sinanju

Re: Using nanotech in a campaign I don't worry about gray goo because we don't know that it'll be possible. That stuff has to be powered by something; either a concentrated power source is necessary or its going to spread slowly, giving you time to deploy defenses*. Nanotech replicators may also be too fragile to be so dangerous anyhow. *I refer you to the Diamond Age world--defensive "dog pods" and an ongoing arms race between attacks and defenses. Gray goo may be good at spreading, but defense nanites designed to attack and destroy gray goo won't be all that hard to create either.

Re: Character: Robocop ZERO ED? I'd think that heavy armor would give him some energy defense, personally. I wouldn't give him the Life Support advantages either. He has to eat and breathe (he's vulnerable to gases), and he has an exposed face, so he's vulnerable to low pressure/vacuum too.

Re: Modern-Day Urban Fantasy Most of my campaigns in years have been of the "secret magic in a contemporary world" sort. Mostly set in Santa Carla (Buffy's Sunnydale writ large, basically). Werewolves, vampires, demons, ghosts, mages, Slayers, immortals...everything. And it's always fun when all the groups are ignorant of the existence of all (or most) of the others, or--alternatively--if every group thinks _they_ are the secret masters and everyone is a pawn.

Re: Evolution of the races? The Anicent Race (humans? dark elves?) came first. They were around for a very, very long time and grew wise in the ways of the world (i.e., science or magic, depending on how you want the gameworld to go). They also grew decadent and cruel. They created all the other races to be their servants and/or playthings. Dwarves were created to be strong, tireless and small enough to work underground in smaller spaces than would be required otherwise. Orcs/Goblins/Ogres/Whatever were created to serve as soldiers or gladiators. "We'll pit armies against one another like a chess game! We'll take our due in blood!" Hobbits/Halfings were created to be house servants, cooks, butlers, etc. Centaurs, Minotaurs and the like were created to be prey animals--they were animalistic and lived in the wild, but had enough elf-level intelligence to make them more interesting to hunt. Elves (or less elves if the Ancients were also elves) were bred to be beautiful playthings. And then the Ancients disappeared. Maybe all at once, maybe over centuries. They're gone, but all the races they created are still around, still well designed for the roles they were created to fill. They may or may not remember their origins.

Re: Doctor J.A. Quest I absolutely agree. Venture Brothers is "must watch" tv in our household. It's on the Tivo season pass list. It's hysterically funny more often than not, and always good for a jaw-dropping "I can't believe they did that!" moment in every episode. Dr. Venture, son of the ORIGINAL Dr. Venture, is what I suspect Johnny Quest would grow up to be. A second-rate "super scientist" with serious self-image issues....

Re: WWYCD? #126: For Whom the Bell Tolls Hmmm. LE FANTOME would want a wake. A huge party with truckloads of booze for all of his many friends to eat, drink, remember him, and then move on with their lives. HELL'S ANGEL really doesn't care. Whatever the people who care about her need to deal with their grief is fine by her. CASSANDRA is 16 years old. See "But I'm immortal" above. Forced to confront the idea, she'd probably opt for a traditional funeral (with lots of weeping and wailing, of course).

Re: Name for a fictional city Santa Carla, California, baby! I've set all but one of my contemporary campaigns (mostly mystic wierdness-oriented games) in this fictional town, which I lifted from the film LOST BOYS. "The murder capital of the world? Are you serious, grampa?" "Well, let's just say that if all the corpses that are buried around here was to stand up all at once, we'd have one hell of a population explosion!" *** "One thing I never could stomach about living in Santa Carla--all the damn vampires!"

Re: What's the best way to conquer Canada? Best way to conquer Canada (or anywhere else): Mind control the voting public to go along with whatever you want to do, including--if necessary--passing amendments to the Constitution (USA) or other founding documents, as well as to the laws, to make it all nice and legal. If you want to be subtle, arrange for the votes to be close enough to be convincing. Nobody is going to believe that 100% of Canadians think Sinanju should be God-Emperor For Life, but a hard-fought campaign to elect me, and then to give me ever-increasing political and military authority...that's somewhat more plausible.

Re: Is a politician a good secret ID? Or, as an article in a comics magazine once put it many years ago... We ALREADY have colorfully costumed characters patrolling our cities, fighting crime. They're called THE POLICE."

Re: Is a politician a good secret ID? That was one of the things I liked about The Shadow (the movie). Lamont Cranston had a reputation as a slacker (well, a lazy layabout playboy in period terms) precisely because being The Shadow all night was a fulltime job. "I got caught up." "In _what_, for God's sake? You don't do anything! At least pick a hobby or _something_! It's unseemly--a man your age...."

Re: WWYCD #125: The Turn-Coat Hell's Angel: 1) Absent utterly convincing evidence of sincere repentance and both the desire--and ability--to travel the straight and narrow, Hell's Angel wouldn't cross the street for her would-be ward. Her entire life experience (mostly with her own family) has taught her that leopards never change their spots, and that users will ruthlessly abuse any trust. 2) Protect him physically? Whatever's necessary. Protect him from temptation? That's not her job. Resisting temptation is HIS job, and he'd damn well better be up to the challenge if he wants her protection. 3) Depends on the crime. If restitution is possible, it better happen; if the crime was rape or assault or murder, Hell's Angel isn't going to accept the proposition in the first place. Cassandra: She's neither a hero nor a villain yet. She could go either way, depending on how things work out. The question isn't really applicable.

Re: [Pulp] Suggested Reads

Re: An idea on how to make characters I think Worldmaker's GGU campaigns have a pretty good approach--you're required to have at least 25 points of non-combat-oriented skills. Knowledge skills, professional skills, area knowledges, languages, etc. are all good places to spend those points. Deciding what skills my character would have that have nothing to do with combat or being a superhero really helps focus on the personality.

Re: Your Favorite Useless Power It's been done. PROPHYLACTUS! was a (short-lived) character in a Champions game my gaming group played years ago. His power was a superhumanly powerful prehensile penis with stretching. And everybody in the room cringed when an NPC archer pinned it to the ground in combat.

Re: X-Men Continuity Question (shudder) concering Emma Frost.

Re: [Pulp] Suggested Reads

Re: Anybody ever play Fantasy Superheroes? Gave them all 200 points of Primal Base, 20 points of Primal Flux (per day), and all the advantages that go along with that* per the Primal Order book. Immortality and Total Life Support, of course. Plus the ability to duplicate any magical feat they'd witnessed, enchant [transform] items or beings, and shield themselves or inflict damage by spending Flux. And they could draw power from consecrated items/places/worshippers, which increased the amount of Flux they had to draw on. More worshippers meant more power. Three of the players' characters got together and formed a pantheon, pooling their daily Flux allotment to create Paladins (1 Flux point = X character points for granting advantages/stats/etc) to do their bidding and spread their religion. Spending three times the points anyone else could scrape up each day gave them a real headstart. They gamed the system beautifully and were well on their way to kicking ass on a global basis when the campaign ended. Another PC bumbled around accomplishing little but doing it very entertainingly. One player simply couldn't get into the campaign and dropped out. The last tried to organize the goblin hordes of western Yrth, turning them into good anarcho-capitalists. He ran into the annoying problem that they were very good at being yes-men when a god showed up, but left to their own devices, quickly reverted to squabbling and exploiting whatever advantages the god gave anyone for their own advancement.

Re: Anybody ever play Fantasy Superheroes? I ran a GURPS Primal Order game once. I let the players take any existing GURPS character (except no psionics and no supers) they'd ever played or wanted to invent and turned them into Godlings, and then dumped them into Yrth. Except that this Yrth was being depopulated by YADE (Yet Another Dark Elf), who'd finally been convinced that humans were vermin and had to go. He was too powerful for any existing human nation (or heroes) to stop by the time the PCs showed up. Fortunately, they were Godlings. And they needed worshippers to grow in power, so they soon set about gaining worshippers by defending them from the genocidal Dark Elves.

Re: Crime and Punishment

Re: Crime and Punishment In the Anita Blake (necromancer and vampire hunter) novels, ordinary crimes are treated as usual, including capital crimes. The trials, appeals and whatnot for capital cases can drag out for years or decades, just like in the real world. It's...different for supernatural types. Lycanthropes are considered varmints in several states, and can be killed with impunity (as long as a post-mortem test proves the dead guy was a lycanthrope, you're golden). Vampires are too powerful--physically and psychically--to be held in prison safely. Therefore, there's only one punishment for vampires: death. And the death warrants aren't hard to come by once a vampire is discovered to have committed a crime. As for magic--the use of magic against an unwilling victim is a capital crime, and self-defense is NOT a defense to this charge. And dangerous magic-users, like vampires, are just too damned scary. Someone convicted of using hostile magic will have his conviction appealed immediately, to be either affirmed or overturned, and then the sentence carried out WITHIN A MONTH.

Re: Crime and Punishment Actually, a policeman has no greater authority to kill than any ordinary citizen. He is entitled to kill only in self-defense, or in defense of another. In fact, very little that a cop does involves powers that a normal citizen doesn't have, although an ordinary citizen who attempts to arrest a fellow citizen is more at risk of finding himself sued for it and doesn't have the advantage of job- or union-provided legal advice and protection.

Re: [Pulp] Suggested Reads Yes--I highly recommend the Perry Mason novels. I love them. On top of which, many of them were written in the 40s or 50s, and it was truly a different world then. Reading those books will give you a real feel for how that world differed from ours. Also, I highly recommend Peter O'Donnell's MODESTY BLAISE novels. They're more contemporary, but Modesty and Willie are classic pulp-style heroes, and the villains are all black-hearted villains thru and thru, perfect for copying into a campaign (along with the death traps and villainous schemes they employ). I've used the basic plot of LAST DAY IN LIMBO for several different groups of players over the years.

Re: Usning nanotech in a campaign

Re: Usning nanotech in a campaign Read "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson for a look at a world awash in nanotech. Some of the things he describes (in no particular order) Cookie Cutters--nanotech explosives that are injected into the body, drift around in the bloodstream for some length of time, then explode, turning you into undifferentiated goo. Mites--invisibly small nanotech devices with myriad uses. Surveillance, espionage, counter-espionage, attack, defense, etc. Any time you visit a friend or establishment, you can expect to spend a while sitting in his waiting room drinking and reading magazines while _his_ nanotech system scours you for hostile mites before you're allowed to interact. "London Fog" -- Armies of mites act as seeds for water vapor to coalesce around, tending to create fog. When two armies of mites go to war, the air is awash in pinprick flashes of laser light (for ranging, targeting, destroying one another), and the "dead" mites accumulate as a layer of "toner" on every surface.... "Dog Pods" -- a hemispheres of airborne widgets that surround an enclave, of various sizes up to the size of a small ball. So called because they're close enough together that a dog cannot slip between them. They keep track of everyone who comes and goes, and can attack intruders (people who belong can walk past them with impunity). Mediatrons -- surfaces ("smart paper" more often than not) which consist of layers of nanotech machinery. They possess enormous amounts of computer power and can display still or moving images (and produce sound), respond to commands or even act independently (within the limits of their programming), responding to events around them. "M.C." (or Matter Compiler) -- programmable by voice or keyboard, you request...well, any material object, pretty much, and it begins building it an atom at a time in a vacuum chamber. What you can create is limited by how fast it can acquire raw materials, the size of the chamber, and what it's programmed to produce. (Free public compilers are slow and limited.) "The Feed" is the network of conduits that feed the MCs. "The Source" is the source of raw materials for the feed. Some are simple bins of chemical elements; others are far mor elaborate (giant coral-like nanotech structures which draw constituent elements from the air, earth or sea). There's lots more. It's a fascinating book.

Re: An Alternate Superman Young Kal-El rockets to earth from the doomed planet of Krypton, where he is found and raised by... 1. Joe Kennedy, growing up as young Clark Kennedy and going on to be elected as the nation's first bulletproof President! 2. Eric Von Strakenberg of the Domination of the Draka. He grows up as Clark Von Strakenburg, and goes on to show the world what happens when a REAL superman with a will to power comes along.... 3. Raised by the apes who raised Tarzan. The mind boggles...