Campaign Toybox
The Story: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a probably stable (which means it may run forever) hurricane eight kilometers high and the diameter of three earths. At the eye of that storm is a place where the centrifugal forces of the wind cancel out some of the enormous pull of the planets gravity. There, crystals formed, and from these crystals, life began. A few million years later, the immense City of the Storm stands aloft as the grandest structure of the solar system. Within this red megopolis are the birdmen of Jupiter. They are muscular giants – akin to greek gods in stature - due to the powerful forces that surround them, and to ride the terrible winds that whip around their city, the great red wings on their shoulders have a span of many metres. The Scarlett City is of course an aristocracy, and these proud young princes occasionally seek the ultimate hubris: to break beyond their cyclonic-walled empire and seek new conquests beyond in their great crystal starships.
Sadly, they found the galaxy empty, except for a tiny blue ball filled with tiny, weak ape-men who had only barely invented the rocket. Still, they might prove a challenge, or an amusing plaything. Something to study, to begin discourse with – or something to watch struggle as it dies. Because if you’re going to do such a 1950’s style of romance, you might as well have a 1950s earth to go with it. Or at least, 1950’s space men. If the Adonis-like birdmen are going to meet somebody, it should be hard-jawed Herculean heroes of the Americo-Soviet Outer Space Squadron!
Style and Structure: Planetary Romance is a beautiful thing. Don’t mess it up by over-thinking it. On the other hand, remember to focus on the romance. You want more soaring over the mountains of Jupiter and seducing the Princesses of Mars and less meeting the mighty Earthmen and learning of their human greed and violence. Keeping the latter around makes for a good plot macguffin, however, mixing up your swords and planets with a little bit of old-school SF. In a world where everything is over the top, having a bit of grounding like that can go a long way to giving the campaign a kick and keeping it kicking. It also means you can draw double inspiration from classic resources: when Buck Thunder, Space Commander stumbles into the Venusian Love Mazes, you can now run a plot about the Venusian Love Mazes and then a sequel where Buck Thunder shows up to complicate things.
PCs and NPCs: Your heroes should be the heroic princes and princesses of the Crimson City, doing what such fantasy types do: dealing with interplanetary diplomacy, fighting monsters and villains, rescuing princesses and taming the wilderness. Resist the temptation to add earthmen to your party – you want them to feel really strange when they show up and have them drive plot as antagonists, not give both away to a running gag. Do include non-Birdmen, however. Planetary Romance would feel wrong if Prince Ka-Ro wasn’t teamed up with his trusty sidekick the hairy ManBeast of Mercury. You’ll need an expansive or light system, of course, but the whole point of Planetary Romance is to turn everything up to crazy. And that goes for the emotional stakes, too – make sure your characters live large, shoot for the brass ring and have emotional flaws the size of planets. Be bold, be passionate, and be romantic. And make sure the NPCs do the same.
Plots and Villains: When you’re riding dinosaurs across the dunes of Mars, you don’t have to worry too much about plots making sense. Certainly not your MacGuffins. If the Martians can only marry every hundred years when the desert worm rages, so be it. Antagonists should be easy to find. All the galaxy wishes to plunder the wealth of the Crimson City. The Martians are endlessly savage, the Venusians decadent, the Mercurians Machiavellian, the Asteroiders mysterious. And at every inopportune moment the humans can show up with their manifest destiny and empire-building ways (or their infantile pledges for peace and shared prosperity). The galaxy teeters on the edge of chaos, the Venus Mantrap Gardens are overrun with Plutonian Vixens, the Festival of Plenty is just two days away and the dinosaurs need watering. Go!
Sources: Planetary romance is less popular these days, but the classics are surprisingly available. The entirety of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series (which basically invented and defined the genre) is available on Project Gutenberg here. Robert E Howard also dipped his toe in these waters and while his space works are hard to find, you can steal everything from his fantasy books which are back in print with a vengeance. Pretty much the same goes for Jack Vance’s work. Some might find it insulting to put the Dune novels in this genre, but they most certainly owe a lot to it, as does Star Wars (which was even co-written by Leigh Brackett, a long-time writer of planetary romance in her own right). Comics and planetary romance have gone together forever, and if you can’t find the old Flash Gordon comics (or watch the wonderfully camp movie), you’ve also got Adam Strange, along with elements of the Green Lantern Corps, Superman’s backstory and big chunks of Starman. Buck Rogers was in comics too – he was the very first SF comic ever written, in fact – as well as appearing in fiction, movies and a really terrible TV series – but it did get the genre trappings right.
RPGs: Thanks the stars, Adamant Entertainment has actually produced a planetary romance RPG called Mars, using the Savage Worlds system. There’s also the lesser known but no less awesome Space and Steel. Star Wars in all its many, many version is also a good place to start, although be careful to carve out a new setting so it doesn’t feel like Jedi-lite. Dune had an RPG of its own although it was almost stillborn and very hard to track down; meanwhile Fading Suns owed a lot to Dune as well. Hellas is more stars and sandal than sword and planet but could easily be converted. Greg Stolze’s …in Spaaaace fits well, and is free, as is Zak Arnston’s Adventures in Space. They’re at the wackier end of things, and so is Space Rat, an indie gem. Some of the older school SF games are up the right alley – Star Frontiers, Metamorphosis Alpha and of course, the TSR version of Buck Rogers. Speaking of TSR, there’s also the wacky world of Spelljammer and the weirdness of DragonStar. And although it likes to be made of harder stuff, Traveller can never be missed from such a list.
