Old School Heretic: Public Domain

Showing posts with label Public Domain. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Public Domain Resources Index Page

Note: There will be some amount of overlap and duplication between this list of links focused entirely on Public Domain Resources and the more general Links to Resources that we've arranged into alphabetical order along the left-hand sidebar of the blog. If anything, this redundancy ought to make your use of these two different resources all that much easier.

Our series: Revisiting the Public Domain will be continuing, and will have its own Index Page, once it has a few more entries.
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Featured Resource:

Public Domain Sherpa A very useful tool for tracking down whether something is or is not in the Public Domain, or at least it's a very good start. After this it takes professional researchers, librarians, and lawyers...and money.

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Last Updated: April 29, 2011

Archive(dot)org (The Internet Archive)
A tremendous repository of books, films, audio, and more and all of it in the Public Domain. You could spend entire weeks just mining the amazing lost treasures buried all over the various interconnected sites that make up the Archive.

Creative Commons
Everything you need to know, care to know, want to know or just might need to know all in one handy place.

Everything New is Old Again by netherwerks
We go on and on about Public Domain superheroes from the Golden Age, amongst other, related stuff.

A List of FILMS in the Public Domain in the United States
From Wikipedia

The Free Library
Millions of articles, books and more all of it free and online and ready to go right now.

Google Books
A quick and painless way to find online references that you probably already know about, but since we dislike assuming things, we included it anyhow.

Government Comics
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln maintains a sizable collection of vintage Government Comics that has to be seen to be believed. Some of this stuff might well prove useful to writers, artists, alternative historians, DMs and other mad-folk.

Hathi Trust
An online research library that can get you results that Google Books can't and probably won't.

International Catalogue of Superheroes

The first place to go to do research on obscure, out-of-print and other characters from across the world.

Karen's Whimsy
A wonderful Public Domain Clip-Art site.

LibriVox
Free Audiobooks. Good ones.

Old Book Illustrations
A great place to discover old, vintage, obscure bits of graphics, design elements and full illustrations derived from ... you guessed it ... Old Books.

Open Clip Art Library
A place to browse for clip-art, if you have a need for it--also a good source for reference images.

Open Library
Your online lending library away from the library.

Photos of the Great War
Photography from World War One. Be warned: you could lose a few hours sifting through this site if the subject matter is at all of any interest to you...and they provide a nice set of links to take you farther down into the trenches...

Photo-Sleuth
A great blog devoted to scrounging about and exploring vintage photos and associated things of great interest to anyone interested in said things, like us and maybe two of you lot.

Project Gutenberg
The original and still one of the best sources for Public Domain editions of just about anything/everything that has ever been written/published. It just keeps on growing and getting better--but they need all our support to keep going. Or better yet, you could sign-on as an editor, scanner or other volunteer...and of course they always need charitable contributions...

Public Domain
As explained by Wikipedia

Public Domain Archive (and Reprints)
An experimental site that transitioned into a Search Engine for Public Domain Books.

Public Domain Characters
At Comic Vine. A good place to learn more about who and what's out there in the Public Domain.

Public Domain Clip-Art: Karen's Whimsy

Public Domain Image Resources
At Wikipedia

Public Domain Resources for Your Game by Netherwerks

Public Domain Superheroes
A site that went from featuring information on Public Domain Superheroes to announcing its transition to becoming a cartoon-blog focused on Public Domain Characters to silence since Jan, 2011. Maybe they're still getting ready?

Public Domain Superheroes (Wikia)
A Wiki focused on Public Domain Superheroes. Yes, it is a theme.

The Public Domain Treasure Hunter
This lady is a hardcore Public Domain researcher and here she offers courses on how to use Public Domain Sources in your work, but we haven't taken any and probably won't as we've been mucking about in this area for a long time now. She does offer some interesting tips and other stuff at her blog/site. Just be aware of the marketing.

Public Domain Wargames (FREE)
A great source for tons of Wargames that have entered the Public Domain, one way or another. You might find our post on this site useful: Public Domain Wargames: Princes, Pole-arms and (tri)Pods.

Rare Book Room
400 of the great classic books of all time digitized and offered up for your education. What wonderful people!

SF Project at Project Gutenberg Australia
A wonderful selection of Speculative, SciFi, and other stuff that you might not find through the normal channels...

Stories and Characters That Have Had Their Copyright Expire
By no means the only list, nor even the most complete, but it is useful, inspirational and worth taking a look at, even if you're not all that sure just what this whole Public Domain thing is about yet.

USGS Map It
A service of the US Geological Survey that allows you to make maps based on real-world data that they have accumulated at tax-payer expense. It'd be fiscally foolish to not use this service.

The Vintage Library
Pulps that you can read from all across the web--a great place to start if you want to find out more about the Pulps and what-all goes along with them...

Vintage Pixels
An online database of images, some of which are in the Public Domain, most are available for use, though a few might cost you some cash...

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Revisiting the Public Domain: The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen

The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen

It's not a book in and of itself, but it is a story that you'll find in several old books that collect and anthologize Machen's stories. Maybe you've already read or have heard of this story. Arthur Machen doesn't get anywhere the respect that say H. P. Lovecraft has gotten, nor that Edgar Allen Poe has regained from his sordid trashing by people who should have known better. Instead, Machen remains fairly obscure outside of the usual horror enthusiasts and Mythos-fans. Yes, you can quibble about this author's literary merits or his overall grammatical or structural strengths and/or weaknesses, but who really cares? In an age when the worst grammar and least editorial input seems to be the order of the day for popular best-sellers, arguing about that seems like dusty virgins having a pillow fight in a crumbling Victorian brothel that's on fire, while collapsing into a deep, dark lake. Pointless. In truth, much as The Rock would say: "It doesn't really matter."

What matters about Machen, and most of his contemporaries are their stories. Like Shakespeare said: "The play's the thing." In this case the tales and the ideas and the legacy of their wit, their words, and their writing -- and the weird worlds that they opened up a path for us to go explore after them.

Arthur Machen has many stories well worth examining, and we'll get to a few more before we're through, but for now, we're taking a look at Just One Story in order to see what it holds for us, where it leads onwards, and what hidden things await us within these mostly overlooked and obscure words from very different time...

You can download your own copy of The Inmost Light at Horrormasters, Project Gutenberg (as part of the collection House of Souls), Arthur's Classic Novels, Neotake, Feedbooks, and if you need more options just Google it. You'll find The Inmost Light in several collections. You can also find some music inspired by the story here, if you're in the mood for some sort of accompanying soundtrack.

A Description of the Jewel illuminated by The Inmost Light...

"He hailed the first hansom he could see and drove home, and when he had lit his hanging lamp, and laid his parcel on the table, he paused for a moment, wondering on what strange thing the lamplight would soon shine. He locked his door, and cut the strings, and unfolded the paper layer after layer, and came at last to a small wooden box, simply but solidly made. There was no lock, and Dyson had simply to raise the lid, and as he did so he drew a long breath and started back. The lamp seemed to glimmer feebly like a single candle, but the whole room blazed with light--and not with light alone, but with a thousand colours, with all the glories of some painted window; and upon the walls of his room and on the familiar furniture, the glow flamed back and seemed to flow again to its source, the little wooden box. For there upon a bed of soft wool lay the most splendid jewel, a jewel such as Dyson had never dreamed of, and within it shone the blue of far skies, and the green of the sea by the shore, and the red of the ruby, and deep violet rays, and in the middle of all it seemed aflame as if a fountain of fire rose up, and fell, and rose again with sparks like stars for drops. Dyson gave a long deep sigh, and dropped into his chair, and put his hands over his eyes to think. The jewel was like an opal, but from a long experience of the shop-windows he knew there was no such thing as an opal one-quarter or one-eighth of its size. He looked at the stone again, with a feeling that was almost awe, and placed it gently on the table under the lamp, and watched the wonderful flame that shone and sparkled in its centre, and then turned to the box, curious to know whether it might contain other marvels."

Of course in the story...

"He lifted the bed of wool on which the opal had reclined, and saw beneath, no more jewels, but a little old pocket-book, worn and shabby with use. Dyson opened it at the first leaf, and dropped the book again appalled. He had read the name of the owner, neatly written in blue ink..."

It seems that in these sorts of stories, someone is always finding handy diaries, journals, scrawled notes--that approach is so very common in these sorts of stories that it becomes a parody of itself in The Diary of Alonso Typer where the narrator actually transcribes their screams into the diary in a moment of Monty Python surreality. Thankfully Machen keeps things a bit more sound and reasonable--the journal in question is being offered as a sort of sordid confession, sort of a brutal challenge. Not a spurious, cliched trope that even Monty Python couldn't take seriously any longer...

(We'll be coming back to Alonso Typer another day, and not just to mock his diary...)

Back to Machen and The Inmost Light. The Journal and the Jewel were both contents of a mysterious parcel recovered through a bit of smooth, even bald-faced serendipity that few modern authors would dare to attempt. As the narrator examines the shabby old pocket note-book it reveals some lurid details surrounding the work of its author. Troublesome Things indeed...

"In that work, from which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber)--in its place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself."

This madman is meddling with the very essence of human souls. He's literally extracting the soul-essence from living human beings and has discovered -- surprise -- that something more awful than the horror of death itself enters the vacated body in its place.

Yeah. Didn't see that one coming. Right. Something about vacuums and abhorrence and nature. Duh.

But hey, this explorer of the arcane secrets of life and death, who works diligently, obsessively and even arduously in his cobbled-together 'laboratory' or work-space is a man of science, not some hare-brained alchymist or some half-literate mumbo-jumbo artist with pretensions of being a sorcerer. He's not even an inbred congenital wizard like one of those Whateleys from America. Nope. He's conducting experiments into the nature and chemical composition of the soul, extracting it, weighing it, analyzing it and seeing how it can be stored within a stable vessel outside the human body. But it's not black magic. It's independent scientific inquiry.

But somehow, after reading tons of books and poring over scribbled manuscripts from the children's section of the local library, and after blowing wads of cash on glassware, exotic herbs, more peculiar books (all collectible First Editions to preserve their scientific potency no doubt), the dabbler with things best left untampered with decides he's missing one essential thing in order to really, really go on with his ultra important and incredibly scientific work.

He needs a v~~olunteer from the audience~~, ahem, a human ~~victim accomplice~~ experimental test subject.

So, like any good Victorian man of his station, he brow-beats his wife into obliging him in participating in his 'experiments' as though he were demanding some variation in their sex life.

She breaks down in the obligatory 'weak and overly emotional female' sort of tears and eventual resolution to do what she must for her husband, no matter how half-baked, crack-pot or dangerously demented his 'work' really and truly appears to be.

He removes her soul.

He places it into a synthetic Jewel--the very one that the narrator is fondling even as he reads the shabby journal.

The Inmost Light is the idiotic pseudo-Faust's own wife's soul trapped in a Jewel.

Eeeewwwww.

But of course you saw it coming, didn't you.

Sure you did. Or maybe you thought he was some sort of perv? Well, he pretty much was, when you think about it. Extracting your wife's soul? Putting it into a ~~box~~ Jewel. Just to see if you can do it. And then finding out that something else has entered into her body. Talk about an anti-feminist reverse-Galatea. Wow. That is perverse, in a chilling pre-Stepford kind of way.

To make a short story shorter, something unnatural and weird comes into the wife's body. We don't actually see much of that though, as it mostly takes place off-stage. If you've read Machen's The Great God Pan, then you have a pretty good idea of what was going on. The wife's body and its new occupant take to the streets and start doing all sorts of unspeakably horrific things like holding opinions of their own, speaking bluntly and openly, eschewing the trembling school-girl routine, and generally getting all uppity and difficult and powerful. What a terrifying thing that turned out to be for the wonderful, sensitive husband who only wanted to extract his wife's soul in the name of science.

Like most such stories, it sort of works out in the end. The Jewel gets crushed and the world is made safe from the unspeakable feminist threat once again. But that's the least interesting part of it all.

What would you do with a Jewel containing the extracted essence of another human being? What could you do with such a thing?

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Postmodern and Apochryphal Barsooms

...being a short compilation of resources associated with Mars/Barsoom and how it has evolved into a shared world within the Public Domain and beyond...

Last Updated: April 20, 2011

Postmodern Barsoom, by Den Valdron
A good introductory article that opens the way to Mr. Valdron's more detailed and far more engaging two-parter on all things fictionally martian--

H. G. Well's Barsoom, by Den Valdron

Another rather fine article by Mr. Valdron that further investigates the ongoing admixture and adulteration of Barsoom with Wellsian bits, or is it Well's Mars with Burroughsian pieces? Either way it's a lot of fun and now an established literary tradition, so why not muck about with it a bit yourself?

Apochryphal Barsooms, Part 1, by Den Valdron
Apochryphal Barsooms, Part 2, by Den Valdron
Den Valdron essentially states up front that he considers Barsoom to be a shared world. He backs this premise up with a two-part article that will give you a lot to mull over. He opens some intriguing doors and makes a lot of interesting connections concerning the various fictional approaches to Mars. Very useful stuff if you're at all interested in the roots of the Sword & Planet genre, and would like an expanded palette of literary references with which to experiment and work with on your own Sword & Planet projects.

What We Know of Mars, by Edward S. Holden
This article at ERB-zine has newspaper clippings, picks a fight with Tesla and gives us some nice old fashioned maps of Mars. Well worth taking a look.

Invasive Techniques: An Analysis of the Sarmaks and Other 'Martian Invaders' by Dennis Power and Dr. Peter Coogan.
This is a very wide-ranging article that veers wildly across a wide array of literary universes in its effort to nail down just who, what and where the Martian Invaders from Wells' novel came from--and how they fit into Burrough's Barsoom and other fictional versions of Mars. It's quite a tour de force.

The French Wold Newton Universe: Mars in the Shadows, a Hundred Year Retrospective by Jacques Garin
This is a wonderful reference and resource for getting started with the impressive accumulation of French fictional explorations of Mars. Edgar Allen Poe on Mars is the least of the wonderful oddness involved.

Prisoner of Mars/ War of the Vampires by Gustave Le Rouge
Erloors=bat-winged vampires from Mars who serve a Great Brain. The hero builds a psychic-powered rocket-ship with the help of a friendly Hindu who might or might not have been Captain Nemo in disguise. This is one of those bizarre books that combines science, mysticism, and pulp adventure in equal proportions. A quick review of the combined edition is available at Vintage Pop Fictions, and Black Coat Press has brought out a very nice edition that combines both The Prisoner of Mars and The Vampires of Mars as translated by Brian Stableford. It's $15. Come on.

The Red Star, by Alexander Bogdanov
Introduces the 'etheroneph', a nuclear photonic rocket. Yep. Socialists on Mars, nuclear rockets, murder in space, extreme apathy, and androgynous doctors to help you sleep better on the rocket to Mars. How'd this never set the literary world on fire? This one might have to wait a while. Even advanced insomnia has it's limits...

Principles of Martian Technology (Some Invasion Ideas...)

We recently discovered a rather detailed and wonderfully well-done bit of speculative engineering analysis concerning the technology of the Martians featured in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. You can find it here. We highly recommend it. Unfortunately, this seems to be an archived fragment of something a bit larger in scope. If anyone knows any further details about this seemingly orphaned project, please contact us: netherwerks (at) gmail (dot) com. We'd very much like to find out more about this rather nicely done investigation into the technical aspects behind Mr. Wells' Martians and their technologies. The handwavium-esque 'Viridigen' powersource itself is a touch of genius.

Viridigen not withstanding, there are a few other aspects of Martian Technology that seem to have been lost, forgotten or overlooked in the rush to the Tripods, Cylinders and Heat-Rays.

The Martian Flying Machine(s)

Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It's like a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can't. But nearer--I haven't seen them—' (he counted on his fingers) ‘five days. Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the night before last’--he stopped and spoke impressively—‘it was just a matter of lights, but it was something up in the air. I believe they've built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly.’I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.‘Fly!’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘fly.’

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

It wasn't just something that George Pal dreamed up in his classic 1953 movie. The Martian Flying Machine is in the book. But it only gets mentioned in passing and never really seems to do much more than spread some Black Smoke before the war is over. In fact, the Flying Machine only gets mentioned after the War in an issue of the Daily Mail. And in the version of the story that ran in Pearson's Magazine, it is conjectured that the Martians might not have flown more than 50 miles from London. It is supposed that perhaps the Martians were not able to adapt their Flying Machines to Earth's gravity, air pressure, atmosphere or something like that. It is also possible that the Invaders were caught-up in the throes of an on-going scientific-industrial revolution and only invented the Flying Machines en route to Earth. That opens the door to some wonderful What If? lines of conjecture, such as what else might they have come up with, given more time to fiddle with their slide-rules, erector-sets and lens assemblies?

The Black Smoke
The Black Smoke was delivered by explosive rockets. It is an almost viscous, ink-like vapor that supposedly bonds with Argon in the atmosphere to produce a horribly toxic gas that is almost instantly fatal to all forms of terrestrial life that come into contact with it. The gas is extremely dense, almost fluid-like in its characteristics, and is definitely much heavier than air. One can sometimes escape it by climbing upwards, out of the way of its billowing mass. It forms a nasty black scabrous-scum whenever it comes into contact with water and the Martians were able to clear it away with jets of compressed steam, which reduce it to a soggy gelatinous mass that dries-out into a granular black powder.

We only have Mr. Wells' theory to go on that the Black Smoke actually binds with Argon, but the evidence is grimly clear that the Black Smoke most definitely causes a terrible chemical reaction within its victims that is extremely lethal. This is a terrifying form of chemical weapon that kills on contact, not by inhalation. The primary component of the Black Smoke is unmistakably some heretofore unidentified element that terrestrial science has yet to successfully identify, let alone synthesize. Though there are those making great efforts in this area in numerous locations.

It is possible that some of the 'black tubes' used to launch the rockets carrying the Black Smoke could be recovered from a Cylinder Crash-Site by an intrepid group of adventurers who perhaps were lucky enough to discover a Cylinder that landed poorly, killing its crew. It is also conceivable that a group of freedom fighters might topple a Tripod and be able to strip away some of its armament, such as the black tube rocket launchers (plus the rockets themselves...) or the heat ray mechanisms (parabolic mirror, focusing crystal, power source...), but doing so poses a number of secondary problems such as jury-rigging some means to actually operate the weapons without the intrinsic control mechanisms within a Tripod. But such engineering problems are the meat and drink of stalwart Scientists and Adventurers in the mold of Professor Challenger, Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage or even a Moriarty or Fu Manchu...

The Red Weeds
An often overlooked component to the Martian Invasion is the Red Weed, a biological weapon that was derived from the ultra-dense red weed that grew abundantly on Mars as seen in The Crystal Egg. This fast-growing red plant spreads like super-kudzu, reproducing almost explosively on contact with water and quickly clogging-up rivers, lakes and streams. The Red Weed practically engulfs those areas it is able to take root within, and tends to choke-out the native vegetation. It glows a soft purple at night and can be eaten, but has a metallic taste that tends to discourage most potential grazers or any but the absolutely most desperate diners.

The Red Weed effectively blocked shipping and all waterborne transport. It also could very easily have infiltrated reservoirs and municipal water supplies, cutting off any form of resistance from their supply of water. That makes it a very effective weapon, and more of a threat than even the Black Smoke. Without water, there is no resistance. Perhaps the Martians had some way of extracting the water from the Red Weed, or they had no need for water in the same way that terrestrial biology does, as they tend to be of more sanguinary tastes or proclivities...

The Big Gun on Olympus Mons
The Martian Cylinders have no propulsion units, only a few maneuvering jets at best. They are a one-way delivery vehicle. Each Cylinder is fired out of a massive giga-cannon erected atop Olympus Mons. In certain respects this huge gun resembles the Railway Guns of WWI, only ridiculously more massive and powerful. Later sources have taken to designating the Big Gun as a form of mass driver, but that just doesn't fit with the rest of the technology--it's probably a gigantic cannon. The idea of a gigantic Space Gun isn't just something limited to old science fiction--this is something that very real military money has been spent on and Top Men have investigated on behalf of the United States. But that's getting into the whole black projects end of the conspiracy-nutjob pond and we'll come back to that another day.

Once the Invasion succeeded, the Martians would most likely have built another such mega-cannon on Earth and used it to invade the Moon and possibly Venus, as well as go back to Mars. It would be most unfortunate if the Martians were to discover Cavorite in the course of their depredations and inhuman activities on the Earth. One also has to wonder how they would manage the invasion of the Moon and the attempted subjugation of the Selenites...

The Cylinders

The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to frag- ments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was, however, still so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near approach. A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it had not occurred to him that it might be hollow.

...And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that had been near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated, until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The cylinder was artificial--hollow--with an end that screwed out! Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Big, thermally-insulated bullets approximately 90 feet in diameter, the Cylinders were fired out of a big Space Gun on Olympus Mons and they came to a very abrupt, hard landing just like interplanetary artillery-shells.

The Heat-Ray

It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Whether it is a carbon dioxide laser, a maser, particle beam weapon, or some sort of flame-thrower or babble-onium death-ray, the Heat-Ray used by the Martian Invaders (not the one invented by Archimedes), is an iconic Directed-Energy Ray Weapon. (But you definitely have to use the sound effect from the 1953 movie!)

In the interests of enhanced gaming mayhem, why not randomize the type of weapon each Tripod has equipped?

Random Ray Weapon

Laser
Maser
Particle Beam Weapon (See this article as well...)
Directed Energy Ray Weapon (as seen on The Six Million Dollar Man...)
Death-Ray
Tesla-esque Teleforce Ray Weapon
Heat-Ray
Charged Particle Beam
Super-heated Plasma
Hydrogen Fluoride Laser
Electromagnetic Pulse Weapon
Electrolaser (Lightning Bringer!)
The Obligatory Ray-Gun, only much bigger
Phaser
Disintegrator Ray (...it was good enough for Edison to Conquer Mars...)
X-Ray Lasers
Gas Dynamic Laser
Carbon-Dioxide Laser
Chemical Laser
SASER

For more ideas, go look over the list of fictional Rayguns at wikipedia.

The Fighting Machines / Tripods

Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine-tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Some of the very first Mecha or Land Ironclads/Dreadnoughts in fiction, the hundred-foot-tall Tripods from Wells' novel are iconic harbingers of interplanetary malevolence. Every adaptation and movie has revised and re-imagined the Tripods until now there are dozens of competing, conflicting and sometimes complimentary versions floating about all over the place. Wells describes them as having a brazen hood over the top and they tend to move along at a very speedy clip, out-pacing flocks of birds, for example.

As a bonus--click HERE to go get the plans for building your own paper-miniature version of a Land Ironclad based off of H. G. Wells' story The Land Ironclads.

The Handling Machine

Besides the Tripod-Fighting Machines, the Sarmak/Mucoid/Martian invaders also employed five-legged 'Handling Machines' that are alternately described as being "spider-like," or "crab-like," with many jointed levers and tentacles with which to move things, manipulate things and build the other machines such as the Tripods. They have the uncanny appearance of being almost alive, possibly they are some form of symbiotic or cybernetically-enslaved lower life form domesticated/enslaved and employed by the invaders for brute labor, and as the hands that they lack. If some enterprising group of adventurers were to ~~hijack~~ acquire one of these machines from their masters, it could quite possibly reveal a great number of things about the Sarmak/Mucoids/Martians...

The Embankment or Digging Machine

A gigantic machine used to excavate the pits around the Cylinders and to form earthworks for the Martian invaders. These machine may have been automatons as they are explicitly described as having no pilot or drivers. These machines were often abandoned when the Tripods moved on, though a few were re-directed to work on various secondary projects. They are not described in any real detail within the original novel. Subsequent interpretations seem to favor the form of massive centipede-things, but there is no reason that they couldn't be more along the lines of one of Jules Verne's drill-like machines from Journey to the Center of the Earth. In fact, it might make a very interesting scenario where the Sarmak/Mucoid/Martians are actually trying to invade the Hollow Earth and the surface-world is just something that they need to pass through to get where they are going.

Ulla-ulla-ulla

Public Domain Wargames: Princes, Polearms and (tri)Pods

Wargames. It could easily have been the 'W' entry for this month, but it's not just any old wargames that We're interested in right now. We're interested in Public Domain Wargames. Yep. Free games out on the net that you can download, mix-and-match and rebuild, mod or mash-up to your heart's content.

There are a ton of them.

Just go to the Web Grognard's links page and scroll down until you find the section for Wargame Files: Complete Public Domain / Shareware Wargames.

Under the Board Sub-Category there is a game available titled : Princes of the East.

From their site:
Princes of the East is a political/military game of the period immediately after the first crusade. Each nation strives for supremacy. Only the strongest, most cunning, will leave a legacy of stability and survival for his people.

This game can be played face-to-face or by e-mail. Included are the rules, counters, sheets which allow control of a state, individual named leaders for use as councillors or as generals, tables, expenditure charts and a map of Southern Asia Minor and Northern Syria.

Choose the Principality you wish to rule!

There you go: a free Domain Level Wargame, complete with rules, counters, expenditure charts and more. This might come in handy to a few of our readers.

There is another game there, Plantagenet, that we've downloaded and are looking at as a model for handling dynasties of squabbling nobles. It's a card game, but any card game that includes rules for political shenanigans including assassination is worth a look-see in our books.

If you keep scrolling down past all the other wonderful bits of free wargame-boardgame goodness, you'll come to the Miniatures Section. Ah. Now here are a few intriguing things to lose a few hours in ... uh research, yeah. It's research.

Ahem.

Seeing as there are no entries starting with 'P,' how about we look at 5 randomly selected entries? No, we will not roll dice to pick them. What a bunch of geeks...no, instead we'll look for some stuff that just might be pertinent to the work we've been doing on our Seacrawl for the Sea of Os'r. Maybe we can find some fun stuff to supplement Labyrinth Lord for conducting some adventures and battles out on the High Seas...and we're still hammering away at our Airlord Supplement for Labyrinth Lord as well, so maybe we'll toss in a few air warfare games while we're at it...oooh tanks...

A Few Free Miniatures Wargame Rules at Web Grognard

Battlefleet is a wargame for Pre-Dreadnought sea battles around the 1890-1905 era. A little late in the game, era-wise for us at present, but it is an interesting site and as things develop, this will become more useful no doubt. Gunpowder and technology have a very different line of development in several of our settings, so the notion of running a Pre-Dreadnought naval battle with electrical-steamships and bomber-zeppelins could very well be in our immediate future, so this might be a handy reference/resource for us to develop that sort of thing...
Blue Max/Canvas Eagles looks impressive--but then WWI vintage aircraft have a certain flair and aesthetic appeal to them that is unique and wonderful. The earliest days of the very first combat aircraft are truly strange. They used to toss bricks at one another. Most of the first planes used in warfare didn't even carry guns because no one knew how that'd work out. Then they figured it out. The whole process of trial, error, pilot fatality, new pilot in a new plane, repeat was quite bizarre at times--and very inspirational for gaming purposes.
Combat Wings 12 o'clock takes things a bit farther with the aerial combat that starts in WWI, takes it into the Spanish Civil War and opens the door to all the other cool things that Capitan Games is doing. Interesting stuff. Available in Spanish as well as English.
Grognards & Grenadiers, a card-game/miniatures rules-set for Napoleonics that has one of the best names for an old school miniatures wargame that we've ever seen...
Or how about a happy-go-lucky 2-player game of cards & dice based on the Hundred Year's War?
John Bull, a miniatures game based on the War of 1812. This looks like fun, and it's closer to the sort of gunpowder warfare that we're interested in exploring a bit more in-depth.
Dwarfstar Games -- okay, this one is a bit of a departure, but if you read down this far, you deserve a nice prize--and this site is a very nice prize indeed. These folks are making the old small-box games put out in the very early Eighties by Heritage USA. These games were frikkin cool! You can learn more about them at the DwarfstarFAQ, or just go and download the games and see what you think. Let's see someone bring out something more along these lines as part of the whole OSR-thing. Maybe Raggi will notice this and get inspired. It seems like it would appeal to him...and that would be very, very cool. Just think what he'd do with this concept...
There's Eric Springelkamp's free Naval wargame that covers the 16th to the 19th Centuries in one minimalist set of rules. It looks spartan, at first, but there's a lot of detail packed into this document, and it'd be cool to see what the author might do in terms of expanding the rules back into the 10th-15th Centuries. A great deal of this could get ported over to just about any RPG as the tactical naval warfare sub-system...
Spanish Fury: Sail This looks very promising indeed. 16th Century sailing ships. There appear to be some other expansions/supplements such as This and This, and they are all free, so why not check it out--we certainly intend to do just that! Spanish Fury looks to be a complete set of rules for all forms of warfare in the 16th Century, so it might really be just what we are looking for to expand upon the Archipelago of Alavan and the like.
The there's Trench Storm, a set of 20mm WWI miniatures rules that handles a lot of the trench warfare sort of stuff that we want to expand upon in at least one of our settings--sorcery, psychic powers, gunpowder and weird beasts all make trenches a better defensive effort than abatis or flimsy walls...so they get a lot more developed during what amounts to the early days of gunpowder.

Those are all fun and interesting, and we may have found some stuff to help us further develop some of our current projects, but there's one Public Domain Wargame that really has made an impression on us--H. G. Wells' Little Wars.

Yeah. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine guy. He's going to be popping-up a bit more around here in the coming weeks, along with Machen, Bierce and Hodgson, amongst a few others.

Little Wars is a literally the set of rules that H. G. Wells wrote back in 1913 for playing games with little toy-soldiers/army-men, ahem, Miniatures. This book grew out of Wells' previous effort along these lines called Floor Games. So, not only was Wells a visionary and a science fiction author, he was a wargamer. H. G. Wells was a miniatures enthusiast. A grognard by any other name--Wells was Old School more than sixty years before OD&D even got published.

But wait; it gets better.

Check out A Fistful of Tripods. Really. This is a set of rules for no less than Five different eras of Martian Invasion Miniatures Mayhem based on H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, taking things from the original scenario to a rematch a couple of decades later, on through WWI-style, WWII-style and more Modern-style combat options. Fun stuff.

But there's more. The same folks have developed Tripods & Hussars. Yep. That's right. It's a quicker-playing version of the 1899 period Invasion from Mars pitting Nineteenth Century infantry, cavalry and artillery against the Tripods.

If you want to build your own Tripod for miniatures gaming, check out this article. The guy uses an old computer mouse, some disposable razor-handles and a few other odds-and-end and makes a pretty spiffy-looking Tripod. (http://wargamerondeckca.blogspot.com/2006/09/martians-have-landed.html )

We've spotted a few more Tripods out there like This one and This one, but there don't seem to be too many other options available out there at the moment. But then we found this entry over at the Armchair General's blog for When the Navy Walked. We've been meaning to check that out ever since reading about it at Porky's Expanse. Well, now we have. You should take a look as well. When the Navy Walked is a 'Victorian & Edwardian Science Fiction Wargame in an Age of Steam.' And they are going to be doing Tripods. We like Tripods. Just watch out for the Red Weed...

Wonder how our Mucoids and their Tripods would fare against these newfangled ones? Or against John Christopher's Tripods?

Public Domain Clip-Art: Karen's Whimsy

Medieval Castle Clip-Art from Karen's Whimsy

A lot of bloggers make use of Public Domain Clip-Art, and why not? There are a lot of amazingly good things out there, and many of them are ours to use freely and clearly. So in the next few weeks, we'll be taking a look at some of the handiest, most interesting and useful sites that offer Public Domain Clip-Art for your blog, game or as references and fill-in bits for your own artwork or creative endeavors.

Our first stop is Karen's Whimsy.
(http://karenswhimsy.com/)

Karen's Whimsy offers hundreds of very nice clip-art images that span a wide range of subjects from Animals to Pirate Ships, to Medieval Castles, to a section on the very nice Altered Books produced by Karen herself. There are loads and loads of decent images available at this site and Karen has recently launched a new sub-site devoted to U. S. History Images that might also prove very useful to some of you who are working on projects that aren't quite so medieval...

Monday, April 18, 2011

Old Books: The Lost World

An interesting book by an even more interesting author. The Lost World takes you from London's more fashionably scientifically-oriented drawing rooms and smoke-filled Explorer's Clubs packed with hunting trophies and testosterone, and drops you right in the midst of the Amazon on a plateau (not Leng...though one does wonder...) where the dinosaurs still roam and not a discouraging word is allowed as all must maintain a suitable stiff upper lip. And a loaded high-powered hunting rifle.

When you first look for Sir Arthur's novel, should you ever decide to go do such a thing, you'll find that there are quite a few other entries for Lost World out there. The Lost World page at Wikipedia is rather useful for a jumping-off point to go hare-ing about looking into all the various other forms and versions of the Lost World concept/trope. In fact the Lost World theme is an entire genre unto itself. And it's a very fun one to go exploring as a reader and literarily-excavating as an exercise in data-mining and research as an author/game master/game designer as well. There is also a list of Non-Fictional Lost Worlds at Wikipedia, which we only discovered by chance. That might come in handy down the road...

The Plateau within the Amazon where the Lost World takes place might have been inspired by Mount Roraima, or the tepui or table-top mountains found in South America. It is interesting, and potentially useful to a worldbuilder to take a look at the page on Table (landforms) at Wikipedia in order to get a feel for all the options that are available for developing these sorts of terrains and geographies in a fictional or game-oriented setting. There are such things as tuyas, mesas, potreros, buttes, plateaus, and Fluvial Terraces to consider, many of which we've been adapting for use on Riskail. Plateaus have a lot to offer in terms of creating isolated communities, pockets of lost civilizations or lost races, providing niche ecologies of monstrous survivals from primordial epochs, etc. They're well worth considering in your setting. Look at Blair's excellent Iridium Plateau at Planet Algol for an example.

For $30 you can get your hands on Bradley Deane's article: Imperial Barbarians: Primitive Masculinity in Lost World Fiction via Cambridge Journals Online, or you could save the beer money and go over to Jessica Amanda Salmonson's amazingly erudite and wonderfully useful site Aunt Violet's Book Museum and click on the links she provides to her compilations of reviews and notes regarding various forms of antiquated literature including her very handy Lost Race Check-list, her excellent essay A Meditation on Lost Race Literature, and her piece on Mr. Machen is rather interesting as well--though we'll be getting to Machen soon enough in another post, probably several.

Ahem.

Professor Challenger, the star of the show in the novel The Lost World is one of those daring, dashing, intrepid two-fisted Man Of Science who also happen to be very handy with a rifle. Claude Rains played Prof. Challenger in the 1960 movie (directed by Irwin Allen and including a lot of his infamously over-recycled footage from his various TV productions), John Rhys Davies took up the role in the 1992 adaptation, and Bob Hoskins took over in the 2001 version. The character is right up there with Alan Quartermain, Carnacki, Sherlock Holmes and Lord Greystoke.

Here is how Professor Challenger was described initially in The Lost World:

His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size, which took one's breath away-his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top hat, had I ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard, which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-grey under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.

Now that's one heck of an initial impression. They don't build them quite like that anymore. Perhaps they ought to. Haven't we suffered through enough morally ambiguous whiny weaklings? Where's the great grand-daughter of Professor Challenger? What's she up to these days? Is anyone writing about her adventures? They ought to be. We'd read them. In a heart-beat. Hey, whatever happened to Section Zero--there was a female descendant of Professor Challenger in that super-group...too bad Gorilla Comics folded...maybe we should further develop a few other descendants of the good Professor, possibly as special or Displaced NPCs for various nefarious gaming purposes...the idea does have a lurid sort of Wold Newton allure to it.

You can find out more about the further adventures of the original Professor Challenger, as written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the following links: The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, When the World Screamed, and The Disintegration Machine.

You can read these stories by clicking over to these sites: The Poison Belt at Ye Old Library or Project Gutenberg, The Land of Mist at Classic Literature Library, When the World Screamed at the Classic Literature Library, and The Disintegration Machine, again at the Classic Literature Library site.

The handy Wikipedia page on Professor Challenger also has a lengthy list of Other Author's uses and abuses of Sir Arthur's bombastic master of the direct application of scientifically correct brute force that you can examine and use to rationalize your own use of the guy--or his offspring--in your own stories or game scenarios. He is in the Public Domain, so the issue of canonical depictions and authorized interpretations are not only moot, they're spurious and silly. Anything past Doyle is open to question and completely disposable and eminently dis-regardable. None of it is necessary nor required to be adhered to, nor adopted. It's all subject to your personal veto or emendation, or adaptation depending on how you want to deal with other people's potentially copyrighted sub-creations and spin-offs. Personally, we tend to opt to ignore everything past the original source materials and forge ahead along our own lines, in our own direction. You decide what works best for you.

The Lost World is an amazingly fun romp through the jungle-like backwash of discredited scientific theories that were once taken seriously by very, very earnest authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is a great example of how to further elaborate and expand upon out-moded and exploded, spurious or superceded scientific theories such as the perennial Bierce-Machen-Lovecraft crowd-pleaser about primordial survivals, Preformationism, Aristotelian Physics, Luminiferous Aether, or the Hollow Earth, amongst a plethora of other debunked and discarded theories left lying broken and abandoned along the minefields of scientific orthodoxy and its rigorous enforcement of conformity, compliance and circumspection.

Crack-pottery and pseudoscience can be a writer's and a game designer's and a game master's best friend. All you need is a good guide like Professor Challenger or his grand-niece to lead you through the dense undergrowth to some of the Lost Worlds that have been just waiting to be re-discovered and explored. Just be sure to pack plenty of extra ammo and don't forget your tooth-brush.

There are a lot of other Old Books out there worth taking a look at--and we've just gotten started...

Friday, April 8, 2011

Has Anyone Seen This?

It's a graphic novel based on Edgar Rice Burrough's mostly forgotten/overlooked classic The Outlaw of Torn. Dark Horse is bringing it out, it's $12.99 soft cover & $49.99 limited edition hardcover. We love the Burroughs-ouvre and this sounds cool, but we'll wait until we can see it before we plunk down any money.

Has anyone already seen this thing? What'd you think?

Links to the original story by E. R. Burroughs:

The story is in the Public Domain. It's on our ERB Reading List, right after we finish the Moon Maid trilogy.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Cross-Gen Revived

Marvel Launches Crossgen Imprint in March
This just in from Scoop:

Marvel Comics will launch a new imprint, Crossgen, in March 2011, with two four-issue mini-series, Ruse and Sigil.

Mike Carey (Age of X) and Leonard Kirk (New Mutants) will be the creative team on Sigil #1, and Mark Waid (Stan Lee’s The Traveler) and Mirco Pierfederici (Tron: Original Movie Adaptation) will kick off Ruse #1.

You can read the rest of the Marvel Launches New Cross-Gen Imprint article at the Scoop site.

ABC News covered this matter, So has ComicsNexus, and others will no doubt get vocal as the March debute draws near. This is a fairly big deal as it involves a defunct publisher's relic-IP being ~~zombified~~ resurrected (and Marvel-ized! for your protection & comfort) by Marvel through the back-door of its corporate parent-company Disney. One look at this story and it is apparent to anyone with more than two functional brain cells currently in simultaneous operation that this is a very low-risk test-case scenario for Disney-Marvel. What other old, defunct, gobbled-up properties are there to be re-discovered and trotted out from deep wtihin the recesses of Disney's manifold corporate corpus?

It feels as though Disney/Marvel has been on the verge of becoming the IP-equivalent of Shub Niggurath spewing forth Revised, Revamped, Rebooted, Reconfigured, Ret-Conned and Regurgitated versions of various defunct and assimilated properties for a while now. They have been dipping into the older Atlas stuff that they inherited to develop the intriguingly off-beat quasi-Noir Agents of Atlas, they've reprised and extensively ret-Conned the Invaders (mostly to good effect, though Blazing Skull is NOT Ghost Rider...he's a Tulpa, DUH!) and there are other examples of this sort of thing, too many to fully catalog. DC is doing the same things with Red Circle (which they've assimilated after dropping the Impact line), etc. Maybe it's a competition? Could it be some sort of strange comic book arms-race of obscure and defunct titles/characters being resucitated and sent out to compete in the marketplace-arena of modern comics fandom. It's also a very old, time-honored and integral practice within comics publishing. As one publisher absorbed the defunct, stunned or stone-dead husk of another publisher, they have rebooted and incorporated any of those older characters into the 'current' line-up as they saw fit. Consider Fawcett's characters like Captain Marvel, or Charlton's Blue Beetle or Captain Atom in the DC universe. Look at how DC has brought back a DC-ified relaunch of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. It's an absolutely fascinating ongoing process of tulpa-like evolution and memetic-exchange and re-discovery. Heck, the Blue Beetle had already been handed-off between at least three different publishers before he landed at DC, so at least he's used to this sort of thing.

Shared universes aren't all that new of an idea, and the comics industry has been exploring some rather interesting approaches to reconciling the collision and assimilation/integration of parallel universes and inherited characters for decades now.

What I find most compelling and intriguing about this ongoing cycle of integration and amalgamation is the way it is all managed and directed and driven by market forces, not the creative process. This is a blatant intrusion of economics into the mythosphere and we've pretty much all just taken it for granted. Ho hum. So some obscure nitwit in tights used to be featured in stories put out by this company or that now-defunct publisher and now they're the property of some other company. Yawn. Who cares? Maybe someone ought to care. Like Rupert Murdoch did for news, a few megacorps are swallowing-up the remnants of the past and while they are at it, they are making substantial land-grabs of otherwise Public Domain characters. Older, neglected and lost characters are getting revised by the corporate titans so that they can establish and defend a trademark on characters that they have no more claim to than you or I...but once they have Their Trademarked Version of these characters, it effectively puts a major chill on anyone else's use or devleopment of them. It blocks other expressions, other versions, and makes the process of using these legacy properties/characters more of a mine-field than is ethical, reasonable or right. These are often the same people who preach the gospel of the so-called Free Market and Nonintervention by 'Big Government', despite their lobbying for extensions, protections and special treatment any time it looks like the Copyright Law might finally apply to them. But we can let the rhetoric/non-politics hang. There's work to be done, opportunities to go develop and Amazingly Cool Things to Do.

Companies that have built their fortunes upon the Public Domain ought to respect the source from which their wealth has come and respect the Public Domain. But Disney absolutely does not respect the Public Domain, despite having pilfered it ruthlessly and often from the very beginnings of Walt's non-union shop. It is just plain wrong to base your work on the Public Domain and then prevent anyone else from doing the same in return to your works. I'll refrain from invoking Steamboat Willy. This is a topic that used to get me steamed. Now it's something that I find engages my problem-solving tendencies along fun and potentially productive avenues. Why get het-up when you can do something about it? Look at what Dynamite is doing with Public Domain characters in their incredible Project Superpowers projects like at this Squidoo page, Wikia, or Wikipedia. Things are far from grim. If anything, there's more opportunity to delve into the Public Domain in a really big way now, more than ever before. Besides, time is on the side of the Public Domain. Even Disney will one day find it no longer cost-effective to legally game the system. But that's a tangent, and we can come back to it another day.

Getting back on track with the whole CrossGen/Marvel thing, this reminds me of how DC has been integrating a lot of their inherited properties of late, like the Phantom Lady and Uncle Sam. Over at Wikipedia, you can find a list of Quality, Fawcett & Charlton Characters Who Have Not Appeared in DC Comics Yet. Consider it a checklist that DC editorial will no doubt be examining for ideas soon enough.

It isn't just DC and Marvel that ahve been mining the Obscure and the Forgotten-- Moonstone, Boom! , AC and Dynamite have been bringing back older, often forgotten characters. Some of these are more successful than others, such as the enjoyableThe Last Phantom series from Dynamite. Despite the 'Last' in the title, maybe there's a chance we'll finally see a black Phantom before the next millennium? Who knows. There's a black Heimdall in Thor, so maybe some measure of progress is taking place after all...after a fashion...so to speak...

DC has also incorporated Eisner's The Spirt, Doc Savage, and The Shadow into their universe. Which is not new, either, as both Marvel and DC (as well as Gold Key, Street & Smith, Skylark, Millennium & Dark Horse) have done their own comic book re-interpretations of both Doc Savage and The Shadow over the years. It can get confusing, but there is a wonderful flowchart that maps out how things migrate from Copyrighted to Public Domain that might help out a little. If you care. Which I do.

So. CrossGen is coming back. More or less. This is akin in many respects to the Return of Atlas. Maybe it's a trend? Nah. It's busienss as usual in the Comics Industry, and that makes it all the more interesting and just plain weird all at once. Do petty godlings sit around boardroom tables discussing the relaunch of previously Ragnaroked universes? They do in the Comics Biz. Regularly and often.

What Once Was...

And What Will Be...

and...

Some CrossGen Links

CrossGen at MyComicShop
A site featuring a ton of CrossGen covers
Crossgen Comics site ...which appears to be just a placeholder. Maybe Marvel-Disney need to get their digital ducks in a row, or perhaps they let the domain lapse. I wonder if they'll make an offer or send in the lawyers?
CrossGen at the Big Comicbook Database
A nicely nostalgic article on the Pre-Marvel/Disney CrossGen
Former CrossGen creators speak out
Marvel Exec Tom Brevoort: Marvel to reimagine CrossGen properties
CrossGen Picelist at Top Shelf Comics, for an example--watch those prices now that a new and Marvelified CrossGen is coming...just like how Atlas has seen a slight bump in collector-value...

CamC: Cross-Gen Revived

This just in from Scoop:

Marvel Launches Crossgen Imprint in March
Marvel Comics will launch a new imprint, Crossgen, in March 2011, with two four-issue mini-series, Ruse and Sigil.

Mike Carey (Age of X) and Leonard Kirk (New Mutants) will be the creative team on Sigil #1, and Mark Waid (Stan Lee’s The Traveler) and Mirco Pierfederici (Tron: Original Movie Adaptation) will kick off Ruse #1.