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fantasy
All posts tagged fantasy
I love Ray Harryhausen movies. They’ve always been a favorite since childhood, and the Sinbad films are no exception. Each one is good in its own right and brings something fun tot he table, but no Sinbad portrayal was better than John Phillip Law. And no Sinbad Girl was hotter than Carilone Monroe as Margiana in the Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
JPL brought a likeable humanity to the character that was lacking in the other films, and he looked the part more than anyone else. It’s impossible not to like this incarnation of Sinbad whenever he’s onscreen. And every time I see Munroe in those Arabian outfits I swoon a little.
So I decided to pay tribute to them both in Mego form! Sinbad’s head is a repainted (thanks Metalhead Minis!) Gideon from the Bible Greats line, and really resembles JPL well. The costume is cobbled together from a variety of sources to match his costume in the latter half of the film, and an Aladdin sword from Mattel rounds him out nicely.
Margiana is a real prize, with a Zica Yvonne body and a vintage Demo Girl head that sort of resembles the actress herself. I added the eye tattoo on her hand myself, and the badass costume was made by O. T. Puente based on movie stills. They look amazing together, and all that’s missing is a monster for them to fight.
Welcome to the Arkista’s Ring series, turning Heretic and Hexen into a sci-fi & sorcery epic with a pulp fiction vibe and a pretty elf with a smart mouth. Each mod comes with a readme file with a detailed breakdown of the story, characters, weapons, items, and lore to help immerse the player in the setting. If Heretic and Hexen feel too stale or tedious, you’ll find this series gives them both a shot in the arm!
This series began as a reboot of the fantasy-oriented NES game of the same name, reinvented into a pulp sci-fi fantasy in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Andre Norton with a hardboiled edge.
Click the link below to download the series in a single convenient package!
DOWNLOAD!
Read on to learn the details of each mod, listed in order of release!
For Heretic
Requires GZdoom & Heretic
A hillbilly space elf named Christine is arrested for collaborating with a despotic Shogun who is conquering the galaxy. After having a bomb installed in her skull, Christine is given a chance at redemption by braving a treacherous planet in search of a powerful artifact.
Arkista’s Ring is a nonlinear sci-fi fantasy adventure where you choose your path through the game. Doors open via single-use keys, and some paths to the end are easier than others. Wield a vast array of sci-fi weaponry and fantastical artifacts against the strangest creatures in the galaxy.
A follow-up that turns any Heretic mapset into a space n’ sorcery adventure with ray guns, undead space dwarves, killer robots, and evil winged babes.
Optimum Security visits Jarro, planet of the dwarves, to rid their ore-rich moon of an infestation of ancestral ghosts and rogue robots, which turns out to be the doings of a cult of winged lunatics, led by a former underworld chum of Chrissy.
Other mapsets beside the original Heretic maps essentially detail further adventures on Jarro after the events of DDD.
Requires GZDoom & Heretic
ALSO INCLUDES REVISED VERSIONS OF THE FULL MOD FOR USE WITH
MASTERS OF CHAOS
&
FAITHLESS TRILOGY
(Run the revised mods instead of DDD when playing MoC or Faithless.)
REQUIRES GZDOOM AND HEXEN
A follow-up that turns any Hexen mapset into a hardboiled sci-fantasy epic with new classes, weapons, monsters, textures, sounds, hud, you name it. Unlike Hexen where you have to assemble the pieces of your superweapon before you can even use it, MoM has you collect upgrades for your main weapon to make it more powerful the further you go, so you get an instant benefit rather than having to wait until late in the game. You also can find Arkista’s Ring to power your starting weapon for the duration of the hub.
When they chase black marketeer Schloss the Red to the technophile planet Ydos, Optimum’s leaders Durrante and Chrissy run afoul of an A.I. called Medusa, which acts as the planet’s BIOS and the deity of the brainwashed inhabitants. Chrissy and Durrante team up with Schloss in order to kill the false god and escape the dying world before they become the latest members of Medusa’s mindless flock.
Mapsets other than Hexen’s base maps basically chronicle the trio’s further attempts to escape Ydos.
Also includes music compatibility for Vicerus, Kaiser 28, & Cyrgoth Manor!
I love this game, and I made a ton of custom modules and expansions for it, all included in my Custom Heroquest Trove!
DOWNLOAD THE HEROQUEST TROVE!
CONTAINS THE FOLLOWING:
Custom Rules and Mechanics
Revised Armory Cards, US and UK items, plus New Stuff
Revised Spell Cards from Base Game & All Expansions
New Hero Classes: Clerics, Witches, Giants, and More
THE ARDEN DAREDEVILS: My epic campaign with tons of quests.
KELLAR’S KEEP REDUX: Remake of the original Heroquest expansion.
THE SLAVE CITY REDUX: A revised quest pack from Dragon Magazine!
THE CHANGELING: A standalone campaign made for a community project.
THE MANSE MACABRE: an older one-shot in a haunted mansion.
MANHUNT: Detour quests for defeated heroes, instead of perma-killing them.
Turns out there are way more Polly KO’s than I anticipated — literally too many to name! Here are a couple of nameless knockoffs, the pieces of which may not always be accurate.
The first exhibits are a clamshell that comes in a couple variants on ebay and/or etsy, and two sets from a line sometimes simply referred to as “Dino” given the odd sticker on the compact. These scream “dollar store knockoff” if anything ever did, although I’ve seen far worse attempts at cashing in on Polly or Max.
The clamshell has a lovely scene inside: some sort of fantasy realm with a waterfall crashing down the side of a pink mountain. I have no idea if the mermaid doll goes with this set, but she seemed to fit right in.
EDIT: More info and guesswork found here.
EDIT: Identified! It is Mermaid Pocket Paradise, by the company Simba. More photos and details if I manage to win this auction.
The Dino and Dog compacts come from a toy called Pocket Land, apparently, evidenced by this pic of a carded set I totally forgot I had in my Knockoffs folder.
Dino and Dog open into an amusement park and minigolf course respectively. I was able to positively identify these two dolls and their vehicles as belonging to this toy line (thanks again, Patricia!). These sets are shockingly cute, and would almost fit right in with anyone’s legit Polly collection. The minigolf course is missing a couple flags and the fountain is broken, but the amusement park appears to be complete and intact.
Hinstar’s Small World – Pocket Paradise toys probably belong on this list, too. I have a separate article about them here.
These Pocket Family toys are kind of neat. I mainly like the cat one with the two-wing entertainment center.
I’d never seen one of these before til one popped up randomly on ebay. A really low budget Lion King line, apparently. The card has a hole in the middle so you can see both sides of the compact, which is kinda neat I guess.
Got a Goodreads account? Enter this giveaway for a chance to win both Bishop & Holiday books, autographed by me! Interdimensional travel, red tape in the afterlife, mythical babes, three-headed dogs, alien spiders, and daemonic possession: all in a day’s work for the Bishop & Holiday Paranormal Agency.
A lot of authors take the concept of originality too seriously: they stress over it constantly even when they have fun ideas.
A guy on facebook was talking about an idea he wanted to write that he felt might be too cliche: in the far future a guy is sent on a mission to destroy a terrible new superweapon. He finds the weapon, and realizes it’s a lady, and falls in love instead of destroying it.
Now, I used to watch an anime OVA called El Hazard in the 90s, which involved something similar: a guy falling for a semi-robotic harbinger of the apocalypse which also happens to be lonely and confused. It was pretty fun, annoying anime tropes and rampant fanservice notwithstanding. Who wouldn’t like a Boy Meets Killer Robot story? It’s a cute premise and the sex is bound to be weird as shit.
The whole fun of writing is taking a well-worn premise and putting a new spin on it to see what happens. I wrote a love story myself recently (well, it was supposed to be a humorous supernatural adventure, but the romance sorta dominated it) called The Amityville Nuisance.
Boy meets medusa, boy befriends medusa, boy and medusa have frustrating off-and-on relationship while going on adventures in the occult. On the surface it’s a pretty standard trope — the boyfriend-girlfriend adventurer pair — but the mythological creature angle makes it interesting. How would a medusa adapt to modern times? They have image issues, so of course they would only wear the swankiest of outfits, and would definitely style their snake-hair into something posh (at the expense of the poor snakes, who hopefully don’t mind so much). And besides humanizing them as much as possible, how does one convincingly make a snake-haired demoness alluring? Probably not that hard this day and age, with all the weird shit on the internet. They’ve already got an anime or three about this very subject. Never would have thought to have a lamia wear a denim skirt.
I guess my point is, it doesn’t matter how original the story is, as long as you tell it well. And also that romances are stale unless they involve a monster babe or some other element of weirdness.
I’m getting sidetracked again. There is only one story: The Journey, with its call to adventure, occasional refusal of the call, then rising action, climax, and denoument. What matters is HOW you tell that story. If you’re worried about your work being too cliche, take it in a weird direction and see what happens. A cliched story about “knight slays dragon” becomes way more interesting if he has sex with it instead, and has a half-dragon kid who struggles to fit into regular society (thanks again, anime).
And if you think your writing isn’t good enough, you’re doing something right. The only people who assume they have no room for improvement are reality TV stars. Do you wanna be a reality TV star?
Don’t answer that. Just keep writing, and keep asking questions.
This has been another PSA from a random know-it-all on the internet, who happens to have lots of good books on the market (only some of which are about inter-species dating, I promise).
Mike's Toybox 