Lords of Creation - Intro

While many modern games will open up with a piece of game fiction, back in 1984 intros like that were rare.  It was more typical to open up with a "What Is Roleplaying" introduction, which is what Lords of Creation gives us here.  This would have been a perfect place for a blurb telling us what the game is about, but we don't really get that.  The closest we get to that is:

LORDS OF CREATION is a role-playing game of science fantasy, fantasy, science fiction and high adventure that explores the farthest reaches of the imagination.  Game adventures take place throughout time, space and other dimensions.  The game is designed for both experience role-playing gamers and beginners. All that's needed to play are these rules, the dice included in the game, and your imagination!

Lords of Creation - Opening Moves

To start my examination of Lords of Creation, it's probably best to begin at the beginning.  In this case, with the Cover :

There we go - right from the cover we know that this is going to be a genre-mashup game.  We have a couple of adventurers wandering through an obvious portal between worlds.  On the one side a fairly standard fairy-tale kingdom complete with menacing dragon.  On the other some kind of pock-marked alien landscape with a robot standing sentinel.  Our adventurers are clad in strange garb - one is a man who is maybe supposed to look like his clothes were designed during the Italian Renaissance carrying a blaster pistol, and the other is a woman who looks to me like a starship pilot casting a lightning bolt.

Lords of Creation

So late last week the following showed up in my mailbox:

Lords of Creation!  The copy is pretty beat up, but both books are complete and mostly intact.

More Gamma World

So yesterday we had our second Gamma World session.  Three of our four intrepid mutants returned to the table to continue their search for the source of the strange malfunctioning robots that are bothering the village of Owl on the outskirts of the Great Forest.  Last time they tracked the robots to a warren of mutant badger-men (badders) and after a pitched battle they tracked the source of the robots to somewhere deep into the lower levels of the badder warrens.

Sci-Fi Channel Universe

So last night I watched the Sci-Fi Channel Monday night line-up:  Eureka, Warehouse 13 and a new show caled Alphas.  For those not in-the-know, Eureka is about the small town full of geniuses in Washingon State, where the sheriff has to deal with all kinds of screwball weirdness -- like antigravity machines accidentally getting turned on and causing the town bank to float away -- which was almost but not quite the plot last night.  And Warehouse 13 is about the giant warehouse full of bizarre mad science technology and magic items being collected and maintained by a government conspiracy.  These two shows have been crossing over for a couple of seasons now and have established themselves as being in the same universe.

Alphas is a new show about a group of "people born with incredible abilities based on their genetics" who have been organized into a group to track down and stop other "alphas" who are using their powers for selfish/evil reasons.  Think X-men without costumes or code names and with a Sci-Fi Channel TV show budget.  The show so far has been fairly serious - the alphas are generally tracking down individuals who are part of a terrorist network of other Alphas.  Think Brotherhood of Evil Mutants without costumes or code names and with a Sci-Fi Channel TV show budget.

Oh yeah - THAT will work

So Warner is planning on making another Green Lantern movie despite the fact that the first one didn't do as well as they hoped.  Well good - it's a decent franchise idea.  I mean, I'm not a big Hal "second most boring superhero on the planet" Jordan fan, but there's an appeal there.  Not character setpiece type of drama, but big space adventures, or possibly aliens coming to Earth to menace the locals.  It's "space cop with a magic wishing ring" - how can you screw that up?

To go forward we need to make it a little edgier and darker...

 Gah?  Green Lantern - again "space cop with a magic wishing ring" - and you want to make it "edgier and darker"?  WHY?  FOR THE LOVE OF GROD WHY?

It's like they've got some program that they're using to try to target post-adolescent males, and when things don't work the only thing they can do is ADD MORE EDGY DARKNESS.  The thing doesn't have any other settings - and heaven forbid they think about maybe, you know, making a movie that appeals to a wider audience.

Most prolific DC Comics writers

Now this is interesting.  It's a list of the "most prolific" DC comics writers as determined by the number of pages of published stories as recorded in the Grand Comics Database.  Very cool - I didn't know that the GCD had the kind of interface where you could get direct access to their data like that.

Interesting, but not too surprising I guess, that Robert Kanigher would be the most prolific -- he wrote a LOT of stuff back in the day.  And it's across every metric too - pages, stories, issues it just doesn't matter.  Gardener Fox comes in second, which is also not a surprise.

The surprising one for me is that Chuck Dixon comes in third.  I knew that Dixon wrote a LOT of stuff for DC -- I remember buying a lot of it -- but damn, he's got more pages under his belt than Bob Haney or Carey Bates?  That's surprising.  Also surprising - Geoff Johns coming in right behind him.  And he'll probably surpass him in a couple of years since he's only about a thousand pages and twenty stories behind him.  And right now Johns has Justice Society as his #1 title -- I imagine that will shift to Green Lantern if he keeps on the book for much longer.