Meta Monday: Psychedelic wizards, living on Earth-Prime, and the D&D Cartoon

Fr. Josh has continued to indulge me in working his way solo through my first Monstrous Matters campaign.  At some point I'll probably get it in my head that other people want to read details about my game sessions and write up some specifics, but until then, I'll just say that it's gotten a little weird.  Which I think is something most of us would like to be able to say about our fantasy RPGs, so I'll definitely take it.  Eh...what the heck...as a small example, the MM team (Josh's character "Fingers" Watson plus less experienced agent and son-of-a-Ghostbuster Bobby Flech) found some scrolls while exploring part of a dungeon.  I decided to just let these scrolls be randomly assigned from among the full range of traditional fantasy spells, and...well, one of them turned out to be a Wish scroll.  And then it got used when Fingers was on the brink of death, but not just to get healthy, but also to fulfill Fingers' childhood dream (seemingly nourished by a healthy helping of Dungeon Crawl Classics) to become a psychedelic wizard.

So, not only did they succeed at the first mission (encountering goblins in the mountains of western North Carolina and seeking out the story behind their actions), but Fingers is now known as Tape Deck the Something, and is finding his consciousness progressively merging with that of the millennia-old spellbook for which he is the latest in a long line of psychic hosts.

It's pretty fun.

Along with thinking about the role of the Monstrous Matters team lately, I've also been reflecting on how many of my favorite comic book moments have come from those most "meta" of ideas, the ones that fully embrace the inherent silliness of superhero worlds but also acknowledge the powerful space they occupy in the human psyche.  I'm thinking about stuff like when Julius Schwartz helped Barry Allen build a cosmic treadmill to get back to his own universe, or when the Fantastic Four met God, and he looked like Jack Kirby.  And, of course, there's the story in what might be the greatest single issue in comics history (IMHO), Grant Morrison's "The Coyote Gospel," in Animal Man #5.  (The art -- by Truog, Hazlewood, and Wood -- and that Brian Bolland cover are also pretty badass, but hopefully it isn't TOO unfair that I usually think of it as G-Mo's masterpiece...)

From the issue's page at the DC Database

All in all, I'm wondering if I should take the premise of the Monstrous Matters team a bit more in this...for lack of a better term, I'll use this one a second time, complete with quotation marks once again..."meta" direction.  There are a lot of implications tied up in this.  I think there's actually quite a bit that changes if the monsters that are finding their way to our world aren't just similar to the ones in our stories and imaginations, but are actually shaped by our stories and imaginations.  It's one of my favorite aspects of superhero comics...and I'm wondering how it could play out at the gaming table.

And so, each Meta Monday, I hope to explore this theme a little bit, or at the very least take a look at some examples of this metatextual approach to RPG-style fantasy.  It's entirely possible I'll never follow up with a second Meta Monday, but right now, I'm feeling it.  And there's probably nowhere better to start looking than at what is in some ways the root of it all: Dungeons & Dragons itself, and its well-known '80s cartoon.  Remember, those kids didn't just haphazardly stumble upon some interdimensional portal; they took a D&D carnival ride there.  And they met a mysterious mentor/observer who happened to speak English...and they ended up with abilities they were undoubtedly familiar with from the tabletop game.  Whoa.  Meta!