I Think My Next Project Has Found Me

With the world the way it is, my design work has been hit or miss lately. On top of this having to more or less go into business for myself has wrecked a lot of my creative time. I've started a couple of new projects, and then stopped them because of interruptions on the business side of things. But I think that my next project is opening itself up to me. I am (tentatively) calling it Adventures In The Cyberaktive. It is going to be a cyberpunk game using the system from Adventures In The Unknown.

All of this is still early, so it is very much subject to change. But I'm going to write some form of a cyberpunk game with an antifascist vibe like Adventures In The Unknown. Anyone who knows me knows that I love cyberpunk, and if you've gamed with me, there is a very good chance that I've run a cyberpunk game of some sort that you've played in. Honestly? I never planned to write a cyberpunk game, mostly because there are so many of them already. I never had the itch to scratch for a cyberpunk game. However, ever since I started working on Adventures In The Unknown there's been a little voice that's been saying "Maybe it's time for a cyberpunk game?" And I guess I finally listened.

I'm still working out the details of what I want this game to be, but my favorite William Gibson novel is Pattern Recognition and I think that one thing that RPG publishers are missing out on is cyberpunk stuff set (more or less) in the current world. Just a current world where things like cybernetics actually work for people, rather than being a pie in the sky idea from an oligarch who no one in their right mind would let near their bodies with medical tools.

I'll be posting more as I write it. This is probably going to be longer of a manuscript than Adventures In The Unknown, but it still isn't going to be a gigantic game. I am hoping to shoot for an upper limit of about 200 pages (the current release of Adventures in The Unknown is 90 pages). A lot of this will be because of having to explain things like cybernetics. I am thinking about a system of psionics for the game too. Maybe.

Adventures In The Cyberaktive will be a standalone game, but you will be able to pull material and characters between the two games. I am not making any dramatic changes to the rules that I've already written.

Chris

You can currently find my games on itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

Action-Heroes on itch.

Adventures In The Unknown on itch and on DriveThru. (affiliate link at DriveThru)

A New Era

I keep saying that I am going to dust off the blog and start posting to it again, and now I have some news that's going to cause me to be more active here. Outland Entertainment, the original publishers of my Action-Heroes Adventure Role-Playing Game, have decided that they are going to return the rights to that game to me. It is sad news, but unfortunately with the current weirdness of the economy things like this are going to happen. I appreciate the help that Outland Entertainment gave in getting that game ready and out to press. Honestly, Action-Heroes wouldn't be the game it is with their involvement.

What does this mean? Well, going forward I am going to self-publish the game and produce new material on my one for it on my own. We will be transferring the existing book on DriveThruRPG from Outland Entertainment to myself, so it will continue to be available on that site. I will also be offering the PDF via my existing itch.io page, so you can buy it along with my Adventures in the Unknown game. Once I receive the production files for the game, and am able to update them to reflect my ownership of it, I will update all the files on DriveThruRPG. I will also stop offering the hardcover version of the game and only sell it in softcover once everything is transferred and updated, so it you want a hardcover of the book you should buy it before I update everything. Hardcovers are a pain to move around and ship, so I am going to stick to the one physical format.

But! This does mean that Adventures in the Unknown will be available eventually on DriveThruRPG, as will any other game/supplement that I put out from here on out. This will allow me to offer a physicals edition of Adventures, which I am excited about. I will nee to make some updates to the files for that, before I can offer it over at DriveThru (and any changes will be made to the current version on itch.io as well for people who already own it).

Going forward I will make what new material I can for all of my games, but since this is now a one person operation, and I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, my resources for new material will be limited. If you want to see new supplements and new games, that will mean supporting the games that I am selling because the money for new stuff will come from sales of existing stuff. I will put out material as quickly as I can, but that will be the main limitation to things. I am excited, but I am very proud of my work on Action-Heroes and I am glad to see that the game will be able to continue to exist.

All of this will mean some changes over here at the blog. I will continue to talk about general pop culture trends, comics, music and other fun things, but I won't be reviewing RPG stuff any more here. I don't think it is right for me to use this blog as a platform for my publishing, and potentially say negative things about other publishers' products like that. Will I still do call outs to bad behavior? Probably, but it won't be here on my blog. That's pretty much what social media is for.

This is everything at the moment. I will post more on social media, once we've begun to transfer files on DriveThruRPG and I have started selling other of my games at itch.io and DriveThruRPG. 

I am excited for the future. Keep an eye open over here at the blog for announcements, as well as at my Bluesky account. Talk with you more very soon!

Crossover By Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw

 

Part of my "strategy" for getting myself to post here more regularly is to focus on the things that I'm reading, watching or listening to that get me excited. My last review here on my blog was a part of that, and this one fits that bill too. Today I am looking at the comic Crossover, published by Image Comics, with writing by Danny Cates (mostly) and art by Geoff Shaw (also mostly).

This is a book that has been on my to read lists for a while. For comic fans of a certain again, most of the time we've been fans have been marked by the summer events or big company crossovers. From the JLA and JSA summer meetups of my childhood, to the first really big events like Secret Wars or Crisis On Infinite Earth, the crossover has been an important part of comic book reading.

These events are the subtext of Crossover, which Cates recontextualizes into a more personal kind of story. My introduction to Donny Cates' work came with his run on Marvel's Doctor Strange book, and after that I checked out a couple of his other Image Comics books. God Country is an interesting book that I would definitely recommend checking out, if you haven't. I don't think I'll get into his Venom run, mostly just because I was never a fan of the character.

Dawn of DC: Birds of Prey #1

I don't often finish reading a comic and think "Holy shit. I have to say something about this." Honestly, if that were the case I would have a lot more posts here on my blog. Today I decided to get out and go to the comic store, something that I haven't done in a while. I have been good with money lately, so I decided to treat myself with a couple of comics in print (rather than my usual digital purchases). After perusing the store for a bit I picked up a couple of trades (the Golden Age, Neil Gaiman's start on the Miracleman comic from back in the 80s, and DC's Pride Through The Years). Emerald City Comics, a local comic store that I've gone to for years now, is smart and they have a mini rack of comics at the register. I decided on a whim to pick up the first issue of the Dawn of DC "event" for a new ongoing Birds of Prey comic.

Am I glad that I picked up this comic.

I am a fan of Kelly Thompson's Marvel work. Her runs on the Kate Bishop Hawkeye and Black Widow are some of my favorites of either character. I figured that I would like this book, but I still had high expectations.

I had seen some previews for the book, so I knew that the art was phenomenal. Drawn by Leonardo Romero, and with colors by Jordie Bellaire, the art is everything that you want and expect from a super-hero comic. Romero's work is dynamic, and plays to the strength's of Thompson's writing. One of the things that Thompson writes well are dynamic fight scenes that flow across the page, and Romero brings this to life. Bellaire's colors move from restrained when showing the motion of characters, to vivid and "gaudy" in that way that great super-hero coloring can be.

Look at this page:

The art and color combine in a way that makes the page come alive. You can see the movement of two of the best fighters in the DC universe. You can feel the impacts of their blows against the ninjas they're fighting (only the League of Assassins would put ninjas in orange jumpsuits), and you can feel the bodies hitting the ground.

Back to the writing. The character interplay is stellar. From the reaction of Black Canary in the first panel of this page, to the conversation between her and Batgirl on the rest of the page, to how Harley Quinn gets involved with the team is all top material. The dialog is crisp, and each character has their own unique voice, such as with Big Barda (who has honestly never had a unique voice going back to when Kirby wrote her). Barda's referring to Cassandra as "small bat" throughout their interactions is just heartwarming. Barda has respect for Cassandra from their first interaction, and the nickname isn't meant to to belittle Cassandra, but shows the respect that she has for Cassandra as a hero and a fighter.

Zealot doesn't have a lot to do in this book, but it is all about the setup and many of the characters meeting for the first time. It is obvious that they know about each other, and their reputations precede each other. That's important because this is story about reputations. Black Canary is carefully assembling a team that will have a reputation for being dangerous. Black Canary. Batgirl. Big Barda. Zealot. Harley Quinn. All of these characters are characters that are the "best at what they do," and it is refreshing to see a team like that built around characters who are women.

Once upon a time, the only way that you would have been able to tell these characters apart would be because of the colors of their costumes, because women in comics were all drawn very similarly for a long time. The fact that each of these Birds of Prey have a different body type is another reason why Romero's art is so wonderful on this issue.

And, holy crap. That last page reveal. There's no way I am spoiling it, but holy crap. It is a deep cut that fans of certain Gotham related books of the last decade will really be shocked and amazed by. I don't say that lightly. What I can say is that you need to buy this comic, and if this first spectacular issue is any indication, you need to put this title on your pull list.

Unlike other Dawn of DC books that I've picked up, this doesn't look to be a limited series. I hope that, like with many of Thompson's Marvel books, we get one of her solid, and lasting runs on the book. I am excited to see where she takes the story, and what she does with these characters.

After the Batgirls book by Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad, it is good to see Cassandra Cain on the front line of a comic again. If you haven't read that, you should really pick up the trades for it. Cloonan and Conrad are one of the great writing teams in comics right now, with great characterizations and stories in their books. I think their runs of Wonder Woman and Batgirls are going to be held up as some of the great runs not just of this era of comics, but for these characters in the long haul.

If the ongoing Birds of Prey book holds on to the potential of this first issue, Thompson's run is going to become a definitive one for the Birds of Prey.

Happy Birthday Dear Multiverses

June 14, 1961 and Barry (The Flash) Allen travelled to Earth-2 for the first time. Comics would never be the same again.

Before the Silver Age of comics, comic books tended to have a loose interpretation of continuity. If previously published comics fit into a story that a creative team was currently telling, that was awesome. If it didn't, someone sat around trying to figure out why and then they published something in a comics fanzine somewhere.

But, as of 1961, there were two Flashes, and they lived on Earth-1 and Earth-2. Weirdly the heroes who were around first were relegated to Earth-2. But for the first time there was an in story rationale for the then current Flash, Barry Allen, and the original, Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, to more or less coexist. And if both of these Flashes lived in the same universe that meant that the two characters could team up together. Fans of the Jay Garrick Flash of the 40s could read new stories about the character they loved, and hopefully find out what he had been doing with himself in the interim.

Action-Heroes RPG: Ground Division

 

I am working on some expanded setting material for my Action-Heroes game that will end up, at the very least, in the hands of the backers of my Patreon. Ground Division is 90s-style conspiracy/espionage action inspired by movies of the era and a number of comics from that time.

In the ramp up to launching the Kickstarter for the game, I talked about a couple of the primary influences on my design choices for the game. The name Action-Heroes is an homage to a line of characters originally published by Charlton Comics, and now owned by DC Comics. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, when Charlton was at the height of its publishing (such as it was, unfortunately) they had a line of heroic fiction that was a mix of offbeat revamped costumed heroes from the mind of Steve Ditko, espionage and military comics, and a couple of martial artists that haven't aged well. But, at that time the term "super-hero" was a trademark co-owned by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Dick Giordano, then editor at Charlton Comics, came up with the idea of calling their characters Action-Heroes (with the hyphen) instead. He felt that label fit their characters better since they weren't really mainstream super-heroes, like those published by the other comic companies.

Rebellion's "I Am The Law" By Michael Molcher

 

History isn't as much of a cycle as people would like to think. It is a staccato drumbeat, pounding at its points until people have to listen. I think that I Am The Law is the first ever piece of non-fiction published by Rebellion, and it is an historic look at the development of British comics powerhouses Judge Dredd and the 2000AD magazine.

The 2000AD magazine owes a debt to earlier comics magazines like Action and Battle. Where Action magazine crawled, and ultimately stumbled before being taken down by political forces in the UK, Judge Dredd would eventually stand up and walk.

Like a lot of satire, problems always arise when the satirical elements are taken at face value, and this happened with Judge Dredd pretty early out of the gate. Where the writers and artists of the early Judge Dredd stories like John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, and Pat Mills, looked out at the world in which they lived and channeled that into the creation of the character. Wagner looked at the rioting and police corruption in England at the time, and used it to create a world where the police were the ultimate arbitrators of right and wrong, who were judge and jury, as well as executioner.

The earlier comic magazine Action featured prototypes to the ideas that would find a home in Judge Dredd stories and its setting of Mega-City One. The Kids Rule, OK stories in Action showed a lurid and hellish cityscape where gangs of teenagers run amok, and not even the police could stop them. The One Eyed Jack stories took the essence of movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish and make them bleaker. However the magazine ran afoul of crusading "law and order" politicians who didn't like how they and the police forces were portrayed in these stories. So they cracked down on the comics and saw to it they were censored. Does this sound familiar? That drum beat is pounding away again today, as politicians seek to censor anyone who looks or thinks differently than they do.

This isn't a reflection on I Am The Law but I would really like to see Rebellion do an anthology of some of the early Action and Battle stories, particularly the Kids Rule, OK stuff. We've seen a reprint of One Eyed Jacks, but as far as I know the only Kids Rule, OK material currently available are the updated stories, including the Vigilant related one.

I Am The Law is a warning. It shows the rise of authoritarian police powers, a surveillance state that not only has cameras pointed everywhere but also keeps track of the bands you listen to, and corrupt politicians who want to rewrite history and hide what they've done in the past. This is a powerful book, and it leaps with both feet into the turbulence of the UK in the 70s and 80s that brought us punk rock, and Judge Dredd. Not everyone is going to like this book, and a lot of people will have problem with some of the brutality and utterly heinous acts that are recorded in the book. History is a staccato drumbeat, and with I Am The Law Michael Molcher plays that beat in as masterful of a way as Gene Krupa. This is a must read book, not only for fans of the history of comics around the world, but also for those wanting to know about about the rise of authoritarians powers and the dark mirror that fiction can hold up to them. Read this book.

H.P. Lovecraft vs. The Public Domain

The other day I had a conversation via text with my friend Ben about the legal status of the Lovecraft copyrights. As one does. That caused me to go down a rabbit hole that led to this article, and made a couple of other forks.

1) The "estate" of Lovecraft, Lovecraft Properties LLC, who tried to get publishers and authors to acknowledge them as rights holders to Lovecraft's works had been dissolved by the state of Rhode Island in 2007. A collection of Lovecraft's works I have from 2009, and published by Barnes & Noble, acknowledged the estate, as did a few other works around the same time.

And internet search found the registration with Rhode Island, and that the registration was ended by the state for not following the rules (without stating what rules were violated). The best I can ascertain is that they didn't do a required annual filing with the state of Rhode Island. This could be because I don't think they were ever very successful at getting anyone to pay them for the rights to Lovecraft's works.

2) In a lawsuit filed by Donald Wandrei in 1973, contesting the will of August Derleth and the ownership of the rights held by Arkham House because they hadn't been paying Wandrei royalties on the various Lovecraft books they had published, the lawyer for Arkham House and Derleth took a unique approach to why they didn't pay any royalties to Wandrei: no one had ever actually renewed the copyrights to Lovecraft's works, so that meant it had all lapsed into the public domain. Because of this, Wandrei had no rights that required the payment of royalties from Arkham House.

The fact that a lawyer said this in a courtroom is pretty amazing:

Insofar as the copyrights are concerned, I can testify that there are no renewal copyrights for any of the H.P. Lovecraft stories that were signed on October 9, 1947 to August Derleth and Donald Wandrei.

and:

Moreover, Lovecraft died in 1937 and while he left a will, the evidence will show that none of Lovecraft's copyrights were renewed. The forty-six (46) Lovecraft stories contained in Exhibit "B" were not renewed by the assignees nor could they do so under the copyright law. Thus all of the stories are now in the public domain with the result that there are no rights contained or effective under the agreement between Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, dated November 8, 1955.

So, from 1973 until 1986 (when Wandrei finally won his lawsuit against Arkham House) the lawyer for Arkham House argued that Lovecraft's works had in fact lapsed into the public domain. Despite this, Arkham House publicly claimed ownership of the rights to Lovecraft's works during this time, to get fees and licensing money.

For nearly the entire part of the second half of the 20th century, people argued about the copyright status of Lovecraft's work, while no one knew that the lawyers for Arkham House/Derleth's estate made these arguments in a courtroom. The judge declaring Lovecraft's works in the public domain would have been outside of the scope of the trail, so I am not surprised that there was no ruling on that. But, considering how intellectual property rights have to be fairly rigorously defended most of the time, I am really surprised that the legal representative of a company that otherwise vigorously defended these rights would say something like this in a public record. It doesn't really make any sense, but I am not a lawyer.

I had read up on all of this over the years, and never once before now had I seen a reference to Wandrei's suit, or Arkham House's defense that the rights had lapsed. Even Joshi's writing on the subject of the copyright status of Lovecraft's works didn't mention this, and I find it hard to believe that he wouldn't have known.

Originally I wrote this up as a post on my Facebook page, but I figured it deserved a more public sharing so I rewrote it a bit for this blog post. Nothing is this post should be considered to be legal advice, but it does contain links that you likely could run past an actual lawyer for actual legal advice.

In case you're wondering, this link is what my friend sent me that started my tumble down the rabbit hole of H.P. Lovecraft vs. The Public Domain.

Release The SRDs!

With everything going on in open gaming in tabletop RPGs right now, I have decided that I am going to release SRDs (system reference documents) for a couple of systems based on the Fudge role-playing game, to which I have the rights. I will be calling these the Crasher and Quest SRDs/systems. They will be derived from two game systems to which I own the rights. More details will be forthcoming, but the plan is to release each of these SRDs first under a Creative Commons license, and then probably eventually under the new ORC gaming license that is being developed. More to come!

Action-Heroes Is Coming!

After years of development and writing, along with more than a couple of pandemic-related delays, my Action-Heroes role-playing game is finally coming to Kickstarter next week. You can click here to sign up to receive a notification when the project launches next Tuesday.

I am really happy to have the game so close to the finish line, because I have put a lot of work into this system over the years, and I am really proud of the end result. Please sign up for your notification, and also please support the game's Kickstarter project. There are only supposed to be a couple of stretch goals, but they are going to provide some nice upgrades to the game if we hit all of them. 

Thank you all in advance.