mongoose Publishing is releasing the 2nd edition of the Conan RPG. I’m pretty excited about that too.
As for Fallout… well, I’ve always been a big fan of post-apocalyptic stories and both Fallout and Fallout 2 are my favorite computer games. I had recently gone on youtube and watched some of videos from the game. I guess I was kinda’ nostalgic so that’s why I must have dreamt about Fallout. Supposedly Fallout 3 is in the works, but who knows when that’s coming out. The guys making it sure don’t.
When comes to the crossover aspect, the only thing I can come up with is… I want a Fallout comic books series. Think about it. I really enjoy both the new and the old Conan comics currently being published by Dark Horse. Conan’s adventurers occur in an incredibly detailed fantasy universe. Fallout, by comparison, has this amazingly rich, visually engaging retro-futuristic world. It just begs for a comic series. I think that a comic company could make some serious cash on it as long as they stayed true to the computer game’s themes. Also, another aspect might be that I’ve always wanted to run/or play in a nice long post-apocalyptic campaign. Conan’s got a good tabletop RPG, so I’d like something compatible for Fallout. Darwin’s World comes close but… I just haven’t gotten around to it.
Anyway, my dreams were back to normal last night as I had an excursion through a city that couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted to be New York, London or Frankfurt.
There’s an unfulfilled yearning I’ve had for a long time. It was the hope that Chaosium (the guys that publish the Call of Cthulhu RPG) would really support their Michael Moorcock licensed game Stormbringer. It was the first non-TSR game I ever played that I honestly enjoyed and it was also my first introduction to Elric, the multiverse and the Eternal Champion. Well, that’s not entirely true as I had read the Oswald Bastable stories years before but at that time I hadn’t realized their connections to Moorcock’s other works. After playing the Stormbringer RPG, I immediately went out and scooped up and read all the Elric novels. This of course led me to Hawkmoon and Corum as well as the rest of the Eternal Champion titles. The battle between Law and Chaos both in the books and in the game was a fantastic backdrop for the adventures. Also the dimensional and time travel aspects fired me up as I greatly enjoy this type of fantasy.
Eventually, I bought all the Stormbinger game materials I could get my hands on, many from used bookstores. The product line went through many aborted restarts that included a name change to Elric for a while and even a poorly adapted version for D20. Many promised supplements never came out as the line was always thrown on the back burner in deference to Call of Cthulhu. We finally did see a Corum supplement and Chaosium finally put out some of their unpublished but promised books out as monographs (cheap photocopy tape bound books) but the fan base for their Moorcock inspired works seemed greatly reduced as was the enthusiasm for game itself.
Recently, I discovered that Mongoose Publishing acquired the RPG rights to the whole Eternal Champion line including Elric from Chaosium. See the link here. In the end it’s probably a good thing because Chaosium really wasn’t doing a whole lot with it (the biggest missed opportunity of the RPG world in my opinion), plus they had terribly damaged their relationship with Michael Moorcock. Still, it is a little sad as I thought we just might be on the verge of a Basic Role-Playing System Renaissance, Basic Role-Playing being Chaosium’s house system. Elric and Hawkmoon, which are coming out very soon, will be using Mongoose’s new Runequest rules (MRQ) to make them compatible with other game products they publish. This is good as the original Runequest formed the foundation for Basic Role-Playing (BRP) and Stormbringer, although the new Mongoose Runequest rules has been tweaked to make it appeal more to D20 fans.
I’m a little leery on dumping money on these new game products as I have spent a ton of cash on Mongoose’s Conan line only to see it revamped with an updated second addition. This is very much like how many fans were stuck when Wizards of the Coast decided to go from 3 to 3.5 on D&D. But if the past is any kind of prolog, Mongoose Publishing will be putting out a bunch of supplements for the Eternal Champion line, something Chaosium was unwilling or unable to do.
To sum it up, I guess it feels like I was in a relationship where I was never getting what I needed or wanted but still I stayed. Now, that bad relationship is over and I wonder if I should start a new one. I think I'll wait and see. I waited so long for Chaosium to step up to the plate, I guess I can wait a little longer to see if Mongoose’s game is any good before I buy.
