Mars: The OTHER OD&D Setting

    I've spoken before about implied worldbuilding, how fun it can be to tease apart the world that the rules of Dungeons and Dragons build. This has been done before for the setting of OD&D, and it's a fascinating read, but something that's stuck with me is the fact that the example for an alternate setting the players can venture into isn't some other plane, time, or even something like the Hyborian Age, but instead Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom. 

One of the odder details of Barsoom that pretty much every adaptation has left out is that the Martians may or may not have been naked all the time. (NSFW LINK)

    There isn't anything particularly deep about this choice. As has been well documented, Gygax had a fondness for the books, which he passed on to his children, and it makes sense he'd put them in his game because Lord knows he didn't mind getting his ass sued for copyright infringement. Curiously, however, while things like Balrogs did get stats before the Tolkien Estate sued, the statistics for the different kinds of Martian creatures were left to the GM's discretion, with the suggestion that, if the GM hadn't read the books and didn't know what the fuck these creatures were, to let the group decide collectively!

Yes, really

    Making things even more curious is the random encounter table presented in Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. It paints a picture of Barsoom different than the one in either the books or implied by the passage above. Since the non-Tarzan works of Burroughs are a lot more obscure than Howard, Lovecraft, or Moorcock, I'm going to put on my Expert Hat and walk us through what exactly this table means for the state of the Red Planet. But first, a quick rundown.

A Brief Guide to Barsoom

    Barsoom is Mars. Much like our own Mars, it used to have water on it, and doesn't anymore. Unlike our Mars, it has aliens on it! Lots of them in fact! And they fight, they fight so much that only three out of every thousand die of old age (technically, for reasons we'll get into). Setting aside animals like the great White Apes, the dog-like Calots, and so on, we have a set of humanoid species color-coded for our convenience. Note here that when I'm describing their color, I mean that in a sense of like...Crayola Crayon colors. 

• Red Martians are the predominant subspecies, living in city-scapes all across the Martian surface.
• Green Martians are a completely separate species than all the others. They're taller and have four arms and tusks. As part of a long history of racist depictions of Native Americans, they're nomads who are based in one of the long-dead cities of the desert, naming their horde after their city (the Thark horde is based in Thark, the Warhoon horde in Warhoon, etc.)
• Yellow Martians live up at the frozen North Pole, and generally prefer to be left alone. 
• Humans are us! Homo sapiens sapiens. We're the only species without the natural telepathy all the other Martians possess, but we make up for this by being super strong thanks to gravity (which is also, somehow, a heritable trait). 

    Their technology is both more and less advanced than ours-their use of The Eighth Ray lets them have hoverships and radium pistols and other cool stuff, and their medical technology means death by disease or old age are functionally unheard of. Those who make it to 1,000 sail down the River Iss to be with the Goddess Issus and her Holy Therns. Except surprise! There's not one but two sets of false gods at play!

via Dynamite Comics, a depiction of the First Born

• White Martians, the Holy Therns, are the cannibalistic hyper-psychic servants of the Goddess Issus. They're naturally hairless and wear blonde wigs. Except surprise! Issus is actually a member of the 
• Black Martians, or First Born. They're super-daring sky raiders content to live off of tribute until John Carter ruins everything.

With all that in mind, let us now turn back to 

Dungeons and Dragons and Mars

From page 18 of Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. Let's overanalyze, bitches.

    Astute readers looking at this encounter table may have noticed a few things, and what they might say about the state of Barsoom, so I'm just going to go through them in the order I noticed them:

• First and foremost, there are no animals here. No apts, no calots, no plant men, no nothing. On the one hand, this is a good design decision because those aren't actually in the monster book. On the other, none of the types of martians have stat blocks either. One might assume they're meant to be represented by different types of stat blocks (brigands, bandits, etc.) except those are already represented on the chart!
• Speaking of which, fully half of the Barsoom Encounter Chart is made up of humans. Or at least like....Elves and stuff. In the actual Barsoom stories, the human population on Mars is two, not counting a few half-human kids running around. It also, of course, includes Wizard as an option, but we will get to that. 
• There are no other Green Martians. It's only Tharks. Now the reason for this is that Gygax, like most people reading the books (including myself) forgot that "Thark" wasn't the word for Green Martian because that's the only horde we spend time with past the first book. However, it's a bit more interesting to think that maybe the wars of the green hordes has finally had a victor. Given they're twice as likely as any other Martian to show up, this feels likely.
• Finally, all of the non-Green Martians have an equal chance of showing up. The White, Black, and Yellow Martians, all of whom are fiercely isolationist, are all roaming around the Barsoomian wastes, implying the kind of major social shakeup that John Carter caused over the course of the first three books.

    Putting all of these things together, I ended up coming to a kind of weird conclusion. The Barsoom depicted in OD&D, thanks to TSR's slapshod editing, is one that is being colonized by the fantasy world the heroes originate from. That's why half of the encounter tables are forms of human-including those who are settled in towns or castles! That's why there are no wild animals-the fantasy adventurers killed them all. These invaders, whether preceding John Carter or following him, are far more dangerous than the Skeleton Men of Jupiter ever could be, causing a massive social shakeup. It is a framework that places the Fighting-Man and the Cleric, with their magic and their armor and their great strength and their gestation period of less than ten years, as the colonizers, looting the lost dead cities of Barsoom with near-impunity. 

    It's a framework that is, perhaps, a little more honest about what the system is for. 

The playback seems to be blocked in embeds, but this scene is great. Skip to around two minutes in.

(House)rules for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns

    However, never let it be said I do not pay my 🤮🤮🤮 Joesky Tax, so let me offer a trio of houserules for Marcia B's Fantastic Medieval Campaigns:

1. In Appendix A, Chain of Command, all Jasoomi (Earth or Equivalent Planet) Foot Troops are considered to be one category higher and have their movement doubled. (Armored Infantry instead become units of Heroes). 
2. If using the optional Ability Modifiers in Appendix B, all Jasoomi characters gain 18/00 Strength and double their movement outdoors, as long as they are on Barsoom.
3. Radium Pistols cost 200 Gold Pieces and ignore a target's Armor bonus to Armor Class. 

    If these stories sound at all interesting to you, a lot of them are in the public domain! I personally recommend A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and Warlord of Mars, as well as The Synthetic Men of Mars. They're not Deep Literature, but as far as junk food goes they're enjoyable enough. 

    If for whatever reason my houserules aren't good enough for you, there are a few games about the Barsoomi experience that I can also recommend:

• Warriors of the Red Planet is an old-school game with some fun random generators and OD&D compliant stat blocks for the critters of Mars, albeit with the serial numbers filed off. 
  
• Barsoom: 1960 is a Troika! setting that takes Barsoom into the Swinging 60s, with the Cold War in full swing. Will you side with NATO or the Warsaw Pact, or maybe just hope your Gridley University protest goes well? It's a bit weirder and sillier, but also hilarious.
  
• Finally, I would be remiss not to mention Modiphius' John Carter: Adventures on the Dying World of Barsoom. If you want something to replicate the action of the books, this is it. The mechanics are light and fantastic, and its three major supplements all add something worthwhile. My only complaint is that Modiphius' editing leaves a lot to be desired.

    And so, with all that, fair reader, I hope you have learned something today, about a now-obscure book series that was big in its heyday. If you ever feel like your group needs a vacation from the same old forests and castles of traditional D&D Fantasy, you can do a lot worse than taking a trip to Mars.