The Paul Czege Effect, part 1

If you know Paul Czege's name, it's probably because of his indie role-playing games My Life With Master or Nicotine Girls. Or maybe he registers on your radar as simply as one of the usual suspects in the indie gaming scene. But for me I'll always associate the name Paul Czege with one beautiful, half-throwaway idea of his that has been reverberating through my skull for the last five years. At one time Mr. Czege was playing Theatrix, which happens to be the first diceless RPG I ever owned. Theatrix is basically a set of light cinematic generic rules, which Mr. Czege's group was using to power a superhero game. If you can stand diceless games and aren't one of those points-crunching power-minutae freaks, then I could totally see using Theatrix for the cape-and-cowl set.

Anyway, back in '01 I must have still been regularly reading the Forge, because I stumbled across a thread where Mr. Czege talked about this game. The thing that stuck with me all these years later was the naming convention he came up with. He breaks it down like this:

One thing I haven't described about the game is the naming convention for superheroes and supervillains. It's an idea I had last summer, that you could create a superhero scenario without seeming derivative if you invented an alternative naming convention. So all names have prepositions in them. The gun toting villain in the very first scene of the game is Quick on the Draw. The villain that bursts into flames is Point of Ignition. My character is No Appetite for Pain.

Other characters in the game include heroes War on Crime (the local Batman-type), Champion of Fair Play (the Superman equivalent), as well as Keeper of Faith, Justice of the Piece (gotta be a gun-toting Punisher type), Day of Salvation, Spirit of America, Mind over Matter ("who's a brain in a jar"), and Up from the Earth. The campaign featured villains with names like Life from Death, Born from Concrete, Impossible to Find, Falling through Reality, and Harvester of the Weak.

Hot damn, but that's good stuff. By a simple change in the rules on how you name your supers, Czege has left an indelible stamp on the campaign. If you think about it, you can see a little of this in the comic books themselves. If I tell you a character is Magma Man, that's pretty blank. It's tells you nothing but the dude's power base. But if he's Magma Lad, suddenly I read into that character a lot of Silver Age innocence without knowing anything subtantive about the dude. Similarly, if you called the guy The Magma it's a pretty good bet he's one of those grim and gritty guys that stunk up so many 90's comics.

It must be noted that Mr. Czege came up with this delightful technique for what I personally think of as all the wrong reasons:

And I think for us, it enables the game to have to work less hard to achieve a mature tone. Traditional superhero naming conventions have become somewhat associated with Saturday morning cartoons: Spiderman and His Amazing Friends, Superfriends, X-Men. I think the alternative naming convention kind of breaks down those associations and defaults us to treating the characters and their relationships with seriousness..

But in part 2 of The Paul Czege Effect, I will use this technique to outline a superhero world my way. A way that is less mature, less serious, and more stupid. Stay tuned.

Gold Key/Whitman

When I was a kid there were three companies that made comics. There was DC, which I knew as the company that published the characters from the Superfriends. There was Marvel, who became the apple of my geeky eye upon publication of the original Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. And then there was Gold Key, later known as Whitman.

Gold Key's heyday was in the 60's, but you could still get easily lay your hands on their books in the 70's and early 80's. They held a ton of licenses, from Walt Disney stuff to popular live action TV shows. But it was there original characters that interested me the most as a kid.

Valiant Comics, that staple of the 90's comic boom, launched itself on the back of Gold Key's three most successful original characters: Magnus Robot Fighter, atomic-powered Doctor Solar, and dinosaur hunting Indian brave Turok, Son of Stone. Magnus was a guy who punched evil robots, 24/7/365. In the future. Usually while his girlfriend watched. Turok was basically Jay Silverheels rolling around the Land of the Lost shooting dinosaurs with his bow. Doc Solar was a scientist who was made out of nuclear energy. And he came out long before Ronnie Raymond ruined that concept. To this day you won't find more solid character concepts than Magnus or Turok.

Gold Key had some other great characters as well. Dagar was your basic Conan type. Every issue he threw down with a necromancer or a demon or something like that. The Mighty Samson sounded like a Bible comic, but it was actually the story of a big strong guy who roamed around the post-apocalyptic remains of America, beating up mutants that were menacing humanity. Keep in mind this comic preceded the Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon and the role-playing game Gamma World.

My favorite Gold Key character was Doctor Spektor. In many ways he was a low-rent Doctor Strange, always getting into spooky occult adventures with mummies and cultists and such. What made Doc Spektor adventures so exciting was that he wasn't the Sorcerer Supreme. His mode of operation was much more down-to-earth. You could easily run Doctor Spektor as a Call of Cthulhu PC. Instead of throwing hexbolts, he'd just punch the bad guy. He dressed in dark suits rather than outrageous dayglo silks. Instead of knowing a dozen general purpose spells and magic items, ol' Doctor Spector would research the one amulet or spell that would work against the creature of the month.

Two things made Gold Key really stand out from the competition. First of all, most issues had awesome painted covers that were much more photo-realistic than anything I saw from DC or Marvel in those days. The other thing that strikes me as different is that Doctor Solar was Gold Key's only standard superhero title, where a guy had a secret identity and funny pajamas and fought crime. The rest of the Gold Key comics fell into various genres, but the one with original characters were all basically adventure stories of one type or another. Well, except for Grimm's Ghost Stories. Those were ghost stories. Duh.

Either way, my basic point remains. The Gold Key characters were extraordinary peoples in extraordinary situations, but (except for Doctor Solar) they were regular people in a way that superheros sometimes aren't.

a note from the management

upgrading to blogger beta, expect strangeness...

Okay, this makes sense now.

Yesterday my mind was blown when I discovered that the entire run of the old Marvel comic John Carter Warlord of Mars takes place between two paragraphs in Burrough's original A Princess of Mars. Well, here are the paragraphs in question:

Three weeks later, Mors Kajak and his officers, accompanied by Tars Tarkas and Sola, returned upon a battleship that had been dispatched to Thark to fetch them in time for the ceremony which made Dejah Thoris and John Carter one.

For nine years I served in the councils and fought in the armies of Helium as a prince of the house of Tardos Mors. The people seemed never to tire of heaping honors upon me, and no day passed that did not bring some new proof of their love for my princess, the incomparable Dejah Thoris.

So that paragraph break allows for nine years of Martian adventure. 28 comic book adventures don't hardly begin to fill that gap. Now that I think about it, the rest of the John Carter novels are probably set in that same space between the wedding and the sudden passage of nine years.

RIP: Independent Sky Ship Cloudfool

We spent weeks repairing the old dwarvish airship we found, as well as learning dwarvish so we could read the manuals and operate the voice-command magic mouth-based controls.

Our first and only voyage lasted less than a whole day. My guy Osric was at the helm because he had nine ranks in Profession (sailor). Turns out this old dwarvish machine requires a DC 30 check to steer it and DC 40 to land safely.

And where did we end up crashing? In the backyard of the Flaming Pagoda of a ferocious necromancer named Pagdush Firethrower, who we only know by name because we are in possession of an artifact he created and no doubt wants back. So we got the hell out of Dodge before he cast stone-to-flesh on his army of petrified orcs. We crashed right in the middle of the stony sons of bitches.

We're not sure if the Cloudfool will fly again, but we know we won't get much time to repair it under the nose of this wizard. In the interest of denying assets to the enemy, Dix the Warmage pops a burning ray into the hydrogen tank from maximum range. After we pick ourselves off the ground we start hoofing it out of Pagdush's valley retreat.

We end up killing a bunch of trolls just so we can huddle for warmth in their stinking cave. Pagdush's valley is up a mountainside well above the snowline. We had found the airship in a realm trapped in a perpetual magical blizzard, so we traded one icy environ trying to kill us for another with no real break in between.

This campaign is awesome.

Last Session's Loot

This is what the gang in my game got off the bodies before the Rainbow Bridge completely shattered. I thought I'd share because this stuff is completely rad.

Hastsezini's Bow - mighty (+7 Str bonus) composite longbow +2, fiery burst, distant shot

Heimdall's Sword - bastard sword +3 vorpal, dread (vs. giants)

Surtur's Sword - colossal greatsword +5, mighty cleaving, fiery blast

Agni's Axe - large greataxe +3, speed, shocking burst, fiery burst

Head of Agni - One time between now and the final heat death of the universe the decapitated head of the god Agni may be be held aloft and compelled to utter a single word which reverberates throughout the entirety of the spacetime continuum. Whoever wields the head will have their effective spellcaster level boosted to 50 for the next spell they cast. Also all effects with caster level caps have those caps temporarily negated, allowing for such things as 50d6 fireballs. Using the Head is a move equivalent action and the follow-up spell must be cast either the round the Head is activated or the following round. Woe unto he who activates the head but does not cast a spell. Once the Word of Agni is released that energy must be used or the wielder's soul will be consumed with the fires of creation itself.

my mind is blown

I've been doing some research on the Bronze Age of Comics, because that period is basically my personal Golden Age. So I was over at mega-resource comics.org when I came across the page for the John Carter Warlord of Mars series. It only ran 28 issues, which makes collecting it seem a lot less daunting than one hundred issues of Marvel Two-in-One. Anyway, I was blown away by this factoid about the John Carter comic:

The entire series (with few exceptions) takes place between the third and fourth paragraphs of chapter 27 in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel A Princess of Mars.

Man, I am so cracking open my copy of A Princess of Mars when I get home.

As a side note, people like to debate when these various comic ages start and end. I don't have a solid handle on the start of the Bronze Age, but my own personal take is that it ended no later than 1986 with the publication of Iron Man #194. That's the first appearance of Scourge, the guy who killed many of the goofier villains littering Marvel's sordid past.