Highwayman

Re: Stephen Hawking working on Supers/SciFi campaign...

My first thought when I saw the thread title was this.

Re: Brainstorming superhero team liaisons

The city liaison' date=' who doesn't live in the house, is involved because the city wants the team to, in exchange for services provided, show up at major public events.[/quote']

 

Seems like this guy could be either:

 

A.) a shark in a $1,000 suit, always on the lookout for the mayor's image and a constant source of politically-motived suggestions ("Um, Mighty Maid, not to criticize, but we've been getting some calls from church groups about your costume..."), or

 

B.) the screwup brother-in-law of the city councilman who was the swing vote on the team's funding. He has no skills and less competence, but he also doesn't have an agenda beyond collecting his paycheck and bragging to his buddies about the superheroes he works with. He could end up being anything from a mild irritation to sidekick material.

Re: Sun Koh versus the Nigerian Bankers!

I'd say that if you're not prepared to go chasing off to Africa in pursuit of lost treasure on the word of a mysterious stranger you need to turn in your Pulp Adventurer card. Yeah, maybe it's an elaborate trap set by some criminal mastermind, but you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

Re: Atlantis The Antediluvian World

I rememeber reading that as a kid. My grandfather left behind a somewhat eccentric collection of books, including some pulp novels and this.

I think this is the guy who invented or at least popularized a lot of the now standard Atlantis bits, like holding up pyramids and sun worship as proof Egypt and Central America were both Atlantean colonies.

Re: from little plot seeds, mighty games do grow: Share you ideas!

The Takofanes talk got me thinking...

Memories of A Hollow Crown

A mystic comes to the conclusion that Takofanes is animated by his pride at having ruled the world and his anger at having lost it. To stop him, the mystic sets out on a quest to gather the ingredients for a spell that will erase the lich's memories, laying him to rest.

Unfortunately, there are avenues of lore the mystic never chose to pursue. If he had, he might recognize that Takofanes, as the last remains of the ruler of a world that has vanished so completely as to never have existed, bears more than a passing resemblence to a King of Edom. In fact, the only thing keeping him from sliding from Evil to Cosmic Evil are the memories of his mortal life.

A more knowledgeable mystic realizes this, and sends the PCs to prevent it from happening. Unfortunately, Takofanes knows the mystic is planning some kind of attack on him, and has dispatched his minions to deal with it. Even more unfortunately, those minions include Turakian shapeshifting demons, who have left the mystic rather paranoid...

Re: Egyptian Organisation for Champions (pic and setup help)

At the risk of sounding a bit silly, what about a gorilla mummy? It's not impossible that a gorilla could have found its way into a pharaoh's menagerie, and since the Egyptians had no problem mummifying animals, it would be plausable that an unusual beast like that would have been mummified when it died.

OK, that might be too Silver Age. Maybe Pharaoh just has some mummified cats roaming her throne room, for atmosphere.

Re: Looking for cool ideas for "puzzle-combat"

Forensic medicine: The opponent's previous victim is still lying in the arena. The wounds provide clues to the opponent's powers and how he's likely to attack.

Re: Parasitic hive mind villain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampulex_compressa

The emerald cockroach wasp's prefered egg-laying site is a species of cockroach much too large for it to lift. It overcomes this problem by injecting a venom into the cockroach that disables its flight reflex. It then leads the now-docile cockroach back to its den and implants its eggs. Since the cockroach no longer has the ability to flee danger, it just stands there until the hatching wasps devour it.

A scaled-up, mutant version might inject humans with a venom that renders them docile and extremely suggestable. It could then ride the human and issue verbal or telpathic commands. Removal would just be a matter of knocking the bug off them (and possible inventing an antidote for the venom).

For the actual power, make it, say, a 6d EGO Drain, no range. One sting will put the average person into negative EGO, where they have to make an EGO roll to refuse any command. Repeated stings will take them to -30, where they can't take any action unless commanded. Make the sting not work against resistant defenses, and reduce the return rate to taste. To make the bug's lives easier, make them small enough to hide in the victim's hair or clothing, or give them some camoflauge.

Re: The V'han/ Tyrannon War!

Perhaps because of the war that isn't on earth but close (like the refugee bit)' date=' the walls between dimensions are breaking down around Earth's Dimension and with no Sorc Surpreme there is no other defense so all sort of mystic characters are bursting into earth, so the PCs need to stop them, and find out why so many of them are coming through which could lead to dealing with the war.[/quote']

 

Seems like it would be to V'han's advantage if Earth had a Sorceror Supreme, since one would be able to block Tyrannon's passage but not hers. Realizing this, she sends some subjects from one of her more mystically-oriented dimensions to find a promising candidate and help him or her claim the title. Of course, the candidate they pick is a villain...

Re: Champions universe created by magic?

I also have problems with the idea that in 14 years any "Official" Champions games will have to start being set in the past. Doesn't make sense to me.

In the "official" version in the Champions 3000 history section there's a specific event that causes the end of magic. Moreover, it involves the Champions, who I've always seen as basically placeholders for the PCs. If there's any "official" CU campaigns still going in 2020 it's certainly possible for things to go differently.

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

I read somewhere that if you dropped a decent size explosive charge into the six major continental shelves, you'd disrupt the pressure-crystallized methane plates under the water. The best deposits would off the Eastern seaboard of the USA, off the southern coast of Mexico, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Japan, Millions of years worth of built-up methane deposits stored and compressed that have not been released and broken down in the atmosphere. If you released them all at once, it would covere the surface of the earth to a distance of 124 feet or so. That's sufficient to choke out a large amount of animal life. And then, it catches fire. The whole world burning, with over 120 feet of methane over every square foot of the planet. That'll affect the climate some.

Previous poster mentioned disrupting enough to increase global warming by a thousand percent, but if you go far enough with it, you can just end all human life.

Even if that's actually not true, and I suspect it isn't, it's too "comic book" not to be true in a comic book universe. Stolen and repped.

Re: (Fun) Character: The Named Extra

As for a reason to protect/whatever Fred... maybe they find out that' date=' for once, he's [i']not[/i] just an unimportant extra in this life (Captain Chronos is handy for this sort of reveal)? He'll blithely go on with things, figuring that he'll end up splattered some time next Tuesday or so, and the heroes end up having to keep him from meeting his maker for a while... until he ends up actually dying importantly, taking a hit for somebody who's important in the future, or kamikaze-dive-bombing some giant monster with the Secret Weapon to take it out, something like that.

 

Just a random thought.

Maybe he's never been an unimportant extra. He has some cosmically-important destiny, but someone keeps arranging for his death to try and keep him from fulfilling it.

Re: History of the Super-Soldier Serum (need suggestions!)

For the most part, the West reanimation formula sat on the shelf after the doctor's 1922 disappearance. There were rumors that both the Nazis and the Soviets managed to steal or derive the formula, but any experiments they made along those lines evidently left fewer living witnesses than West's own.

When an enterprising government researcher did start looking at the formula in the early '60s, he was smart enough to decide it was too dangerous to use as originally intended. He was dumb enough to instead conceive of a weaponized, aerosol version of the formula, intended to raise legions of the angry dead behind enemy lines. How this version came to be released near Pittsburgh in 1968 has never been completely explained, as was exactly why the animated dead behaved differently than in West's experiments. The zombies created when improperly-stored waste from the Pittsburgh outbreak was released in Louisville in 1985 behaved differently still, although this was attributed to chemical breakdown in the stored formula. A substantial amount of this waste is still unaccounted for.

The 1968 outbreak did inspire new Pentagon interest in the original West formula. They actually achieved some success using an altered version of the formula to resurrect dead soldiers for combat use, but a rouge subject blew the project's cover in 1992. Since then, the U.S. government has officially renounced any interest in reanimating the dead.

Re: The things I've learned playing a munchkin

Not even on a d6!

 

(Prologue: The Sending Of Eight: The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett)

 

But see the end of The Last Hero...

Re: Super-sorcery Necromancer Ideas... Help!

EDM would give her a lot of extra options like having a secret undead army or her spooky castle that is built from damned souls and such... Giving players a goal of getting there so they can finally defeat her.

And giving her the goal of bringing her Castle of Souls and Army of the Dammned to this world. That'll show Daddy for sure...

Re: Borrowing your brains: Greek Gods in New Con

Oooh, when the rest of that baby's extended family hears about this, what they do to the IHA will make the scene from Deliverance look like a Tea Party.

 

TB

Except that the spouse of the father was probably the one who sicced the IHA on the kid.

Re: Wonder if VIPER ever thought of this...

Camp Viper might not be a bad idea, actually. Give it an innocent-sounding name and sell it as a free program for underprivillged kids. Tag the promising future recruits and run the rest through some light brainwashing so they'll be more accepting of the Viper World Order when it comes. Of course, it wouldn't be a real prestigous posting, so the commander might be tempted to try something a little riskier for some short-term gain and a promotion out of there, something some heroes might catch a hint of...

Re: Champions Universe Movie Casting Call

Christopher Walken wouldn't make an all too bad Luther Black if you ask me.

I could believe the man has stared a Lovecraftian horror or two in the eye in his day.

Re: Weird Science Projects

Wow! You get free vortex imprinting cables with your advanced bio-photon analyzer. How can you pass up a deal like that?

Re: VIPER vs UNTIL: Who has the best toys?

UNTIL would be much more adverse to agent casualties and collateral damage than VIPER. I would expect UNTIL to have slightly better protective gear and a wider variety of non-lethal weapons, while VIPER is going to have more autofire and area effect weapons and fewer safety precautuons on their equipment.

Re: Stalin's Legion of Super-Apes!

Knew I should've finished reading that thread first.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2434192005

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, which was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

Re: what to do with a psychic gorilla

For a twist on the conqueror ape idea' date=' here's a thought: the local villagers nearest to wherever he is ask him to protect them from the incoming army of [insert local strongman here'].

 

This leads to that, and before you know it, Psi-Ape is ruler of an African nation. . . more or less because the people asked him to.

 

Additional element: perhaps some quantity of locals worship him as a deity.

That would also fit in with an ape utopia plan. After all, it would never be safe while central Africa is politically unsable. The obvious solution is to conquer the humans and impose some peace and order.

Re: Suggestions needed: Undead Civil War

You could also have an undead hunter or group of undead hunters who are working to prolong and escalate the war, hoping to eliminate as many undead as possible and maybe break the council once and for all. The innocent people who are getting caught in the crossfire are just a tragic but necessary price to pay for ridding the world of eternal evil.

And the war could be pretty bad for ordinary mortals. Even assuming they're not duking it out on public streets, the combatants will need more blood and lifeforce. Dark rituals need sacrifices. Mortal allies, even unwitting mortal allies, will need elimination.

Re: CONVENTION ADVENTURE NEEDED for HP Lovecraft’s Birthday Party 2005 Convention

One of the members of DEMON's inner circle is a scientist who's tapped into mankind's ancestral memories of slavery to the Elder Worm. If he ever came into contact with the Slug, he'd be easy to manipulate.

Of course, him coming under the Slug's control would be a disaster for DEMON's long-term plans, but that wouldn't matter in a one-shot.