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Showing posts from January, 2014

Interplanetary Flatfoot Sounds Better Than Space Dick!

As implied a few posts earlier here's some of the more interesting pieces of gear used by Dick Tracy. At one point it looked like the Major Crime Unit could take on a banana republic and win. Most of this gears is from the Moon Era where Chester Gould wanted to make Tracy a 'space cop.' This period is either loved or despised. There is no middle ground. I found it fascinating,and maybe it's time to give it another look since many of its themes are more relevant today. Tracy began dealing with a variety of foes who used high tech to commit crimes. Some inventions like the space coupe had devastating potential in the wrong hands and Tracy often had to guard them from crooks. Finally humans were discovered living on the far side of the Moon in a habitable valley and the possibility of crime coming to their utopian world caused no end of twists in this first contact. Yeah I know people on the Moon. Assume it was the doing of the Ancients. They were human too because Junio

Atlantis Rising

Suppose we're playing a supers game. I offer you a pregen character. The character has mid level super strength (not god like but good enough to bend steel, rip through a fortress wall with time etc.), limited invulnerability (bullets sting, a tank gun is still gonna kill you),  the ability to travel at over one hundred miles per hour, and finally limited telepathy. Wait there's more. You have access to the technology of an ancient civilization and its resources in a pinch. You're Aquaman. You need periodic immersion in water (in the old days every hour, nowadays a few hours or days depending on humidity.) Telepathy is mainly the control and communication with marine life. Travel is swimming. So you have fairly rapid travel over 71% of the Earth. The ancient civilization is Atlantis of course several centuries beyond our technology and with some elements of magic. Water breathing supers are something of a joke in role playing games and comic books. Mostly due to 1) li

Tracy-Verse

Okay Mongoose Traveller can run supers (after a fashion.) This set up is a little easier for it. Dick Tracy! Dick Tracy was my all time favorite strip as a boy. I picked it up in the '60's Space era, a time when fans either applauded or loathed the story arc. I couldn't read yet and it looked like a acid trip to a five year old. I was especially amazed and fascinated by the Space Coup and the Moon People. Sadly the strip waned in popularity over the years and eventually was dropped from local papers. After I got on the internet I checked it out occasionally over the years and hated it after Max Collins was taken off writing. I started checking it out again few ekes ago and discover that Joe Staton and Mike Curtis had taken it to new heights (they brought the Space Coup back!) In fact the strip won the 2013 Harvey award for best syndicated strip or panel. What really caught my ey was the crossovers. In the course of a year Tracy dealt with 1) a villain who was implied

Supers Made Real

As I said I've been fiddling around with Traveller and trying to adapt it to a dieselpunk setting. As a side note I was also wondering about how far I could take the Mongoose Traveller system. Could you for example run a supers game with it? The answer after a little thought is a cautious yes. No new rules needed in fact. Think about it. three possible origins for supers can already be handled with the RAW: power armor, cybernetics, and psionics for starters. Add to this the rules for creating aliens and you have genetic experiments as well. depending on what tech level you set the supers' tech to they could be gritty street level types or world beaters (assuming most of the world is TL 7.) Instead of the tech tree becoming a timeline it would become a measure of an individual's brilliance (maybe TL = Intelligence as a rough guide.) Supers would be less freak accidents (although I guess some mutants and spontaneous psi's could creep in) and more national or corporat