I did a thing! Somehow I have found myself participating in a thing called the One-Page RPG Jam 2024, which is a thing where people create role-playing games, the rules to which can fit on a single page. I’ve been tinkering with a PDR RPG for some years now, so the chance to carve off some of that work into individual slices and actually have something to show for it is very welcome.

My first one-page rpg is called “And Lo, The Wizards Shall Fight!” and it is lets two players generate some random Wizards and then have them fight with a system of my own creation that relies on dice and a deck of cards.

My inspirations for this are pretty specific and very much the sorts of things that PDR would connect. There’s the wizards duel in the Disney movie Sword In The Stone for a start. That’s definitely what I’d call the most mainstream inspiration. After that comes the climactic sorcery fight between King Graham and Mordack in King’s Quest V, which I figure was probably inspired at least in part by the movie. And finally there’s the fight between Modred the Mystic and Blade in Marvel’s comic Darkhold: Pages From The Book Of Sins (My favourite from their Midnight Sons line). Those are the big three, in reverse order of importance, because I took them in at a very formative age and they put a love of wizards fighting that has lasted to this day. I suppose there was also the computer game Magic Carpet, though I never played more than a demo of it, so my idea of it comes less from the game itself than from PC Gamer reviews of the game.

All of which is to say that And Lo, The Wizards Shall Fight comes from a long lineage of wizard duels. But now you can play it with cards and dice!

As mentioned back in the timeline of planet Gurx, for much of the last million years, the Strondovarians were not the only kind of Varian (or “intelligent” creature) one would find. Though Strondos are the only ones alive today and they don’t remember the details of their cousins, there were ages during which civilizations rose and fell and countless adventures were had. If someone out there were, let’sjustsayhypothetically, making an RPG with all this stuff, they’d work as player races. So let’s take a look at them.

Denizens of the Neboosidih

Here we see our pal Nibnassin next to three of the most successful other Varian species. The Strondos of that age were, on average, smaller than those of today, but this will work for scale. We’ll also use the names for these peoples as they are found in the Knowledge Bank of the Strondovarians. They undoubtedly had names for themselves, but modern Strondos don’t know them. Here’s what we do know, going from left to right:

Ealnoosvarian: A dense, round people who lived in caves and mountains, the Ealnoos were adapted for cold and dark. They were possibly the first of the Varians to invent clothing, making pants and gloves out of the skin of animals, and even had some primitive hydraulic technologies. Even at the heights of their civilization, they were unlikely to conglomerate in cities, but lived in small tribes, or even alone. They hid from other Varians whenever possible.
Hradivarian: Perhaps the most numerous and successful of the non-Strondo groups, the Hradivarians were extremely successful at living in forest environments. They built large villages in the canopies of tropical forests. Some of their larger civilizations were based around the rule of individuals worshipped as gods, who often led their people against other Varians (including other groups of Hradis), but they were still not warlike as a whole, and were often skilled rope-users to an extent that other Varians believed them to be magical. They even had hang-gliders, so that reputation is well-earned.
Glorkisvarian: The largest of the Varians still remembered, the Glorkis were seen by the others as we humans might have seen ogres. They were warlike as their reputation might suggest, but they were not so dumb. They actually mastered fire earlier than any of the other groups. They also lived in the largest urban settlement known from that era, a walled city the likes of which the planet has not seen since.

These three types of Varians were the most successful, but other groups existed as well. Sometimes the Strondos find evidence of these other cousins on their evolutionary family tree, but few Strondos care.

Since January 2013, I’ve been doing those posts on Sundays where I put up sketches of characters and describe them and such. It’s been fun. It was mostly an attempt to keep me doing something every week, while also expanding on the fictional universes I enjoy creating so much.

Since July 2015, I have also, not in the “public” view that is this website, been creating a tabletop RPG that takes place in my fictional universe(s). It’s a lot of work because, for some reason, I decided to build it from scratch, and I have pretty minimal experience with such RPGs to begin with. But I’ve greatly enjoyed doing it.

But these two projects, pretty time consuming as they are, have had an unintended result. While I have now a lot of raw material about my universes, I haven’t gained all that much new actual story content set in those universes. So now I’m gonna stop doing the Super Sunday sketches regularly (they will still pop up on occasion when I can’t think of anything else or what have you), and will try to use Sundays for actual story content, or perhaps discussion of the PDR RPG. I haven’t decided just yet.

Let’s see how this goes.