Original Roleplaying Concepts
This is going to irritate some people, but no honest discussion about the BECMI Basic set can occur without a mention of the doomed cleric Aleena and Women in Refrigerators. 
However, no matter what the character (a fighter, and a male one as depicted in the art) does, Aleena will die.
Aleena and Baron SherlaneMy Own Takes and What Would I Do?
The Player's Book is 64 pages, color art cover, black & white interior art.
The Dungeon Master's book is 48 pages, color art cover, black & white interior art.
Grimlock
1960 Morlocks
1978 Morlock
Grimlocks from Charmed 
Name: Unremembered
What is it?
What is it?
Brutal Imperilment in the Bag of Infinite Holding is a short and clever, if slightly silly scenario for the fantasy roleplaying game of your choice. Published by Mottokrosh Machinations, it is nominally written for use with Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm, but in terms of mechanics, it is all but systemless. Certainly, it would work with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition and any number of Old School Renaissance retroclones or roleplaying games which involve high magic. The set-up is very simple. The Queen has lost her prized possessions—the crown jewels and her beloved poodle, Duchess—and she charges the Player Characters with their retrieval. She may even accompany them! That sounds simple enough, but nothing about this situation is so, for the Queen happened to lose both of them into her magical Bag of Infinite Holding!Michael Grasso / May 28, 2020
Detail from cover of issue No. 1 of “Mysteria,” a German “trade magazine for UFO research and ancient astronautics.”
Part of the “unprecedented” reality that humanity has been experiencing the past couple of months has been the way this pandemic has scrambled one’s normal cognitive pathways. Putting aside how badly my remotely-diagnosed COVID infection last month sent me into a deep spiral of brain fog, even since recovering from that misery I haven’t been able to concentrate on much. For a while, reading anything more complicated than a comic book was completely beyond me. And even as I’ve been slotting longer books back into my everyday routines, it’s been nearly impossible for me to write. Even when I find a topic that speaks to me, every single piece I’ve tried to start has withered on the vine. “Why bother?” I find myself asking myself. “Who cares?” Mental illness will steal a lot from you if you are unlucky enough to have it play a prominent role in your life: your time, your pride in your labor, your self-respect, even your friends and significant others. But what it seems to steal from me most often—even under “normal,” non-pandemic circumstances—is joy, the joy of discovering something amazing and getting to share that discovery with others. With existential anxiety stalking the human race along with this deadly virus, those simple pleasures of life have been so hard to find.
So when I was reminded last week of a link to an amazing archive of UFO organizations’ publications and zines hosted by the Archives For The Unexplained of Norrköping, Sweden, I was gifted with a brief afternoon of respite, a momentary return of long lost joy. When I’d first glimpsed the archive back in October of last year, I had a brief breeze through it. I was overwhelmed by the variety and relatively secure in the possibility that it would be there if I ever wanted to revisit it. This month, the archive was there for me when I needed it. I discovered over the course of that afternoon that this collection’s cockeyed series of hand-drawn flying saucer encounters and alien visitors, its poorly mocked-up layouts and headlines, its entirely sui generis outsider art vibe—all of it was medicine for the despair and crushing lack of a hope that was ailing me.
I think part of the profound impact of this archive is the way I found it, from an off-handed mention in a tweet that had made its way to me through academic folklore studies circles. But it’s often those accidental discoveries that have sent me down the most satisfying paths while I’ve been writing for Mutants. It’s how I discovered video of the uncanny Nebraska PBS performance by Entourage: after reading a Pitchfork review of a reissue of their albums. It’s how I discovered so many great Mutants exhibit subjects on the Internet Archive, and how I discovered yet another inspirational ufological archive, at textfiles.com. So yes, when I rediscovered this archive I dove in head-first, marveling at the dozens of countries these UFO zines came from, the impressive time period they represented (all the way from the 1950s to the 21st century), and the care that had been taken in assembling and scanning them. Since the original link had gone to a featureless web directory page, I never even bothered back in October to investigate fully who had collected and assembled this amazing archive. This time however, that was the first thing I wanted to find out.
As mentioned, this trove of treasure was preserved for posterity by the Archives of the Unexplained in Norrköping, Sweden. Formerly known as the Archives For UFO Research, the organization was founded in 1973 specifically to collect and preserve an archive and library of UFO sightings and ephemera for researchers. It is also connected to one of those very UFO research organizations whose magazines and periodicals I had fallen in love with last October. The AFU’s founders had broken away from a ufological group called UFO-Sweden over differences in “ideology” to found the AFU. By 1986, that rift was reconciled and UFO-Sweden and AFU agreed to a reciprocal agreement of support that would see AFU preserve UFO-Sweden’s archives full of materials from over a hundred local UFO-Sweden groups. But AFU preserves far more than materials from its native Sweden. UFO documentation from dozens of countries finds representation in both its material and online archives.
And that sort of local, bespoke interest in UFOs is precisely what makes AFU’s archive of magazines so special. I of course restricted myself to UFO zines produced during our usual Cold War period in preparing this piece, but you can find plenty of later material from the dawn of the home computer “desktop publishing” era of the ’90s and beyond. Needless to say, while they have their own charming aesthetic, I was won over by the hand-layout and manifold typewriter typefaces of the zines from the 1950s to 1980s. Some of the covers of these periodicals, especially the ones produced in the 1950s, display a strikingly professional sense of artistic composition on par with their bigger competitors of the early UFO era, such as Fate magazine. Of course, the AFU magazine archive is far too vast for me to give a review of every single periodical in there. But despite the startling diversity, both culturally and philosophically, on display, it’s the commonalities between all these organizations that pleased me the most. While the magazines themselves vary—from very simple typewritten and mimeographed/photocopied bulletins to quite professionally-produced full-color magazines—the common thread linking these publications is their passion and obsession for a subject that, one senses after reading a few of the articles and editorials within, has largely left them on the outside of the mainstream.
Because despite some of these publications representing the official organs of “national” UFO organizations like UFO-Sweden, the vast majority represent UFO aficionados on the state/provincial/county/city level. You may well wonder if there was enough content to keep a magazine like “Merseyside UFO Bulletin” or “UFO-Quebec” or the “Sri Lanka UFO Register” going for longer than a couple of issues, but even some of these smaller local publications went on for a decade or more! And in the archives of each, you get these magnificent glimpses of local culture, UFO or otherwise. I had a blast reviewing the archives of the two-page MUFON Massachusetts newsletter from the early 1980s, of course, a time and place where I myself was getting deeply into ufology as a little kid. Seeing the quotidian details of the Mass. MUFON group—their fundraising efforts, convention organizational efforts, meeting minutes, appearances on local Boston television (these were especially exciting for me, of course), and indeed the gradual maturity of their merrily amateurish newsletter layout skills—sent me back in time and made me feel like I was part of the team. On the flip side, you have more eerie dispatches from the past, such as the silent testament of the brief run of UFO Chile abruptly ending in May of 1969—poignant because we know what transpired a few short years thereafter.
These are mostly small clubs of like-minded individuals, all doing their best to keep track of local UFO happenings and dutifully preserving those records for posterity. And on the masthead of a majority of these zines, in all the languages of the world, there is a consistent clarion call: please make contact. Not a message to our alien visitors, mind you, but to the publishers and clubs of enthusiasts all over the world. Please reach out, please make a connection. Several of the publications in non-English-speaking nations produced separate English-language editions of their bulletins expressly for this purpose. And I think this aspect of the AFU archive is why it spoke to me so deeply and meaningfully in a time of quarantine and lockdown. Here is a global subculture, in the days before wide adoption of the internet, which ends up assembling and organizing itself in a modular, fractal, rhizomatic manner. Here, despite all odds and with very little in the way of resources either professional or financial, small groups banded together over a shared occult interest, one that likely exposed many of their members to mockery and derision. They not only found each other on the local level but produced collectively a massive, tangible archive that serves as a testament to a Cold War-era social phenomenon. It is an archive with real, profound historical value.
These magazines reached across the oceans and continents in a time when the only means of communication UFO enthusiasts had at their disposal were the national postal service and maybe some stolen Xerox machine time at the office. A sense of community, however dispersed and fragmentary, was what these ufologists really sought—the visitors in flying discs are almost incidental. One wonders if the lesson of the UFO craze is not its possible origins as an intel operation meant to distract citizens of the West from experimental machines of war, but instead perhaps its subsequent co-optation by ufologists into an exploration of the potential of global togetherness and understanding. It’s an historical example of a kind of virtual community spontaneously forming, triumphing over distance and very long odds, that really hits home at a time when we’re all lucky enough to have a global communications network at our disposal, and yet are still somehow feeling only tenuously connected to each other. In these wonderfully weird artifacts of the past, we gain a new perspective on community for our increasingly troubled present.
Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.
Abigail Bellweather
Tally CravenTally comes from the depleted Craven line. All her aunts had gone to fight in the Army and they all died. She is the last of her line. She lived in the Matrifocal Allotment near Sacramento, California. She had not even seen a male until she answered her call of duty, an action her mother strongly wished her not to do. Her power is to "see." She can detect disguised and hidden objects or people and might be one of the most powerful seers to come up in the ranks in a long time.
Raelle CollarRaelle lived in the part of American known as the Chippewa Cession where the Indigenous Tribal Federations are. She is a healer of great power, like her mother was. Her mother was reported dead by the Army and Raelle blames the Army and Gen. Bellweather in particular. She doesn't want to be there and her plan was get enlisted to the infantry and get killed as soon as possible. Her attitude earned her the nickname "shitbird" from Abby.
Scylla RamshornScylla is a "Necro" or a Necromancer. Because their power makes others uneasy they are quartered in a different part of the base. We learn that Scylla's parents were killed when she was young. She meets and falls in love with Raelle. Later we find out she is part of the terrorist organization known as The Spree, responsible for hundreds of deaths across the country. Her job was to recruit Raelle, but she actually fell in love with her.
I like to think I have some solid talents. I am at an age where I know what I can do well and what I still need to learn how to do better. And what I am terrible at.
Let's move Threnody to the front.
Not sure why her hair lost it color, but that is not a big deal.Other Packs give you the option of making character portraits or monsters.
Chrome vs. Windows 10The big thing that caught my eye was their full Commercial License. Yup, if I want to create some art here and add to one of my books I can do that! It won't (nor is it intended to) replace an artist, but it will give me some spot art or filler art for characters. Especially the portrait options.
Mike Apichella / May 26, 2020
Detail from the cover of The ‘Nam #24, November, 1988
The Reagan-worshiping, Polo-drenched patriotism of the 1980s couldn’t hide the scars left by the Vietnam War. An entire generation grew up with nightly news reports sporting brutal images of guerilla warfare and violent political demonstrations. The confusion left by Vietnam caused moral perceptions of American wars and soldiers to become complicated and uncertain. Cultural ephemera in the ‘80s reflected this ambiguity across all media. More than a decade to meditate on Vietnam through books (Born on the Fourth of July, The Best and the Brightest), film (Coming Home, Apocalypse Now), and both mainstream and underground journalism led to the conclusion that there were no longer concise justifications for large scale armed conflicts. Even garden variety action fare like the Rambo films and the A-Team TV series had protagonists embodying the “crazy Vietnam vet” stereotype.
Objective definitions of right and wrong attached to previous “popular wars”—especially World War II, which gave rise to the first war comics and mass-produced war toys—no longer applied. Trusted storytelling tropes faded away as war’s questionable nature became a muse for artists seeking to portray the reality of battle minus vainglorious machismo and nationalism.
‘80s comic books were no different than any other medium. Marvel Comics’ The ‘Nam, DC’s G.I. Combat and Weird War Tales, and Charlton’s Battlefield Action eschewed “feel good” war stories in order to focus on the far-reaching consequences of physical violence, the shifty political motives of the Cold War, and the universal philosophies that define military service. With the exception of The ‘Nam, most mainstream ’80s war comics were created by artists who were WWII veterans and aging members of the “Greatest Generation.” Even though they never made overt anti-war propaganda, Sam Glanzman, Robert Kanigher, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, and many others went out of their way to present war as a negative element of society. There’s nothing cold and heartless about their work, but there is always a sense that something is being held back. While The ‘Nam was biting anti-war criticism, the rest of these books gave voice to the confused masses who had yet to take a side in the struggle for peace.
The quintessential ‘80s war comic is the 255th issue of DC’s anthology title G.I. Combat. The series began publication in the ’50s as a conventional war book with a clear pro-war stance. During its final years it developed a much more nuanced perspective. The Joe Kubert cover art for #255 shows a grisly flaming skeleton dressed in a soldier’s uniform standing in the turret of a tank as two helpless infantry men look on, consumed by horror and fear. Before you even open to the first page it’s clear that American military might will not be this issue’s dominant theme. The burned up corpse comes from the book’s final story, “Dead Letter Office,” by Robert Kanigher and Sam Glanzman. By the time of the issue’s winter 1983 publication, Kanigher and Glanzman had become sequential art’s premier war story team, with careers that spanned more than 40 years in mainstream comics.
“Dead Letter Office” is a seven page tale about Army Captain J.J. Jamison, a World War II officer assigned the thankless, heartbreaking job of composing letters to combat fatalities’ next of kin. It depicts the CO’s angst as he futilely attempts to keep emotional distance from the job while the death toll symbolically piles up in his office (nicknamed the dead letter office). Day after day stacks of casualty reports spill on to Jamison‘s desk, overflowing with all the warm sentiment of a corporate paper trail.
When a young soldier and his comrades are killed during a fierce tank battle, Captain Jamison suffers a moral crisis while attempting to write a letter that gives the soldiers’ story a heroic spin. It feels like Kanigher and Glanzman are describing themselves when they reveal the captain’s plight as a messenger who must document gory death in patriotic language that’s socially acceptable—or bear the burden that comes with an uncensored account of war’s power to twist bodies and minds beyond recognition.
Many of the latter G.I. Combat stories are poetic and heartbreaking, but none more so than “Debt Of Honor,” another Kanigher/Glanzman piece and the opening tale in G.I. Combat #255. Spoilers abound in any attempt to sum it up, but it’s safe to say that the hardest hitting element is the story’s ability to convey tragedy without visuals, a breathtaking feat for a medium driven by illustration. In “Debt Of Honor,” the reader’s own preconceived notions of violence, evil, love, reverie, and loss serve the same purpose as a pen, a pencil, or a typewriter. The story’s tragic elements are as old as war itself, and they remain as relevant now as they have always been.
A few months after G.I. Combat #255 hit the newsstands, Charlton Comics published the 83rd and 84th issues of their war anthology Battlefield Action. The two comics were entirely comprised of true stories written and drawn by veterans of World War II and the Korean conflict. These originally appeared in the pages of an innovative but obscure 1950s comic book called Foxhole, whose primary creators were none other than comics legends Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. In the ‘80s, Charlton was the biggest little indie publisher in the business, barely staying afloat financially and mainly reprinting material from their halcyon days. Even within a glut of reprint books, these Foxhole stories were exceptional. First and foremost, prior to the publication of Battlefield Action issues #83 and #84, the company had never made a focused effort to reprint material from one specific war series. Charlton’s creative core at the time included editors George Wildman (a veteran of both WWII and the Korean War) and Bill Pearson, a multimedia artist who got his start as a fanzine contributor for the Wally Wood publication witzend.
Battlefield Action #84, December, 1983
It’s anyone’s guess as to why Wildman and Pearson felt these books deserved a retrospective, but there’s no doubt that Foxhole didn’t get a fair shake in its original run. Early issues of the title appeared in 1954 and were published by Mainline, one of the many comic book companies whose sales were crushed by the censorship and witch-hunt tactics of child psychologist Frederic Wertham and his infamous anti-comic book rant Seduction Of The Innocent (1954). When Mainline went under, Charlton swooped in to scavenge the copyrights of their unpublished comics, which in the case of Foxhole applied to the last three issues of the series. Like The ‘Nam, Foxhole presented a distinctly unglamorous vision of war. Because it centered around WWII and the early days of the Cold War, the title had no acidic streak of anti-war sentiment, but nonetheless its stories expressed pain and tragedy in a way that was much more palpable than anything in either The ‘Nam or G.I. Combat. These true anecdotes were illuminated by informality and confessional intimacy. Despite rarely breaking seven or eight pages, they overflowed with character development and nuance.
Foxhole avoided any over-the-top reverence for the American military. It depicted war with stark realism and little else. Consequently, it only lasted for seven issues. Thought provoking stories like Jack Kirby’s “Listen To The Boidie” and Art Gates’ “Kamikaze Joe” struck a chord with fans in the post-Vietnam era, but they were freakish upon arrival in the mid-’50s, a period when G-rated pablum dominated comics as a result of Seduction Of The Innocent.
At the opposite end of the spectrum was Weird War Tales. Like G.I. Combat, this was a long running DC publication. The eccentric comic’s name says it all. The book featured supernatural fantasies set in war time (narrated by The Grim Reaper dressed in army fatigues) and serialized genre mashups starring G.I. Robot and The Creature Commandos. “The Day After Doomsday” was another serialized feature in WWT. Its post-apocalyptic narrative took place during the first days of The Great Disaster (a catastrophe made famous by Kirby in his dystopian DC title Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth). Throughout its run, “The Day After Doomsday” possessed an emotional complexity identical to that of many ‘80s war comics, even though its first installments were published in the early ‘70s.
Issue #124 (June 1983) was the final issue of Weird War Tales, and it included a lengthy work called “Old Enemies Never Die,” Robert Kanigher’s abstract take on the origins of war and violence. This mythic saga follows the endless rivalry of two warriors who experience cyclic death and reincarnation beginning in the days of Attila The Hun and ending in the distant future. Its filled with dreamy images created by the young art team of Topper Helmers and Gary Martin; their approach owed less to the hard-boiled impressionism of Kubert and Glanzman than it did to the sword and sorcery works of Wendy Pini, Tom Mandrake, and Ernie Colon. “Old Enemies Never Die” was also unique for its cryptic references to some of combat’s root causes: machismo, competition, greed, and the monetary system. Violence spirals out of control through time and space at the turn of each page. An Edenic paradise makes a cameo in the story’s final moments, but there’s no concrete ending. Kanigher viewed war’s destruction as an omnipotent force. “Old Enemies Never Die” may not have been the first effort to seamlessly connect war, mysticism, and social anthropology, but it is one of the most politically subversive comic stories to focus on that strange trinity.
The ‘Nam #3, February, 1987
In 1986, Marvel debuted The ‘Nam, an extraordinary piece of historical fiction, one of the most critically acclaimed comics of the ‘80s, and one of the first mainstream series to portray the Vietnam conflict in a negative light. Before The ‘Nam began publication, its principal artist, Michael Golden, had been working on a variety of superhero and fantasy titles, most famously on the sometimes Swiftian Micronauts series, which he co-created in the late ‘70s. The ‘Nam‘s writer was newcomer Doug Murray, an American army veteran who had been a non-commissioned officer in Vietnam. After the war he worked writing articles in fanzines and the short-lived film publication The Monster Times. In 1984, a friend who was an editor at Marvel convinced Murray to collaborate with Golden on a series of Vietnam-themed short stories for the anthology comic Savage Tales. Titled “5th To The 1st,” this series would eventually transform into The ‘Nam.
Murray’s editor friend at Marvel was Larry Hama, a comic pro and fellow Vietnam vet who got his big break in the ‘70s when he was hired by Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates. Hama became a fan favorite as the writer/co-creator of the G.I. Joe series, which was inspired by a popular line of Hasbro action figures. Though G.I. Joe did have strong military themes, the book followed the adventures of an espionage organization that battled terrorists, robots, and super villains, but rarely fought in any real or imaginary wars. This conventional escapism had little in common with the gritty dramas that Murray and Golden were crafting.
The ‘Nam pulled no punches in its hopeless depiction of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of The U.S. Army’s 23rd Infantry. Only a handful of characters come even close to being sympathetic. They’re a rough bunch—conniving and power-hungry top brass, disgruntled noncom’s, and square pegs constantly at odds with Army bureaucracy. They aggressively avoid understanding the purpose of America’s bloodiest Cold War police action, sometimes to save their own sanity, other times because they simply don’t care. In each case it’s a strategic apathy born of American exceptionalism, something that infects every plot point. The PANV and Viet Cong, too, are presented as restless generators of violence. In The ‘Nam, war is never honorable; it’s just an irritating chore that ends human beings.
Golden’s artwork owes a lot to Will Eisner, as he often draws in a caricature style that’s more grotesque than funny, a quality that reinforces the overwhelming atmosphere of dehumanization fostered by Murray’s minimal use of dialogue and narration. It may have been cutting edge in the ‘80s, but by today’s standards the series’ harsh tone could be misinterpreted as insensitive and politically incorrect. As an exploration of pragmatism’s role in the war, The ‘Nam never defends any clear definition of right or wrong. Murray and Golden didn’t set out to make a political statement with the title, instead claiming that a desire for heightened realism was their goal. Regardless, the book’s blurred morality only makes war feel ugly and evil.
Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.
