Monday, June 27, 2011

The Epic Age - Alien Legion















From April 1984 – August 1990 it was an Epic Age, every month I'd wait at my comic box for the latest issue of Alien Legion. Not The Alien Legion but simply Alien Legion. It was done by the Marvel Epic line & was orginally conceived as: 

Pimary creator Carl Potts and co-creators Alan Zelenetz and Frank Cirocco developed the concept, and in 1983 Marvel ComicsEpic Comics imprint launched the first of several Alien Legion miniseries and one-shots. Collaborators have included writers Chuck Dixon and Larry Stroman, and artists Terry AustinWhilce Portacio, and Scott Hanna. Potts said in 2000
"The original concept was the 'Foreign Legion in space' and all the legionnaires were human. ... Then I created the humanoid/serpentine design that later became Sarigar and decided that the Legion should include a wide variety of species. This was in the early '70s. By the time I got around to developing the idea further in the early '80s, Star Wars obviously became an influence. The Alien Legion universe is a giant extrapolation of the American democratic melting-pot society where different races and cultures work together for the common good while dealing with the pluses and problems that the nation's diversity creates

Alien Legion wasn't the Green Lantern Corps, it was a take on the dirty aspects of  a war film told through the eyes of a group of aliens in a foreign legion style universe in a comic book
You weren't going to see any super powers here folks. A few natural abilities of an alien perhaps but that's it.
The plots were interesting & often historical events with the serial numbers filed off. The characters had motives, were interestingly complex in their own ways, & things made a sort of comic book plot line sense.
Uses For The OSR 
  • The organization of the Legion is tailored made for a space campaign
  • The plots are easily turned into adventures 
  • The races are perfect 
  • The politics makes for an excellent extended campaign 
  • The monsters are very generic & cool 
  • The body count is very high making this an excellent adventure design to steal from 
  • The beginning characters in the series are just that 1st level characters 
  • This is how a low powered space game should be run 
  • The omnibuses are fairly inexpensive & many folks have forgotten about the series. That means a Dungeon Master can mine it for all its worth! 
Want to know more check this out http://thedailyprocrastinator.com/tag/alien-legion/
This http://www.foot-sloggers.com/
http://cpotts1.home.netcom.com/index.htm/
wiki/Alien_Legion




2 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree more. At one time I worked up a ton of the Alien Legion cast for the Alternity RPG, sadly my notes were lost long ago. I recently picked up the Alien Legion Omnibus. Good Stuff!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks man! Thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete

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