sinanju

Re: A galaxy rising from the ashes Examples from Larry Niven's "Known Space" Stories (all the early colonies were founded after habitable worlds were located by robot probes; alas, the probes reported a habitable world if they found ANY habitable spot on a planet, without regard for whether it was a large area...or a stable one). JINX: A high-gravity world (moon) shaped rather like an easter egg due to gravity effects of its parent planet. The atmosphere is chokingly thick and and toxic at the poles (which point toward its parent planet), thins to a livable band in the upper lattitudes, and becomes unbreathably thin closer to the equator. The equatorial regions are in vacuum. Jinxians are short, stout, and insanely strong. They also tend to suffer from circulation problems and an unfortunate tendency to succumb to heart failure fairly early in life. WE MADE IT: A world whose axis is in line with its orbit; twice a year it points at the star it orbits. Twice a year, the surface is scoured by continent-sized hurricane storms. The probe examined the world during a time between said hurricane seasons and reported it livable. The colonists live underground. Due to living their lives underground, on a low-gravity world, they tend to be tall, slender, and pale. They're also extremely flexible as a rule, and often use their feet as an extra pair of hands. Albinism is common. PLATEAU (aka MT. LOOKITTHAT): A world with a Venus-type atmosphere over most of its surface. The sole exception is an area the size of Southern California on a plateau miles above the surface, which is habitable (and rather pleasant). The colony is constrained in size, and the society is hierarchical with descendants of the Crew (of the sleeper ship that brought the colonists to the planet) lording it over descendants of the Colonists; after all, the crew did all the work, so they ought to be rewarded, right? HOME: The only early colony world that was truly earthlike. So much so, that the Colonists changed their minds about its name and called it "Home".

Re: A galaxy of humans It depends on the planet. If the gravity is substantially greater than earth-normal, you'll probably start seeing results fairly quickly. That kind of stress on the whole body is going to start winnowing the population for people who have the right stuff to survive it right away. Gravity never sleeps. If there are plants or animals that prove toxic or poisonous to the inhabitants, you'll probably see a drift toward people who have greater resistance or immunity to it. That's going to be the case even if you have the tech to treat such things; evolution happens on the edge cases. People who might have been saved if they'd been reached in time but aren't will die; those who have enough resistance to survive without treatment--or simply last long enough to GET treatment--will live. Over time, the result is going to be a tendency for locals to show greater resistance than visitors, but it'll be slow. According to Wikipedia, humans evolved 500,000 years ago, and modern humans 200,000 years ago. That was time enough to differentiate into all the various physical types we see around us today. "A few thousand years" probably isn't going to make a big difference except in special cases.

Re: A galaxy rising from the ashes Define "habitable" first. Truly earthlike--i.e., humans can live unprotected on the surface? I suspect you'll need a bigger boat sphere. On the other hand, if the system has worlds or asteroids available for mining, you could probably build habitats in many, if not most, systems.

Re: A galaxy rising from the ashes This becomes even more important if truly habitable worlds are few and far between. Why settle for something only approximately earth-like (different gravity, different biosphere, different sunlight, etc.) when you can BUILD a habitat that will have earth-normal gravity (at least on the main level, if you're using spin for gravity), exactly the atmosphere you want, and can be filled with earthly plants and animals. Put in only what you want/need, leave everything else out. No nasty surprises from plants/animals/etc. that you stumble across on alien worlds. As long as you have access to raw materials (and if you can travel between systems easily enough to make this sort of game viable, access to planets or asteroids with all the raw materials you'll ever need is easy), you can build a habitat anywhere you like. People living permanently in space might well outnumber those living on planets.

Re: Repercussions of mass-producing comic book technology One legal problem is the possibility of governments seizing such supertech under "national security" or "eminent domain" rules. After all, we can't let John Q. Supergenius be the only one making (whatever it might be). Consider also the Shipstone. This device, mentioned in a number of Robert Heinlein's novels, (which is to an ordinary battery as a nuclear weapon is to a firecracker) provides vast amounts of stored energy for use anywhere you need it. They come in sizes small enough for flashlights or cell phones up to automobile-sized shipstones that power FTL starships. The Shipstone Corporation leases endless square miles of desert for solar collectors to charge the stones. They're also the only people making them. Nobody else knows how. Mr. Shipstone never patented his invention, so there's no documentation. Only he (and later a tiny handful of carefully selected acolytes) know the secret of the shipstone's construction. Anyone who could reverse engineer a Shipstone could be richer than Bill Gates, but nobody's been able to do it. This might be implausible for an ordinary--albeit incredibly valuable--invention. But the fruits of Reed Richards' genius? Or Tony Stark's? I can easily believe that nobody else can figure out how to duplicate it. That gives them incredible leverage. As an example, in the novel Friday

Re: A galaxy rising from the ashes James P. Hogan (Hogun?) wrote a novel called The Two Faces of Tomorrow years ago. So something like that might have happened. But not before Skynet murdered a few billion people....

Re: A galaxy rising from the ashes Well, unless something has happened to mellow Skynet, you'd have a machine empire doing its best to annihilate the re-emerging human and ape civilizations. I'd vote for focusing on one pocket empire. You can always bring in (I mean, have your PCs "discover") additional pocket empires if you really need/want to introduce them, but it's easier to do that than to right them out if they don't work.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans To quote the Mythbusters (usually while standing over a completely destroyed machine), "Well, THERE'S your problem!" I'm not willing endure years of having my character treated like crap in order to set-up a scenario where my reward is NOT being treated like crap. If you're enjoying the game, that's great. But I think you're going to find that most folks wouldn't be so forgiving of the GM's behavior.

Re: Tactics

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans Ditto this. Treating superhumans as prisoners instead of assets--barring actions by the superhuman in question that demonstrate that he's not to be trusted--is a stupid waste of manpower. Any real world military commander worth his stars/bars/whatever would give his left arm for a guy with the powers (and the desire to help) that David's PC displayed. Treating him with contempt and dismissing all his suggestions was arrogantly, aggressively, abysmally stupid.

Re: Combining post-apocalypse and accidental uplift Well, Poul Anderson's 1953 novel Brainwave might be one way of doing it. In that novel, he postulated that life on earth evolved while the solar system (our section of the galaxy, or the galaxy, I forget how big the area) was passing through a region of space in which there was...resistance is the best way I can put it...to the physical processes involved in intelligence. Eventually we passed out of that region of space. The result was that humans all became supergeniuses--and animals acquired human- or near-human intelligence as well. This did not go well, especially amongst domesticated animals who were now smart enough to realize how we were treating them, and how flimsy our methods of control were (after all, they depend on the animals being, well, ANIMALS and not all that bright. Now they were bright--and in many cases much bigger/stronger than their human captors. All those supergeniuses invented FTL travel in short order we went out to explore the universe, and found that most worlds were populated by low-grade morons. Not having developed intelligence in the face of such resistance, their brains were weak and flabby by comparison. Another alternative is Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, in which he posits that the laws of physics change depending on how are you are from the galactic core. Near the center, in the Unthinking Depths, intelligence is impossible, and most technology doesn't work. In the Slow Zone, where earth is located, intelligence and high tech are possible, but some tech (FTL travel, for instance) is impossible. The Beyond, along the very rim of the galaxy, permits ultra-tech to function, including AIs, FTL travel and pretty much any "magic tech" you care to name. Beyond THAT, out beyond the edge of the galaxy is the Beyond, where godlike entities exercise unimaginable intelligence and power. If the boundaries of such zones were to change, that could radically alter a game world.

Re: Uncanny Valley

Re: Creepy Pics. Well, at least they weren't making any health claims. Just preying on parental fears that their kids wouldn't be socially accepted if they didn't swill carbonated drinks.

Re: Ways to manage a huge team with a lot of characters? I diito lapsedgamer. In Steamteck's campaign (in college and, later, out in the real world) we all tended to have a stable of characters. We'd finish an adventure and maybe we'd continue with those characters, and maybe we wouldn't. We might decide to take different characters out for a spin. We did a lot of mixing and matching, and Steamteck wrote up adventures (still does, no doubt--I'm just not there) with notes on which characters it would work for and which it wouldn't. (Telepaths, for instance, make short work of plots that depend on a murder mystery. Combat-oriented characters didn't work well in intrigue-heavy plots, and vice versa.)

Re: War of the Worlds: Martians So...the Martians deployed Xenovirus Takis-A (aka the "Wild Card" virus)? BIG mistake....

Re: Final Destination Raven would be mourned by no one, really. Kate Sutherland (Raven's civilian persona) would be mourned by her father, and her friends--and the handful of honest people to be found in the Hudson City D.A.'s office. (By the same token, others in the D.A.'s office would be popping champagne corks....) The rebirth scenario would involve Raven's reappearance as if she'd never been gone--but she'd be the alter ego of some other ordinary person. The Black Knight would be missed by his teammates, and by lots of drinking buddies and many, many women. On the other hand, they'd all agree that he went just the way he always wanted to go. 'Orribly. His rebirth would involve the words, "I was only MOSTLY dead!" (Given that the Black Knight's whole schtick is that he can suffer horrendous amounts of damage and get right back up, only something drastic like a major explosion would be likely to stop him anyhow...and then he'll just dig his way out of the rubble. Eventually.) Iron Maiden would be missed by her teammates (the Guardians), by the couple with whom she shares a three-sided relationship, numerous friends, and (though they wouldn't know it, since she has a secret identity) a great many swinging acquaintances. Her rebirth scenario would involve someone new, someone unconnected to Leah, taking up the name and identity to carry on the legacy.

Re: Life Support and NNDs Not me, but--a gaming buddy of mine was in a game once where the GM attacked the player characters with a NND gas attack (poison + DMSO), and they all succumbed. Except his--because, as he pointed out to the GM, he'd bought "Immunity to skin-absorbed gases" as part of his life support package. To which she replied, "I was not expecting that...okay, you're unaffected. What do you do?"

Re: How does your hero celbrate the 4th of July? Black Mask spends the holiday with his family and friends doing traditional things--picnics, fireworks, etc. Rose Hancock attends some public event where she can be anonymous and enjoy the festivities. Black Knight finds the most boisterous event possible, and spends the day eating, drinking, boozing it up, cavorting with willing females, and generally partying as hard as you'd imagine an immortal 20-year old brick who lives life on the edge would. Iron Maiden spends part of the day with friends, swimming, picnicking, etc. When it's time for fireworks, she slips away to take to the sky to watch them with an unobstructed view nothing else will match. After the fireworks, she finds her boyfriend du jour (or a cooperative stranger) and takes him to bed for some fireworks of their own.

Re: Fantasy Economies: How closely should we examine them? Well, there's a lot less treasure just lying around for the dragon to find and confiscate in the first place. Unless he's been building the horde for centuries, it's extremely unlikely to look like the treasure room in The Mummy. His "hoard" is more likely to consist of lots of bones, and the armor and weapons (and any magical items) of the previous few decades or centuries worth of would-be dragonslayers.

Re: Fantasy Economies: How closely should we examine them?

Re: shrinking characters I played a character with shrinking. Actually, she had "body manipulation" as a power--she could grow, shrink, become intangible, shapeshift.... She sometimes shrank down to about an inch in height in battle to make herself hard to see or hit, and sometimes hitched a ride on a teammate with good dodge-type defenses as well. She was versatile, but had limited defenses when not giant or intangible, so avoiding getting hammered was important.

Re: What would you do for a Klondike bar? Iron Maiden (all my characters, really) wouldn't do anything for a Klondike bar. She (they) much prefer Dove Bars. Mmmm. Thick chocolate shell over chocolate ice cream. Way better.

Re: Setting, really: Corporate Champions? I always figured a lot of superhumans would gravitate to Hollywood. A lot of them could do stunts that normal humans couldn't, or could do them far more easily and safely. Those who don't look human could no doubt find work (assuming they can act at all) as aliens or monsters--no time-consuming make-up needed. Need someone to take a 20-story fall? Or get run over by a car? Indestructible Guy is willing to do it, and he won't need insurance. Need someone to get set on fire? Human Torch is your man.

Re: Here's the scenario A professor at my college (William & Mary) was reputed to have done this, as part of a research project. He determined that a human with no tools could, in fact, run down a gazelle by simply chasing it at low speed until it wore itself out with bursts of speed and no chance to really recover. The human could even kill the (exhausted, unresisting) gazelle with his bare hands. What he couldn't do, was pierce the critter's skin with his teeth. You need a tool of some kind to make any use of the carcass. Which sort of made the rest of the process pointless. As your own experience demonstrates, your average out-of-shape city dweller couldn't do this, but it IS possible if you're fit enough. Anyhow, to get back on topic, yes--if you can track Cheetah and are able to follow him long enough, unless he has super-recuperative powers, you may be able to wear him down and corner him while he's gasping for breath and unable to keep running.

Re: Here's the scenario