Role-playing on the Red Planet

Adamant Entertainment's Mars RPGIf you’re like me, you can’t wait to see John Carter of Mars hit the big screen.  I’ve started rereading the Barsoom tales on my Kindle already.  But, if you’re like me, sometimes reading and watching is just not enough.  Sometimes, you have to immerse yourself in it.  Be a part of it.  That’s where a good old paper and pencil role-playing game comes in to save the day.  Look at all the choices we’ve got out there that go beyond Dungeons and Dragons and all of its variants.  Tolkien fan?  Try I.C.E.’s Middle-earth Role-Playing or Decipher’s Lord of the Rings: The RPG.  Moorcock?  There’s Elric!  (either the Chaosium’s or Mongoose’s.)  Don’t forget Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan.   There’s also Babylon 5 and Star Trek.  And there’s Cthulhu for any setting you can think of.   Fortunately, we John Carter fans have some excellent options, too. 

Space 1889 is one.  Heliograph republished the material a few years back, and Savage Worlds has just released Space 1889: Red Sands.  I love this game for its battles between airships and sky galleons and the possibility to reenact some of my favorite battles involving outnumbered British soldiers.  All in all, however, Brits colonizing Mars just doesn’t have that Edgar Rice Burroughs feel.  It’s just a little too Jules Verney or steampunky. 

Closer to the Mars we know and love is Adamant Entertainment’s Mars.  It’s offered in d20 and Savage Worlds versions.  I picked up the latter and was quite impressed.  It’s very Burroughsian, and the fast-paced, cinematic feel of the system works perfectly with the sword and planet genre.  There’s Green and Red Martians and White Apes.  Of course, they’ve made the game their own; it’s not an ERB RPG.  The Green Martians and White Apes look like those of Barsoom but with only two arms.  Another difference with the White Apes is that they are intelligent, have their own culture, and strive with the others races for habitable portions of the dying planet.  Adamant also adds Gray Martians into the mix, which are essentially the H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds variety, tripods included. 

Skirmisher's Barsoom d20 PDFOf course, if you are a die-hard, Barsoom-or-Bust role-player, you can visit Savage Barsoom on the web.  It’s a wonderful website offering Savage Worlds rules based on Burroughs’ books.  The site covers races, culture, technology – everything.  If it’s in the books, it’s there or going to be.  There’s also a d20 source from Skirmisher available at DriveThru RPG called Shadows of a Dying World.  It actually works more as a bestiary, covering the various flora and fauna encountered in the John Carter stories.  It was published a few years ago.  Supposedly more material was going to be follow, but I’ve never seen it.    

I also recommend John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom (Del Rey 1976).  It is a compilation of material for the original Burroughs books covering everything from pre-Carter Barsoom to language and religion.  The paperback copy I have contains several wonderful illustrations, too.

Bronze Age Miniature's Wasteland MutantAnd finally, let’s not forget the role-players who want miniatures on the table top.  There were some John Carter minis released some years ago.  They’re pretty difficult to find now; some do pop up occasionally on eBay.  Your best bet, though, is a series released by Bronze Age Miniatures.  They’re not labeled Mars or Barsoom, but they are some of the Best Burrough-esque miniatures I’ve come across.  Check out their Wasteland Mutants if you want to see a good, formidable Green Martian, and they have male and female warriors that couldn’t be beat as Reds. 

So you don’t have to settle for simply waiting for the film or rereading.  You can live the great tales of the dying, red world, and the beauty of any of these systems and supplements is that you can follow the canon as closely, or not, as you like. 

Old News But Good News: John Carter of Mars Movie in Pre-Production

It might be old news to some, but at least its good news: John Carter of Mars is going to the big screen. I should qualify that. It’s potentially good news. If anybody could mess up a straightforward-science-fiction-pulp-classic-adventure yarn, it’s Hollywood.

But let’s not be too pessimistic. I try to be thankful for all the good that comes my way: potential or otherwise.

So, what’s good? Well, after years of false starts, decades really, we have the film in firm pre-production. According to IMDb, the release date is 2012. (Of course, this in and of itself could be a Hollywood ploy to get our hopes up and already spending on pre-release stuff before the Mayan prophecy proves true, destroying the world, and saving producers from having to face the fact they screwed up something as beautiful and simple as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ beloved classic. But again, let’s not be too pessimistic.)

What else is good? Andrew Stanton, the man behind Wall-E. Yeah, Wall-E was cute and adorable and a heart-tugger, but it was one of the smartest science fiction films to come along in a while. It was story driven, unlike say, most everything that has come out in forever, not to mention it wasn’t a remake or a part two of something. Stanton, too, is a confessed lover of Burroughs. That’s always a good thing: to have someone who knows and appreciates the source material. Let’s face it, The Lord of the Rings worked because Peter Jackson knew and loved The Lord of the Rings.

Of course, my first concern here was that we were going to have an animated Carter and Dejah. While that’s not entirely a bad thing, animated films tend to automatically be labeled family films. In many cases they are family films. If you’ve read any of the Barsoom books (for the uninitiated, that’s Burroughs’ name for Mars), Carter can be pretty gritty on occasion, and no, animated or not, Pixar or not, I would not even hope for Dejah Thoris to be gracing the big screen displaying her glorious natural assets for the whole universe to see as she does throughout the book. From what I understand anyway, it’s going to be released as a Disney film. That info comes from johncartermovie.com, which, by the way, is an excellent unofficial site. I’ve been checking it out for some time now.

So that brings us to Disney. Can go either way here. They’ve made some classic family films, which may or may not resemble the source material. 20,000 Leagues is my personal favorite. But they have gone grittier in recent years with the whole Pirate franchise. But herein resides the problem. I read somewhere, forgive me for not recalling the exact place, that Disney was hoping for another franchise success like Pirates. Well, all you have to do is remember what went on in Pirates 2 and 3 and you know why my heart cringes at the thought. What few producers realize is that nothing works, absolutely nothing, when the goal is simply to make money.

Nothing.

On the bright side, Michael Chabon is reworking the script as you read this (if you’re reading it in 2009, that is). Chabon is, for lack of a better word, brilliant. Check out The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Not only did it win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001, it was awesome. Then there’s The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Gentlemen of the Road. He acknowledges genre fiction, he appreciates genre fiction, he writes genre fiction. To me, this is one of the strongest arguments for doing this film right now. Disney could mess this up, however. Chabon could write something too good. (Good, for some reason, is not appreciated by most money-grubbing producers. They could just as easily order a rewrite. But let’s not be too pessimistic.)

What else is good? Well, they’ve got the primary characters cast. Taylor Kitsch will be playing Carter. Kitsch played in Friday Night Lights and more recently in Wolverine as Gambit. (Is it me, or does he look a little young for a civil war officer?) Lynn Collins will be Dejah Thoris. She, too, was recently seen in Wolverine, playing Silverfox. Well . . . I mean . . . what can you say? Just look at the picture!

Veteran actor Willem Dafoe will be portraying everyone’s favorite four-armed green Martian, Tars Tarkus. Dafoe is a pretty spectacular actor, but I suspect some serious CGI getting ready to happen here. Still, no complaints. Remember how great he was under all the make-up in Shadow of the Vampire? Heck, his voice is a better actor than a lot that I’ve had to watch.

Interestingly enough, as I write this (August 24, 2009), three more cast members have been confirmed. NewsOk.com reports that Oscar nominee Samantha Morton (“In America” and “Sweet and Lowdown”), Dominic West (“The Wire” and “300″) and Polly Walker (HBO’s “Rome”) have joined the cast.

All we can do for now is sit back and bask in the glow of expectations and potentialities. This is a movie with everything going for it. What could go wrong?

(Now, now, let’s not be too pessimistic.)