Planets of Peril

FORGOTTEN FUTURES XI:

PLANETS OF PERIL

ROLE-PLAYING IN THE WORLDS OF STANLEY G. WEINBAUM’S 1930S SCIENCE FICTION BY MARCUS L. ROWLAND

To the best of my knowledge and belief all European copyright in the works of Stanley Weinbaum accompanying this collection, including editorial copyright, has now expired. No copyright in these works is claimed by the current editor. About half of this material was originally scanned by Malcolm Farmer for Project Gutenberg Australia, the remainder by me for this collection and for general publication on line. While every effort has been made to remove OCR and other errors it is likely that some remain. Some obvious proofreading and editorial errors found in the original books (such as two variant spellings of the hero’s surname in The Black Flame) have been corrected. I have not tried to convert American English to British English! Special thanks to Malcolm Farmer for his help with proofreading etc. Several stories could not be included since they remain in European copyright, or their European copyright status is unclear – most can be found on line in the USA or Australia. See end notes for full details.

This game contains numerous “spoilers” for Weinbaum’s stories; you are strongly advised to read the fiction first!

Print formatting: If you print double-sided, for best results print the cover and this page single sided, and all remaining pages (starting with the contents) double sided. The font used for most text is Albertus Medium; some other fonts are used for “handwriting,” “newspaper cuttings,” etc.

This game uses a mixture of Imperial and US measurements, the metric system, and astronomical measures such as AU and light-minutes, as seems appropriate. While it would be nice to imagine a world that uses a standard measuring system, we all know that things really aren’t like that. This game is science fiction, not fantasy…

This game has been put on line as a FREE download; you are asked to register if you find it useful. Please inform the author if you are charged any other fee to obtain it in any form. Forgotten Futures XI ~ Planets of Peril ~ Contents

Jupiter: King of the Planets 49 Contents Io: The Jungle Moon 50 Medical problems 51 A Martian Odyssey 1 Loonies 52 The first and most famous story of Stanley Weinbaum’s Slinkers 53 ‘Planetary’ sequence, with sidebars on Adventure Idea: Arms Race 54 Stanley G. Weinbaum 2-3 Europa: Small Edens 55 The ‘Planetary’ sequence and other stories 4 It’s Life, Jim… But Is It Kosher? 55 The ‘Planetary’ sequence – story summaries 5-9 Cycle of Fire 56 Timeline 10-12 Ganymede: The Tidal Moon 57 (Slightly) Weird Science 13-14 Cree and Crephine 58 Interplanetary Trade 15 Adventure Idea: The Last Round-Up 58 Technology 16 The Nympus 59-60 Glossary 17-20 Callisto: Cold to the Core 61 About Forgotten Futures 21 Saturn: The Ringed Wonder 62 Titan: Eskimo Hell 63 Islands in the Sky 23 Titan Natives 64 A guide to the Solar System and its principal worlds and A Note on Iapetus 65 moons, with assorted sidebars and sections: Adventure Idea: Rough Justice 66 Let Us Not Go There 24 Adventure Idea: Time-Slip on Titan 66 Adventure Idea: Frozen Fortress 24 Uranus: The Shrouded World 67 Table of planets 25 Neptune: The Last Enigma 69 Mercury: Too Hot To Handle 25 Neptune and Pluto 69 A Matter of Gravity 26 Pluto: Lair of the Pirate Queen 70 Venus: The Parasite Planet 27 The Pirates 71 Xixtchil 27 Crawlers 72 The Hotlands 27 Adventure Idea: Big Bang Theory 72 The Venusians 28-29 The Cool Country 30 Between Planets 73 Adventure Idea: Medical Run 30 A brief guide to spacecraft construction and operation, with The Glacial zone 31 sidebars on associated topics: The Dark Side Sample 31 Hullfile design 74 Earth: Cradle of Mankind 32 Tetrahedral Hulls 74-75 The Moon 32 Atomic Blasts 75 Adventure Idea: Scrapheap 32 Life Support 78 Power Blocs (economy etc.) 33 Weapons 79 The League of Nations 33-34 The Interplanetary Peace Treaty 79 Everyday Life 34-35 Shipboard Routine and Duties 80 Adventure Idea: Mercy Flight 35 The Laws of Space 80-81 Visiting Earth 35 The Customs of Space 81 Industries 36 Qualifications 82 Adventure Idea: Innocent Abroad 36 Ship-Building 83 Mars: Planet of the Thoth 37 Payload 83 Phobos and Deimos 38 Engines 84 Kingdom Areobiota 39 Fuel and Range 86 The Thoth 40-41 Game Data 87 The Other Martians 42-43 Traits 87 Life On Mars 43-44 Sample ships 90 Pyramidology 44 Accessorising 91 The Asteroids: Cosmic Rubble 45 Vehicles 91 The case for the Asteroids 46 Protective Clothing 92 The case against the Asteroids 47 Accommodation 94 Adventure Idea: Make Money Fast 48 Gadgets & Gizmos 94

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Preliminary Enquiries 128 Load up on Guns (Friends Optional) 95 A brief guide to some of the weapons available in this era: Harlech Hallta Ltd. 128 Projectile Weapons 95 The Salt Flats 130 Martian Pistols 96 Salty Badness 131 Flame Pistols & Cannon 96 End Game 133 Blasters 97 Bonus Points 133 Stun Gun 97 A Ceres of Unfortunate Events 134 Love And Rockets 98 A crack science team is needed to explore the interior of the Romantic Plots and Subplots: largest asteroid. Who are you going to call? Woke Up on Venus 99 Recruiting Advertisement 134 The Pirate Queen 99 The SILGRS 134 Crewman “Bob” 99 Use with the ‘Grand Tour’ campaign 135 The Princess Bribe 100 The World Ceres (Referees Only) 136 The Venusian Queen 100 Troubleshooting 137 Mighty Joe Yurgguh 100 Training Montage 138 On Location 100 The SILGRS in Depth 138 …Together They Fight Aliens 100 Base Camp 140 Running Romantic Adventures 101 Ice Palace 141 Romantic Traits 101 Dive, Dive, Dive 144 S… S… S… 145 Have Spacesuit, Will Travel 103 Upwards and Outwards 148 Campaigns, Adventures, sample characters, etc: End Game 149 Miniatures 104 Bonus Points, Notes 150 Sample Characters 104-107 Earth Girls Aren’t Easy 151 Grand Tour 108 An heiress must investigate her father’s death on Titan. Not A Planetary campaign for 3-6 adventurers: everyone wants the mystery solved… Player Handout – The New York Times 108 Use with the ‘Grand Tour’ campaign 151 Introduction 109 Nivia, the City of Snow 152 HMSS Endeavour 109 Trouble on Titan (Referee Only) 153 Adventure Seeds Sample 114 fileCharacters 154 Fugitives 114 Timetable 157 Adventure idea: Where No Man Pursueth 114 Conditions on Titan 157 Smuggling 115 Exploring the City 158 Adventure idea: Human Traffic 116 The Body in Question 164 Adventure idea: Going Legit 117 Reading The Will 169 Union Problems 118 Funeral Plans 170 Adventure idea: Sabotage! 118 End Game 171 Automation 119 Bonus Points 172 Adventure idea: Robert 120 The Interplanetary Corporation 121 End Notes, Tables, Etc. Richard Herrick, CEO Interplanetary Inc. 122 Credits and Legalities 173 Adventure Idea: The Hunting Party 123 Shareware License and Distribution 173 Keeping the Peace 124 Copyright 174 Adventure Idea: Warlord of Mars 124 Art Index 174 Useful Sources 176 With a Pinch of Salt 125 Coming Attractions 176 When the Venus colonies start to run out of salt, the vital Tables etc. fuel for atomic blasts, who better than the adventurers to Weapons Summary 177 rectify the situation? Spaceship Design Record 178 Use with the ‘Grand Tour’ campaign 125 The Situation (Referees Only) 126

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A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum

ARVIS stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares. J “Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port. The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious ravelled of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world. Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frostbitten nose. He sighed again contentedly. “Well,” exploded Harrison abruptly, “are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don’t get a peepSample for ten days, fileand finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!” “Speel?” queried Leroy perplexedly. “Speel what?” “He means ‘spiel’,” explained Putz soberly. “It iss to tell.” Jarvis met Harrison’s amused glance without the shadow of a smile. “That’s right, Karl,” he said in grave agreement with Putz. “Ich spiel es!” He grunted comfortably and began. “According to orders,” he said, “I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed south. You’ll remember, Cap—we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high—about two thousand feet—for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low.” “We know all that from Putz,” grunted Harrison. “I wish you’d saved the films, though. They’d have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?” “The films are safe,” retorted Jarvis. “Well,” he resumed, “as I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings haven’t much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets. “So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the under-jets, the seeing wasn’t any too good. I could see enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this gray plain that we’d been examining the whole week since our landing—same blobby growths and the same

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eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard me.” “I did!” snapped Harrison. “A hundred and fifty miles south,” continued Jarvis imperturbably, “the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then, and this gray plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another gray plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did.” “Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!” grumbled the captain. “Let’s get to the point.” “Coming!” remarked Jarvis. “Twenty miles into Thyle— Stanley G. Weinbaum believe it or not—I crossed a canal!” Despite a tragically short life and “Putz photographed a hundred! Let’s hear something new!” writing career, Stanley G. Weinbaum “And did he also see a city?” (1902-1935) is generally considered “Twenty of ‘em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!” to be one of the “greats” of 1930s “Well,” observed Jarvis, “from here on I’ll be telling a few science fiction, and one of SF’s classic authors regardless of period. things Putz didn’t see!” He rubbed his tingling nose, and He was born in Louisville, Kentucky continued. “I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this and studied chemical engineering, later season, so eight hours—eight hundred miles—from here, I switching to English, at the University decided to turn back. I was still over Thyle, whether I or II I’m of Wisconsin, but failed to graduate, not sure, not more than twenty-five miles into it. And right allegedly due to participation in a there, Putz’s pet motor quit!” cheating scandal, which led to him Sample“Quit? How?” file Putz was solicitous. leaving the university in 1923. “The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right For the next ten years he managed a away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle movie theatre, writing in his spare time. of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!” He rubbed His first known work was a romantic novel, The Lady Dances, sold in 1933 the injured member ruefully. and serialised in 1934; his first SF was “Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit the short story A Martian Odyssey, also acid sulphuric?” inquired Putz. “Sometimes der lead giffs a published in 1934. But at this point secondary radiation—” Weinbaum was already seriously ill, “Naw!” said Jarvis disgustedly. “I wouldn’t try that, of suffering from the lung cancer which course—not more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened eventually killed him. It’s notable that the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the cancer is a recurring theme in his thing working—what then? Ten miles with the blast coming right stories; the narrator / hero of A Martian out of the bottom and I’d have melted the floor from under Odyssey finds a stone which might be a me!” He rubbed his nose again. “Lucky for me a pound only cure for cancer, the adventurers of Parasite Planet are pursued by “dough- weighs seven ounces here, or I’d have been mashed flat!” pots,” explicitly described as giant “I could have fixed!” ejaculated the engineer. “I bet it vas not mobile cancers that eat anything serious.” organic in their path. “Probably not,” agreed Jarvis sarcastically. “Only it wouldn’t Continued next page fly. Nothing serious, but I had the choice of waiting to be picked

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up or trying to walk back—eight hundred miles, and perhaps Although he was increasingly ill, twenty days before we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well,” Weinbaum wrote prolifically through he concluded, “I chose to walk. Just as much chance of being 1934-5, and was working on another picked up, and it kept me busy.” romantic novel, Three Who Danced, “We’d have found you,” said Harrison. when he died in December 1935, “No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat barely eighteen months after A Martian Odyssey’s first publication. Much of straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt his work was published posthumously, and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out.” and one story, Tidal Moon, was little “Water tank!” exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. “She more than notes at the time of his weigh one-quarter ton!” death, completed by his sister. “Wasn’t full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds Weinbaum wrote in a variety of earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own genres including crime and romance, personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, but is now chiefly remembered for his so, tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five science fiction, and in particular the pounds less than my everyday earth-weight. I figured on that “Planetary” sequence, beginning with when I undertook the forty-mile daily stroll. Oh—of course I his first SF story A Martian Odyssey (1934), ten stories with a common took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry Martian nights. background describing the exploration “Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of and exploitation of a consistently daylight meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of detailed Solar System, and the first to course—plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing to describe genuinely alien aliens, whose see, not even Leroy’s crawling biopods. But an hour or so lives, minds and societies were unlike brought me to the canal—just a dry ditch about four hundred those of humans or any known human feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own company map. culture. While this collection includes “There’d been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was several of Weinbaum’s other stories, covered with what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I the Planetary stories are the primary approached, the lawn moved out of my way!” source for this game. The Planetary stories are not “Eh?” said Leroy. entirely consistent, but Weinbaum “Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods.Sample I caught one, filea little probably never envisaged them as a grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, “future history” of the type many stemmy legs.” subsequent authors have created. “He is where?” Leroy was eager. Despite this they hang together “He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the remarkably well, and it seems likely that walking grass opening in front and closing behind. And then I many discrepancies would have been was out on the orange desert of Thyle again. eliminated if they had been edited as a “I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going single volume in Weinbaum’s lifetime. so tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of Weinbaum’s other genre work included numerous short stories and yours, Karl. It was just before twilight that I reached the edge of three novels; The Black Flame (originally Thyle, and looked down over the gray Mare Chronium. And I two novelettes, Dawn of Flame and The knew there was seventy-five miles of that to be walked over, and Black Flame), The New Adam (1939), then a couple of hundred miles of that Xanthus desert, and and The Dark Other (1950, horror). about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I started One SF story, The Adaptive Ultimate, cussing you fellows for not picking me up!” was adapted into radio and TV plays, “We were trying, you sap!” said Harrison. and was filmed as She Devil in 1957. “That didn’t help. Well, I figured I might as well use what Sources: The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction was left of daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. (Clute & Nicholls); Introduction to A I found an easy place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was Martian Odyssey and other stories just the same sort of place as this—crazy leafless plants and a (Moskowitz); Wikipedia.