Fitz

Re: Staves That would be quite an interesting exercise, requiring considerable research and no doubt inspiring countless arguments. I don't know that I'd use it myself - my present campaign is High Fantasy, so that sort of granularity wouldn't add much - but I do think it's a worthwhile project.

Re: Doing your own calendar: is it worth it? I'd say the crucial thing to consider is whether or not your characters are supposed to know the calendar or not. If they're foreigners, dealing with an unfamiliar calendar, then maybe the effort is justified for the purposes if local colour. If they're supposed to have grown up with this calendar, then the players' lack of familiarity with it will just create a dissonance that would make it that much harder to achieve character immersion. Personally, I always just use the standard calendar we've all grown up with. It just makes life easier to be able to say "May 15th" and have everyone know what that means, rather than having to constantly explain that "Second-day of Floon-Tide" basically means May 15th.

Re: Help with an ability You have a couple of options. The first would be to use Cramming -- the character would need to buy it for each skill (i.e. once for each KS, once for the language, etc.) The problem with this approach is that Cramming only allows a 8- Familiarity that can't be improved with Skill Levels. However, it's probably the most appropriate approach for a low- to medium-powered Heroic campaign. The other approach, more appropriate for use as a mystical or magical bard ability, would be to buy a Variable Power Pool devoted entirely to appropriate skills. You would limit the Pool by requiring a couple of days to change skills (i.e. to adapt to the local area), and once active, the relevant skills would work exactly as if they'd been bought individually. Neither way is going to be as cheap as buying skills, but they pay for themselves in flexibility, especially the VPP method.

Re: Victorian / Western HERO Firearms Something that few lists of guns 'n ammo tend to address, and which might be worth considering, is that shooting before the days of smokeless powder created a LOT of smoke. If you're in confined quarters (like a bar, or train carriage, or Victorian drawing room) and blazing away like mad, there's a pretty good chance you won't be able to see further than the end of your arm in no time flat.

Re: FH Gripes I assumed that the Vitals location corresponded with the centre-line location shown on targets like this: ...unless, of course, it's funnier to have the blow hit straight to the goolies. Which it almost always is.

Re: Tuala Morn Art I've been making my way through TM since it arrived a few days ago, and generally I like it. Some parts I like a lot. But some of the art in the Bestiary -- the illustration of the Spriggan, for example -- is the worst I've seen lately, not only in Hero System stuff but in any professional RPG publication. Maybe I've just been spoiled lately, but amateurish stuff like that really makes me wince, and it makes me embarrassed to show the book to others. On the other hand I really like the heavy blacks and moodiness in some of the other illustrations, like that of the Athac, so maybe it balances out. I'm not really au fait with the realities of small-venture publishing, so maybe there are compelling reasons to get it out the door asap. If it had been my baby though, I'd rather have pushed back the release date to fix some of the art-related issues than pump out a "near enough is good enough" product.

Re: Mental Plane Battle This is basically the way I used to run cyberpunk VR "combat" (i.e. net-running), and it works well. It's certainly a lot more interesting for the players than just saying "OK, make a SysOp roll.... fine, you penetrate the NSA database. Now what?"

Re: FH Gripes I run the magicians in my campaign with fairly heavily limited END (Mana) reserves. First, the Reserve and Recovery can have a real cost no higher than the stat the Magic roll is based on (usually INT). Second, It can recover no faster than once a day (usually the REC = END, so the Reserve refills once a day). Third, any magic not powered from the Mana Reserve must be at least x3 END, and that END comes straight off LTE. I've made available various magic items that serve as additional Mana Reserves, but so far the party have been unusually restrained in their looting and haven't actually grabbed anything much. It's odd; when I want them to get their hands on an item, they ignore it completely. At present I'm not making them pay for individual spells unless they want to be able to cast them without daily reference to a spellbook. Essentially, all the spells are built with the spellbook as an Independent Focus, so if a particular spell proves to be too unbalancing it's reasonably easy for me as the GM to take it away. On the other hand, it's relatively easy for a PC wizard to get a bunch of new spells by murdering and looting their fellow magicians.

I've gone through all the Hero Designer prefabs for the million-zillion spells of the Ultimate Grimoire and (as far as I can tell) finished them all off. I've added spell descriptions for all the spells that didn't already have them, and completed the sections that weren't already done (mostly the letter E, for some reason). I also split up the prefabs for S a bit more in an attempt to keep them as small as possible. You can grab them at http://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/fantasy/magic/spellfinder.html, either all glommed together in a single zip file (approx. 350 KB) or as individual .hdp files. This has been a monster of a job, so thanks to everyone who did some of the work so that I didn't have to (most particularly Shadowcat). I've been meaning to do this for some time, but I forgot about it -- mainly because we haven't had any magicians in the campaign for a while.

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion My copy of Tuala Morn arrived the other day. So far I've skimmed most of it, but what I've read in detail and really like is the bestiary. I've been reading (and imagining) about these creatures for many years, but the book that had the most influence on me was Alan Lee and Brian Froud's Faeries, published back in 1978. Putting their pictures together with Steve's descriptions has been a delight. I'm stoked. Now to start on the rest of the book

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion There's a page of Irish Gaelige insults and curses (with translations) at http://www.insultmonger.com/swearing/irish_gaeilge.htm -- they also have a page for Scots Gaelic. WARNING!!! DO NOT open the page at work; it is decidely NOT work-safe (it's one of those pages surrounded by boobie-ads).

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion That's because it's not actually a real language. It's really a sort of joke Esperanto, but designed specifically to be less coherent and understandable than other European languages. You don't seriously think the Irish and Scots actually talk that gibberish when there aren't Englishmen around to confuse, do you? Come on.

Re: Requirements for Sainthood I would assume that, saints basically being demi-gods, if you prayed to them and you got miracles in return then they'd be likely to be officially recognised (or officially reviled as a heretical demon-spawn, depending on the politics of the time). One advantage of a fantasy milieu when it comes to determining sainthood is that your high priest can just get on the holy telephone, ring up Heaven Inc. and ask if so-and-so has actually qualified.

Re: REH Out of Copyright and Online That's fantastic, thanks for letting us know about that stuff.

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion I suppose I could just wait until my copy arrives to find out (any day now.....) but I just can't resist immediate gratification. So... How are gods and mythology handled in TM? Does it deal with any of the Celtic gods (Belenos, Taranis, Bel, Nuada, Lugh, the Morrigan etc.) or does it introduce a new bunch? Or does it use the TA pantheon? I'm currently running a campaign which has pagan Celtic elements, and though gods haven't figured very heavily so far, that could all change since the party have just managed to get all blasphemous and sacrilegious against Cernunnos, the Horned God.

Re: What exactly is the "Spell" limitation? To tell the truth, that's pretty much the way I've always used it -- when I've used it at all. These days I just lay out a bunch of campaign-wide restrictions on how all spells work; the limitation is therefore implied and doesn't really need to be restated within the spell description. I could see it being an actual limitation in a campaign where different types of powers are available to the characters, otherwise it's a -0 and just adds to the verbosity of the description.

Re: D&D Spellbooks as Bases I forget who made this suggestion originally, but I seem to recall an idea for D&D/Hero magic conversion which went like this: For each Level of magic-use, the character buys a Talent (cost per level is up to the GM, but I'd probably use a climbing scale: say, 2pts per spell-level?). Purchase of each Level-Talent beyond the first requires that all of the preceding ones have been bought -- in other words, if you want to be able to cast 5th-level spells, you have to have the Talents for 1st through 4th level as well. Once you have the requisite Level-Talent, you can cast any spell of that level to which you have access (i.e. that's in your spell-book). The individual spells don't cost the character anything, though some may still have an XP penalty for casting (does D&D still do that?) You can keep the D&D set-number-of-spells-per-level-per-day I guess, though I use a Mana-Pool system (basically an END REserve that all spells are powered from) that can only be recharged once per day; that allows a reasonable amount of freedom without allowing wizards to fire off spell after spell willy-nilly and just taking a few minutes of recovery every once in a while. This should allow a reasonable facsimile of D&D magic, and it has the advantage that you don't have to worry about costing out the individual spells: as long as you decide on the appropriate powers and limitations to mirror the D&D spell, the cost doesn't really matter. Some D&D spells are mind-bogglingly powerful when converted into a points-based system, but if you're not paying for them, who cares.

Re: Economy???? Campaigns are normally defined as Heroic or Superheroic. In Heroic campaigns, items like guns and flamethrowers are bought with money; all the character needs is the skill to use it (and the money!). Characters are normally within the range of human possibility in terms of their Characteristics, but not always. This is the system used in most RPGs. In Superheroic campaigns, characters normally have to pay character points for their gadgets as well as their innate powers. Sure, they could pick up a gun in the course of an adventure and use it, but if they wanted to keep on using it (i.e. if they wanted to add it to their character concept) then they'd have to pay for it in character points. The reason for this is to better simulate the superhero comic genre. The two campaign styles don't mix and match well, so you need to decide up-front which way you're going to go.

Re: Swallowing a Man Whole Gastric juices would probably only be an issue to someone who doesn't have to breathe; they're relatively weak, and take a long time to dissolve large masses. Long before they'd have a noticeable effect, the swallowee (?) would be crushed and asphyxiated, unless you're talking about a creature like Leviathan, with a gullet large enough to walk around in. For something like a giant anaconda, once the victim has been swallowed (a simple Grab would do the trick; maybe several in succession if you want to string out the suspense) I'd have it doing Continuous Uncontrolled Casual STR (i.e. crushing) damage, while the victim would use the rules for drowning, and I guess would need to make a STR-vs-STR roll to be able to move limbs -- to cut themselves free with a knife, for example.

Re: If Hero was linear It occurs to me that in Char vs Char roll-offs, the important thing is not the Char value but rather the Char Modifier. A characteristic of 13 is functionally identical to one of 14,15,16 or 17 -- they all give you +1 to your Char roll. Using STR as an example, the only reason to know that you have a STR of precisely 16 (or 116, or whatever) is to know exactly how much you can lift; it otherwise has no game effect on STR vs STR contests. That ratio would be all you'd need to know for combat too, if you used opposed rolls to determine hitting. Of course it would double the amount of dice rolling involved in a combat since both the attacker and defender would have to roll, with success going to the one who made their roll by the greatest margin, but the main burden of that would fall on the GM. (Note: as a matter of personal preference I don't particularly like this sort of system because it can be very frustrating to constantly have your hopes raised by a good attack roll, only to have them dashed when the defender makes an equally good defence roll). If that were the case, then whether the Char scale is linear or exponential becomes irrelevant. Only the relative roll modifiers are important.

Re: If Hero was linear STR is the only characteristic that would be noticeably affected by changing to a linear scale, and might need some sort of scaled pricing to cater to both Heroic and Superheroic characters -- for example, you might pay 1pt per pt up to a STR of 50, then 1/2pt per pt to a STR of 100, then 1/4pt to 250, and so on. The Megascale advantage could be expanded to accommodate damage and defences as well as area and speed. It would need a little bit of tweaking, but I think it would be an easy way to accommodate such a vast range of values.

Re: Why model smoke grenades/pellets as Darkness? I agree that unlimited Darkness isn't really a good match for smoke or fog effects, and that Change Environment would be a better fit. Even so, it still needs some tweaking: CE allows you to apply negative levels (to normal vision PER, in this case) but as far as I can see there's no "by the book" way to model an increase in those negative levels according to range. "Explosion" comes close, but in this case it would be a limitation, not an advantage, since you're already dealing with an Area of Effect. "Hole in the Middle" could be a candidate, except that then there's a sharp delineation between no effect and absolute effect. I've also had plenty of experience with WP smoke in the army, and although it's pretty dense and obscuring I've not generally had too many problems seeing my immediate vicinity -- it's only stuff further away that gets fully obscured. I'd want to model smoke by applying a -1 sight PER per hex (for example) from the viewer rather than an absolute value.

Re: What would you like to see in Enchanted Items? What I'd be looking for in such a book would be back-stories. Having a compiled list of powers is handy, but it's the descriptions and adventure hooks that would make the book appeal to me. Stuff like the old AD&D artifacts and relics -- the eye and hand (and head ) of Vecna, for example, were uber-kewl in their day not only because they immediately gave you a campaign-unbalancing kick-a$$ character, but because they had a universally-known back-story which allowed the GM to hang all kinds of sub-plots off them. The other thing I like in my magic items are sneaky side-effects and unexpected properties. I remember, back in the distant past, letting a party get its mitts on what they thought was nothing but a magical self-heating frying pan. What they didn't know (but eventually found out by accident) was that it heated itself by opening a mini-gate to the elemental plane of fire, and when the pan was destroyed (an unfortunate camping accident involving an inadvertant ice-demon summoning) the portal became uncontrolled, allowing all sorts of things through. Oh how we laughed as one character after another was burned to a crisp. OK, I laughed, even if nobody else did. In short: the flavour's the thing. The mechanics are handy, but secondary.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Nice pic. I hope his tetanus boosters are up to date. On a non-subject-related note: this image is an excellent illustration of the problems of working images between Macs and PCs; anything I create or scan on a PC inevitably looks washed out when viewed on a Mac, while I almost always have to shift the gamma down in Mac-created images to bring out details. Those computer platforms, they're wacky!

Re: Herophile Fantasy art