Thor's Day Hero: Dr. Peter Venkman

Let's face it, those of us in a certain age group just love Ghostbusters. Now we all have our favorite Ghostbuster of the group, but for me it was Peter Venkman. I feel a closer connection to him than the others. Ray was lovable and good-natured but too innocent. Egon was too brainy and socially awkward. Winston was a little too blue-collared for me, so in the end it was Venkman. Flippant, sarcastic, and kind of just along for the ride at first...until he makes contact with the supernatural. He's still flippant and sarcastic after ghost contact, but determined to take the fight to the foe, or at least goad his buddies into attacking first. It's kind of hard not to imagine the Thor's Day Heroes without Venkman somewhere on the roster, welcome aboard!

Thor's Day Hero: Jack Burton

Nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" like...Jack Burton? When Big Trouble in Little China hit the big screen back in 1986 it wasn't a smash success but I think there was a large chunk of viewers who became instant fans, my twelve year old self at the time being one of them.

Jack Burton would certainly think he's the hero of the movie, but is he really? He gets the girl, sure, and gets the bad guy, all right, but for the most part he was just always in the right place at the right time. It was a whole host of other characters that did the heavy lifting, so why aren't they being admitted into the Thor's Day Heroes? Well, Burton has style, he's quick with the one-liners, and he's a decent shot with the throwing knife. It's all in the reflexes you know. Welcome aboard Jack Burton, truck parking is behind the building.

Thor's Day Hero: FBI Special Agent Dana Scully

We don't really think of the X-Files television show nowadays, I don't anyway, but it did kind of open a lot of doors to a lot of the shows around today, just like the shows Twilight Zone and Kolchak kind of paved the way for the X-Files. But when the X-Files was in its prime, man, it was hard to beat. Also hard to beat was Agent Scully, the incredibly skeptical and incredibly hot FBI 'straight man' to her partner, the rogue Fox "I believe in aliens" Mulder.

She was tough, she was smart, and she didn't take any guff. She was also a medical doctor and decided to trade in her surgeon's mask in order to go on adventures with an FBI badge and a gun. A lot of these adventures were 'monsters of the week' but some were longer lasting alien twists, of course all of it was wrapped in government conspiracy. As I type this it will be an entire year before Scully's official debut of which you're reading right now, so until then, err, now, welcome aboard the Thor's Day Heroes Agent Scully!

Tuesday Art Leftovers: Grown-Up Goonies, Aliens, and Landscapes

First post of 2013, and it's more art leftovers.  This time going way back with this first drawing scanned out of a sketchbook from my senior year of high school.  Ahem, high school twenty plus years ago!  So my idea was to take a character from the something like the movie Goonies, grow them up a little, and put them on the path of paranormal investigations and supernatural conflict resolution.  Looking back my idea was pretty much X-Files meets Supernatural.  And yeah, I guess I could've been mega-rich right now if I had pursued it!  As it stands I have this one sketch, haha.

This one is easy to date because "1997" is right in the corner!  So the thought here is to have a couple of "cosmic level" superheroes.  On the left is an amorphous, sentient potato-in-a-jar.  He has a wide array of mechanical and robot bodies he can control once plugged in, including a starship.  His buddy is another alien who was average for his race until the super-space jewel-symbiote thing attached itself to his chest giving him the power of a hundred black holes or what-not.  To paraphrase that 'superhero plot' generator from a couple of years ago:

"One is a sentient potato with an army of mecha at his disposal.  The other is a noble defender with the power of a hundred black holes at his command.  Together they...fight interstellar crime!"

Closing we have an alien suburban townscape.  That's it, a cozy little street, a few plants by the walkway, and a sprawling metropolis in the distance.  This was one of those "just because" drawings, no plans or backstory.  That's it for now, as always enjoy!

Happy Halloween!

Gothic earth

eternal

Hey guys! 

For Halloween this year, I'm going to give you all a gift. The gift of free gaming materials. For about a year, off and on, in conjunction with the Fraternity of Shadows, I've been working on Gothic Earth Eternal. GEE is a modern horror game based on the old Masque of the Red Death game put out in 1994 by William W. Connors through TSR. 

The short, short version is that Masque of the Red Death was a setting in the 1890's where Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and Sherlock Holmes were all real. The new rules and game updates the setting to 2012, using the Pathfinder rules as its core.

We also let fans write in their own versions of various Darklords and villains to be included with the setting. Those write-ups will be coming shortly as well.

Anyhow, I'm giving this all away for free. Here's the link.

To find out more about the Gothic Earth Eternal project, find out more on the Fraternity of Shadows page. 

On a final note, I want to say that this is a bit of a dedication to Mik and the Minions of the Monster Master as well, because way back in the day, we played a short Masque of the Red Death game. I have found memories of that one. As I remember it, Mik got to play Nikola Tesla in a romping, horror-filed game of hauntings, cultists, and Creatures Beyond Time and Space. 

Enjoy, and Happy Halloween! 

Thor's Day Hero: Howard Phillips Lovecraft

art copyright John Cebellero

Just saying his name, H.P. Lovecraft, evokes all kinds of immediate imagery. Here we are, about a week from Halloween, and I felt his induction into the Thor's Day Heroes was most timely. He's an author, alongside Edgar Allen Poe, some say one of our first proto-horror writers, but what he put down on paper was so much more.

I can't claim to have "love Lovecraft since high school" or some such, in fact it wasn't until the last couple of years that I really started reading his near hundred year-old work in earnest. Sure, it's horror, but it's also science fiction, and it's an imagination the likes we've not seen since. It's funny, sometimes reading one of his short stories you can easily predict where it is going and 'call it' pages before the big reveal, since it's been done so many times already. The catch is, he was the first one to do it.

It goes without saying his rich, otherworldly mythos that he crafted is just as stark and chilling today as it was alien back when he crafted it. It makes for good reading, makes for good gaming, it's just all around Elder goodness. Welcome aboard Howard!

Thor's Day Hero: Solomon Kane

Nigh on a hundred years later, Solomon Kane is still a character too cool for words. Sharing a lineage that goes back to the same Howardian inkwell that gave us Conan the Barbarian, Kane is a 16th century dark hero, brooding and smiting evil with all the zeal only a Puritan can muster. Equally at home with musket and rapier, not to mention a magic cudgel from time to time, Kane cut a swath through supernatural horror before people even realized supernatural horror was a genre.

Friday Rucht Hour: Modern Horror

Happy Friday the 13th....

I happen to have an entry that is appropriate to the date.

Gothic Earth Eternal

So, I wrote my own Pathfinder mod. It's a set of Pathfinder rules for playing in a modern day horror setting.

The story of how this project came about is kind of interesting. It all sprang from a dead book that I wrote for the now largely-defunct Morrigan Press. Basically, I wrote an entire Horror RPG for them, but it was never published. Just so that you know, this is pretty typical in the RPG business. My friend, Rob Schwalb has written well over 200,000 words that he's never seen a cent for.

So, I had this thing just collecting dust for years and not doing anything. The folks at the Fraternity of Shadows (who run the Ravenloft website) wanted to look at it, I let them see it and then the project sort of sprang to life on its own.

Design Concepts

I'll be completely honest - a lot of my design ideas for the Gothic Earth Eternal project came from my buds at the Minions of the Monster Master. Listening to some of their podcasts, particularly the ones featuring more independent-type games gave me many of the ideas I had for GEE.

The idea behind Gothic Earth Eternal wasn't that it was just going to be Pathfinder set in the modern day. It was going to be an RPG catering a specific type of game - one where investigation and roleplaying would be extremely important.

So I definitely was inspired to do stuff like the Investigative Roleplaying System and Foreknowledge tokens - from the spirit of independent games like FATE, Fiasco, or Zombie Cinema.

Anyhow, take a look at it. It's all there in PDF. Tell me what you think! Also, give love to the Fraternity of Shadows for keeping the Ravenloft dream alive!

Thor's Day Hero: Orcus

Demon-prince and Lord of the Undead, Orcus is about as hardcore as they come. Asinine edition wars aside, he's also the only bad guy to get a detailed writeup in every edition of the game. I mean look at him, you think you get a rock hard body like that by being a chump?

Orcus is also the first truly bad guy to make a Thor's Day appearance, so why pick a bad guy? Countless hours of flipping through Monster Manuals and Fiend Folios was always cool, but Orcs and Rust Monsters got old. It was the Demons and Devils section that everyone invariably went to, mainly because those write-ups were always the most interesting. Of those bad guys, Orcus was always the top dog, earning him a Thor's Day spot.

A Cthulhu Christmas to You!

Happy holidays to everyone out there! I thought I'd share this pic before it got wrapped up, a friend of mine made this Great Old One cutie for my daughter and she did a great job. So to you and yours and whatever it is you're doing, enjoy!

I figure I'll have a "look at what I got" post or two, get through the holidays, and then get it on come 2012 with this thing back to what it should be!

LEGO Thursday: Guardians of the Terrible Tower

More from last week's LEGO post, these are closeup photos of the denizens of the tower itself. If you didn't read that post you may want a refresher now. When I took these photos I had intended to make up little stat cards of each villain that had their photo on it, weapons, equipment, treasure, damage, and other stats.






I like the way this one turned out, the sun made the 'space rocks' look cool

LEGO Thursday: The Terrible Tower of Terror

I wanted to build a tower, so I did. I wanted it stocked with all kinds of bad guys, so there they are. I wanted to be an epic type of tower along the lines of a TARDIS where each level of the tower is like a mini-realm rules over by one key figure. The thing is I envisioned this not so much for a fantasy setting, but something more akin to the post-apocalypse, ala Thundarr the Barbarian, maybe a Gamma World game.

Basically it would be similar to a super-mega dungeon module that takes characters from first to tenth level or something. I didn't know where I was going with it at the time, but that was the general idea. There was also going to be a mysterious 'space rock' or element or ore or something that was super rare and super powerful. The higher up you went in the tower, the more space rock the bad guys had access to. Of course at the top of the tower, protected by all the levels below it, is the sentient space rock matriarch.

First stop, undead weapon-master level (the space rock is his brain!)

Next level, the dual-hammer guy (the space rock is a fine dust in his re-breather!)

Next up is vicious lizard-wizard with a small hunk of space rock

Cyborg space-rock-a-mancer with an even bigger chunk of space rock

The brothers of science, with their techno-wizardry weaponry

The liche, with a whole staff made of space rock

Vampire lord with spider-venom wrist gun and white space rock wand

[insert cool name of sentient, psychic space rock matriarch here]

The triple-T tower showing you its backside

Certified Zombie Ammunition

Zombies are hot right now, and not just in our gaming sphere, nor entertainment media...the firearms industry is taking notice as well. Welcome to Hornady's new line of Zombie Max bullets. As it says on the front of the box; these are not toys.


So you know what you're getting into, the box is clearly labeled "certified zombie ammunition". Not just your generic Zed-head 'sploders such as heavy hollow points, Z-Max are the pinnacle in Undead defense and come in a large variety of calibers.


I gotta say it is very refreshing to see a serious product, such as real life bullets which really aren't anything but serious, being given such a fanciful treatment. Especially this "Zombie 101" crash course posted on the back of the box!


These particular specimens come in the .40 cal variety, but there are all kinds of Zombie Max ammo available; two different assault rifle rounds in very common calibers, sniper rifle ammo, shotgun slugs, and three different types of pistol ammo. If you can find it in the rubble of a Zombpocalypse ravaged city, chances are there's a ZMax round for you.

Left to right; ZMax, target round, and defensive hollow point

As you can see above, the ZMax has a very pointy, ballistic tip to it, which is an interesting configuration for being a hollow point. In the middle is a standard "semi wadcutter" round that you would see for every day use like recreation shooting and target practice. Finally the right shows a heavier bullet packing a large cavity hollow point.


The green impact tip on the ZMax round is very unique in that it does some kinetic mumbo-jumbo that makes for lots of "boom" action. Frankly, it just looks cool and green is my favorite color.

The zombies that these rounds are designed for will never know what hit them. The large hollow point on the right would still be put to excellent use in defense of the undead (so will the middle round for that matter) so the bottom line is that in the case of Zombolocaust, you've got choices.

Everyone comes out a winner, and in zombie terms winner = survivor.

Happy Halloween!

Shutting things down for the night I just wanted to give a hearty "Happy Halloween" to everyone. The above pic is from the front of the garage this year. Good night!

LEGO Thursday: Zombpocalypse Survivors

Not all roleplaying adventuring parties are fantasy based. We ran a short-live (no pun intended) but incredibly fun Zombpocalypse game using the d20 Modern rules some time ago.

Our GM, Rucht, threw some interesting curve-balls in on us and turned what we thought was a run-of-the-mill zombie romp into something a bit more creative.

I believe we all ended up on a boat, marooned at sea, unaware that the zombies were approaching us underwater. Like I said, lots of fun, and any game where the GM has you make a back-up character at the same time as your regular character you know things are going to be rough!


My first character, a thuggish, street-wise hooligan is on the left here. He was eaten by zombies fairly quickly. In the middle we have the local preacher, armed with a buzz saw and revolver, he was a zombie-whacking machine. Speaking of whacking, on the right was a local professional baseball player armed with his bat. He could also throw baseballs with deadly accuracy. A rag-tag bunch of survivors indeed.

Mik the Blitzing Thunderhoof

It's not every day that you get professional-level, animated portraits of yourself in all kinds of different gaming genres. Or, if you're like me and are buddies with just such a person, you may. I can safely say however that there's probably not too many people in the world that have been caricatured as Chaos Dwarf Bull Centaurs!

A few days ago Bi3cuit whipped up a new Blood Bowl themed banner for the Minions of the Monster Master blog. As always, it ain't too shabby, and as I've already said...I'm a friggin' Bull Centaur! Oh yeah, bonus profile pic too! To date:

Mik as a Bolter-wielding Holiday Elf!

Mik as a veteran Mouse Guard adventurer!

Mik's Mouse Guard veteran disguised as Ash!

Mik in HALO-style power armor!

Mik as an Inquisitorial adept agent!


...and of course, one of my favorites. My "almost" zombie survivor portrait!

Mik's Moment of Zen, pt. 17

"The official cookie of the Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Mik's Moment of Zen, pt. 14

"Sludgy daemon goodness from the depths of the Play-Doh bucket."

Mik's Moment of Zen, pt. 8

"One whiskey, one Bourbon, one beer...and one zombie horde."

Pharaoh's Quest: 2 of 2

This is part two of my Lego Pharaoh's Quest set reviews. If you haven't checked that post out, go ahead. The long and short of it is that Lego is putting out their own line of pulp/horror goodness. This isn't a licensed product like the Prince of Persia sets either, these new sets are all Lego and really pack a punch. This is good news because we won't have to worry about licensing issues in the long run, these sets can go on for a while.


The second set in the series to be reviewed is #7307 Flying Mummy Attack. Yes, you heard right, flying freakin' mummies! You get three mini-figs in the set, plus a really cool bi-plane and new accessories to boot. Lego hasn't skimped on the details this go-round either. Almost all the mini-figs have printed torsos and printed legs, but furthermore, all of the torsos I've seen so far are double-sided as well. Also, the mummies have "two-faced" heads depending on your mood; crazy menacing, or cyclopean chic.


The mummies are the same as set #7306, but their gear sets them apart by a mile. Looking at the box I thought these were same headdresses we've seen all along, but painted anew. Nope, these are completed new headdresses without the "pony tail" in the back, making these much easier to fit with capes and certain armor pieces. Not to mention these look cool with the Horus-styled paint jobs.

The new helmets aren't the coolest things though, it's the wings. These are hard plastic, neck-hole/peg backpack style wings, and you get two of them. These look great, are multi-colored and printed on both sides.

You can also see in here our hero, Jake Raines. He's got a nicely printed torso which is a leather flight jacket and as you can see, he's got his biplane symbol on the back. He also comes with not one, but two of the blocky, drum fed machine guns. These are really parts for the biplane itself, but they're too good to pass up in you character's hands. Other than a few Batman sets, these have been kind of scarce to get a hold of.


This Egyptian obelisk is very cool and makes a great addition to the tabletop. My one complaint however is a trend I don't think we'll see Lego reversing anytime soon and that it's not printed bricks you see here, but stickers. Johnny Thunder never put up with stickers! Other than this, which I won't begrudge them too much, it's a nice terrain piece.


The biplane itself is a very cool model. Let's face it, compared to the original Thunder biplanes, this one is amazing! I thought the engine could've enjoyed a little more detail, but the twin machine guns up top more than make up for it. It did have a very lame "sky hook" attachment underneath (so you could fly by the obelisk and snatch the diamond) but I didn't bother with it...and neither should you!


So the intended action in set #7307 is pretty cool. You've got a hunk of treasure atop an obelisk. Swooping in to snatch it away you got a daring pulp hero pilot, but wait, freakin' flying mummies are here too! They want the diamond and at the bidding of an yet-to-be-revealed master, they aim to steal it first. Barrel rolls and machine gun chatter fill the skies above the desert as biplane and flying mummy dance their aerial tango.