Spence

My opinion for years is that computer/console RPGs are not actually RPG's. They are closed event games with lots o pretty eye candy. You can do nothing in a "CRPG" that hasn't already been thought of and specifically programmed in. Even the "open world sand box" CRPG's are limited. An RPG needs a human to be actively running the game and human players to be actively playing the PC's. I do find it amusing that they are calling it an Arena Game because it is long on combat and short on non-combat Role Playing because that is exactly what Hero is. Lots of guidance on combat and power usage in combat. Very little to nothing on out of combat role play. There some great guidance on building campaigns, but not much on non-combat run of play.

I went back and re-tried the Legend of Vox Machina. I made it all the way through and will agree with you overall. Combat was decidedly not D&D as well. The combat actually had action and people being knocked around. Basically Hero style cinematic battles including Knockback. Leaving out the unnecessary crude softporn halfling garbage it was a decent series. Very anime’like in the good way.

I didn't doubt that my assessment would not be universal I probably have a little "blockbuster fatigue" but to me it was like the Star Wars prequels. Massive and impressive line up of actors and characters. Very adequate budget. Basically all the tools and resources a movie maker could possibly want. And yet the story is a pedestrian slog with a few contrived super-battles. If I was to write a review I would say the plot could be defined as "Ooopsie! ..... and then stuff kinda happens." I don't want to spoil it for people that haven't seen it yet, but with that big of a line up (both villains and heroes of the spidey universe) and this is what they came up with????

Does anyone know where I can find "usable" deck plans for 20s-40s merchant ships? I can find literally dozens on Pinterest and similar sites. But they are all low resolution and I cannot actually read the compartment labels. Any guidance would be appreciated.

I am knee deep in preparing my Dragonflight one-shots for August. Since I always vapor lock when trying to decide what to run I ask my local game group to vote on a few possible. This year it will be: A Klingon Star Trek Adventures game A 1950s aliens game using a blend of NBA and Delta Green (GUMSHOE) A 1935 Pulp spy actioner using A!C. And the reason for this post. A cinematic Hero Fantasy (5thR) delve. The Hero game is taking 80% of my time. Trying to make each PC have a unique feel while being balancing/complimenting the other PCs is a bear. Not a D&D/PF style clone. More of an anime/manga influnced western fantasy feel.

Call of Cthulhu Trail of Cthulhu Nights Black Agents Fear Itself and as Cygnia notes, Achtung! Cthulhu I use CoC 7th edition and ToC, NBA and FI are all GUMSHOE games. For A!C I am getting used to the 2d20 version which I think works pretty well for action pulp.

Finally watched Spiderman NWH. It was a good movie. I thought the cast was great, all of it. And I really liked the reunion of the Spideys. But the plot was just meh. With all of the fantastic characters they had to work with, couldn't they have hired a professional screen writer with at least one ounce of creativity. I have read 7th grade fanfic that was better. In this case the cast definitely propped the movie up. a 1 star movie gets boosted to 4.5 stars by the pure will of the actors....

Interesting premise, but I would need players with the right mindset. Currently I mostly run CoC, ToC, NBA and FI with a little A!C2d20 mixed in.

It would be nice. But for me most of my games are pre-90s making the book contemporary or even "future tech"

Another really great series is the Howdunit series of writers guides. They are basically writers guides in multiple disciplines. Here are the titles I have. Malicious Intent : A Writer's Guide to How Murderers, Robbers, Rapists and Other Criminals Think (The Howdunit) Mactire, Sean P. Police Procedural: A Writer's Guide to the Police and How They Work (Howdunit) Bintliff, Russell Armed and Dangerous: A Writer's Guide to Weapons (Howdunit Series) Newton, Michael Body Trauma: A Writer's Guide to Wounds and Injuries (Howdunit Series) Page, David W. Scene of the Crime: A Writer's Guide to Crime Scene Investigation (Howdunit Series) Wingate, Anne Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide for Writers (Howdunit) Lofland, Lee Cause of Death : A Writer's Guide to Death, Murder and Forensic Medicine (Howdunit Series) Wilson, Keith D. Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons (Howdunit Series) Stevens, Serita Deborah Howdunit Forensics, Lyle, D P Book of Poisons: A Guide for Writers (Howdunit Series) Stevens, Serita and Bannon, Anne I mostly run investigative style games so these were fantastic resources to give things a gloss of believablity.

And besides I have yet to offer the correct interpretation.

It does, or did. I have it. The HD package was 30 files from Champions and 30 files from Champions Universe. But it isn't in the store which is very odd.

Recap?

The Middleman. I really don't understand why this was canceled. Especially when some of the "stuff" on TV just will not die.

A really well done 5th ed adventure.

I never thought it was a case of adventures not selling well. I always thought it was more of what kind of adventures and whether they were actually available. By availability, I mean on the shelf of the FLGS. You couldn't just go online and order back then. I have literal STACKS of V&V and Superworld adventures that I would repopulate with Hero stat'd NPCs for Champions. But beyond a very small handful, Hero adventures did not exist to be bought out in the wild. And it was near impossible to hear any news about what was available. We played the heck out of the Viper intro adventure and I know my groups played Bloodfury, Demon's Rule and such a lot. Many of the 3rd and 4th ed adventures were not too hard to fit into existing campaigns. The biggest problem (in my mind) was that most of the post 4th ed Supers adventures were tied too tightly to specific villains and heroes and could be very difficult to work into an existing campaigns. But I think that is more a "me" issue than an "everybody" issue. But the biggest most telling problem IMO, was once Hero products were actually easily accessible and the non-physical product was viable, they had already closed the door. Once access was easy there was nothing to buy adventure'wise. Villainy Amok was one of the most useful products to come out of 5th for a GM IMO. But it, like Shades of Black arrived late and almost secretly for many of us.

We were big players of Traveller. But unlike many people I have met, we stopped when the available adventures and source books shifted from "insert anywhere" to being tied to their setting. I look back and laugh because these days I am so used to modifying things to fit my own campaign I almost don't notice and back then we simply didn't consider doing it.

In my old groups we handled this differently. The only time we allowed a built PC to be changed was after the first game session. Every player had a "stable" of PCs. You could only actively play one PC per session, but you had multiple characters. I usually had at least three primary in a campaign and they were usually very different types. But I was very quickly turned away from allowing established characters to be reworked. It has significant ripple effects on pretty much everything. It doesn't just make me have to rework that PCs threats and enemies, but pretty much all of them. I don't build up enemies as separate villains for each PC. If possible I try to use a single villain to cover multiple hero complications. And if you let one person make the change it is almost guaranteed that at a minimum half the remaining players, if not all will want to do it as well. A supers game is not a XP progression game like D&D or most others. Supers are usually already competent with the slow rate of XP accumulation used more to tweak or adjust abilities rather that exponentially add to the characters power. A new build PC can and will be able to join in a game if built at starting point value. You just don't have the insurmountable disadvantage that occurs in systems that use levels.

I am dusting off my Campaign Cartographer and will be mapping out the town. I simply haven't found one that I like so far on the internet or places like Drive Thru, either too big or too small. They either have zero fortifications or have huge stone walls. I am not looking for a castle or a metropolis. So I am back to the old if you can't find it then make it. I have actually come down to making two separate towns, the one right on the frontier and the second deeper in the "safe" that is the primary trading partner. Beyond the smaller frontier town is the vast, mostly unexplored wilderness. Just as a working title call the smaller one Outpost and the larger Town. So I am trying to get my brain in gear and to do a rough sketch I can use to begin mapping. I am thinking of the Outpost having somewhere around 3 to 4 hundred residents with close to that surrounding in hamlets or cots. The Town to have a couple thousand residents and about that again in smaller surrounding communities. Overall terrain to be gently rolling forested hills with small lakes and streams. One major river along which that I plan on setting the towns. Just rough right now, but once I narrow down the establishments for the Outpost, I will fill out what is missing in the Town.

So I have decided to sit down and map out the town my Fantasy Hero game will operate out of. The adventure uses one of the standard Fantasy Anime tropes. Smaller cities and towns are spotted throughout the Kingdom. Each is an island of safety in a hostile wilderness. Monsters abound and “Dungeons”, from small randomly spawning ones to large semi-permanent warrens dot the world. The primary method to cull the threat is the Adventurers of the Guild. The local lord (Baron, Duke, Count, etc) may maintain troops to protect the town itself and the near hamlets, but the true deterrence are the Adventurers. Adventurers are the Fantasy equivalent of Superheroes and as such don’t mesh well with following orders and prefer to freelance, though some Nobles and Knights are powered as well. There is no “King” just a lot of small independent “city-states”. The town I am envisioning is on the frontier of “civilization” and as such has a large guild presence. What I am looking for right now is a listing of businesses/services that would exist. Here is my initial list: Adventurers Guild Armorer Weaponsmith Leatherworker Blacksmith Tanner Weaver Farmers Market Butcher Carpenter Woodcutter Bowyer Fletcher General Store Apothecary Inns Taverns Clothier Cobbler Fish market I am looking for more ideas. I am not planning on putting all of them in, but I am trying you get a good starting point. There will be more than one of each business, and the town/city has been in existence for several hundred years and will have one or two if it’s own “dungeons”. The idea is for it to serve as a base from which the players party can adventure from.

I never actually liked Wheel of Time so I really didn't care one way or another. I am mostly referring to the current trend of changing things that literally have no sense of value for the story or that work directly against the story for other reason than fake virtual signalling. Lord of the Rings is a specific series of stories written by a man that was painfully precise who very clearly described things in both his published works and correspondence. The changes are in direct opposition of it all. Halo's Master Chief never had a ethnicity defined. You never saw his face. It is the only actual fully "inclusive" property on planet Earth. And now they are #1 assigning a ethnic group and #2 sidelining the main character to a support role for the a made up token. Snow White is based on folklore from a specific culture and the characters description is literary in the text, "skin as white as snow". There are thousands of tales in folklore that represent every group on the planet and yet they are creatively bankrupt or deliberately spiteful to the point they make themselves look like 5 year olds in a tantrum. I am waiting for the remake of the saga of Shaka Zulu, 1816 to 1828. IN order to ensure diversity and token'ism I look forward to Nandi's casting as a wise White Woman with red hair. After all, that is how the world looks now There is nothing wrong with changing a character if it is done with some degree of intelligence and is plausible. Nick Fury in the Marvel Movies is a brilliant example of how to do it. Jarl Haakon in Vikings Valhalla may have been completely unnecessary and a major stretch. But! They put together a plausible reason and found an actress that could pull it off, which made it work. For Cowboy Bebop I didn't think the casting or costuming was bad at all. Real life is different than animation. If the story had stayed on track and not inserted gratuitous sex scenes (of any kind) and other garbage it could have succeeded. The first Captain America made many changes but stayed true to the story and was a hit. If a property doesn't do what you want it to, find another property. Don't turn out half a$$ flops and then cry that the world is an 'ist when the actual customers reject it because it was poorly written. Next they will be trying to say that Black Panther was a success despite all the 'ists, rather than the truth that it was a damn good movie and pretty much everyone enjoyed it.

True, but I am not surprised. Amazon wants to sell you stuff so they go to great pains to make sure all of their platforms recommendations actually target things you like. It is not about the message, it is about the dollar. That is why I am surprised their Prime Video created series are abandoning built in fan bases to agenda signal. I can just hear the money swirling down the drain.

It has been a while and I don't remember specifics, but anything that the site would "recommend" was always filling up the screen with garbage that I would consider grounds for frenzied destruction just to maintain sanity. Of course there was no way to indicate you considered their firehose of sewage to be sewage. So after constant bombardment and no visible way to browse through anything actually interesting I left. I would consider trying again if HBO Max agrees to pay me $300 dollars a month for mental anguish while subscribed. Netflix does have some good and some bad originals, overall they have far better everything than the so called networks. Of course I mostly watch K-Drama there but there have been some good shows. Vikings Valhalla was not to bad. Most of the really bad garbage is garbage for the same reason and Disney's, Paramount+, network shows and a lot of movies have been cratering. Announce a neat new movie/show based on a popular and well loved property. The ignore the property and fill steaming pile with personal whim of the moment and then call everyone an ist of one type or another. Cowboy Bebop initial looked promising and might have been OK if they had actually used the Cowboy Bebop story. I looked through the original and for the life of me I could find an episode dedicated to engine room floor sex. They have the technical ability to make good adaptations, but just like the upcoming steaming piles soon to release from Amazon and Paramount+, the only part of the shows that will tie to the source materials are the titles.

That could very well be. Unless you already know the exact title you are looking for their search was also useless and their "suggestions" got worse after every show I did watch instead of suggesting anything similar. From what I saw a dedicated Bollywood streaming service has more content for a person that hates musicals than HBO MAX has content for anyone.