Very Very Frightening, Me

Bearing in mind that (1) the Sentry has always been a terrible concept, and (b) the whole "there are no Avengers" premise doesn't really convince given that we've seen at least one working version of the Avengers since Endgame, Thunderbolts* is really quite good!

It's interesting and (very) weird and funny and sad and it's about something, depression mainly. David Harbour, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Wyatt Russell are pretty good, but the standout is Florence Pugh, who is excellent and very nearly steals the film and turns it into Black Widow II Plus Some Supporting Guys I Guess.

It's a shame it didn't do better in cinemas, but I can sort of see why it didn't. It's almost like an anti-Marvel movie, a sometimes low-key, almost "small", film about a bunch of really quite rubbish "heroes" who accidentally become a team; in that way it's perhaps more accurate to call them the Defenders.

(Ha ha. Comics joke.)

Yes, the comic Thunderbolts have a better, more clever, origin, but I can see why we didn't, perhaps couldn't*, get that in the MCU.

I liked it! A lot!

(Except for Sentry, he's still terrible.)

M People

I was noodling around with a project yesterday and realised that a lot of my favourite D&D-type monsters begin with the letter "M". So in the spirit of those old "make a campaign from only ten monsters" or "only use the Fiend Folio" posts of yore, let's see what's brought to us today by the letter "M"!

We will be using the AD&D2 Monstrous Manual, of course, for it is the best of the D&D monster books that isn't the Fiend Folio. Onward!

Mammal. An inauspicious start, but we have Ape, Carnivorous and Gorilla in there, so there's some pulpy potential.

Manscorpion. Not bad. Monstrous creepy hybrid bastards. Intelligent enough to have a society, and with manscorpion wizards! Nice and pulpy. I'd perhaps give them a tendency towards aggressive mansplaining and other forms of misogyny, just for the pun.

Not from the Monstrous Manual, obviously, but we must always make time for Iain McCaig!

Manticore. These have long been a favourite monster of mine. Lion-bat-scorpion-man monstrosities that are really angry, probably because they are lion-bat-scorpion-man monstrosities. Glorious.

Medusa. Another classic and another favourite. Can't go wrong with snake haired women with stone gaze powers. In the AD&D2 MM we also get the male version, the maedar, who are aggressively dull even by AD&D2 standards, and I will probably ignore them.

Merman. Fine, I suppose. I would probably blur them into sirens and play up elements of capricious horror, maybe even bring in some Deep One aspects.

Mimic. Great. Everyone loves mimics. Of course, I would have them be able to disguise themselves as anything, including people, probably. Imagine if the village blacksmith splits down the middle into a giant mouth and tries to eat you. Imagine!

Mind Flayer. Classic D&D enemies, but I've never much liked them, despite my Cthulhoid proclivities. Maybe I'd include one as a Big Bad type villain, squatting in a dungeon somewhere.

Minotaur. Another classic, literally. I've always liked minotaurs as a player-character option, so I'd include that too.

Mist, Crimson Death. I'm not a big fan of malevolent weather, but perhaps you could make this the centrepiece of an adventure and get away with only including one of them.

Mist, Vampiric. See above. Maybe the crimson death has these as its henchmen. Henchmists.

Mongrelman. Great! Horrific and sad. Monstrous but not necessarily monsters. They also fit into that Low Hit Dice Humanoid niche that every campaign needs. I love these guys.

Morkoth. Weird undersea hybrid thing with a very specific environmental effect, I wouldn't imagine lots of these in an M Campaign, but like the crimson death and mind flayer I could see them as the focal point of a one-off adventure. I'd probably put them into some sort of uneasy alliance with the mermen too.

Mould. Terrifying to me in real life because of a severe allergy, somewhat boring in game terms. They feel like a Gotcha! monster from the old days and if I drop anything it'll be these.

Mould Men. Fine, but we've got a similar and more visually interesting monster coming up, so I'd probably quietly fold these into them and hope no one notices.

Muckdweller. I would probably never use these in a standard campaign, as there are too many other Low Hit Dice Humanoids that would get used instead, but limiting myself to M-monsters gives them a way in and you know, I quite like them. They are Lawful Evil but I'd still put them into a sort of cute little guy role like a sort of amphibious Moogle, just a cute little guy with a burning hatred of land-dwellers.

Mudman. Great visual, boring monster. Another one that I'd probably use as the central idea in an adventure, rather than a common creature. Perhaps there would be some quest to return a mudman to human(oid) form, or at least find out where it came from and what created it.

Mummy. Yes, absolutely. Grade A superstar monsters.

Myconid. Mushroom people make for a great visual, and they are different and weird enough to feel alien, despite their intelligence and society. Like Groot but even stranger. I love them.

---

There's a desert or wilderness theme emerging with some of these monsters, with a bit of mythic Greece in there, and quite a few aquatic, or at least damp, creatures. A coastal desert perhaps, or a series or barren, hostile islands, with a swampy jungle area and some damp caves too. The number of hybrids suggest some sort of curse or experiments or cursed experiments, and I quite like the idea of a blasted "hot zone" that is home to the mists and rumoured to be full of treasure, Roadside Picnic style.

(Maybe the Zone produced the mutant hybrids?)

You've probably got the mind flayer, morkoth, and at least one mummy as "villains", maybe the crimson death and medusa too. Factions include the manscorpions, mermen, mongrelmen, muckdwellers, and the myconids; maybe there are enough manticores and medusas to form groups, maybe not. I like the idea of apes as a faction, although that's perhaps stretching the rules of the exercise a bit.

In terms of player-character options, although "Man" is technically there as an option, we are listed under "Human" in the MM, so I think I would limit players to the intelligent species above. And maybe the apes too. For fun.

Your turn. Pick a letter -- the first letter of your name, or roll a d26 if you have one -- and create a campaign from the monsters beginning with that latter. If you want.

My Dirty Secret (Defenders)

Calvin, I did not resist the temptation.

I even read it! The most surprising thing is that it's not terrible. It's not good either, but by the standards of 1990's Marvel it could be much, much worse. Both writing and art are solid but unimpressive. The storytelling is clear but never dramatic. It's competent, if dull. That said, there's a halfway interesting central mystery.

There are a couple of clumsy, weird moments, like Spider-Woman almost fumbling an investigation just so Wolverine can tell her off in the next panel, or whatever the creative decision was behind this panel:

After some arbitrary fighting with random costumed villains, the issue ends with the introduction of a new character! We don't know if they are hero or villain, which I think was probably the intent. I hope.

(It's impossible for any of these characters to be standing where they are based on their positions in the previous panel, by the way.)

I don't have #2 so I don't know why this character is called Dreadlox, but I'm hoping it's something to do with liquid oxygen related powers. I did look the character up to see if they had appeared again, as they are just the sort of obscure rando who would get used in an Al Ewing or Jed McKay comic, but alas they only seemed to appear in this one storyline.

Anyway, that's Secret Defenders #1. Not terrible, not good either. I give it two Cables out of five.

Fantastic Five(ish)

Over at Tower of Zenopus, Blacksteel lists the first five role-playing games they played. I like rpgs. I like lists. Let's have at it!

The first rpg I played was Fighting Fantasy, except I don't always count it because my friend Gareth and I didn't properly grasp what what we were supposed to do, so we read through it together as a sort of collaborative solo Fighting Fantasy adventure. Still, we made choices and rolled dice and fought battles, and it is an rpg, so I'm counting it. Today, anyway.

Then there was a gap of a few years until around 1994 or 1995 when my friend Tim saw that I was a big Warhammer 40,000 fan and said something along the lines of "If you like orks with guns, then you'll love this" and...

We did love it. We played the heck out of Shadowrun for the next three or four years, until our group broke up as everyone headed off to university or went off to work or went travelling. Tim was a massive Shadowrun fan and had pretty much all of the splatbooks so he ran most of the games but occasionally wanted to play something too, and somehow we met Dave and Dave was a keeper of eldritch lore...

That was me done for. We played the heck out of Call of Cthulhu too and, unlike Shadowrun, that love survived "growing up" and has lasted through the years decades.

After that, it's a bit fuzzy and I'm not certain what my fourth or fifth rpgs were. We were teenagers with a lot of spare time, we were new to the hobby, and we played a ton of games between huge, sprawling Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun campaigns. I know Dave introduced us to Cyberpunk 2020, RuneQuest, and d6 Star Wars, and Tim encouraged me to get and run Traveller: The New Era, and Tim also ran a bizarre sleep-deprived game of Basic Dungeons and Dragons -- the Black Box -- in there too, so those are all likely candidates, but my gut feeling -- based on Star Trek: Voyager being on the telly at Dave's house when we went over to play -- is that RuneQuest was fourth, specifically the Games Workshop third edition:

My friends and I still remember this game as "the Battle of the Left Arm" because for some reason the hit location dice were wonky that day and all of the player-characters had their left arms either injured or severed in a battle with some broo.

Fifth though? No idea. Roll 1d4:

1. Black Box D&D
2. Cyberpunk 2020
3. Star Wars d6
4. Traveller: The New Era

Update: Adam at Barking Alien has also weighed in with a First Five!

BRUTICUS COMPROMISED

I am 45ish. My ambition*, before I vanish into cosmic dust, is to own a complete Bruticus.

This is Bruticus:

I owned two-fifths of him when I was a child. I had Onslaught, a fantastic toy and the main body, and I had Blast Off, one of the limbs -- usually an arm -- and a neat little space shuttle. Alas, I did not have the rest of the Combaticons. I did have a couple of other combiners -- Blot and Nautilator -- so I could assemble most of a hybrid, mutated Bruticus, missing a limb. Probably an arm.

At least they were all Decepticons, but it was Bruticus Compromised, at best, and it always niggled at me.

Later, in 2001, I was surprised to discover that the toys had been re-released with different colours and under different names, so flush with student loan money -- ha ha -- I bought them all and at last could assemble Bruticus.

Except it wasn't Bruticus. It was Ruination. This shouldn't matter, but it did, and anyway, I have somehow since lost Rollbar/Swindle, so even if it didn't matter I'm back to four-fifths.

I missed out on the various revamps and reimaginings of the toys -- including this beast -- but just a few weeks ago they released a new Vortex toy. Here he is:

(That's his 2001 incarnation there, "Ro-Tor".)

We will be getting his team-mates Blast Off and Brawl -- probably a leg -- and leader Onslaught in 2026. Maybe I will have a complete Bruticus before I'm 50.

*(I do have other ambitions. I'm not a total loser. Of course, those ambitions include such lofty goals as "finish painting my Eldar army" so...)