Barsoom Brain-worms (I have 'em)

06 Jun, 2026

I was on vacation last week, during which I devoured Gods of Mars, the second of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, plus part of Warlord of Mars, the third.

A Princess of Mars, the initial entry in the series, left me lukewarm when I read it a year or so ago. In Gods, it's like Burroughs tightened everything up -- the frame story is gone (aside from a brief opening vignette), and the plot whizzes from one action scene to another. Princess felt like a cumbersome 19th century novel in the vein of A Strange Manuscript Found in A Copper Cylinder or something by Jules Verne, whereas Gods feels like a 20th century pulp action story.

For all their many, many shortcomings, Burroughs' books regularly manage to surprise me with something wildly strange or original, which is exactly what I want out of this kind of thing. Stuff like the elaborate natural history rattled off by the Xodar of the fact that Martian religion is apparently a double-layered cannibal conspiracy(!?), or the idea of a slowly-rotating prison that can only be accessed once per year.

Though hardly a novel insight, it's also funny to realize how much of Barsoom lives on in better-known sci-fi and fantasy. Tatooine is basically a pastiche of Mars fiction despite nominally being in a galaxy far far away. Even Dune is obviously indebted, though arguably a satire or subversion of the basic John Carter narrative. Really anything that involves a desert planet, or people fighting weird monsters in a gladiatorial arena, or a white guy "going native" and becoming a badass warlord owes its existence to Burroughs.

Preliminary Notes for A Mars Hexcrawl Jam That May Never Happen

A few people have expressed interest in a jam to key the Mars hexmap and while I'm not touching it with a 9.5' pole until AAJ is wrapped up, it's still fun to toss around.¹ I'd want to approach it a bit differently from how I'm running AAJ, though.

First, I would want to make the co-development a ruleset fully a part of the jam. Not specifying a particular system for Antarctica lead to some headaches when compiling the anthology. For Mars Jam, I'd rather stipulate that everyone work within to one set of rules, albeit rules that can be hacked and modified to suit individual tastes.

The shared system should be the "minimum viable ruleset" needed for stocking the map. It needs to set the basic terms for things like how monsters are described, how characters are rendered, and what damage weapons do. As much as possible, procedural stuff like how combat initiative works or whether dungeon exploration uses an overloaded encounter die should be omitted.

In a related vein, the system should provide "building blocks" that can be added to and iterated on by participants (c.f. Gearing on "Limited Monsters") In that vein, I'm thinking:

• A starter bestiary, which includes some classic Martian creatures from Burroughs, Brackett, Smith, and maybe others.
• Troika-esque character backgrounds in lieu of classes
• A set of hexfill tables similar to the Wolves hexfills that did so much heavy-lifting for Antarctica (see below)
• A basic system for Psionics???
• A list of Martian treasures??

What system to use as a base? It brings me great joy that OD&D already includes Barsoomian monsters. However, AAJ is already very D&D-heavy, and I think hacking D&D to really nail sword-&-planet vibes might be tricky (I especially want to get away from D&D-style magic). I also like the idea of writing a hexcrawl that's less reliant on D&D levels and power scaling. Other options under consideration:

• Holme Alone -- If I were to stick with a D&D chassis, I'd use this. However, it may be a hard sell to get everyone on board with a random idea from my blog, and would require some hacking to introduce guns and tech and psionics.
• Wolves -- The other option for a D&D chassis. My one insight here is that the boast system is actually perfect for a Burroughs-style game of boisterous warrior-types. Would require rules for guns and psionics.
• Traveller -- This would be perfect for a grittier Leigh Brackett take on Mars. It has swords, guns, and psionics already. The biggest hurdle is probably adapting the character creation system.²
• Troika! -- Probably my top choice right now. Troika! already mixes lasers and swords. It is also really easy to tack-on additional monsters and backgrounds, so it seems like a good option for a collaborative jam. Also, Stella Condrey wrote this amazing Psionic Oops table.
• Violence -- I like the idea of writing something called "Martian Violence" that mixes in stuff from NBateman's Fantasy Violence, but I think it might make things too gritty and grounded. It also might be trickier to write up weird alien monsters, though maybe that's just my laziness talking.

The other thing I would want to refine is the map. The Martian Hex map is a bit trickier to work with than the Antarctic map.

For one thing, Mars is bigger than Antarctica! The map has 360,000 12-mile hexes vs. Antarctica's 110,000 6-mile hexes. I recently tried re-mapping with 24-mile hexes, which cut the number back down to 110,000. I think a 24-mile hex is reasonable given the scope: 1 day of foot travel, as the minimum unit, with aircraft and flying boats and whatnot able to traverse larger areas. My only reservation is that the area within each hex is huge, much larger than the Martian horizon at ground level. The idea of a "guaranteed" encounter with a hex feature starts to strain credulity.

The other option is to map a smaller area of mars at 12 or 6-mile resolution. I find this less appealing because then we're not keying Mars, but part of Mars, and then one has to go through the agonizing process of choosing from among the available maps.

(This is my top choice, if I had to pick -- the Valles Marineris canyon is so damn cool, and Argyria Planitia in the bottom right would be a great enclave, surrounded as it is by hostile tundra.)

Another minor issue is that because it uses a high-res heightmap, it's probably better to hand place POIs rather than just plopping them at hex centroids. Getting this right would require some fancier scripts than are currently in use for AAJ.

Finally, the map is less differentiated than the Antarctic map -- there's tundra, desert, water, and unspecified vegetation. Not a huge detail, but it is limiting. Also, no canals! A pulp sword & planet Mars jam should have canals on the map.

But anyways, I'm not touching this again until AAJ is done!

Martian Lore

Despite having had fun with Burroughs, I like how his work spun out into a broader cultural phenomenon that imagines Mars as a dying world of ruinous canals and barbarian warriors.

There are countless books about Mars out there, so this list is very incomplete, mainly limited to things that seem like good fodder for a Martian campaign.

• Obviously, ERB's Barsoom series
  • Princess of Mars (read)
  • Gods of Mars (read)
  • Warlord of Mars (currently reading)
  • Thuvia, Maid of Mars
  • Chessmen of Mars
  • Etc.
• Leigh Brackett -- I really liked the three stories by her that I've read.
  • Black Amazon of Mars (read, highly recommended)
  • Queen of the Martian Catacombs (read)
  • The Coming of the Terrans
  • The Road to Sinharat
  • Beast Jewel of Mars
• C.L. Moore
  • Shambleau (read, highly recommended)
  • The Tree of Life
  • Probably others?
• Percy Greg -- Apparently an influence on Burroughs
  • Across the Zodiac
• Michael Moorcock
  • The Michael Kane Trilogy
• C.S. Lewis
  • Out of The Silent Planet
• Ray Bradbury
  • The Martian Chronicles
• Percival Lowell -- the OG popularizer of canals and dying civilizations on Mars
  • Mars and Its Canals
• Mike Davis -- I just think this essay is cool.
• H.G. Wells
  • The War of The Worlds
• Clark Ashton Smith
  • The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (read, highly recommended)
• Stanley Weinbaum
  • A Martian Odyssey

Additional suggestions from Scribble:

• Edwin Leister Arnold
  • Gullivar Jones: His Vacation
• Gustavus W. Pope
  • Journey to Mars the Wonderful World: Its Beauty and Splendor; Its Mighty Races and Kingdoms; Its Final Doom

Wolves Hexfills for Mars

For the Joesky Tax, here are hexfill tables for... Calots upon The Coast? Banths upon Barsoom? Reavers upon the Red Planet?

The implied setting here is a riff on both Burroughs' & Leigh Brackett's Mars. Brackett's Mars stories are set on a version of the planet that's heavily based on Barsoom, full of barbarians, city-states, and nomads, but they are grittier & more morally complex, starring rogues rather than superheroes. The linked article argues convincingly that her stories fit neatly into a future Barsoom undergoing colonization by Earth.

Settlements

City-states

Terran Installations

Weird

Dungeon

Obstacle

Lairs/Encounters

(Some entries left blank to fill in later)

#mars #musings #random-tables