Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Strontium Dog

We'll call her Petal.

Strontium Dog, the 2000 A.D. comic series set in the near future of the Judge Dredd universe. A world poisoned by three nuclear exchanges. A world of oppressed mutants. Dog eat dog in every sense. Space travel is a thing. Dimensional and time travel are things. Sorcery is a thing.  Aliens exist and every single one of them is every bit as bad as we are. It's violent, it's gritty and there's a touch of dark humor. A post-apocalyptic spaghetti-western where the only way a mutant can get ahead, or rather, just keep up, is by bounty hunting the worst of the worst.

Beautiful.

Mongoose tackled Strontium Dog along with Judge Dredd as part of it's Traveller line of books. Now called 1st Edition Mongoose Traveller as they've moved on to the 2nd Edition of their version of the game.

Speaking of this...

The Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition Core Rulebook is one of the most perfect RPG rulebooks in existence. That's the black book in the picture below. 


The Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition is also a nice book with some nice, but not altogether necessary, rules additions like -- boosts and banes, destructive damage, consolidated skills -- no more battle-dress as vacc-suit handles it all, and a new prisoner career.


An older, incomplete character sheet of mine.

The mutants in this game are supposed to be weird. Funny how stories about mutants who are supposed to be grotesque and deformed always have good-looking main characters, human looking mutants with only subtle mutations like Johnny Alpha, Durham Red, Cyclops, Jean Grey, etc. It's the surrounding cast that aren't so lucky. In this game, there's a very strong chance that your mutant will be quite bizarre. Petal, the one I just rolled up, has feathery stalks for eyes. The tables didn't exactly give me this, but as is often the case with tables, you improvise. With her eye-stalks, she can see into your soul, hypnotize you, and see dimensional rifts. Her stats ended up being average and she has no melee skills, but, she did manage to acquire the coveted jack-of-all-trades. I originally also rolled that her right leg below the knee was backwards, but when drawing, I forgot about it, so, never mind.

The mutants of Strontium Dog are discriminated against mercilessly. They are the garbage of society, forced to live in gutters and ghettos. They pay more and get less. Many have such severe mutations that they won't make it very long. Either way, short miserable lives, discrimination, and genocide are their lots in life. A few, with a modicum of skill and toughness are lucky enough to eek out a living as Strontium Dogs -- Mutant Bounty Hunters working for the Search and Destroy Department, scouring the galaxy for criminals wanted dead or alive...

A certain, ultra-woke gaming company would call this setting "problematic." 

I call it awesome.