RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026, Day 5 - Origins of the Fifth Moon of Elysia

Well...as we all know, "the best intentions something something something," so despite hoping to get back to the blog after yesterday's post to continue the tour and maybe even get caught up...here I am well over 24 hours later seeing that there's almost no way that happens.  Because this next question...oh boy, does it make me want to ramble.

So there's your warning.  Now let's see where this takes me...

Day 5 - Can you tell us about the campaign's history?
(In the real world and within the universe.)

To start off: Why am I so adamant about gaming with action figures?!?  (And what is it about He-Man?)

I have imagined making action figure skirmish gaming a major part of my hobby life for years now.  It might have emerged soon after I first discovered minis gaming, when I started to work on a universe and system to support battles among garden gnomes in actual gardens.  Since then, the idea to set up a game in whatever outside environment I happen to find myself in has crept into my thoughts over, and over, and over.  And the more I've thought about it, the more I've idealized the dream scenario in my mind...like the more I've thought about running outdoor miniature scenarios with toys being something that I could do to legitimately add a bit of positivity to the world.  (Even though I know that sounds a little...eh, pretentious...?)

Several years ago, I read an online piece about Masters of the Universe-styled figures' making a bit of a comeback.  I wish I could find that article again now...but the main things I remember are the emphasis on the unique figure anatomy (I think the author may have referred to them as "chunky") and the specific reference to their being perfect to play with at the beach.  This hit home because I remember doing exactly that!  Back in the early '80s, my family spent a day (I guess multiple days over the course of my childhood) at this "beach" in south Georgia called Crystal Lake.  (And this was after Friday the 13th had become a very well-known cultural reference point, so I don't know what they were thinking.  Maybe it existed before the first movie...?  Not sure, as I think it was actually an artificial body of water...)

Anyway...the brother of one of my sister's friends was also going to be there for one of these trips, and either through fortune or the kind foresight of our parents, he and I both ended up with chunky action figures to play with in the sand and water.  I had the one that was my first MotU figure (maybe my only one at the time?), and potentially the one that many people would find most appropriate to bring to such an outing...Mer-Man:

Photo from the Motu Vintage Variants page

Christopher, meanwhile, brought a figure that I wasn't yet familiar with...

I believe The Warrior Beasts were made by Remco alongside their Warlord (and other DC Comics fantasy property) action figure line, perhaps to serve as villains.  (I definitely find that little "PLAY WITH" box mentioning Arak and the Warlord alongside Masters of the Universe pretty interesting...!)  Gecko here was also a great choice for the day of play in the sand and Sun.

Now, add in a few other bits of info:

1.  The absurdly exaggerated bodies of these figures reinforce that they are meant for play, not accurate representation of reality;

2.  Masters of the Universe as an IP is arguably the strongest connection I have to what might be called 'classic fantasy' from my entire childhood.  (The fact that it's really Star Wars-influenced science fantasy only makes it cooler to me now, just as it did back then.  I mean...it's also basically a superhero setting, so it has elements of pretty much every type of adventure story I enjoyed as a kid!); and...

3.  The snowstorm across the American Northeast a couple weeks ago has left everything around me covered in snow for a while now, and as I'm driving, I can't help but think about how much fun it'd be to set up adventure scenarios in the yards, fields, and hills stretched out around me.

Put all of these things together, and I truly have this specific, archetypal experience playing out in my mind where strangers are brought together by the unbridled fun of rolling big dice outside to play out stories with action figures.  And while I'll probably always gravitate toward roughly 1:18 scale toys due to the fact that in my childhood, that was simply the default size for an action figure, it's definitely possible that this unbridled fun would be amplified even more if they happen to be ridiculously muscular 5.5" figures!

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Okay...and one more thing about Masters of the Universe that has struck me so powerfully lately that I felt it deserved an entirely new section of this post:  I am kind of blown away by how easy it is to find similarities between things happening in old episodes of He-Man and She-Ra and things happening right now in my own country.  I know that sounds...hmm...alarmist, maybe...?  But...I really didn't start my recent stretch of watching the old series with this connection in mind...yet it was impossible to ignore.  The Great Rebellion led by Princess Adora (that's She-Ra, in case you don't know) is fighting against a tyrannical government that ignores all manner of compassion and dignity to exploit its residents...even occupying villages with faceless troops who demand complete obedience.  Hell...I watched an episode of He-Man last night that had this kid talking about how great Skeletor is (while his father or grandfather was there telling him Skeletor couldn't be trusted), and I swear you could just replace "Skeletor" with a certain American celebrity/politician's name every time the boy spoke, and it would sound exactly like the sort of things being said in the United States right now.

Image from Wiki Grayskull

And y'know...maybe that's the craziest part of it all, the part that REALLY makes it resonate.  At some point, as I was aging out of the target audience range for Masters of the Universe, I started to recognize how ridiculous the caricatured portrayals of its villains really were.  I guess that could be said for a lot of cartoon "big bads" that were meant to be invariably selfish and occasionally bungling, but somehow powerful enough to be the biggest threats to their respective settings.  And it seems like that's exactly what I'm watching in the U.S. right now.  It's pretty easy to say, "Yeah, but how could someone like Skeletor gain so much power and inspire such loyalty in his lackeys?"  It's absurd...and kind of funny...but we're now seeing it every day in the real world.  It's un-freaking-believable at times...

Hmm.

So, yeah...He-Man and She-Ra really hit home these days.  Uncomfortably so.  However, the goofy heroism and kindness emphasized by their stories is as good a remedy as I can find to shake off the despair that discomfort brings with it.

So let's play with some chunky figures!!

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Heh.  There, I guess I'm done with the rambling.  I need to cover the other part of the question, though: What is the in universe history of the Fifth Moon of Elysia?  I'll see if I can make this quick...

The planet Elysia; art by Decster1

Elysia is the fifth planet in a system centered on a Class G star in a distant spiral galaxy.  It was what drew humanoid explorers to the system in the first place; while essentially an ice planet, huge deposits of etherealite with a variety of chemical compositions have been found just below the permafrost layer, in many spots around the globe.  This led The Corporation to send legions of miners and their families to live on the planet, exploiting the galaxy's many citizens in need for cheap labor and simultaneously mounting an incessant propaganda campaign that has influenced many of these very workers to develop great Corporate loyalty.  You might think, with a name like Elysia, that the planet would be a pretty fantastic place to live.  That certainly is not the case, but it is why The Corporation settled on that name.

Over time, other planets in the system have also been populated to varying extents, and a highly advanced civilization of metallic dragons was discovered on the system's third planet, Chalcothon.  In addition, the many moons of Elysia have been settled and offer a wide spectrum of experiences and adventures.  The Fifth Moon, aka AB-5.5, is the center of the system's resistance movement, a collection of warriors, mages, and citizens of all walks of life who recognize the uncaring and occasionally downright malicious intent of The Corporation's policies and are determined to bring a more progressive and democratic way of life to Elysia and its nearby planets and moons.

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Thank you for making your way through all of that (or even for skipping down to this sentence...)!  I shall be back tomorrow(?) with a focus on where we'll start our tour of AB-5.5...

RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026, Day 4 - A little bit about AB-5.5's neighborhood

Moving along at an insufficient-but-better-than-average-for-this-blogger pace in this month's Campaign Tour Challenge, I have a bit more regarding the Fifth Moon of Elysia...

(Looking back to Adam's original post for guidance...)

Day 4 - Is there a map?
Give us a visual! Show us a map of your setting! Don't have one? WHY NOT?!?

Well, I didn't have one, but I found enough spare moments at work yesterday (don't tell anyone plz) to put together a rough...well, diagram, I guess.  This certainly isn't a proper map, as it definitely isn't to scale space-wise (after all, scale is actually pretty insane when it comes to astronomy), and the planets don't normally line up like this.  (Although I bet some really crazy magical stuff happens on the rare occasion they do!)

At any rate...here are the first five planets in the star system containing the planet Elysia, whose fifth moon (AB-5.5) is the starting point for this setting:

And while the spaces between them are obviously out of whack, I'd say the relative sizes of the planets themselves are probably pretty close to "accurate."  (And yeah, the sun over there on the left probably matches the inaccurate scaling of space more than the relative sizing of the planets...)  In order of average orbit distance from their sun, here's what interplanetary explorers think they've figured out at this point...

1. Aerona - A gaseous planet where most life is found on magically-floating landmasses or perpetually-flying aircraft.

2. Benthiko - Ocean planet!

3. Chalcothon - Ruled by metallic dragons...IN SPACE!  Well, they're in space when they leave the atmosphere of Chalcothon.  Which they do, often!

4. Duresta - It's yellow here, so...desert planet!  (Maybe...?)

5. Elysia - The heart of it all!  Like the metaphysically connected realms of Eternia and Etheria, Elysia is home to people, places, and artifacts of great magic.

Beyond Elysia, there's a big old asteroid belt that probably has a bunch of other ridiculously cool things going on in it, and then there are a number of planets even farther out.  Definitely some gas giants with inhabited moons.  (I actually really like the idea of keeping aspects of the system intentionally vague for as long as possible so that details can be filled in through play.)  But those five up there...those are the high points of the neighborhood for now.

And Elysia, of course, has nine moons.  Sometimes ten!  More on that later today...!

🤞 (for luck)

RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026, Days 1-3 - The Fifth Moon of Elysia, plus Kraite Felrune and what's in the night sky

Buckle up, everyone...it's challenge time!

(Ugh.  "Buckle up."  Really...😅)

So anyway...when Adam Dickstein aka Barking Alien posted the details for his RPG CAMPAIGN TOUR CHALLENGE (not sure if the caps are important or not) last week, it was obvious to me that I wanted to take part.  It's always fun to be part of something as I tap away in my little corner of the blogosphere.  BUT...it wasn't obvious what I should write about.  The only game that I'm currently sort of running is the eponymous Monstrous Matters campaign, in which Father Josh continues to indulge my ridiculously overwrought fantasy dilemmas with even more ridiculously designed fantasy solutions.

I also really love the idea of having a blogging challenge force me to shape ideas bouncing around my noggin (oh man, I'm turning into my Dad...) into a form that's accessible to (1) people other than me, and (2) me, years from now when I mine my Monstrous ramblings for memories.  And so...I'm going back.  You might even say way back.  More than six years ago, I started writing about a gaming project that I had the bald-faced audacity to call "The One I'm Going to Finish."  That endeavor was also known as Project 5.5...a plan to formalize some game rules that make use of stocky, overmuscled, 5.5-inch action figures in the style of Masters of the Universe.

I even found an eBay deal for some old figures, to kickstart my character creation...

I'm actually not 100% certain where these figures have been stashed away since we moved to New Jersey, which is probably some sort of metaphor for my lifelong struggle to pay attention to one of my "million dollar ideas" long enough to get a few bucks' worth of fun out of it.

Alas...aka of course...that didn't end up being the one I finished.  But maybe there's still enough time to correct that...?  And even if I don't completely complete it, in a complete way, maybe some creativity will get splashed onto my other creative projects through their connections to Project 5.5 or simply the mind-flexing that will surely accompany seeing everyone else's posts for the month.

Then it's settled!  For Barking Alien's RPG Campaign Tour Challenge, I present...

The Fifth Moon of Elysia...

The fifth moon is that blue marble to the upper left of Elysia; image by Decster1

...a heroic science fantasy setting filled with rebels, magic, technology, and lots (and lots) of muscles.

So let's get into this thing!  (And get...almost caught up...!)

Check out Adam's full post for more details on the daily assignments...which I'll also write out as I go...

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Day 1 - Campaign Introduction and Overview
What is your campaign called, what system does it use, and what is it all about?

The Fifth Moon of Elysia is all about heroes and villains battling for the magical soul of the multiverse.  Elysia is the fifth planet in its star system, and many of the celestial bodies within rocketshot are prime adventure locales.  The system's heroes are colorful, and its villains are pretty unflinchingly evil...but maybe we can even work in a shade of gray here and there...

For the game (not star) system, I'll take a stab at polishing up the framework I've been throwing about for playing with action figures of a slightly smaller scale...which will broadly follow the rules of my own take on a (Monstrous) fantasy heartbreaker.

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Day 2 - About Your Tour Guide
Introduce us to a character who can serve as our guide through your campaign and its setting.

All right, let's see.  I think maybe I have a direction to take this, so let's go with this guy...

Kraite Felrune

Image by Land_of_Books_YouTube

(He's the one in the middle.)

Kraite spent much of his youth with various Orcish raiding parties, having plenty of good times and causing plenty more destruction across the entire system.  But now he's seen the light, found his purpose, and started fighting the battles of a hero.  He stands in fierce opposition to the cruel authoritarian rule of the Evil Being That Wants to Rule Everything™.

We'll all learn more about Kraite as the month goes on...

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Day 3 - Where the heck are we?
What is the campaign's location, and where is that location relative to other important places?

Let's zoom in on our moon of interest:

Image by AdisResic

If it looks Earthlike...well, yeah.  The fifth moon of the system's fifth planet Elysia (sometimes referred to as Astronomical Body 5.5, any other names TBD soonish) would definitely remind us of our own homeworld.  There are even a bunch of the same organisms living on both our Earth and AB-5.5.  But rest assured...there's some weird shit here too.  (I can't wait to learn about it all...!)

Oh!  And Elysia actually has nine moons, plus a tenth that only appears during certain time windows in the story of the universe.  And all of the moons are really closely tied to the magic in the setting.

Hmm...

Okay, thank you for reading!  See you soon with more from AB-5.5...

Not AB-5.5; also, swiped from the Battle Ram blog

1st-level spell: Commune with S**t

This really isn't the sort of post that I'm super-happy to use to punctuate my blogging flow (or lack thereof), but I am inspired to take part in Barking Alien's RPG Campaign Tour Challenge, starting tomorrow (well...I'll try to catch up at least every other day or so...!), and wanted to get this little bit of trivial content out of my head first.

So...this came up while my group was playing Dungeons & Kittens, which has been amazing so far (thanks Rachel!), and which probably doesn't give much additional meaning to this post other than the fact that I find the contrast between this spell and the theme of that game pretty entertaining.  (Y'know, I should probably just devote a post to D&K sometime soon...it is a blast...)

Anyhow...Father Josh's kitten Bobbin got a magic item that allows him to talk to the mycelia of mushrooms (and maybe other fungi...?), and that somehow led to the idea of conversing with excrement, to which Josh said something like, "How is that not a Mörk Borg scroll already?"  And maybe it is...but here we go anyway...

Photo by Caleb Oquendo

Commune with S**t

1st-level Spell

(Nature spell and/or Sacred scroll)

Casting time: 1 action

Range: Immediate vicinity

Duration: 10 minutes

Save: None

This spell allows the caster to communicate with nearby excrement that has come from any animal, including sapient animals such as humans.  This includes feces expelled in liquid form and substances such as bird droppings that combine solid and liquid elements.  The excrement has knowledge of all actions taken by its host while being processed through the body, although it is usually not capable of explaining anything regarding the broader context of the actions.

In the case of a mixture of excrement from multiple individuals, as with a latrine or septic tank, the magic-user will not be able to separate the targets' voices unless the caster is in physical contact with the stool.

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And yeah, I'm kind of all over the place when it comes to whether or not 'swear words' get censored on here.  Something about having it in the name of the post and the spell felt...I dunno...unnecessarily 'edgy,' I guess.  So fucking sue me, eh?

This trailer for MTG's Lorwyn Eclipsed is freaking fantastic...

The lore for Magic: The Gathering (which I will still stand behind as my favorite game ever) has entered a strange place over the past several years.  For a while there - and as I think I may have noted on here a time or two - the MTG story team at WotC was absolutely killin' it from my perspective.  (In a good way, in case that isn't clear.)  They repeatedly addressed the question, "What would ____ look like as an MTG world?" with creativity and genuine affection for both the mother IP and the genres that were tackled.  Along the way, there were some real high points for fans of innovative, game-able worlds (especially, as MTG lore fans are called, Vorthoses): the fantasy cyberpunk of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, for example, and the friendly anthro-animal antics of Bloomburrow were both pretty well-received.

That's not to say that every decision was 100% spot-on.  Folks got tired of what came to be known as hat sets, the expansions that overlaid a theme on the MTG multiverse partly by putting characters in hats that you don't expect in a traditional fantasy setting...for example, cowboy hats for a Western set and detective hats (or...sort of fedoras, I guess...) for a murder mystery set.  (It really is interesting that the sets that have been praised over this time - like those mentioned above - basically followed the same gameplan as the oft-dismissed hat sets, they just didn't put characters in funny hats.  So, while I suspect that the set design and gameplay also had an impact on the sets' reception...well, maybe there really is something to this hat thing...)

Of course, that approach is arguably negligible when you consider the biggest change to the MTG creative approach over the last several years: the release of Universes Beyond sets (which feature IPs outside of MTG's regular lore) and their eventual incorporation into the regular cadence of yearly set releases.  Right now, in Magic's Standard format - which is treated as the "default" format for competitive MTG enough to be called "Standard" - folks are playing with cards representing the lore of Final Fantasy, Avatar (the Airbender type), and (perhaps most surprisingly) freaking Spider-Man.

I will admit that I am so far undecided on how I feel about this "invasion" of other IPs into the MTG battles played out on tabletops around the world.  (I don't play enough currently, especially out in public with strangers, to really have an opinion yet.)  BUT...I can definitely understand why this grinds the gears of many MTG lore devotees.  It has not gone unnoticed that when the Ninja Turtles set (yep) drops in about a month and a half, there will be more currently available Magic expansions set in New York City than in most of the (maybe any...?) original MTG worlds.  And I'm kind of okay with that (I like NYC!), but it is...weird.

Anyway...all of that is to say that when this promotion for the new set Lorwyn Eclipsed was released a couple of weeks ago, it was such a breath of fresh air that I don't think some MTG lore fanatics knew what to do with themselves.  The bright plane of Lorwyn and its dark counterpart Shadowmoor are built upon the folklore of the British Isles, and the new set (which just had prerelease tourneys this past weekend) really examines the interaction between the contrasts of the related planes.  And that includes this amazing music video, featuring some beautiful puppet renditions of the settings' goblins (AKA boggarts), produced by The Jim Henson Company.

I'll quit rambling now so you can just enjoy this video...

Musical Monday: Shots Fired (Negro Terror)

So, I have a much happier song that I've been meaning to post, and hopefully I'll get to that one within the next day or so (maybe even today?), but man is the state of my country distracting right now.  So for now, I guess I'll just post this song that may or may not be relevant to the American status quo.

Galaxy Laser Team comic #1 (Ekatón) - English translation

If you know your GLT, you'll probably notice that I'm missing the turtle-crab...

Happy Holidays all!  I hope your season has been amazing so far and that you ring in the new year exactly as you most enjoy.

Tomorrow will mark 10 years since I published my first post on this blog.  I kind of can't believe that...while I've had my lapses...it's something that's still a part of what I do and think about.  It probably helps that many of the people I've met through blogging (even my meager and sporadic output) are some of the folks I'm happiest to know in this world of ours.

I've been giving a fair amount of thought recently to directions I might try steering things in 2026 in an effort to streamline my blogging focus....and maybe stumble into more completed projects along the way.  So...we'll see how that goes, I guess...but in the meantime, I wanted to go ahead and share something else I've put a little time into lately.  (I'd like to think of this as my "Christmas gift to the world"...or the first part of it, at least...but I do realize that its weight doesn't really merit that kind of lofty description...!)

To cut to the chase, these links will take you to an English translation of the first issue of Ekatón: El Pueblo Perdido del Espacio, a comic series included in the Argentine children's magazine Anteojito beginning (I believe) in 1980.

Ekatón #1 in English (A5)

Ekatón #1 in English (A5, in an order to print and fold into a booklet)

The longer explanation goes something like this:

The picture at the top of this post shows a selection of characters from a reasonably well-known set of cheap plastic space figures initially released in the late 1970s.  While I'm not even sure if all of the names under which they were sold have ever been gathered together, they are now most often called the Galaxy Laser Team, or occasionally the Star Patrol.  At this point, there's been quite a bit written (and filmed) about these toys, so I'm not going to dive into their history right now.  If you're interested, you can find some great blog posts about them here and here, and plugging "Galaxy Laser Team" into your favorite search engine or video site search bar is sure to give you a number of informative results.

Another look at not-Chewbacca and one of the astronauts (to show a bit more detail than what can be seen above due to their color)

Now, they may not look like much, but something about the sculpts and the coloration (some of my actual childhood figures are pictured here) made these toys pretty freaking memorable for those of us who played with them way back when.  They're even being manufactured again (in loads of new colors) by Tim Mee Toy!  The thing was, while they were obviously made to cash in on a specific cultural phenomenon of the late 1970s (one that still earns new fans today), there was never a background story to accompany the figures.  Well...so I thought...until a few(?) years back when I found out that a children's magazine in Argentina, Anteojito, included a five-issue comic insert in the early '80s that featured characters based on the figures.  (Or...maybe the figures were based on the characters...?  I'm not sure if anyone knows for certain the order that everything took effect, but my guess is that the figures came first...)

While this comic series, Ekatón: El Pueblo Perdido del Espacio, has been widely available on the web for a while now and has even been reprinted fairly recently, I had never seen it translated into English.  So, I've tried to correct that.

The "cover" of the English translation

Some caveats(!!)

1)  I do not speak Spanish very well, so this translation is mostly from ChatGPT.  I did make some edits for syntax and flow, but nothing substantial was changed.  This seemed to me like a reasonable use of AI, since the creative nature of the task is minimal, BUT I recognize that others may take issue with that choice.  I hope you won't hold it against me too much.

2)  It is, admittedly, kind of sloppy...especially the "starburst" word balloons.  I made it in PowerPoint, and my efforts only roughened the already rough edges of the files I started with.  It is meant to be more utilitarian than ornamental, though.  And fwiw, I think the PDFs I have located of later issues are in better shape than the one I used for this installment, so as I continue this project, future editions may be a bit prettier.

3)  On that note:  I do not own any of this material.  I got this PDF from Scribd, and scans of all the original comics can be found pretty easily with a web search.  However, as noted above, this story has recently been reprinted in a deadtree form, and so it is possible there will be concerns about my posting it here.  I hope that adding the English translation will give others reason to believe this is a worthwhile thing to make available, BUT...well, please let me know if you believe it's a problem!

Some figures near the characters they presumably inspired

One final thing...not really a caveat, but a note...if you get some value out of this, please let me know!  I will eventually make my way through all five issues simply because I want to know the whole story and be able to page through it like I would any other comic.  However, if I know there are others who have enjoyed or are enjoying the project, it will certainly encourage me to work on those sooner rather than later.  (And perhaps it goes without saying that I would welcome anyone else who wants to join the effort...or even take it over, since I'm sure there are others much more qualified than I to tackle the translation and layout challenges...!)

I'm hoping the Cosmic Spark will play more of a role in future episodes.

With all of that said, I hope you enjoy!  Those links again (and please let me know if they're broken...):

Ekatón #1 in English (A5)

Ekatón #1 in English (A5, in an order to print and fold into a booklet)

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Happy New Year, everyone!