The John Carter of Mars update post
Okay, so there's this new tabletop RPG called John Carter of Mars that's out (at least in PDF) and which of course I backed because my Inner Child took one look at the KS campaign and promptly went running amok in nothing but a gladiator costume, flip-flops, and waving a wooden sword around giggling like the maniacal little trash panda that he is. The original novels are one of the guilty pleasures of my distant adolescence in a place as strange as Boise, and every so often someone's done something trying to approximate the planetary fantasy that Mr. Burroughs brought to life.
It took me a bit to decide whether or not I was going to do this because a) too many games on the bookshelf already, b) expensive, and c) yet another goofy system which may or may not be a good fit...so this was a gamble, and it was either going to suck or I was going to seize on this and join my Inner Child in running amok. There were a couple of details that sold me on this. First, possibly unlike the last Barsoom-flavored game supplements, this one was working directly with the Burroughs estate. Second, I read a couple of reviews of the 2d20 system and it didn't sound too obnoxiously weird...and I convinced myself that I could always just use the books as source material and do a bit of conversion *cough*7th Sea*cough* if worse came to worst. And third, the miniatures being done as a companion made it very, very clear that the gals of Barsoom were going to be very much self-rescuing badasses in their own right. That's right, people, the Incomparable is packing heat!
(On the miniatures themselves--overall they look fantastic, and the Greens and assorted Beasties look just about perfect. Oddly enough, the Helium and Zodangan squads in the mix both have the same gender lineup, and in both cases it's the gals with the radium rifles. I hope they have plans to change that at some point so that we get some gals with blades and guys with rifles. And I'm not sure we got any tomboy Greens in the mix, although Soja got unlocked so that's something. That said I actually don't like the miniature they did for John Carter. I just can't take him seriously with those sideburns. They fit, they're pretty accurate, but boy do they look kinda silly to me.)
I ended up just going with the PDF backing because the shipping cost for dice and books and all from Merrie Olde Englande to here would have pretty much doubled the pledge amount I was originally considering...but hardcopy and minis are all on my 'eventual' list now, because this game is almost everything I wanted and mostly avoids what I didn't. But that's kind of all beside the point, because there's a Part B to this post.
Bish would have loved this. If there's a kick in the teeth involved, it's the knowledge that one of the people I would most have wanted to share this game with didn't live to hear about it. So I kind of has a melancholy about this, as awesome as it is. Indeed, in the project we were writing up when she died, her main character was technically a Red Martian lass with a piratical bent...so when I work out my own wickedly panda-tastic variation for in-house use (which will be a doozy, and will have a personal love letter to the Asari and the Nendo-kata, and will be set long, long, long after the Jeddak of Jeddaks era of play) I will have to make sure I put her character into the mix.
It took me a bit to decide whether or not I was going to do this because a) too many games on the bookshelf already, b) expensive, and c) yet another goofy system which may or may not be a good fit...so this was a gamble, and it was either going to suck or I was going to seize on this and join my Inner Child in running amok. There were a couple of details that sold me on this. First, possibly unlike the last Barsoom-flavored game supplements, this one was working directly with the Burroughs estate. Second, I read a couple of reviews of the 2d20 system and it didn't sound too obnoxiously weird...and I convinced myself that I could always just use the books as source material and do a bit of conversion *cough*7th Sea*cough* if worse came to worst. And third, the miniatures being done as a companion made it very, very clear that the gals of Barsoom were going to be very much self-rescuing badasses in their own right. That's right, people, the Incomparable is packing heat!
(On the miniatures themselves--overall they look fantastic, and the Greens and assorted Beasties look just about perfect. Oddly enough, the Helium and Zodangan squads in the mix both have the same gender lineup, and in both cases it's the gals with the radium rifles. I hope they have plans to change that at some point so that we get some gals with blades and guys with rifles. And I'm not sure we got any tomboy Greens in the mix, although Soja got unlocked so that's something. That said I actually don't like the miniature they did for John Carter. I just can't take him seriously with those sideburns. They fit, they're pretty accurate, but boy do they look kinda silly to me.)
I ended up just going with the PDF backing because the shipping cost for dice and books and all from Merrie Olde Englande to here would have pretty much doubled the pledge amount I was originally considering...but hardcopy and minis are all on my 'eventual' list now, because this game is almost everything I wanted and mostly avoids what I didn't. But that's kind of all beside the point, because there's a Part B to this post.
Bish would have loved this. If there's a kick in the teeth involved, it's the knowledge that one of the people I would most have wanted to share this game with didn't live to hear about it. So I kind of has a melancholy about this, as awesome as it is. Indeed, in the project we were writing up when she died, her main character was technically a Red Martian lass with a piratical bent...so when I work out my own wickedly panda-tastic variation for in-house use (which will be a doozy, and will have a personal love letter to the Asari and the Nendo-kata, and will be set long, long, long after the Jeddak of Jeddaks era of play) I will have to make sure I put her character into the mix.
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