If the blog has been quiet lately, it’s because we’ve been
very busy down here in the Flumphwerks. And what we’ve been busy with is Leopard
Women of Venus!
I’ve talked about Leopard Women of Venus (LWoV)
before, but I’m going to go into a bit more detail here. LWoV is a psychotronic
sci-fi setting based on the works of cult-favorite Golden Age cartoonist Fletcher Hanks. I’ve called Fletcher Hanks the “Ed Wood of old comics,” because his imagination
outpaced his talents. His artwork is weird, often grotesque, and his stories
are simple, lurid, and violent. But there’s a weird, fever-dream imagination
behind them that really speaks to some core part of me and Leighton’s (my
co-writer) creative muses.
Leighton Introduced me to Fletcher Hanks around 2010, when
he showed me a few pages out of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets,
the first volume of Hanks’s collected works. I was intrigued, and over the next
year or so we put together a setting book for QAGS called “Leopard Women of
Venus” all inspired by this initial panel:
Years went by, and now Leighton and I decided to update and rewrite
LWoV for Dungeon Crawl Classics. The weird pulpy insanity of Hank’s
sci-fi, superhero, and adventure stories lend them selves well to the amped-to-eleven
nature of DCC.
How Do You Make a Game Based on Fletcher Hanks?
That’s a good question. If you’re familiar with Hanks’s
work, you know that he’s not big on world building, or character development or
even plot. Most Hanks stories are only 6 to 8 pages long. A villain executes
some crazy scheme, and out overly-powerful hero swoops in and brutally murders
them in the name of justice. This brutal justice is often meted out in
creatively disgusting fashions. In the hands of a more focused writer, the
punishments would be ironic, but for Hanks they’re just weird. Occasionally
there’s a small setback for the hero that he has to overcome to complete that
W-shaped plot, but for the most part the stories are simple and direct.
Since there’s not a lot to base a game world on, Leighton
and I used Hanks’s work as a springboard for our own imagination. We put all of
Hanks’s best known characters (Stardust, Fantomah, Space Smith) as well as his
most used tropes (giant insects, fear of spies, bug-eyed monsters, toxic
jungles, bodily mutation or mutilation), put them in a big ol’ blender, then
mooshed that psychotronic slurry into a cohesive sci-fi setting.
Fantomah and Stardust are omni-powerful, nearly godlike beings,
so they work perfectly as Patrons. The jungles of Venus are ruled by giant
spiders. Uncanny chemical deposits spawn strange mutations in humans, animals,
and plants. Monsters crave human flesh. And the struggling human settlements
must always be on the lookout for enemy agents.
On top of that we layered our own creations. The human settlements
of Palna, Avrok, Otram, and the Caverns are all terrible places to live, each
with cultural baggage amped up to toxic levels. The Humanoid Coalition is the
one real force of good on Venus, dedicated to bringing something like balance
between the human factions and getting them to work together against the apocalyptic
threats to the planet.
If you’ve read anything else that I’ve written, you know
what to expect from LWoV. It’s not a comedy setting, per se. But we take
a ridiculous premise and deal with it straight. It’s weird, and a maybe a
little disturbing in places, but not distressing. It’s quirky, and there are
some jokes, but it’s not funny-ha-ha. It skews towards “gonzo” but there’s an
internal logic to things (mostly).
The Team!
This is already getting too long, and I didn’t really want
to turn it into a commercial. But I want to tell you about the artists and editors
we have lined up. Aside from Leighton and I, we have a great group of
illustrators lined up: Brad McDevitt, Juan Navarro, Evlyn Moreau, Diogo Nogueira,
James V. West, Matt Kish, and the legendary Erol Otus! Additionally,
we’ve got two great editors to catch all the typos and comma splices and make
sure our sentences make sense: Steve “Dollar Sign” John$on and Fiona Geist.
And so…
You guys, I’m very excited about this book. We’ve added so
much more to the original QAGS version while tightening up stuff that just
doesn’t work any more. DCC is a great fit for LWoV, and I badly want to get it
out to the world!
You can check out the free preview zine to get a taste of LWoV
right HERE.
You can check out the Kickstarter right HERE.
I’m sure I’ll talk about the project more here over the next
few weeks. But come back next time for more Troika stuff!