Superhero Media: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Volume 2

For gamers of all stripes, the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is well worth a read, if not a purchase. Hot on the heels of the last volume, the titular League are sent to Working to investigate the impact site of a supposed meteor, only to discover a metal cylinder filled with cephalopod alien life-forms. Faster than you can say "but still they come", heat rays are deployed and the army is called in. Soon, Tripods stalk the land and the British government is scrambling to defeat the Martians before the country is overrun. Allan and Mina are dispatched to look for Doctor Moreau, whilst Hyde and Nemo battle the tripods from the Nautilus, but the Invisible Man has disappeared... I'll leave it there, because the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is worth reading for yourself, but be warned, this volume contains even more extreme violence and sexual content. 

Now, say you were running a campaign for Victorian age and/or VSF/Steampunk superheroes, a Martian invasion, complete with Tripods, red weed and black smoke sounds like a hell of a challenge for your players to face. Even the ones that can't physically stand up to the Tripods, like all of the League, can rescue civilians, research Mars and the history of the Martians or look for new weapons and powers to overcome the invaders. Maybe it's just me, but more and more as a Game Master or Campaign Arbitrator, I'm looking for non-combat solutions for players to find and use to "win". At the end of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, despite overcoming the Martians, the League is split and broken and the air is more of loss than victory, at least, until you hit the prose section. Rather than a single adventure, like "Allan and the Sundered Veil" in the previous volume, the feature this time is "The New World Travelers' Almanac", a guide to the fantastic places of the world to be found in classic fiction, like Gulliver's Travels, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and even Noddy. 

To take a cynical look, "The New World Travelers' Almanac" is simply a list of locations from literary and popular fiction viewed through Moore's lens, but what it really does is lay the groundwork for the later volumes of the series. Many of the entries describing fantastic lands are "written" by members of various Leagues, not just Mina and Nemo, but also Gulliver and even Prospero and Orlando. The introduction of Orlando is important as Mina, Allan and Orlando form a polamorous triad that will form the main body of the League through to the end of the Century series of the comic. For those looking for inspiration for pulp games, "The New World Travelers' Almanac" is worth a peruse for more exotic locales than the typical Atlantis, Mu and other "Lost Cities". Also introduced for the first time are Les Hommes Mysterieux, the French answer to the League, which includes Jean Robur, Arsene Lupin, Monsieur Zenith, Fantomas and the Nyctalope, which I'm sorely tempted to recreate in miniature.