So, I've been doing some gaming in between other things...

... and maybe people will be amused to hear it.

Both games I'm currently in are being run by my son Christopher. Yes, some of you remember he was a baby not all that long ag... holy crap he's like 22??? So yeah, he's the GM for several games, and I'm in two of them.

Both are set in his own unique world which is a postapocalyptic world with magic. One might describe it as "Fallout meets D&D" without being too far off. Although the apocalypse in this one was partly an alien invasion by bunny people from the Moon (well, Mars, and before then farther away) and partly the disastrous return of magical powers to the world. It's now a few centuries after, and the ruins of New York have become the center of a new metropolis called Robertsville, and San Deigo is a smaller but still fairly large settlement called Seijin Deigo. But these are islands of technology (and magic, and technomancy, and clerical powers...) in what is still a mostly wild and unsettled world. Magic is so widespread and unpredictable that not only has it caused large numbers of magical creatures to appear and even the land to be transformed, but also things can sometimes spontaneously gain life, and even intelligence -- up to and including simple objects like paperclips.

The longer-running campaign is set mostly around Seijin Deigo. My character is Kalama Lightfingers, once a street urchin in Robertsville, brought home and adopted by Lenneth, a magician who gave her adopted daughter a safe and happy childhood -- leading to Kalama deciding to be Just Like Mom and become a mage. Well, not QUITE like mom, because Kalama also became obsessed with ancient tales of heroes ("Ancient" meaning "stuff that was widespread enough to survive the apocalypse, so all the best media, like Marvel's movies...") and identifies with (and sometimes quotes) heroes like Doctor Strange and Spider-Man and Princess-Senator-General Organa and Conan and...

Kalama was therefore excited by her mother's history of "helping out" in some of the difficulties in the last 20 years, and was determined to become a hero-adventurer. Seeing she couldn't be dissuaded from that, her mother arranged for her to take a journey to Coyote's Well, a smaller town some distance from Seijin, where an acquaintance of her mother might be able to give her a taste of that life without, maybe, killing her.

Kalama found the adventurer's life both more terrifying and more exhilarating than she'd imagined, and gained two strong companions: Rockie, an intelligent tortoise who is essentially a ki-using monk (following the Way of the Dandelion, though we suspect she prefers ANOTHER kind of weed), and Ignatius, a warrior who is not as human as he appears. A couple other characters have also been part of the party at different points.

At this point, Kalama and her friends have found that a lot of the bad things that have been going on for the past fifteen or twenty years are all connected to the machinations of two demons, named Tenebreous and Infernum, and their allies, and they've finally gotten to the point that these two baddies have started to take the party very seriously (they've recently achieved 13th-14th level). During their adventures, Kalama's developed her own magical signatures, including anime-themed detonation spells and corgi-themed summons (she's summoned a Celestial Dire Corgi, a Corgi Archon, a Corgi Air Elemental, and an Ankylocorgi, and plans one day to summon Corgberus, Guardian of the Gates of HFIL).

 

The other game started on Martha's Vineyard and just recently moved to the mainland (around Yarmouth on the cape). My character? Conan. Yes, the actual one, from Cimmeria. He doesn't know how he got there, and his memories are kind of wonky; he sometimes remembers things that imply he had a career decades long, other times feels like he just left Cimmeria itself a year or so ago. Still, despite his skills appearing to be more consistent with the latter evaluation, he's a formidable force, and is now partnered with two strange companions: Rakor, a "mystic" who has a talent for illusions and some particularly powerful magics against the dead that walk, and "B4", a strange child -- perhaps 12 or so -- who recently escaped some kind of imprisonment. (she is actually one of the results of a program to develop living psionic/mystical weapons, and she has some formidable psionic abilities).

 

Conan is somewhat ill-at-ease in this world, as he's increasingly discovering it's very, VERY different from anything he knew or had heard of, but he is, at least, comforted to know that no matter how odd the world may be, there's still a place for a very large man with a large axe and the skill to use it...

And the legend is gone...

Stan "The Man" Lee is dead at 95.

If you'd asked me in the 1990s how influential Stan Lee was, I might have waffled. I mean, he was one of the creators and promoters of some of the greatest comic-book heroes, but comics were on the decline, and hey, movie attempts to do comic books had mostly fallen flat or worse than flat (1990 Captain America movie, dear god).

But today? Stan became the face of one of the most powerful media forces on the planet, and he and Marvel did something NEW -- create a full cinematic universe across multiple titles that were still interconnected. It had never been done, never been TRIED. And they succeeded, and their competition is still floundering, trying to figure out how to bottle the same lightning.

Stan and his Bullpen created some of the most iconic characters the world has yet seen, and some which directly spoke to me many times -- Thor, Spider-Man, and Captain America most often.

And he had a sense of timing and humor that showed through in the many cameos for the Marvel films -- themselves a fascinating and very amusing innovation in the film world. (not that cameos hadn't been done before, but the number of them across all those films, connecting them by that specific voice and face, that hadn't been; closest might have been Hitchcock's appearances in his own movies, but these weren't all Stan's movies; they were simply movies that had some of Stan in them.)

 

A salute and EXCELSIOR! to The Man.