The History of Subterraliens
Been Developing for Decades — Premiering at Gary-Con — This Saturday. Here’s the story -
I started developing Subterraliens when I was a young kid, but, of course, had no idea that I’d still be working on it decades later.
I grew up in Glenview, Illinois, where nothing was exotic or scary. I rarely saw snakes, I never saw a killer spider, we don’t have bizarre animals and no sharks or giant squids swim in Lake Michigan. We didn’t even get a Bigfoot or a Loch Ness Monster.
Then, one summer, the Locusts came.
The way it was explained to me is that they ‘laid their eggs 17 years ago and at an appointed time, start digging towards the surface’.
I could never figure out how they knew when to come. Surely, they don’t have calendars and, besides, you can’t even know when a day or a season or a year passes when you’re deep underground.
Never have figured that one out.
Then, one hundred degree, hundred percent humidity day in mid-summer they emerged all at once, like a sneak attack flying in blindly bizarre flight paths and emitting a deafening buzz that sounded like bad feedback on our monoral record player.
It isn’t like I’d never seen an insect before. I was used to flies and bees and mosquitoes, but these things looked like monsters. I was used to the rhythmic sound bed of crickets on summer night, but nothing had prepared me for the horror movie cackle of the buzzing banshees from under the earth.
I’d never heard the world so loud and wouldn’t again until I was in a High School Heavy Metal Band.
In that sweltering summer, the whole effect was that my pleasant little neighborhood had turned into a prehistoric jungle.
Then, the deafening buzzing stopped. Thousands of ghastly alien skeletal shell skins clung to the trees like pirates heads hanging on pikes or Vlad the Impaler’s victims from a Creepy Magazine and the yard pocked with tiny holes that led deep into the earth.
What happened to the Cicada?
Where did it go? Back then, we called them Locusts, so it tied into Sunday School and Moses’ Bible Plagues.
Around that time, I saw something else that changed my life. It was an ‘ant war’ on the Madgey’s front step. By the time we found it, the battle was almost over. The sides were clearly marked. Red Ants versus Black Ants around a 3 foot half moon step that looked, if you squinted, like an ancient fort. I thought I was viewing the results of a final desperate battle.
I studied it. It seemed like the Black Ants won, because there were no living Red Ants. The bodies were piled up around what was obviously the battle line. I saw the scouts who’d killed each other. I speculated on what they were fighting over. Did somebody drop some candy on the front step?
But I couldn’t help imagining two kingdoms.. The Black Ants lived under the fortified step. The red ants probably came out of one of the ant hills we’d find near the baseball diamond and poke sticks into or use magnifying glasses to incinerate the ants like the space ships in the old George Pal ‘War of The Worlds’ which starred Gene Barry who I knew better as Bat Masterson and still later as Amos Burke.
One of those movies we’d watch on hot summer nights on somebody’s Color TV. What a great color movie. I’d never seen anything like the Martian Space Ship green in that movie.
And, over time, I learned that gophers, snakes and termites lived underground. I twisted my ankle on a gopher hole in a football game while going out for a bomb.. It made me wonder if I could fall into one of those lairs. And if ants, worms, snakes and gophers and spiders and termites were under the ground, what else could be there. Did Bears hibernate down there?
That is, not to mention that DEAD PEOPLE were underground.
Eeeech!!!!.
And what about the lost, sunken cities. Comic book illustrations of ‘Ant Farms’ pretty much formed my image of the world under the Earth: tiny farms and cities above an enormous network of passages that connected pockets of life, ranging from Lost Cities to tribes of Morlocks, intelligent dinosaur races that escaped extinction under the Earth and maybe even villages of the prematurely buried and ‘undead’ who never returned to the surface.
But the way I figured it, not everything down there was bad. There had to be treasure, dinosaur skeletons and maybe even lost cities founded by tribes who decided it was safer below ground than above ground. Of course there are.
Now throw in the Airfix soldiers that I played with on the ground where the ants, spiders, beetles and other creatures lived. And after every battle, sometimes fought with rubber bands, sometimes with dirtballs, sometimes with squirt guns… after every battle there would be MIA’s. Lots of MIAs. And since I half suspected my soldiers came to life when I wasn’t looking, I wondered what happened to them.
Did they head into the earth to figure out what was going on. Did they explore the vast gopher labyrinths, find serpents in their lairs or did they ever encounter 17 year locust eggs? Did they fight them, trying to forestall the coming attack?
I didn’t actually believe that they were patrolling sewer pipes (we didn’t have curbs in my neighborhood, something we took pride in) or taking up residence in Mastodon skulls, but I still thought about the lives of sentient toy soldiers were in an underground world.
And after Creepy Crawlers arrived, I could manufacture giant insects for my soldiers to battle from Vac U Form fortresses. (If you don’t know what Creepy Crawlers and Vac U Form are, you probably also don’t have vague light patches of skin on your hands from burning yourself with these incredibly fun and dangerous toys).
Anyway, like the 17 Year Locust, Subterraliens was an egg incubating deep in my mental underground for decades.
Now, like the locusts, Subterraliens is emerging Virtual GaryCon 2021.
Subterraliens is a love letter to the Ant Battle, Airfix Soldiers and 17 Year locusts. It’s my attempt to do a Hollow Earth story processed through Ray Harryhausen, the Pellucidar stories from Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.G. Wells’: Journey to the Center of the Earth. (If you can, listen to Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Return to the Center of the Earth, just for background).
It is not the first time I’ve entered the Underworld and probably won’t be the last. It seems that I’ve revisited the underworld in every phase of my life and career.
Started as an Archeology Major in college. The only thing I didn’t like is that everything was dead and the people didn’t talk, so I moved to Ancient History.
But what if everything wasn’t dead at a dig site?
Even my early writing reflected this stuff, in my first real produced stript, the 100 Year Old Mystery, it centered on a sunken riverboat in a New Orleans graveyard and, some will remember the Mysterious Grottos under Lady Jaye’s ancestral mansion in G.I. Joe and, of course, the Evil That LIes Below in Inhumanoids.
Subterraliens started in 1994 as a game concept. Then it turned into a TV Concept. My mental osterizer had to put aliens into it and the root idea probably came. I conceived the ‘as-of-now’ unwritten, Overlords of the Underworld’ for Agent 13.
So Subterraliens is about Aliens from the Center of the Earth.
The premise is that somewhere a long time ago, when the Earth was still forming… soft and pliable.. An ancient Johnny Appleseed flew to Earth and planted a ‘life seed pack.’ We code name him ‘The Progenitor.’ We can only speculate on what he looked like, though ancient legends suggest that he might be human and might be robotic. Whatever he is. The Progenitor (aka Cosmic Johnny Appleseed) seeded life in the goo of the Earth and had no idea what would survive and what would die.
He just planted genetic packs that could evolve into anything. And most of them were under the earth. Some are monstrous extremophiles that might remind us of the locusts, snakes and ants, some are carnivorous plants (Vegitoids) some are mineral (mineraliens) or Spiritus, ‘possessive live forms’ — ghosts that animate anything from dead creatures to underground pools, possessing all they touch.
Humans have encountered Subterraliens all through history. The monsters of mythology were, in many cases, Subterraiens… Just take a look at the Odyssey or Jason and the Argonauts.
They have appeared from time to time in the modern world as the Loch Ness Monster, Tommyknockers and other cryptids, and have usually been ‘debunked’ by scientists.
When Special Forces inspected caves and ancient structures in the Cradle of Civilization during the War on Terror, bunker busters crashed down into lost cities and awakened the denizens below.
Ensuing encounters and skirmishes were immediately classified, but a few, who saw the secret world, determined to learn the truth.
But now, Subterraliens are rising to the surface like the 17 Year Locusts at the exact same moment that humans are exploring the underworld in search of rare metals, military advantage or mystical insights.
Therefore, Humans and the Subterraliens are on a collision course.
And now, deep into the information age and time of COVID, all manner of Industrial, Military, Academic and Survival groups have gone under the earth and have begun to encounter wildly different varieties of Subterraliens.
In the stygian depths of the Dark Web there are rumors of Subterraliens.
Some ‘fringe’ groups even said that part of the lockdowns was to cover-up an ongoing war with Subterraliens who have emerged on the surface of the earth.
And while this is, I’m sure, preposterous, what is true is that leaked eyewitness accounts, iPhone videos and even scholarly treatises on the Subterraliens have been ‘fact checked’ and removed from the internet — for our own good.
Subterraliens is, of course, a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
And you can believe that, because I say so and it’s on the internet.
And, at GaryCon 2021, gamers will live two Subterralien adventures, ‘Deeper Isn’t Better’ where ex-members of a rumored Japanese Special Forces team created to battle various monsters caused by radioactive events have become a Private Deep Earth ‘Rescue’ Company hired by Billionaire Crocker Vanderlip, who has commissioned an X-Award to anybody who finds evidence of Alien Life Under the Earth. Their mission is to rescue a team that went off to win his prize.
Following Deeper Isn’t Better, we chronicle the adventures of a ‘follow on’ team who re-enters a Lost City deep under the Earth. In the second module titled, Lost Isn’t Dead our mission is to find the remains of a 19th Century Explorer who died under the Earth. His remains are believed to possess a map illustrating paths to several underground civilizations.
And if we do find the map, don’t be surprised if it resembles a comic book ‘Ant Farm’ ad.
The game modules have been crafted by the extremely talented and extraordinarily patient, Jay Parker, using his G-Core X Game System from Dilly Green Bean Games (no relation) games. Jay and I worked out the stories with some of the ideas coming from Black Fire, a hollow earth story John Zuur Platten and I developed with Stan Winston (wish that had happened) and later, Sony Studios.
So… Enjoy.
And, damn I hope we can actually have an in-person GARY-CON next year.
Hopefully, by then, Luke, Ernie, Heidi and I can get together for our RPG campaign through Haunted Stone Manor and the DDEC Mansion and Beverly Hills. And Maybe we can get Jim Ward to Help and anybody else who remembers those days in the Mid-80’s.
