Archive Delving - Terror of the Stratosfiend #1

I'm nearing the end of the zines I'd highlighted for this first round of archive delving! Right now my plan is to finish up a few more, and then get to other blogging. Today, I'm reading Terror of the Stratosfiend #1.

Originally, my idea was to go through my crowdfunded zines, with a thought towards the order in which I purchased them. I've pretty well abandoned any hope of chronology here - the first Stratosfiend product I crowdfunded was #2, but I forgot about that entirely, and today my plan was to read through #3. I thought maybe it would be fun to go in with no understanding of what this little series is doing, but when I tried to locate my pdf for #2, I discovered that I also had, somewhere in the past, acquired access to #1. That's a long story just to return to the entirely unsurprising position of starting at the beginning! The important detail is that I cracked open #3 & #2 in that order, and was rebuffed by both of them - I'm sure if I dug in, I'd find the important stuff, but I opted for ease of comprehension.

Terror of the Stratosfiend #1 rewards my decision with an immediate introduction to the central premise - portal weirdness has brought all kinds of horrible things into Earth's orbit, and now it's your problem. It's nice and punchy, and written in a casual style that's fun, and explains two load-bearing proper nouns that were barriers to my jumping into numbers 2 and 3. It's a little funny that the font and table of contents resemble Apocalypse World, but it strikes me that they are maybe playing in similar or adjacent space! The introduction ends with an ominous declaration that the war is no longer Chaos vs Law." and that "It is up to you to determine how this engagement plays out." (before a little "out-of-character" text describing the setting and explaining some character creation choices).

The very first "content" is that collection of new character options. The original version is designed for Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), a name I've often seen but never investigated - my brainspace for OSR & diy elfgame stuff is limited - and I found these iterations to be so fiddly as to seriously damage the likelihood that I will ever read through DCC. That's not a knock against the design, or the implementation of DCC design - some of those fiddly bits sound kind of neat! But I do not have the context to understand precisely what is being signified with, for example, the Sat-Caster's Orbital Tracking roll, or whether the "missile fire attack to track a target"  is the Orbital Tracking roll, or how I would utilize the DCs, etc etc etc. Luckily for me, there's a Troika edition! I think I can tell that they lose something in the translation, but the ease and simplicity of the presentation is hard for me to turn down.

Time for a little sidebar - the character options specify "race". My most generous read on this is that it's meant to play nicely/for fun with the fact that in DCC you choose your character option only upon surviving to level 1, and in the wacky world of the stratosfiends wouldn't it be kind of wild to have your normie guy burst into a funny tentacle alien? It's also surely in conversation with early D&D stuff, where being an elf or dwarf might simply be your class. I have mixed feelings, which would probably be less negative (but not unmixed) if the "half" option had less of an emphasis on street crime. Anyway, it hangs over the rest of my feelings on the character options, which are, for the most part, pretty cool.

The Troika edition specifically includes the two big "plot-relevant" cosmic entities - Sky-Lasher, an orbital weapons satellite that's also an enormous bat deity, and Earth-Mother, a huge monstrosity that might also be a manifestation of the planet. I think this is pretty bold! Definitely a big swing, which I appreciate, and also helpful to me in understanding these characters to better use them in the adventure (/make better sense of what's going on from the descriptors of the other zines).

Up next are several lists of equipment, including a table to roll on for random weapon augmentations. These seem generally fun! Some are kind of zany, like a weapon that can hatch into an alien, or a mod that swaps "melee" and "ranged" on whatever weapon it's used on. It's a pretty good example to me of what I like about an OSR table - just about every entry has the ability to really change your mind about what you're doing, but with varied enough effects that you can't expect a particular kind of outcome. Many of the items are similarly interesting (like a micro-evolution serum, which offers extra dice or an auto-success in Troika, at the cost of strange and likely deleterious mutations). As a little bonus, the narratorial voice returns here to lampshade that none of the weird items have prices.

After this, there's a fairly sizeable spell section - sizeable not because of the volume of spells, but because of how much text they require. Each spell has a manifestation table, a corruption table, a misfire table, and the actual "spell effect" table (plus we get detailed rules for our two patrons, Sky-Lasher and Earth-Mother, as sources of magical power). I think they're a lot of fun, and the manifestations in particular are useful (and often hilarious - like casting one spell by jumping into the air and plunging headfirst into the ground). The gradations of the spell effects are interesting, and do help the spells feel less like pushing a magic button (even the spell for summoning a magical airstrike). But the cost in complexity is definitely high.

The very last content is a bestiary, with our two factions - children of space (aligned with sky-lasher) and children of earth (earth-mother, of course). Unfortunately, these are not as evocative to me! The children of space in particular are kind of tame - there's a weird wolf creature, a multi-armed person, and a big cyclops that regenerates. The earth children are better, and include a ogress who is so beautiful that being killed by her makes you more beautiful too.

That's all! It's fun and wacky, and there's some stuff I can imagine myself using if I were ever playing a science-fantasy kind of thing. I think the setting itself isn't quite what I was imagining at the outset - I think I was hoping for something a little closer to post apocalyptic. This is maybe, like, a Borderlands 1 vs Borderlands 2 kind of thing. At the very least, it convinced me that it might be fun to actually check out Dungeon Crawl Classics, at long last (although right now I don't think I would ever want to actually play it). And it seems like it would be fun to skim through zines 2 & 3. Thanks for some funky vibes, Terror of the Stratosfiend!

What does this mean for our archivery? Well, the romans arrived last weekend - and roll a pretty respectable 37, against our 39! Whew, they're catching up. 9 paragraphs and no rating (I'll have to do something about DTRPG not letting me review stuff), means 50 points! Kind of low... we go up to 410 points, but unless we do something, the romans are gonna start catching up to us.