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[princeofcairo]

* If you're a fan of chadu's sweet supers RPG, Truth & Justice, now's your chance to dig up the horrific past of your campaign -- or to start a new one in the badly color-registered 1940s! Yes, Adventures Into Darkness, the definitive guide to Lovecraftian Golden Age superheroism, is finally available in Truth & Justice format on DriveThruRPG. It's the

Comments

edited

[richardthinks]

the map broadly agrees with what I'd always assumed (orcs are Turks, Minas Tirith/Minas Anor are Vienna and points east on the expanding Turkish front) so obviously I'm happy. The distances all seem longer than I'd ever imagined, though; if Rivendell is way up in Trondheim, then Smaug's Lonely Mountain is somewhere around Murmansk, across the bay from Archangel, and I never got the sense that Esgaroth should be ice-bound, or northern Mirkwood would be above the arctic circle; I always assumed the misty mountains + Nimrais were conceptually loosely based on the Alps and the half-ring of mountains around Mordor was based on the Carpathian/Bucegi mountains in a mirror - although about the only real mountains I can think of that would be abrupt and pointy enough are the Tatras, making Mordor into Bohemia, which is interesting, too.

BTW, I arrive at Turks (obviously, to my mind) as a sort of proto- or archetype of the German-as-Hun rhetoric popular in both wars: the Turko-Mongol threat that cancels all civilisation through implacable rage and unimaginable numbers, that tears down the delicate tracery of Art Nouveau Paris and replaces it with a mechanistic conformity to alien gods... which was one reason I thought the visual style of the movies was spot on. Maybe other readings are possible, but this one just seemed to fit together perfectly to me.

Re: edited

[jnutley]

The ME in Ice Age map is very neat, but conveniently ignores all the glaciers. I think in order for Doggerland to be dry a significant piece of this has to be covered with an ice sheet. Although I suppose we can apologize for it by speculating a significant injection event to correspond to Noah's flood. (Multibillion tonnes of water in a bollide splash into the Indian Ocean, raising the sea level for millennia.) If sea level was this low during a hot paleo-climate then Smaug's mountain can be in a temperate zone and N Mirkwood above the arctic circle isn't an issue.

I'm not as comfortable with the Orcs as any human tribe. Temujin and Attila have horrible press among the civilized survivor cultures. The propaganda matches up, i.e. merciless mindless endless horde. But thinking too hard about the Orcs makes me think of David Brin's "elves as monarchist oppressors" straw-man argument. I prefer to leave them as convenient cannon fodder. I agree with those that say Sam is the avatar of the pure hearted common born Sergeant, who carries his Officer to the end of the hopeless mission. That reading links Lord of the Rings strongly to a WWI milleue (sp?).