Adamant Entertainment's Mars RPGIf you’re like me, you can’t wait to see John Carter of Mars hit the big screen. I’ve started rereading the Barsoom tales on my Kindle already. But, if you’re like me, sometimes reading and watching is just not enough. Sometimes, you have to immerse yourself in it. Be a part of it. That’s where a good old paper and pencil role-playing game comes in to save the day. Look at all the choices we’ve got out there that go beyond Dungeons and Dragons and all of its variants. Tolkien fan? Try I.C.E.’s Middle-earth Role-Playing or Decipher’s Lord of the Rings: The RPG. Moorcock? There’s Elric! (either the Chaosium’s or Mongoose’s.) Don’t forget Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan. There’s also Babylon 5 and Star Trek. And there’s Cthulhu for any setting you can think of. Fortunately, we John Carter fans have some excellent options, too.
Space 1889 is one. Heliograph republished the material a few years back, and Savage Worlds has just released Space 1889: Red Sands. I love this game for its battles between airships and sky galleons and the possibility to reenact some of my favorite battles involving outnumbered British soldiers. All in all, however, Brits colonizing Mars just doesn’t have that Edgar Rice Burroughs feel. It’s just a little too Jules Verney or steampunky.
Closer to the Mars we know and love is Adamant Entertainment’s Mars. It’s offered in d20 and Savage Worlds versions. I picked up the latter and was quite impressed. It’s very Burroughsian, and the fast-paced, cinematic feel of the system works perfectly with the sword and planet genre. There’s Green and Red Martians and White Apes. Of course, they’ve made the game their own; it’s not an ERB RPG. The Green Martians and White Apes look like those of Barsoom but with only two arms. Another difference with the White Apes is that they are intelligent, have their own culture, and strive with the others races for habitable portions of the dying planet. Adamant also adds Gray Martians into the mix, which are essentially the H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds variety, tripods included.
Skirmisher's Barsoom d20 PDFOf course, if you are a die-hard, Barsoom-or-Bust role-player, you can visit Savage Barsoom on the web. It’s a wonderful website offering Savage Worlds rules based on Burroughs’ books. The site covers races, culture, technology – everything. If it’s in the books, it’s there or going to be. There’s also a d20 source from Skirmisher available at DriveThru RPG called Shadows of a Dying World. It actually works more as a bestiary, covering the various flora and fauna encountered in the John Carter stories. It was published a few years ago. Supposedly more material was going to be follow, but I’ve never seen it.
I also recommend John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom (Del Rey 1976). It is a compilation of material for the original Burroughs books covering everything from pre-Carter Barsoom to language and religion. The paperback copy I have contains several wonderful illustrations, too.
Bronze Age Miniature's Wasteland MutantAnd finally, let’s not forget the role-players who want miniatures on the table top. There were some John Carter minis released some years ago. They’re pretty difficult to find now; some do pop up occasionally on eBay. Your best bet, though, is a series released by Bronze Age Miniatures. They’re not labeled Mars or Barsoom, but they are some of the Best Burrough-esque miniatures I’ve come across. Check out their Wasteland Mutants if you want to see a good, formidable Green Martian, and they have male and female warriors that couldn’t be beat as Reds.
So you don’t have to settle for simply waiting for the film or rereading. You can live the great tales of the dying, red world, and the beauty of any of these systems and supplements is that you can follow the canon as closely, or not, as you like.