Last week, the game took the characters to Mars. The evening closed with a cliffhanger — the party having come through the Eye of Shambala onto the Martian plains in the late afternoon, just outside of a strange city, Elos Das from the Revelation of Mars sourcebook.  We established the half-gravity, compared to Earth and the thin air — on par with being at high altitude, but not so high as to instantly incapacitate…but that was it.

I was left with the choice of how much to use RoM, what to make my own to work with the elements of HEX and the Greco-Hindu mix of mythology that’s been hinted at, and whether to crib from my other favorite “planetary romance” source, Space: 1889. The RoM sourcebook has a decidedly Burroughs tilt toward it. The skyships in RoM have that spindly, alien look to them that was used in John Carter (really…not that bad an adaptation.) 1889 has a more traditional look to their cloudships. RoM seems to have a more “dead” Mars than 1889, which has cities and canals, and more habitable zones. So what to do?

Steal, brothers and sisters, steal! I decided all of the cities presented in Revelations of Mars will be present, and I’m using many of the Martian races — but not all. I’m losing the Saurian and Chitik, but keeping the Dheva as a wealthy class/race, the Zhul-Ya as the more common and poor race, and the Grodh (Gorilla Grodh…sigh…) as the equivalent of the savages of Mars. This parallels the High/Hill/Canal Martian slip of Space: 1889. I’m using the cloudships of 1889, as well; they’re prettier, a bit more realistic-looking, but what about their means of flight? I didn’t want liftwood and the RoM book is very hand-wavy…which isn’t going to work with my group. I decided to go with magnetic levitation that uses a form of “oridium” that the book cites as the ammunition for their blasters.

As for Mars, I’m using the Space: 1889 version, but with mods to fit in the RoM cities as stand ins for some of the Martian cities. There will be canals, many in various states of repair, some areas where water is still present under the surface (Valles Marineris). I’m keeping the “Great Machine” that is keeping everything from dying.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it all…

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