Publius

Re: Pulparize It! Thanks, I do not know how you could get the Worms in on it, but I tried. The spice is kind of like oil, both are natural resources, both are used for transportation, blah blah of course oil can be found in a number of locations and the Spice Melange cannot, but meh it isn't supposed to be identical, just close. Actually, wasn't one of the Nazi's problems in WWII getting gasoline? Maybe their stoodge Vlad was supplying it to them from secret caches he had been diverting material to over the last few years, a good place for the PCs to strike and a good reason for him to panic and kill the Old Duke when he was poised to take over (and poossibly find out about it). Maybe the burrowing device is a steam-punkish mole-driller by some other concern...

Re: Pulparize It! Has this one been done? Dune: The father of one of the PCs, His Grace Leto Atredies Duke of Caladan, has recently been named to the Chairmanship of CHOAM (Cobalt-Hastings Oil, Amalamated), and has been moved to the "Home Office" in the Middle East. There, the former head of Operations, now Nazi sympathizer, Vlad 'the Baron' Harkonnen, laid a trap that killed Duke Atredies and left the PC son a renegade, hunted by Harkonnen's crazed Nephews and their Nazi allies in the desert. Eventually, they find themselves among the local natives that call the young Atredies "Mouse" and keep babbling about some local dish called "Kwisatz Haderach"... Will the PCs manage to stage a raid on the Nazi pumping stations? Can they destroy the CHOAM HQ, now secured as a bunker loaded with Nazis? will they discover why some of the deep desert fields have been destroyed by some sort of large burrowing creature? And why everyone has blue eyes? The Petrol must flow...

Re: Pulparize It! Ghosts of Mars: A group of Marshals (and probably a guide or two just to mix things up) have been dispatched to pick up Jim "Desolation" Williams from the Mining town of Shining Canyon and bring him back to Denver for trial. They stumble onto a scene of edritch horror as body-stealing spirits had been freed the night before and laid waste to all those who had not been taken over. The spirits were from a group of corrupted Native Americans tricked by a Thing Man Was Not Meant To Know. These corrupted ones had been defeated by a combination of (untainted) tribes around them and sealed into a cave hundreds of years before with a mystic symbol-laden rock over the entrance. The Miners encountered the cave, rich with silver, and removed the rock in order to get deeper into the cave. After its removal, the spirits of the corrupt ones began to take over the bodies of the miners, killing them indiscrimnately and moving on to other bodies in the camp. Inside the jail is Desolation, as well as a few drunks, prostitutes and the local administrator of the mining company (they were protected by the fact that metals, like iron and silver, sap the disembodied spirits of their energy. As a twist: iron does a good job of containment, but silver kills them). As the party kills off the spirit-dominated townsfolk, they start to notice that some of the NPCs in their party fall prey to bodily takeover.

Re: Pulparize It! Pitch Black: Onboard of the Zepplin Von Riddick, the PCs and a few NPCs are caught in a storm and end up crashing on an isolated island which has the eerie quality of being practically devoid of animal life and filled with huge skeletons of strange creatures. There they discover that the heavily sedated "French Patient" who had been brought on board by his "Brother" wasn't a patient at all but a murdering Nazi Spy, and with the "Brother" dead, he is now free to wander among them. Or is he? At the same time, they find a reseach facility on the island that has been abandoned for twenty years, and as night falls they begin to understand why as wave after wave of stygian horrors begin to flock over the surface of the island. Can they discover the hidden (and well-supplied) boat that will allow them to escape? When will they discover that water (sea, or fresh and sea water both) causes the stygian horrors acid-like burns? Will the French Patient turn out to be the Nazi spy or an American Double Agent who knows of another Nazi spy hidden amongst the group? Add Twist: As a one-shot convention type game, the "French Patient" is played by a PC 'ringer' whose goal is to kill all of the rest of the players and escape the island. Add Different Twist: As a one-shot convention game, as the players are killed off, they direct the increasingly threatening stygian horrors and help to speed the adventure towards a thrilling conclusion.

Re: If you liked the movie Equilibrium I'm waiting for Equilibrium to come down to $10.00, because I enjoyed it, but I only Ten-buck enjoyed it. Still, the Gunkata stuff made the movie for me, and it sounds like this one will be kick-asstic fun.

Re: Has anyone worked up a Zeppelin?

Re: Is this android "anatomically correct"?

Re: Why the "Big Release" Polls Are Flawed

Re: Has anyone worked up a Zeppelin? I did a slightly morer cleaned up version of those (with hexes no less) and posted them some time ago. Here they are again: Which is the modified version and Which is closer to the original

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Supreme Beings of Leisure

Re: Time Travel, Pulp era tropes and playstyle issues. Sounds vaguely familiar...

Re: Cities of the Future

Re: Time Travel, Pulp era tropes and playstyle issues.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Buster Poindexter, Spanish Rocketship

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Tom Waits -- 9th & Hennepin Ninth and Hennepin ...All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes...

Re: Looking for maps You could try one of these... http://www.digitalindalo.com/rpg/trek/stationplansframe.html This is based on the Regula station for Trek (the one in Wrath of Khan) If want to search around the Trek portion of the site (here), there are also plans for the Nova class, other Canon interiors and some non-Canon stuff that works well for Trek and other settings.

Re: My thoughts on the Serenity RPG PDF I actually like the game. The mechanics are very simplistic (moreso than WW for instance), but I feel that they allow for faster game play and thus capture the mood of a movie/TV series. The LUG Trek game did the same thing: a nice even flow in gameplay thanks to a simple ruleset (there were some PC creation elements I was cranky about though). To each their own. If you want to do Firefly within HERO though, I think that there is some good stuff here to use for background. Yeah the pdf is kind of troublesome if you are trying to print it out, I have a copy for reference more than anything (as I also sprang for the book). The trend now is these full color, graphics heavy books for lotsa dough rather than the HERO model of lower cost and more actual material (which I appreciate). The 4-color glossy books cost considerably more to produce, but in a market which is flooded with #$%$@#^ d20, it is (perhaps) the prettiest flowers that get picked. We'll see if this is accurate when the trend either goes away or remains steady in a few years.

Re: Champions Diceless Role-playing

Re: Game Maps and Counters Exchange Your map Evil? The style is interesting, like the maps for the Serenity in the new Serenity RPG and I was wondering what you were using.

Re: Champions Diceless Role-playing I have been an Amber player since the game first came out and I have played at several of the Ambercon Conventions where they have done just that: adapt Amber to Superhero use. In fact the number of non-Amber games have slowly crept up on Amber games at the last two Ambercons I have attended. I have also had great success with non-Amber games in the past: my Matrix Game was very well recieved (the Matrix lends itself to Diceless play) and the sheer number of Superhero Amber spinoffs speaks to their quality. I am thinking a Sin City game for this upcoming year's Con... Amber is a blast with a good GM and good players. It sucks with a bad GM and poor players. Kind of like any other game. But they aren't necessarily "good" or "bad" gamers/GMs in other settings. Some gamers cannot wrap their heads around the diceless concept, and others take to it like second-nature. In Amber the key to everything is the story and the mutual enjoyment of the people around the table. These two elements must be in balance with one another for a good session. The emphasis on story is the idea that every action in the game, every sequence and event, is designed to propel the story forward. The classic example is the old random moster tables in D&D. Why bother? Either the game needs a combat event to take place or it doesn't and the GM has to make that decision. The Players run into opposition. Should this be a hard fight where the players are pressed against the wall or a speed bump on the way to the next clue? The GM sets that up and determines that rather than random dice rolls. Mututal enjoyment means that the play is going to be fun for everyone at the table. Don't screw them over artlessly (an artful screw-over is a different matter, many times the players enjoy them as much as the GMs), don't make it entirely too easy. If there is a soft spot in Diceless it is combat. "Soft" here in that it is potentially problematic, not necessarily so. It is tough to GM good combats without dice, but it can be done in a way that is challenging and fair. This is where I have taken exception to some Amber GMs who belive that all comes down ultimately to the Warfare Stat. For me, differences in pure ability are secondary to differences in tactics. If you make dumb choices you are going to bleed over them. If you make smart choices you may be able to outfight your opponent who is technically better. For minions, it is okay to play them stupid or smart because they are generally not as good and are just the warm-up anyway. For the main bad guys it is harder, because you have to play them smart but not tip the scale. I have found that writing down actions secretly for a 'mutual reveal' is one of the best options to maintain fairness; then modify by raw ability (the Warfare stat) and see what happens. Some Players (and even some GMs) however have the "I have a better stat so I can do something brutally stupid and still win" mentality.

Re: Egyptian Tomb And Necropolis Maps! I have another project taking up time at the moment, but maybe following this upcoming weekend...

Re: Retcon the CU I don't mind the magic thing, but then I don't use the CU either. I have described the physics-bending qualities of most superpowers (size alteration being a huge one) using various means myself, ranging from a 'meta-force' (that may as well be magic), to something I have on the drawing board now that involves dimensional warping/cosmic string thingees (which may as well be magic). Saying "magic" may just be shorthand then, a way to recognize that which we cannot observe directly. Dimensional sifting, Magic, Factor-X whatever: I'm the guy with the laserbeam eyes.

Re: Fantasy University Floor Plans The Tucan FU Mascot.

Re: Fantasy University Floor Plans GOO boards, some prelim designs I had for a Castle Amber. I've actually been told once here that putting in restrooms was "icky" I agree that it isn't even, but it has happened.

Re: Fantasy University Floor Plans Ironically though, we do see restrooms in some scifi (B5 and Firefly), so it isn't entirely devoid either. I'm trying to think of fantasy examples other than Willow, but I'm coming up with zip at the moment. If you don't put any restrooms in you get flak from some folks, if you do, you get flak from others. Damned if you do... yada yada. Not doing so is therefore fine. My thinking is that it is a design element that has to be taken into consideration because it will sometimes have a radical effect on the rest of the architecture. As most of my maps are intellectual exercises, I place them for that reason alone. I actually err on the other side. If anything, I feel that I place too many restrooms in my maps. My girlfriend says I put more than (male) building designers and less than what there should be, so I guess I am in a happy medium. Of course, because these are fantasy maps, there are all sorts of other things to consider. A bathroom as we would understand one makes no sense, it is like putting in a telephone nook. The medieval examples of 'restroom equivalents' are relatively disgusting as general alternatives. Also, it is certainly possible that chamberpots and spongebaths are all the rage, because there is some reality to that as well. Think about under stairs (for places with plumbing, using that rising space for something) and notches along thick walls that face cliffsides or something similar. After all, there are reasons that invaders didn't swim the moat.