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Evacuate, Wipe, Flush
I’ve been holding this in for too long and now I need to let it out in a rush.
Planet Trashpocalypse
When I call Sandy Petersen’s Planet Apocalypse “trash,” please don’t take it as an insult. I mean it in the same way as when I call Petersen’s previous game Cthulhu Wars “trash,” or the 2001 action-adventure film The Musketeer “trash.” These things, these artifacts of culture, they were never going to escape the dumpster. So instead, they leaned into it. They wrapped their feet in banana peels and armored themselves with spent diapers. They forced Tim Roth to swagger around in leathers and feathers, wearing that eye patch, speaking those lines. That’s their whole appeal. To be so bad that they circle around on themselves, like the fathomless plains of hell, venturing not quite into the territory of good, but perhaps into worth a laugh.
I may have tipped my hand there. Oh well. At least I have some serviceable pictures of the game’s miniatures.
Borantha
Remember Cthulhu Wars? Sure you do. There’s no forgetting that mountain of plastic, as eye-catching as it was bombastic. The horrors of H.P. Lovecraft molded in day-glo, waging war for command of Earth, regardless of whether that placed more emphasis on our little ball of dirt than cosmic horror really calls for.
Now Sandy Petersen is at it again, this time laboring upon another molded mountain. At the very least, Glorantha: The Gods War makes stronger internal sense, pitting rival pantheons against each other in a contest for total supremacy. But it holds so much in common with Cthulhu Wars, from the way factions develop over time to the outcomes of its battle dice, that it’s impossible not to compare the two.
Cthulhu Wars Fhtagn!
Since the dawn of time, when we yet believed the stars were fireflies caught in the thatched ceiling of the nighttime sky and fire was a newfangled contraption not quite trusted by the older generation, a single question has nagged at the back of Man’s mind:
Who would win in a fight between Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Hastur?
SPACE-BIFF! 