Zorro Kickstarter - Just Three Days Left

The Kickstarter for Zorro: The Roleplaying Game closes in three days; it's met its target of $15,000.00 but it needs a few more backers to reach a cool $25,000.00.

The game is based on West End's d6 - the same system for the venerable Star Wars roleplaying game - which is awesome, with some added story-gamey features - which is completely meh for this blogger.

But ¡Cristo! It's Zorro, in a system which doesn't suck, and this fanboy is ready to get his black mask on and kick some Spanish cul.

This Never Happened . . . But It Should Have!

Click on the pic to visit Super-Team Family . . . The Lost Issues, and be prepared to lose hours of your day perusing the greatest comic teams-ups that never were.

Cinematic: The Mask of Zorro

Cinematic: Zorro

Cinematic: The Mark of Zorro

Free Zorro!

Daryl McCullough at Zorro - Swashbuckling News and Updates urges fans of the Fox to sign a petition asking Walt Disney Home Entertainment to release the movies The Sign of Zorro and Zorro the Avenger based on the Zorro series starring Guy Williams, as well as the short-lived Zorro and Son television show from the early Eighties on DVD.

Hey, it never hurts to ask.

Zorro and Shadow and Green Hornet . . . Oh, My!

Sean B at Wine and Savages spotted the Comic Con announcement of a crossover comic featuring Zorro, the Green Hornet and Kato, the Spider, the Black Bat, and the Shadow from Dynamite Entertainment. The release says Masks will be out "later this year."

I'm a fan of Matt Wagner's earlier Zorro books from Dynamite, so this looks groovy.

Illo copyright Dynamite Entertainment. Included here under Fair Use.

Los Zorros

Those familiar with Zorro only by way of the Antonio Banderas movies may not realize that a long line of swashbucklers wore the black mask of the Fox.

Matthew Baugh gives us a chronology listing the various Zorros and attempting to reconcile often inconsistent or conflicting dates, to build a more-or-less consistent timeline of the Zorro saga.

I like stuff like this, particularly since I often introduce characters from cape-and-sword tales - such as the 17th century ancestors of Don Alejandro de la Vega - into my campaign.

Z is for Zorro

One of the rituals of growing up in California is the fourth grade mission project. Every fourth grader in California learns the history of the twenty-one missions built by the Spanish in Alta California. In our school, we each built a model of a mission - the building materials of choice were sugar cubes and popsicle sticks - and we went on a field trip to Mission San Fernando Rey de España, where we learned about life at the mission, or at least its material culture and subsistence practices - instruction on the forced conversions of the disease-ravaged indigenous Tongva by the Franciscans was notably absent in hindsight.

The missions are frequent tourist destinations, to break up long drives up and down the state. We visited Mission San Juan Capistrano on a camping trip to Mission Bay in San Diego, and Mission Santa Barbara on another camping trip to Morro Bay. Our church youth group visited Mission San Gabriel Archangel on an outing. It's a pretty common experience for anyone growing up near the California coast.

The missions are California's most significant architectural vestige of our colonial history, as a part of New Spain. Nearly all of them have been restored to one degree or another - in a land of wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, buildings made of mud bricks tend to be ephemeral. Adobes from the Spanish era in California are vanishingly rare.

Perhaps that's why I so strongly associate the missions with Zorro.

I saw Tyrone Power's The Mark of Zorro for the first time around the same time as our mission projects - either the autumn before or the autumn after - on a Saturday tee-vee matinee. Up to then, swashbucklers were musketeers in Paris or pirates in the Caribbean, but now here were dueling swordsmen right here in California! Even to a guero from the suburbs - unless you grew up here, you'll never really understand "Mexican Radio" - it was filled with names and places that were intimately, immediately familiar in a way that The Three Musketeers or Captain Blood couldn't be.

I eventually found The Curse of Capistrano in either my school or community library, but though Johnston McCulley wrote scores of Zoro stories, most were buried and largely forgotten in the magazines where they were first published. Still, Zorro remains my swashbuckler.

One of these days I'll show my kids The Mark of Zorro on dvd. They'll get to see two great movie swordsmen - Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone - in a classic duel, and hear all those names that were new and yet familiar to me.

But first I'll take them to Mission San Juan Capistrano.

L is for Location

Quick, show of hands. Who thinks playing the Capitán Alatriste roleplaying game in a 16th century mansion sounds like fun?

Y'know, this is one of the reasons I'd like to run a Zorro campaign - he is California's iconic swashbuckler, after all - but even so, it's not like there's a ton of 18th century adobes converted to country inns 'round here, and I think we'd probably make a bit of a scene trying to play at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Cinematic: The Mask of Zorro