Before Disney got their dirty hands on it, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom was actually a very interesting sci-fi saga. The Tarzan creator originally wrote eleven books in the series, before Disney’s abomination of a film infamously became one of the biggest box office bombs in history, leading the House of Mouse to thankfully abandon the franchise instead of running it deeper into the ground. And I guess they don’t need to, now that they’ve got their greedy paws on another space saga. Something to do with laser swords and villains wearing black robes.
Anyway, board game publisher Modiphius Entertainment Ltd have launched a Kickstarter campaign for John Carter of Mars – The Roleplaying Game, an official tabletop RPG created under license and with the cooperation of the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs. They’ve been working on the game for the past two years, and as you can below, it will contain stunning three centimeter figurines of some of the most well known characters and creatures from the franchise, in addition to a fully illustrated rule book. The game’s narrative was crafted under the guidance of Rice Burroughs scholar Scott Tracy Griffin, and will feature a variety of branching narratives based around John Carter’s experiences on planet Barsoom (AKA Mars).
If you’re a John Carter fan, you can donate to the campaign before it ends, but you don’t exactly need to, because they’ve already raised 652% of their £20,000 goal. Damn. I guess there really is a John Carter fanbase after all. Too bad nobody told Disney’s marketing department. Maybe if they’d known, they wouldn’t have removed ‘Mars’ from the film’s title as though it were some kind of dirty word.
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