Warriors of the Red Planet Companion

[tdenmark]

If I was to make a Companion to the base Warriors of the Red Planet rules, what should it include? Off the top of my head here are some ideas:

Social Status expanded rules
Honor

Races
Outlander
Space Vampires
Devil Girl
Space Amazon
Shapeshifter
Volkana (highly logical)
Androids
Plant people

Classes
Assassin
Noble
Space Princess
Psychic Warrior

More Mentalism Powers
More Weird Science Gadgets
Expanded Ship Combat
Ship Plans
More Monsters
Non-Player Characters
One Page Adventures
Barsoom Sampler - a City Ruins of Mars
A Megadungeon of Mars
More Random Tables

What do you think? What else should it have? What's missing from WotRP?

[Finarvyn]

This is an awesome post, chock full of neat ideas. I would definitely buy this!

I guess what it comes down to is whether you want to emphasize a Burroughs feel or a more general scifi feel. I think that all of this stuff fits well with the Red Planet concept, although clearly a lot of it isn't "canon" to Burroughs.

[tdenmark]

Nov 8, 2022 17:54:05 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

This is an awesome post, chock full of neat ideas. I would definitely buy this!

I guess what it comes down to is whether you want to emphasize a Burroughs feel or a more general scifi feel. I think that all of this stuff fits well with the Red Planet concept, although clearly a lot of it isn't "canon" to Burroughs.

I look at WotRP as a kitchen sink of the Sword & Planet genre, heavily weighted towards ERB.

A Companion rulebook would expand that to include whatever Science Fantasy GM's want to put into their campaign.

[grodog]

I don't know the later Barsoom novels after about #6 or so. Anything else worth mining from them?

Or from the Venus novels, perhaps?

Allan.

[cometaryorbit]

Nov 20, 2022 17:41:01 GMT -6 grodog said:

I don't know the later Barsoom novels after about #6 or so. Anything else worth mining from them? 

Well, the later books have a bunch of weird beings...

Intelligent beings -

Tarids (psychic invisible people from Phobos)

Masena (one-eyed cat humanoids from Phobos)

Hormads (mutated synthetic humanoids, artificially created by weird science in a lab)

Goolians (sort of kangaroo people)

Morgors (high tech "skeleton" people - but not undead, just skeletal in appearance - from Jupiter)

Monsters -

Giant spiders that produce very valuable silk

Malagor (giant birds, large enough to ride)

30-foot giant mantis-like bugs

Horrific giant blob created by the hormad vats gone wrong, immune to most things but capable of being destroyed by fire in huge quantities

Giant carnivorous 'plants', basically land sea-anemones the size of trees (on Jupiter)

The (kinda questionable, possibly not entirely by ERB) Giant of Mars also has intelligent 3-legged rats and a 100-foot-tall near-invulnerable/regenerating giant.

[Finarvyn]

Nov 23, 2022 22:59:26 GMT -6 cometaryorbit said:

The (kinda questionable, possibly not entirely by ERB) Giant of Mars also has intelligent 3-legged rats and a 100-foot-tall near-invulnerable/regenerating giant.

I thought it had been established that ERB's son wrote that last material. Certainly, the point of view changes a lot and the writing doesn't even remotely feel like the same author. (The first ten books use first person, as in "I did this," a lot whereas Giants of Mars uses third person, as in "Carter did this.")

[tdenmark]

Nov 24, 2022 6:05:46 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

I thought it had been established that ERB's son wrote that last material. Certainly, the point of view changes a lot and the writing doesn't even remotely feel like the same author. (The first ten books use first person, as in "I did this," a lot whereas Giants of Mars uses third person, as in "Carter did this.")

Yes. John Carter of Mars (the last book in the series) is certainly not written by ERB. It was most likely written by his son. Kind of a funny twist that the entire series has come to be called by that name.

[cometaryorbit]

Nov 24, 2022 6:05:46 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Nov 23, 2022 22:59:26 GMT -6 cometaryorbit said:

The (kinda questionable, possibly not entirely by ERB) Giant of Mars also has intelligent 3-legged rats and a 100-foot-tall near-invulnerable/regenerating giant.

I thought it had been established that ERB's son wrote that last material. Certainly, the point of view changes a lot and the writing doesn't even remotely feel like the same author. (The first ten books use first person, as in "I did this," a lot whereas Giants of Mars uses third person, as in "Carter did this.")

I certainly had heard that it was by his son, but I wasn't sure if it was properly confirmed.

[Finarvyn]

To quote wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carter_of_Mars_(collection)

John Carter of Mars is the eleventh and final book in the Barsoom series by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is not a novel, but rather a collection of two John Carter of Mars stories.

The first story was originally published in 1940 by Whitman as a Better Little Book entitled John Carter of Mars. Although credited to Edgar Rice Burroughs, it was written (and illustrated) by his son, John Coleman Burroughs[1] and was later expanded and re-published in the January issue of Amazing Stories in 1941 as "John Carter and the Giant of Mars", the name it goes under in the collection.

The second story, "Skeleton Men of Jupiter", was first published in Amazing Stories in 1943. Intended as the first in a series of novelettes to be later collected in book form, in the fashion of Llana of Gathol, it ends with the plot unresolved, and the intended sequels were never written. Several other writers have written pastiche endings for the story.

[1] Bleiler, Everett Franklin; Bleiler, Richard (1990). Science Fiction, the Early Years. Kent State University Press. p. 101. ISBN 0-87338-416-4.

All-in-all, not a great book in the collection. The first ten are fantastic, however.

[cometaryorbit]

Cool, thanks. And yeah, it's not nearly as good as the others. My favorites after the first three are Swords of Mars (#8) and Synthetic Men of Mars (#9).

[stevemitchell]

 Chessmen of Mars!

[tdenmark]

Gods of Mars may be my favorite if I had to choose, but all of them are rip roaring fun!