Pride of the Madocs

 

Manifest Destiny- Lewis & Clark & Monsters

Every friendship needs a Lewis and a Clark.  This was the conclusion of one of my closest friend, President Thomas Jefferson, as we gathered to ruminate on life one day.  One to be a starry-eyed dreamer, one to confront reality.  We conducted this conversation as His Excellency and I switched roles in our friendship, where my Meriwether Lewis years of being a student of history and philosophy were being overtaken by a life of Clark-style tearing up the corporate ladder, interspersed with adventures on mountains and in deserts.  In honor of this notion of our friendship His Excellency, who has settled into the role of Lewis to my Clark, gave me the graphic novel Manifest Destiny, the true story of why Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark to the West.

President Jefferson implores you to go West

Vampires.  Monsters.  Buffalo minotaurs.  Crazy plant creatures that turn you into walking moss.  Yes, the French conned us back is in 1802, because the Louisiana Purchase was just one vast Dungeons & Dragons adventure.

In the kind of story that works best in comic books, Manifest Destiny tells an alternate version of the Lewis & Clark expedition, including the secret, undocumented army of river rats and convicts brought up river as cannon fodder and Sacajawea’s warrior princess skills.  The keelboat is full of guns, wooden stakes, and Greek fire, and our heroes dutifully slay monsters with dreamy wistfulness or ruthless precision, as fits their particular styles. 

For all the wilderness adventure and original monsters, Manifest Destiny excels as a character driven story.  The relationship between the two men has been explored in Steven Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage and in M. R. Montgomery’s Jefferson & the Gun-Men.  But while Manifest Destiny is a fictional fantasy, I felt like I got to understand the nature of the two men, particularly the violent and taciturn Clark, in a way that I haven't before.

Manifest Destiny!  Still being published monthly by Image, with two trade volumes out and a third on the way.  Go buy a copy today!

Who Put a Cowboy in My Dungeons and Dragons Game? (Part 2, Zeke Rides In)

(See more in Part 1)

Our band of adventurers rolled into the Stolen Lands, and in a few months were able to rid a goodly chunk of territory of outlaws and monsters.  Settlers started rolling in, we made contact with all sorts of odd critters, and set up a nice, peaceful society.  Sort of.  There were kobold (little nasty dragon creatures), intelligent wolves, lizard men, etc.  I took the challenge as Zeke to redo the West in my own image, making alliances where possible, bridging cultural barriers, and forming a place of freedom where everyone can exist together.

Didn’t work out particularly well, mind you.  The little kobolds were big into enslaving our settlers that strayed near their land, and we eventually broke them of that.  Peace overtures to the lizard folk and the wolves turned to… well… I guess genocide is the right term.  The whole thing turned into one big ass war where the monsters banded together and claimed the Stolen Lands as their land, which they would defend to the end.

I admit I kind of agreed with them.  They were in the Stolen Lands a lot longer than we were.  We even had the nerve to call it the Stolen Lands, when they had been there for centuries.  Who were we to roll in and tell them what to do?  I felt like Gus lamenting his life’s work towards the end of Lonesome Dove.

We’re the fucking cavalry, that’s who, and despite being a game full of people from the mystical lands of Golarion, all the players were Americans and we were by God and Country going to kick some ass.  Well, I know that one guy is Polish, one is technically Cherokee, I think, and was that other dude born in Russia?  Fuck it, that’s close enough to American here in New England.  To war!

More to follow in Part 3.

Who Put a Cowboy in My Dungeons and Dragons Game? (Part 1, Pathfinders & Kingmakers)

I have been a role-playing gamer on and off since I was about ten years old, and to my surprise have spent some of the best gaming days in my 30’s.  Gamers tend to stick to a couple of key genres, notably science fiction and fantasy.  As you may have noticed over the course of reading this blog, I do enjoy those genres but am much more a fan of westerns.  Thankfully, both modern sci-fi and fantasy steal a lot from westerns, and I have found it pretty easy to sneak cowboys into other games.  I played Star Marshal Jorge Dubya Overholster of New Texas in a Star Trek game, have had two characters by the name of The Crossbow Kid in various D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) games, and have played a host of other characters who were fantasy versions of gamblers, gunslingers, and mountain men.  

Most recently my group of friends has been playing a long running campaign called Kingmaker, from a D&D rules system called Pathfinder.  The story takes place in the Stolen Lands, a area that was once filled with towns and farms but over the course of centuries fell to various bands of bandits and monsters.  The whole place to me feels a lot like west Texas after the Civil War, at time where the soldiers, rangers, and fighting men all went off to kill Yankees and the outlaws and Comanche rolled back the frontier a couple hundred miles. 

In Kingmaker, you are part of a group of adventurers who are chartered with taking back the Stolen Lands, developing it into first a barony, then a duchy, and finally a kingdom.  You need a monarch, general, grand wizard, and particularly a diplomat.  Diplomacy has always been my strong suit and gaming, and I dutifully created a character named Ezekiel Medveyed-Narikopolus, a holy man somewhat touched in the head, distantly related to noble families in several nearby kingdoms, a prophet of the wilderness, and a wicked shot with a longbow (Half-elf nature oracle of Erastil, if you’re the kind who keeps track of stuff like that).  Call him Zeke for short.  A mix of Shane and Natty Bumpo with a dash of Have Gun-Will Travel, Zeke was ready to make the Stolen Lands fit for settlers again. 

More to follow in Part 2.