OSR Space Opera Blues & Night Owl Workshop's Warriors of the Red Planet rpg

 

Today's been the sort of running on rpg table dialogue with a couple of friends & on discussion is that infamous Clark Aston Smith solar system campaign that seemed to run me ages ago. There's been talk about the fact that we brought several of our Warriors of the Red Planet rpg characters into interstellar conflict with several of Magic Pig Media's interstellar races. The reason that this has come up is Chenault & Gray Publishing's latest kickstarter Robert E. Howard Art Chronology.  
Why?! Because for a very long time I've been yammering about Chenault & Gray Publishing's The Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology

Bare in mind that two of my players passed on. And the entire group of players that we were running with turned to manure. Death affects groups in different ways & things often take turns in unexpected directions. The fact of the matter is that no one expects the rug to be pulled out from under them. 
These days we're far better equipped to deal with these things because when your fellow DM's & players are your friends things can be easier to digest. 

Now this brings up two very important points. Fact one our Mars was & is a post apocalyptic  campaign landscape. The second thing is that many of Clark Aston Smith's Martians & HP Lovecraft's Martians have returned. But this wasn't your typical campaign setting because the players had invested so much into the background with their PC's. 
There was a lot of plane jumping & several of the PC's died while exploring a realm locked within its own hidden mini plane from Brett Slocum's Warriors of the Lost Planet.  Then two of our regular DM's & player's died. This tore up our home game for almost a couple of months now. 

So what happening now?! There's been talk among to our other players & DM's that they'd like me to return to DMing this campaign. I'm not really sure that I can. There's been a bit of movement on my part with the recent review of Night Owl Workshop's Space Nobles on the blog.  But to be honest I'm not sure if I'm ready for this. There's a lot of baggage under this bridge. Besides which I've been getting involved with DM Steve's own Stars Without Number/Cepheus Engine rpg hybrid campaign. 
Ultimately we were starting to cross into White Star: Galaxy edition rpg turf back in our own Clark Ashton Smith Campaign. Several of the players were/are huge Star Wars fans & there were several references to the ancient Martian psionic clans that kept cropping up. 
Ultimately this leads me back to thinking about Gary Gygax's passing in a way & original Dungeons & Dragons. Really need to let this whole thing rest for the night folks. 

OSR Review & Commentary On The Space Noble Supplement from Night Owl Workshop For Warriors of the Red Planet Rpg or Your Old School or OSR Campaigns

" Alien kings, space monarchs, rulers of the known universe, decadent nobles of a highly advanced and technological civilization, and of course Space Princesses are staples of space operas, sci-fi sagas, and tales of strange worlds and other dimensions. The Warriors of the Red Planet roleplaying game provides the basics needed to run a Sword & Planet style interplanetary fantasy romance campaign using the classic OSR style rules. However if there was one class that was missing it was the Space Noble -- the aristocracy of the dying red planet. This supplement endeavors to fill that gap with a very playable royal character class, though its primary purpose is to describe the NPC’s that the player characters will encounter."

There are times when something so obvious goes right above your head & that it doesn't come into play until you need it. Take for example the NPC  idea of the Space Noble from Night Owl Workshop. Player's PC have been encountering space going nobles since the inception of the 'grand game'. Right?! Wrong! 
The Space Noble NPC class brings the high end space royals into an interstellar game or even an original Dungeons & Dragons! The Space Noble does this in fourteen pages of royal OSR goodness. 
The threat of bringing down the interstellar hammer onto a kingdom isn't one that I've seen before in D&D. But it would easily fit as a campaign goal & here we've got all of the tools to bring to life a 'Ming the Merciless' style NPC quite easily. 
Remember that  Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, from Edgar Rice Burroughs 'A Princess of Mars' & Flash Gordon's Ming are both cut from the same cloth. The cloth of interstellar  alien royalty is quite extensive a pedigree in Science Fiction & Science Fantasy. And in my humble opinion interstellar royals are quite under represented as villains in D&D campaigns. 

Ming as portrayed by Charles Middleton in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), seen with one of his dancers, actress Carmen D'Antonio

Used correctly & a 'Space Noble'  could easily become the center piece for an entire campaign setting. And by this I mean ANY campaign setting. The Space Noble  could be a whole cloth villain of a campaign with a whole host of lesser NPC villains under him or her. The real pattern here could be Ming whose one of those vile villains that has his lesser nobles at each other's throats. Yet, he along with his ancestors built an entire artificial solar system spanning  empire that's mobile. Mongo according to the Flash Gordon newspaper strips is mobile capable of being encountered anywhere in the universe. 

But we digress here, the 'Space Noble' has the potential to be one of the deadliest NPC villains that a campaign can have. And the 'Space Noble' from Night Owl Workshop is classy & very well put together for both your Old school & OSR style games.