Sunday 6 March 2016

30 Adventure Seeds by Gardner Fox

All taken from the first two years of the Justice League of America comic, 1960 to 1962.


1. A Puffer Fish tells its king of the arrival of an alien conqueror in the dead of night.

2. Someone steals a building full of wizards to steal their brainpower, to beat the thief, get the building back.

3. At the moment of their meeting, a team is faced by a villain from the future who seeks to battle them based on a half-obscured record of the fight they are about to have.

4. A  golden golem king turns itself into a time machine, but is tricked by a wizard who lives in its belly into following their commands.

5. An enemy separates a group and battles them one-by-one, but at the end of each encounter, returns to the start to fight a new member of the team, any damage done to the enemy carries over from fight to fight, even though they are happening at the same time.

6. Purple shrink ray with infinite charges, but it wears off quickly if the target is not continually hit, and a smaller target is harder to hit.

7. Weapon firing bubbles which enfold the target and which are relentlessly attracted to a yellow star 250 trillion miles away.

8. Demigods keep a friendly idiot around as a kind of failsafe, their high-level foes always forget to take the moron into account in their schemes.

9. Illusion-making weapon which makes teams fight each other to death as they see each other as monsters.

10. A wizard steals all the powers of a powerful group and combines them in one golem, slaved to his will, but the golem also has all the weaknesses of the same group, and does not know what they are.

11. A villain seeks to create an elixir of immortality by acquiring the oldest man, the oldest reptile, the oldest bird, beast, fish and man, the heroes must find and guard these creatures.

12. Someone escapes from being imprisoned in an aviary by plucking single feathers from every bird and fashioning magical wings.

13. A villain forces a hero to play a game with miniatures of their friends, every move they lose sends that friend to a different plane of existence.

14. A gigantic lens in the sky threatens to boil away the sea, the sea creatures call their king for aid.

15. Evil wizards swap two worlds between realities, on one world where science was real now only magic works, on their own where magic was real, now only science works, and the wizards have machine guns and cadillacs. A golden doorway in the sky links the two realities.

16. Three wizards each hold one third of a vital spell, one is protected by a manticore and griffin, one by a castle full of traps and trolls with tommy guns, the last must be defeated three times, on land, in the sea and in the air before he can be captured.

17. A wizard freezes the population of a city with the tones of a magic bell, to free them he demands to hear his three arch-enemies, a dryad queen, a lizardman tyrant and a golem lord, each speak his name out loud at the same time.

18. The light of three suns combined will give a tyrant incredible powers.

19. Five demigods are imprisoned in a giant diamond, to free them, shoot the diamond-tipped arrow at exactly the right spot, but you only have one chance.



20. A cursed but noble exile general fakes villainy to provoke heroes into actions they cannot take himself in order to save a world.

21. Three doomsday machines must be deactivated, one makes all small creatures large and aggressive, it has an invisible handle, the second sinks continents under the sea, it cannot be approached by anyone in our reality, the last unleashes a race of golden titans but the handle kills anyone who turns it.

22. A genius in prison builds a shrink ray and uses it to escape in the most insane way possible simply to piss off the people who put them there.

23. In a castle of ice a gigantic clock of ice conceals an inescapable trap.

24. Gigantic deadly black puppets dangle from the sky.

25. Villains make golems that look exactly like themselves and mine them to explode.

26. A group of demigods doesn't notice that one of them has been replaced by an evil wizard in disguise becasue they all habitually wear masks.

27. A cunning wizard steal the luck of a group of protective demigods, sending the world into chaos, meanwhile the wizard grows in power. However, one demigod is of alien origin and has no fortune to be stolen, either good or bad.

28. Extra-reality invaders disguise their fortress of dimensional gates, alien monsters, reality-bending fields and mind-twisting energies, as a simple fun-house. No-one knows that the 'illusions' they are experiencing are entirely real, and that their bodies are stolen by the invaders.

29. An evil wizard plans to slowly and stealthily abduct and teleport everyone in a city, replacing them with criminals from all over reality and turning the city into a pirate state.

30. A low-level criminal discovers a magic lamp the light of which causes any being to follow their commands, and uses it to auction the services of the gods to the highest bidder.


Oh, I almost forgot, this exists now, its a kind of zine-collection thing of False Machine blog posts. There's one on Lulu too.


 Click the painting (its Joseph Wright)

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