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Highwayman

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Posts posted by Highwayman

  1. Re: "Ya better talk Oculon, or you'll get the spike!" (A Super law question)

     

    I think imposing the DP on supervillains would be problematic for more reasons than simply that they're hard to kill. The other reasons might be 1) they're incredibly vindictive individuals with 2) lots of very powerful colleagues who would have little difficulty identifying' date=' locating and killing/terrorizing 3) every single person remotely involved with their colleague's prosecution and sentencing. They only have to set a "precedent" once in order to deter imposing the DP on a supervillain. There aren't enough superheroes in most campaign settings to protect 12 jurors, a prosecutor and their experts, a judge and maybe even the court of appeals, the warden and all the guards of the prison(and their families), and the executioner. Even life without parole might trigger a wave of retribution.[/quote']

     

    I can see this as background for a typical "shalt not kill" setting. The first wave of supervillains, drunk on their newfound power, did pull this sort of thing all the time. The heroes, in response, stopping bringing them in alive. The surviving villains started fighting back like people who had nothing to loose. When the dust settled, the most violent heroes and villains were dead and the public, which had been caught in the crossfire, was disgusted with superhumans in general. After that, an unspoken agreement was reached: Villains don't pull things like that, and heroes don't kill them. There are exceptions, of course, but not enough to disrupt the system.

  2. Re: Things You'd See in a World Full of Supers...

     

    Superguy fined for failing to clean up after supermutt left a steamer on the Dog Catcher's front porch.

     

    Did anyone see supermutt do it? If not, what are they going to do, send the "material" to the crime lab for analysis? I don't think that you can get much usefull for Identification from poo.

     

    I think you could get DNA off of that. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it would be pretty low on the crime lab's list of priorities. On the third hand, trickle-down superscience could mean the lab could do CSI-style 60-second DNA tests and get through that list a lot faster.

  3. Re: Things You'd See in a World Full of Supers...

     

    Conspiracy theories would thrive in a world of supers. "Dr. Destroyer's behind all this health care reform stuff' date=' just like he secretly planted explosives in those buildings 8 years ago." The scary thing is, a lot of people would suspect the conspiracy theorists might be on to something...[/quote']

     

    In a world where "shapeshifting alien lizards are reading my thoughts" is a perfectly reasonable complaint, how do you diagnose the paranoid?

  4. Re: Three Villians, one picture, no ideas.. One Contest...

     

    Wow, lots of good ideas here. Here's what came to my mind.

     

    God, the Devil, and Dr. Bob

     

    Most people who meet Dr. Robert Zinn ("Please, call me Bob.") come away thinking of him as somewhat intense but otherwise friendly and dedicated psychiatrist. Of course, any psychiatrist will tell you sociopaths make the best liars. He was always good at convincing people to do what he wanted, and his psychological training only made him better. He had a good thing going for a while scamming rich neurotics, but all good things must come to a review board, and it took all of his skills and most of his money to keep his license and land a new job in a state hospital. If his new patients didn't have money, he could at least take kickbacks to test experimental drugs on them. And if two of them happened to have interesting reactions, well, now there was something he could really use. If his methods are no longer particularly subtle, it's just the nature of the tools he has to work with. Besides, who could blame a man in his situation for looking for a little catharsis?

     

    Jeffrey Wade's delusions of godhood certainly weren't helped when he developed some serious telekinetic power. He finds Dr. Bob's prayers pleasing, and what he's being humbly petitioned can't be wrong, because them by definition he couldn't do it, right? His wardrobe consists of a wide selection of clerical outfits (After all, who is better entitled to wear them?) and the expression of one who can do no wrong.

     

    Dennis Schafer, on the other hand, has been an extremely unhappy soul since the day he realized he was Satan. In fact, he hates the idea. Oh, he agrees with Dr. Bob that as the embodiment of all evil he should be out stealing and destroying, but he's miserable the whole time. It doesn't help that the destructive sonic blasts he generates become more destructive the more upset he becomes over the destruction he is causing. He made his Devil suit because he had to, not because he wanted to, and it shows.

  5. Re: Changing Into The Powersuit

     

    That said' date=' Jess did not build the suit... she is just piloting the thing. Now, she is learning how to maintain the suit but the brains behind the outfit is someone else (DNPC with mad science skills).[/quote']

     

    Simple solution: The armor has a remote control unit. It's no good for fine control or combat (in fact, the relevant circuits get locked down in combat to prevent an enemy from seizing control), but it's good enough for the for the DNPC to fly it to the character's location.

  6. Re: What if Dr. Destroyer....

     

    I see him the world conquest game solely for ego gratification. As a ruler, I picture this guy, turned up to 11, with superscience. You can't swing a cat without hitting a giant gold statue. (Hitting such a statue with a cat is, of course, punishable by death) Sure, the hungry will be fed and diseases will be cured (assuming this doesn't cut to deep into the giant gold statue and deathbot budgets), but first and formost as a way to demonstrate the genius and munificence of Destroyer. Every TV channel will be more than happy to tell you about it, as will Destroyer himself on the holographic talking labels of the food and vaccine packages. He wouldn't encourage cults, since such religious nonsense is foolish and unscientific, but if the weak-minded find some comfort in worshiping him, who is he to object?

     

    In most places, the old rulers are still in place, with obedience enforced by brainwashing, hostages, cortex bombs, or what have you. Ex-VIPER troopers, War Machine deserters, and assorted opportunists and collaborators garrison the major cities, backed by the afformentioned deathbots. The fanatic core of his troops guard vital installations and sereve as a strike force against rebellions.

     

    If he can't figure out a way around the aging thing, I see him eventually going the way of the Emperor in Warhammer 40K, kept just barely technically alive by massive machines as his minions work to conquor the universe in his name.

  7. Re: Evil Schemes for the Average Megalomaniac

     

    Master Mind claims to have planted a series of stolen Soviet nukes in and around the Canary Islands. Unless he is paid an insane ransom, he will detonate the nukes, setting off massive landslides and creating a devestating tsunami. He has, of course, anticipated some heroes will try to intervene, and has some supervillian minions and carefully-crafted deathtraps waiting for them...

     

     

    The bombs are, in fact, old Russian bomb casings packed with broken x-ray machines and Volkswagen parts. The real plan is to spark a panic in Florida, use that as a cover for the theft of a space shuttle that happened to have been scheduled for launch, and use the shuttle to put his orbital mind controller/death ray/Twinkie detector in orbit. With the heroes ambushed and ensnared in inescapable traps on the other side of the Atlantic, it's inconceivable anything could stop him..

     

  8. Re: Evil Schemes for the Average Megalomaniac

     

    What happens when meglomaniacs cooporate? Dr. Noah has been working on a contagious transformation retrovirus, but can't quite get it right. Dr. Anthrax wants the samples in a top-secret biowarfare lab, but can't find human minions with the special abilities needed to penetate the security...

  9. Re: The Champions Universe Without The Champions. How Hard Can It Be?

     

    Or you could assume the team broke up just before the PCs appeared. Nightwing's already gone. Like Tom said, it would be easy to picture Sapphire getting pulled away by her career and Witchcraft choosing to concentrate on the mystic side of things. Ironclad could join another team or just fade into the background. And maybe some crisis hits HI, and Defender has to drop the superhero thing to run the company full-time.

     

    End result, no Champions, but a potential team sponsor with a nice big empty potential HQ.

  10. Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe

     

    And with the Dreamer and the astral realm that has enslaved so many Empyreans' date=' what if "Astroth" is actually Demoiselle Nocturne, DEMON's Queen of Nightmares? What could she do with the life-forces of several dozen insanely powerful superhumans?

    [/quote']

     

    Or perhaps it's the other way around, and the drained energy was what it used to cross into the material world.

  11. Re: Some questions about Stronghold

     

    As far as "one-size-fits-all" supressor fields, it occurs to me that most powers that aren't plain old magic are justified with technology, psychic powers, access to other dimensions, or grossly misinterpreted quantum mechanics. A technology supression field isn't completely implausible, and it's been established the CU has mechanical mental shields, so an anti-psi field could work. If you combined the first two with some kind of handwavium-generated field that nullified the last two, you'd shut down the majority of powers.

  12. Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe

     

    --This isn't an "alien" mystery' date=' but COIL introduces yet another (after Teleios and Herr Doktor Pandemonium) example of the idea of an inserted loyalty gene. In the first two cases the backbround of the discovery is mysterious. Teleios does not remember who gave him the basic breakthroughs leading to his current status, while Timothy Blank won't explain how he came up with the COIL gene. The source of the gene that Doktor Pandemonium is manipulating it is very definitely [i']not [/i]a mystery. It was put there by the Elder Worm to turn humans into a horrid, Qliphotically-tainted slave race. Are Teleios and COIL using Elder Worm technology? If so, I hardly need to point out what a disturbing agenda is at work here.

     

    And then there's Dr. Destroyer's never-explained super-brainwashing technique, and the fact immunity to it seems to run in families...

     

    Of course, it may not be a matter of using Elder Worm technology so much as exploiting a backdoor the Elder Worms left in human brains. Which is not to say overuse might have some interesting effects.

  13. Re: DEMON plot help (Warning: Spoilers)

     

    The fall of Demon' date=' as described in [i']Demon:Servants of Darkness[/i], requires that Vander Bleek (unintentionally) assassinate the Edomite when he first comes into his presence. I took the gem to be the means to that end.

    But if more is wanted, the Thirteenth Floor is critically compromised in the weeks leading up to 2012. Two statted operatives of the Edomite, Devil Dog and Jack Fool, can actually be turned by the Descending Hierarchy, and Jack Fool has access to the Thirteenth Floor.

    I say that the Liber's main power is to free souls from Hell's grip. The Hierarchy's deep plan is to get even fuller control over Vander Bleek by appearing to give up its main leverage. And, incidentally, it will engineer an encounter between Vander Bleek and Devil Dog in which Vander Bleek has to use this power to turn Devil Dog. It is a minor indiscretion from the Edomite's point of view, comparable to the loss of Morning Star. But Devil Dog is fated to be Jack Fool's Dog.

     

    Nice, very nice.

     

    Of course, the question is how do the PCs fit into all of this? Maybe it could go like this. The Liber can summon souls to the mortal plane and either free them or control them. Van der Beek and the Hierarchy want to control Devil Dog's soul, of course. The PCs would presumably have different ideas, assuming they had previously encountered Devil Dog and figured out who he really is. Then it's a matter of tracking Van der Beek as he gathers the mystic artifacts he needs to forge the crown, presumably ending in a climatic battle with hordes of demonic minions for the new Crown Of Lucifier, with the soul of a hero in the balance...

  14. Re: Ground Zero Build

     

    My idea for a Fusion character was five nuclear technicians accidentially fused into one tough, superstrong being, with the five personalities taking turns controling the body. Most of them are violently unhappy with the situation. In combat, one mind fights while the others observe and plan. Brings five brains' worth of nuclear science and technical know-how to the party.

  15. Re: How long does tech last after The End?

     

    Lot is going to depend on luck.

     

    Hard to make electricity without a magnet. Copper, tin and a loadstone, might be able to build a handcrank generator. Scaling up from there to a hydroelectrical dam will require iron, which takes coal, and possibly more man-hours than a human lifetime. Plus a single flood can wipe out a lifetime's work.

     

    Think the best your polymath can do is bronze age metals, Renasance wind or water mills, and maybe enough chemical batteries for a few tricks with electricity. From found objects I don't see a light bulb, much less transistors, in a single lifetime.

     

    Sounds like his best bet is to become god-king of the local cavemen and get them to build his dams, mine his metals, and do the rest of the grunt work.

     

    Then all he has to do is lead them to some hidden valley or Hollow Earth pocket or somesuch that was unknown to the world at large when he left, tell them "stay put until I come back," and step out of his time machine in the 21st century into a hidden high-tech civilization that worships him as a god...

  16. Re: Calling all lawyers--Supers and unique legal issues

     

    Hypothetical no. 5--How would the courts have to redefine "personhood" in order to fit a world where extraterrestrials' date=' gods, elves, robots and androids, vampires, zombies, and giant sentient lizards with thermonuclear halitosis exist?[/quote']

     

    I imagine with your run-of-the-mill alien, AI, supernatural creature, or giant monster you could go with some variation on the Turing test administered by court-appointed psychologists. If you pass, congratulations! You’re a legal human.

     

    Undead would be trickier because of the whole dead thing. Here in the real world, what’s your recourse if there’s some major screwup and you get declared legally dead while you’re still up and walking around?

  17. Re: Calling all lawyers--Supers and unique legal issues

     

    As far as the super-deductive reasoning is concerned' date=' it's a credibility issue. It like a mechanical lie detector would, in general, be treated as a technology or scientific method which would have to gain generally recognized consensus within the applicable scientific field. Not sure what the applicable field would be, but if it's just one person or a limited number of persons, it's simply not likely. It's just too easy to explain anything away in social or psycho-social terms as a statistical outlier when you are dealing with small numbers. Furthermore, you would have difficulty establishing "truth indicators" in any kind of competitive setting. Super Detective says, "I know he was lying because I observed x,y, and z" Defense counsel, "To your knowledge is it possible to observe x,y, and z in someone and have them not be lying?" "Is it possible that a person might be attempting to be deceptive and exhibit x,y, and z and yet be factually incorrect, that is to say if I honestly believe that the Red Sox have never won the world series, and I attempt to lie and say "The Red Sox have won a world series" might I exhibit x,y and z even though the utterance itself is true?"[/quote']

     

    I may be mistaken here, but I believe police can use their observations of a person’s behavior to establish probable cause to stop and search them, so I would assume super-deduction and body language reading could be used in a similar way. Still, I think when testifying how they established cause they would have to be limited to saying “X was acting suspiciously” rather than coming out and saying “X was planning to kill Y.”

  18. Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth?

     

    I like these two. Perhaps she is the "technology dimensional conqueror" and terminates mystics in her own realms because they can be so unconventional (and non-scientific)? :cool:

     

    Nah, it's because mystics have a bad habit of dealing in extradimensional forces and gates. It's bad for dimensional security and infringes on V'han's job description. If you're caught, you get a choice between signing up with the offical Mystic Corps or exile to a magic-nullifying dimension.

  19. Re: After DEMON wins...

     

    I’d suggest it would be more survivable if the PCs arrive after the Kings have moved on. There’s no reason they (or Black, now that he’s one of them) would stick around Earth when they’ve got a whole universe to play in. They used the world like we would use a paper cup; drink it dry, crumple it, and throw it aside. Now the skies are red, the oceans are gone, and the cities look like a Dali painting. Only a few unlucky humans are still alive, unmutated, and sane enough to notice the new landscape. They live in tiny improvised strongholds and try to hold off the lesser things that are creeping through the shattered barrier between the Kings’ world and ours. Time and space themselves are behaving oddly, and it’s getting worse. Either the Earth is falling into the Kings’ world or the Kings’ world is taking over our universe, but either way the Sun’s getting dimmer and the meteors falling from the shattered Moon are screaming in a more disturbing way every day…

  20. Re: [WhatIf] Mechanon took control of the Minute Man VII Robots?

     

    Heck, just turn up the sensitivity of the mutant detectors until anyone with even a slight variance off theoretical "pure human" genes registers as a mutant. It's simple, effective, and you you get the see the look on the IHA meatbags' faces when their own robots start hunting them down as "mutants."

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