Warriors of The Red Planet Rpg & Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation by English writer Edwin Lester Arnold For An Old Mars Campaign

Mars is a massively dangerous place to dungeon crawl & adventuring down in the ruins. This blog post picks up from this blog post. 

So we've been working with Warriors of the Red Planet and taking advantage of the multi WoRP races and PC classes. This is a great system to run full on post apocalyptic rpg campaigns. 

To this end I've been rereading Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation by English writer Edwin Lester Arnold, & this book has numerous elements that perhaps inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs 'A Princess of Mars'. 

Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation was published in 1905 & 'A Princess of Mars' was published in 1917. 

Is there a way of including both Gullivar Jones's Mars  & John Carter's Barsoom together in one campaign setting. According GULLIVER JONES ON BARSOOM?  by Den Valdron in ERBzine issue 1403 there's a ton of reasons why Gulliver Jones adventures took place in the Arctic region of Barsoom. 

The Mars of Gullivar Jones is highly dangerous place because it's essentially a prehistoric micro cosm of 'the Mars of yesteryear'. Sure you've got the Hither & Thither peoples with a relatively stable culture comparable to the Eloi & the Morlocks of HG Wells Time Machine novel. But there are other peoples, creatures, etc. which the author doesn't get deeply into. I have to admit that it was a bit slow going at times with the Edwin Lester Arnold going into far more detail about the alien plants then the creatures and monsters. Does this actually line up with evolutionary traits of ancient Mars?! What I'am I talking about?! 

Does Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation's fixation on the plant life point up a truth that we've found within Clark Aston Smith's Mars cycle. The simple evolutionary truth that the animal life on Mars is highly aggressive and multi limbed  for a reason. That reason is the fact that the plant life is highly evolved to kill animal life in a wide variety of creative ways. 
Think about it. Mars even when it was green is a very 'plant eats animal' based world. This Mars belongs to the first cycle of the planet when it was dominated by plant based life, gods, and even horrors.  We know this because Clark Ashton Smith goes hard into this with his Mars Cycle: 

• Dweller in the Gulf, The  (1933)
• Mnemoka (1955) Fragment
• Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, The  (1931)
• Vulthoom  (1935)
• Seedling of Mars or The Planet Entity  [plot by - E M Johnson] (1931)[An alternative background to the proceeding 4 stories]

What does this mean for Edgar Rice Burroughs material?! Quite a bit for the DM whose linking all of these stories together for their Warriors of the Red Planet campaign. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Plant Men from The Gods of  Mars by  Edgar  Rice Burroughs are hold overs from this time period gardened and tended by the Therns and their religion of manipulation. This ecological manipulation goes deeply into the lands of the Hither & Thither peoples. Extending deeply into the dungeons & ruins of the Martian underworld. We'll go down into the Martian underworld, the Therns, and the dungeon ecology of Mars next time.