I have a son who is getting interested in role-playing games. He is also extremely interested in the Mario franchise, to the point where he refers to himself as Mario. His sister gets to be Princess Peach, his mother gets to be Princess Daisy, and I’m stuck as Luigi.
Recently, I decided to fuse these two interests together, resulting in a Super Mario Brothers edition of Pathfinder.
As Christmastime takes the United States by storm, the controversy surrounding appropriate season’s greetings rears its ugly head once again. Wish somebody “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and you risk stumbling into an unexpected controversy. After all, “Happy holidays” is a neutered statement enforced by the gutless politically correct culture we live in, right?
Not by a long shot, actually.
Originally published in Knights of the Dinner Table #146
The quest was a simple low-level affair: men in a small lumber town were disappearing into the forest. All the PCs had to do was find out what was going on and put a stop to it.
The culprit was a lonely dryad that had been luring men into the forest and charming them to keep her company. I had planned the session out as a diplomatic session, since I figured the PCs weren’t going to outright slaughter an apparently innocent dryad. This was going to be the session that taught the adventurers that not every problem needs to be solved with swordplay. A nice thought on my part, but not a plan that would endure the night.
In a modern-day world where the vampire myth has been done to death in spin-offs and variants, one of the best parallels we have to the classic monsters found in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and John Polidori’s The Vampyre is the gentlemanly serial killer Hannibal Lecter, originally created by Thomas Harris and aptly played on the screen by Anthony Hopkins.
In 2011, DC Comics kicked off the “New 52,” canceling all of their previous titles and rebooting their superhero universe with 52 titles in a brand new continuity. Despite an initial uptick in sales, it’s safe to call the experiment a failure, as the whole continuity got rebooted again in 2016 with “Rebirth.”
There were a lot of reasons why the New 52 failed, but it primarily boils down to a lack of consistently good writing. DC editorial tried to pick and choose from the old continuity, deciding that some things happened and some things didn’t, but never developed a consistent timeline that its creative teams could follow. Editors also heavily meddled in the direction of the books, often hamstringing talented writers. (Prime example: the excellent Gail Simone getting what should have been her dream project on Batgirl, only for the story to turn joyless and perfunctory as the character got sucked into Batman’s “Death of the Family” crossover.)
Despite its failings, the New 52 did have a few gems. Here are a few titles I found really enjoyable.
Aaron Burr is most famous for killing political rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel, making him the only Vice President (that we know of) to murder somebody while in office. But that’s not the only awful thing he did in his lifetime. In fact, some of Burr’s deeds reached the level of James Bond villains.
Most people realize that a lot of the classic fairy tales we read today have been altered and sterilized. Many of them come from the Grimm brothers, whose first volume of fairy tales was criticized way back in 1812 for being unsuitable for children thanks to abusive parents, rape, incest, and other nasty stuff.
I recently read the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a bedtime tale for my daughter. Although this fable originated hundreds of years before the Grimm brothers were born, theirs is the version I chose to go with. The selection bothers me not because of the violence involved, but because the people in this story have such needlessly circuitous plans that they make 1960s supervillains seem downright efficient.
Hal Jordan has always been one of my favorite comic book superheroes. At first it was simply because he had the coolest costume. Then I read his comics and found out that I like the character as well.
There are a lot of things that set Hal Jordan apart from the rest of the classic Silver Age superheroes, such as the fact that he’s got a female boss or the fact that his early issues dealt with racism against Inuits (yeah). But the biggest thing that sets him aside from others is that he’s an impulsive man-child. This is a guy who tries to do the right thing, but he’s hampered by the fact that he doesn’t think things through and is kind of an idiot. Perhaps because I am also a well-intentioned idiot, this resonates with me.
There seems to be a large amount of dislike for Hal around the Internet, with many people arguing that he’s boring. Like him or not, I can tell you one thing for sure: he’s not boring. Allow me to show you what I mean as we delve into the classic Silver Age Green Lantern story known as…“The Leap Year Menace!”
When it comes to comic adaptations, the DC Animated Universe (DCAU) is pretty much the cream of the crop. Running for over a decade, the shared universe included Batman: the Animated Series, Superman: the Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, and various tie-in movies and comics. Each series was full of awesome moments.
A good number of the scenes below come from Justice League Unlimited, which is my favorite of the DCAU series, but that’s not intended as a slight to the other shows. Suffice it to say that most everything associated with the DCAU was awesome, and the shows generally got better as they went on.
Released in 1991, the Dark Sun setting for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a revelation. More than any other setting up to that point, it showcased the way D&D could encompass many different kinds of fantasy while still remaining true to the game. It introduced a metal-poor desert world where survival was as much as a challenge as fighting orcs. It provided a new twist on standard D&D races, including tribalistic halflings and desert-running elves. Drawing more from the Dune series than The Lord of the Rings, it showed how broad D&D’s horizons could go.
If you want a great example of the creative energy that infused AD&D 2nd edition, check out the original Dark Sun boxed set. And then, if you want an example of how bad its adventures could get, check out the setting’s first module, Freedom.
Babbling Brooks 