Saturday, February 29, 2020

Strangers In A Sword & Sorcery Land - A Leap Day Sale - Cha'alt & AS&SH combined with Old School Campaign Goodness

The world of Cha'alt started as a fairly typical medieval land with elves, dwarves, snake-men, clerics, and magic-users; steeped in superstition along with antediluvian traditions, before the Old Gods went mad.  

Three-thousand years passed. The surface dwellers split from the malevolent creatures who slithered below. Those who remained on the surface lost the understanding of magic, but their civilization became a highly developed, technological empire of domed cities welcoming interstellar travelers, their massive starships hovering high above in blue skies!


I've owned Venger Satanis's Cha'alt now for a few months as a physical book & its been one of the best OSR gonzo Science Fantasy books on today's market. But its tempering the weirdness with a solid Sword & Sorcery OSR system that can handle the sheer awesomeness of the setting book. For me that's been Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. 



Hands down these two OSR books work like retroclone peanut butter & jelly. While Cha'alt has Crimson Dragon's Slayer D20 built into it. AS&SH has this plug & play ability with the setting book that makes it just that wee bit more Sword & Sorcery purple weirdness. In fact drop in Tom Moldvay's classic B4 The Lost City & you could have a full on mini campaign of solid adventure for months or years!


The factions in B4 The Lost City line perfectly up with all of the material in Cha'alt & the dangers of the cults of Zar'gon or its children are right in line with the horrors presented by Venger's world. In fact the setting of the lost city could be found within the wastelands of Cha'alt. The small cities of Cha'alt might do a fair trade in some of the artifacts recovered from some of the ruins scattered across the Lovecraftian planet.
Hyperborea might have Cha'alt as a satellite in orbit around one of its lesser moons close enough to be legend but far enough away to only have Cha'alt residents make a forced landing or two. 


Zar'gon & his ilk might have some claim on Hyperborea but 
B4 The Lost City might have a gateway or two onto the demon worm planet of Cha'alt. The possibilities here are dangerous & these cults could become a real world problem for the residents of both Hyperborea & Cha'alt itself. Adventurers from Hyperborea stuck on Cha'alt are going to have to make their way in an alien  world that they hardly understand. I would use the starting equipment from AS&SH for PC's trapped on Cha'alt. The learning curve is going to be huge for those stuck on the world of the black pyramid. 


The magicks of Cha'alt itself are intense dangerous & very violent! Travel between the two worlds would depend upon the whims of the Boreas winds. And the attitudes of the gods. In the end there's some real fusion possible with the right group of players. 

Tracts in Amber - Some CampaignThoughts on Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, Mystara, & Tom Modvey's X2 Castle Amber

"Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.
Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star - how stranger than any dreams of dreamers in the spheres of to-day, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sideral past! There, through cycles of history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens-a dome ol infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of the irresolvable a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people-we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams-the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century- forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immorteles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or swept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.
And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night."
From the Crypts of Memory  (1917) by Clark Ashton Smith

Thomas Moran - Pueblo at Sunset (1901)


Clark Ashton Smith's work creeps into your head a the weirdest hours & in my case it was right after my 
Cha'alt/Godbound  campaign session last night. I rolled into my place around four A.M. & took care of a few things around the house. I lay in bed & Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique slithered its way into my mind suddenly I was transported back to my sessions on the Dying Earth of CAS. But what is Zothique? Here's a quick & dirty break down of CAS's Zothique from the Wiki entry; "Zothique is an imagined future continent in a series of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith. Zothique is also the title of the cycle of tales which take place there.[1] In terms of number and extent, the Zothique cycle is the largest collection of stories written by Smith. The cycle belongs to the fantasy genre, and more precisely to the Dying Earth subgenre." I lay in bed thinking about my sessions of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique with my  friend Steve. 
 You can read about those here:  These days I run these sessions a bit differently right from the start. Many of the campaign resources would be changed right from the start.



Steve's version of Zothique based on Rodney Mathews fantastic artwork.
Used without permission no breech of trademark or copyright is intended.


There's a lot that I would do different these days, especially given the fact that I've got so many good OSR resources & the fact that I've still got Steve's campaign notes. Steve had based much of his material on the 
the Zothique D20 Guide
 hosted on the  'The Eldritch Dark' website. But these days I've got a ton of additional OSR stuff available to me as a dungeon master. Given the fact that I own a good chunk of the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea rpg books & adventures this is the source book & OSR Rpg system that I'd be using as a campaign base. 


Then I'd go straight back to Steve's notes & go back to the Zothique cycle of stories themselves.  
Let's start with the fact that Greg Gorgonmilk did an affordable version of Zothique available on Lulu. Bless his heart! 


Given Steve's notes I'd use ACK's Heroic Handbook  coupled with AS&SH & then spun through the lens of Domains at War complete. I asked Alexander Marcus for a copy of Domains at War Complete. To be honest I'm still going through it.


Couple Domains of War with Goblinoid Games Realms of Crawling Chaos & you've got a perfect set up for Lovecraftian city state warfare. And yes that is as insane as it sounds.  But why would there be city state warfare in Zothique?



The real fly in the Zothique ointment?! Well that's the Amber family (d'Amberville in French, as an option) who have influence & involvement in Zothique. The Amber family from Tom Moldvay's X2 Castle Amber has been a major pain in the neck for my players for years now. Stephen Amber is dead but he's not gone at all. According to Steve's notes. The lich of Stephen Amber has been engaged in a three sided war with the Lich Lords from Mayfair Games Role Aids Adventure Lich Lords



But what your not seeing is the fact that Stephen Amber isn't simply an arch wizard but an arch wizard with the command of Principalities of Glantri as his secret weapon. The deserts of Zothique are his battle ground for the control of the world of Zothique.  T
he d'Ambreville family appears prominently in GAZ3: "The Principalities of Glantri" (1987). So there's a strong connection between Mystara & my setting version of Zothique. Mystara is by no means an isolated plane & has interaction with both Zothique & even Ravenloft given my experience of campaign play in Steve's gaming sessions. 


Mark of Amber puts this influence over the top and brings the cursed family of the d'Ambreville family in a whole different place. With hundreds of agents combing across the face of Zothique looking for clues to the patriarch of the d'Ambreville family. 


But I can already hear the Adventurer, Conqueror,King crowd going where's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu by Omer Joel, & Alexander Macris? Well that title is being saved for a  completely different aspect of this campaign.
 The cycle of Clark Ashton Smith's stories are as follows: 
What are the connections between 
 Averoigne, Ravenloft, Mystara, & even Castle Amber itself? That dear friends is a blog entry for another day

Friday, February 28, 2020

The Egg of the Coot & The Demon Worm - Cha'alt/Godbound Campaign Commentary Session Report Part Ten


The Witch Coven of Garlghast & the Egregore set by Privateer Press (34035), make excellent substitutes for the witches of Egg of Coot. 

 Cha'alt/Godbound  campaign had a high rate of ultra violence! 
In tonight's game the party encountered a Cha'alt demon worm along with purple demon  cleric summoner  & its  the sky ship guardians. The demon worm turned on the handlers as its cleric was teleported away! The party was on its way back to the dragon's city state & had to deal with a scout party controlling a minor Cha'alt demon worm or was it the other way around.  The demon worm is going to be seeking revenge on the party of adventures 



Rex Harenae Crawler In Toxix found out that his guards were way laded by a group of Egg of Coot witches & an egg aviator. The group took their time dealing with the witches & had a bit of a rough time with the avatar.



Voltan the Deathless had a bit of a confrontation with the party but they beat feet away from him! He's porting in  a part army of the Egg of Coot to lay siege to the dragon king's city state. Stepthen the Rock's spies are watching all of the action happening at the city state. There is no love lost between the Stephen The Rock & the Egg of Coot. 
The Egg is very petty that way & beyond capriciously chaotic evil itself.

The action is picking up next week as Cha'alt's power grows in intensity around the PC's. There is an alliance between one of the Demon worms of Cha'alt & Voltan the Deathless. A confrontation between the dragon, the party, & the Egg of Coot is coming up next week!



Gray Morrow - Robot Soldier Illustration  that I think is exactly the right style for my NPC Voltan the Deathless a Godbound rpg agent of Chaos. Art is used without permission but no copyright or trademark infridgement is meant. This blog post is for educational & entertainment purposes only. If you don't know who Gary Morrow is then read about this over looked master right here. 

Divine Inspiration - Ray Harryhausen's Jason & The Argonauts 1963 & Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Campaign Commentary

"The legendary Greek hero leads a team of intrepid adventurers in a perilous quest for the legendary Golden Fleece. "

Sometimes you've got to go back to the well for inspiration & in this case its the Ray Harryhausen 1963 classic Jason & the Argonauts. Here's the low down on this film from its wiki entry; "Jason and the Argonauts (working title: Jason and the Golden Fleece) is a 1963 Anglo-American independently made mythological fantasy film produced by Charles H. Schneer and directed by Don Chaffey. the film stars Todd Armstrong as the eponymous hero, along with Nancy Kovack, Honor Blackman, and Gary Raymond. it was distributed by Columbia Pictures.
Shot in Eastman Color, the film was made in collaboration with stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen and is known for its various legendary creatures, notably the iconic fight scene featuring seven skeleton warriors.
The film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, who also worked with Harryhausen on the fantasy films The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), and Mysterious Island (1961)."

There is a ton of Appendix N references in this film & it doesn't get any better for Dungeons & Dragons mythological style action. From the set up of Jason as the man with one sandal & the shame of King 
Pelias.
The thing about 
"Jason and the Argonauts (working title: Jason and the Golden Fleece) is the fact that the gods take such a personal interest in the destinies of Jason & his crew. The gods are playing chess with the lives of the heroes around them.

From the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons perspective this is straight out of the Deities & Demigods play book. The gods set up the whole affair from "Pelias usurps the throne of Thessaly, killing King Aristo, but knows that a prophecy states that one of Aristo's children will avenge him." This is exactly how the Greco Roman gods manipulate the lives of the mortals to suit their games. A tactic that the dungeon master can use keep the action moving within a campaign.

Jason & the Argonauts also shows the proper place of artifacts & monsters  within a campaign. These monsters &  toys the gods use to motivate & destroy the lives those who have their place on the board of life. This is something that we see time in & out in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master Guide with the iconic artifacts of Dungeons & Dragons. 


The thing about Jason is the fact that the 
Golden Fleece as an artifact floats in the background in the whole mini campaign of the film. This is the way that an artifact should be used & see how Zeus dangles the fleece in front of him several times. 

"Learning that Jason intends to seek the legendary Golden Fleece to rally support against him, he encourages Jason in the attempt, hoping that Jason will be killed.
Hermes takes Jason to Mount Olympus to speak with Zeus and Hera. Hera tells him Zeus has decreed that she can help him only five times. The same number of times that Jason's murdered sister, the lovely Briseis, called on Hera for protection. She directs him to search for the Fleece in the land of Colchis. Zeus offers aid, but Jason declines."



The dungeons & ruins of Jason & the Argonauts also have their roots within the divinity & creation myths of the gods. This is an absolutely perfect for the DM looking to quickly drop in a dungeon into a campaign. I've done this several times within the City of Greyhawk setting.


The ruins of the gods littered through out the film in the background especially in the preproduction Harryhausen artwork I've seen on line. Talos is a fantastic example of a divine guardian in 1963 film. The Argonauts are an example of a party of adventurers going to town on an adventure location with the consequences at the hands of Talos. 



Adventurers within this film have quest after quest & the action keeps moving along. There are so many iconic moments that can be used for motivation. And even after hundreds of repeated viewings this remains one of my all time favorite films. Even though I've heard countless times that this is a 'kiddie film' it remains an old favorite of mine. A perfect storm of a Harryhausen film that will both inspire & keep the dungeon master coming back for that oh so good stop motion action folks.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Review & Commentary Lich Lords Adventure Module By Lynn Sellers of Mayfair Games's Role Aids for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition & Your Old School Campaigns


"After countless millenia, A DARK POWER AWAKENS.

You have been summoned to appear before your king, who was once a great man, but is now held fast in the icy grip of fear. Trembling, he tells of mighty earthquakes to the north that destroyed villages and unearthed the... FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE LICH LORDS

Enter the catacombs of this buried city and find the way to destroy the evil before it brings the onslaught of eternal night. The fate of the living world is in your hands. Defeat the lords of darkness and great reward is yours. Fail and see a world... CRUSHED BY SKELETAL HANDS.

LICH LORDS is a high level quest for 6 to 8 adventurers of Skill Level 12 to 16. Brave every danger in the quest to rid the world of the most awesome of undead.""

1985 ... Lynn Sellers & Frank Frazetta (cover) ... 32 pages + centerfold cardstock map ... MGI 726 ... ISBN 091277133X"

It takes a certain mind set to run Lynn Sellers Lich Lords, as in this is a rather nasty piece of an old school Mayfair Role Aids adventure. Seems straight forward, the high level party of adventurers is hired by the king to destroy the evil undead lich lords. And that's where everything goes completely South. 


The picture was taken from this Etsy seller whose got the module for 30.00 dollars U.S. 
Lich Lords normally goes for forty five on Ebay.

In actuality the party is hired by the king but finds out that the lich lords despise  one another & the party has to decide how to enemy of my enemy is my friend. The problem is that the lich lords are in a weakened state & you can't fool around. By day fifteen their gonna be at full power & deadlier then ever! The downside to this module is the fact that its not a sandbox but a bit of a rail roadie dungeon setting.
There's a lot to like with Mayfair's Lichlords not only are they nasty high level undead for first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons but these guys will give any party of adventurers embolisms.  The maps & cartography are easy on the eyes & the lost city of the lich lords has some potential for even further adventuring.

Lynn Sellers is in top form here bringing the '85 undead pain to the party of adventurers & bring it hard. This is a module that works on the PC levels being twelve to fourteen for a reason. And that reason is the pure lethality of the undead royals. The problem is that the dungeon aspect is very linear. But there's so much to love here, the setting material is gold, the NPC's are completely nasty. And the adventure premise is pure eight five metal. My suggestion is to take the module adventure elements & completely ditch the dungeon crawl aspect. I'm not the only reviewer who felt this way either The Funky Grognard tumbler had this to say in his review of Lich Lords;  "Get rid of the dungeon crawl altogether.  Tear it up!  Toss it! Set it on fire!  Use it to line the bottom of your stupid parakeet’s cage! Focus on the political infighting amongst the Lich Lords and how the PCs either capitalize on their position as outsiders to take down these douchebag dickholes or become expendable pawns in their power games.  I would also opt to utilize an open world environment for this game, allowing the players to decide as to how they want the adventure to progress."

In fact I go just a bit further with Lich Lords & flesh out the undead city more. Keep the adventure's dungeon but use it for other undead NPC's possibly lesser undead nobles or the like. The Lich Lords is classic & classic for a reason & that reason is the whole cloth adventure, NPC's & actual solid use of the adventure material.

By using Lich Lords with the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons  first edition Dungeon Master's Guide its possible to back fill in some of the implied adventure back story & other dungeons that's talked about. Between the random dungeon generator & the random infernal monster generators the whole cloth back story of the 'lost city' could be filled in.


Mayfair games Lich Lords isn't by any means perfect but the quality is very ahead of its time for an Eight five product & it remains an old favorite of mine around the table top.
 

Books matter - OSR Campaign Setting Flip - World War I Godzilla - Prelude To War of the Worlds

"And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling, and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet—it is odd, by-the-by, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2d. I am inclined to think that the appearance may have been the casting of the huge gun, the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the 12th, and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame, suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as flaming gas rushes out of a gun."" 



Chapter 1. The Eve of the War





So my latest blog posts about H.G. Well's War of the Worlds & Godzilla over the last couple of days has been getting me quite a bit of flack in my local antiquarian OSR circles. 

The War of the Worlds Godzilla 1898! - A Troll Lord Games Victorious rpg Campaign Set Up, War of the Worlds Godzilla 1914 - The Opening Salvo A Troll Lord Games Victorious rpg Campaign, & War of the Worlds Godzilla 1914 - Years Zero 1912 -1913 A Troll Lord Games OSR/ Victorious rpg Campaign blog posts.  The reason appears to be because I used the Siege Engine from Troll Lord Games as the basis for this OSR campaign set up. Gotta say I'm in a bit of a state of shock about this development but I can show you how to do this same campaign set up with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons resources & OSR systems easily.  So let's assume here for the sake of campaign setting easy that Europe has had during its existence many of the tropes & clitches that we take for granted in Dungeons & Dragons. Dragons, dungeons, wizards, Elves, Dwarves, etc. And lets assume that the occult, supernatural, mythology, etc. is real & true to history for the campaign's setting. 




So assuming all of the above let's quickly review the video that inspired this campaign above. Now without missing a beat, we've got the crown heads of Europe starring at each other & ready to go toe to toe with each other over a series of interlocking alliances & conflicts. Everything boiled over in World War one from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. But its seeds go back to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the post-1848 rise of Prussia under Otto von Bismarck. And here's where the seeds of this campaign really start with the moves of Stephen d' Amberville against Otto Von Bismark. Stephen d' Amberville is an  undead arch lich & not taking it lying down! He's been going move for move against Otto Von Bismark. 
X2: "Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville)" (1981), by Tom Moldvay, takes center stage as the arch lich established by Tom Moldvay isn't resting peacefully. He plays human chess with real royals & the crown princes of Europe. 

But where's Godzilla?! Well if we assume that ancient dragons & tarrasques are real then it stands to reason that maybe that 'King of the Monsters' title isn't for show. He & his species has been been battling these bastards of the Earth for eons. Here's where you grab that copy of the Monster Manual II for stats kids on the tarrasques! 


All that weird radiation, strange magical energies, & incredible raw power that's been released into the Earth since the time of the dinosaurs? How ever will we as dungeon masters be able to play this?! Well there's Goblinoid Games Labyrinth Lord & the Advanced Labyrinth Lord Companion. But what about the 'modern' weaponry of WWI & the 
kaiju mutations?! Well Goblinoid also has Mutant Future to take care of all of that. 




Now personally I'd be using Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg system for doing pre WWI Dark Europe. And as for the stats for Godzilla himself? Well I'd be using Chris Van Deelen's City Killer Mark I for the stats needed for Godzilla.  I'd also thrown in a healthy dose of Realms of Crawling Chaos for any Lovecraftian bits as well and for some really nasty fringe cults & relics.


Now if you really wanna add a bit of that old school D&D weirdness have many of the smaller houses competing against each other ala Frank Herbert's Dune but add in a  Ruritanian romance element to this campaign; "Ruritanian romance is a genre of literature, film and theatre comprising novels, stories, plays and films set in a fictional country, usually in Central or Eastern Europe, such as the "Ruritania" that gave the genre its name.[1]
Such stories are typically swashbuckling adventure novels, tales of high romance and intrigue, centered on the ruling classes, almost always aristocracy and royalty,[1] although (for instance) Winston Churchill's novel Savrola, in every other way a typical example of the genre, concerns a revolution to restore rightful parliamentary government in the republican country of Laurania. The themes of honor, loyalty and love predominate, and the works frequently feature the restoration of legitimate government after a period of usurpation or dictatorship" 


Fictional countries are established only to obliterated in the shadow of the on coming war & the invasion coming up. PC's could be working hard to avert the on coming horrors by globe trotting & trying to get a handle on both the espionage, saving heads of Europe, dealing with hidden witch covens, & trying to survive against the monstrous spawn of Kaiju. This is the perfect time to add the Lion & Dragon rpg, Dark Albion, & Cults of Chaos to the mix.


In fact much of the history of the  Lion & Dragon rpg could be used as leverage for ancient rivalries between modern national powers. There could be a modern witch hunting campaign in the works.
The ACK's Heroic Handbook is the perfect companion to this campaign with the ancient dragons being incredibly dangerous adversaries & opponents on the world stage.



The Martian invaders are not absent during this time frame at all they have H.G. Wells  Crystal Eggs scattered across the Earth. These eggs have made their way into occult societies, shadowy terrorist organizations, & the hands of dangerous Fey across Europe. Details on the Crystal Egg were written up by The Old School Heretic Blog back in 2012.
In fact many of the dark & sinster cults detailed in ACK's  Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu could be operating on the fringes of Earth during this time frame.



Next time the Fey, the Fairies, & the Fated!