Epiphanis

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? I bought the PDFs but not the books because I pretty much never buy hardcopies if there are PDFs, even if the PDF isn't cheaper; I value portability and storage space greatly over tangibility. But I do think the relatively small number of new characters was probably a significant factor in poor sales of the hardcopies. I hypothesize that most GMs modify stats anyway, so the redundancy of the fluff was not sufficiently offset by updating the crunch. I have absolutely nothing to back it up, but I suspect a compilation of new characters would sell better. Certainly I got more of a thrill reading Champions Beyond with its never-seen-before-content like Mordace and the Malvan gladiators.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) Cryptic Studios apparently decided to represent psionic energy as magenta colored. Which makes a certain amount of sense: magenta is one of the very few colors that doesn't exist in the visual light spectrum and is, in effect, a neurological construct of the brain.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39879[/ATTACH] Mind Slayer.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39877[/ATTACH] Medusa.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) Here are two more, both from PSI: Medusa and her rival, Mind Slayer. I will probably do Deuce and maybe Lancer later.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39836[/ATTACH] Scorpia.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39835[/ATTACH] Cantrip. Yes, I took some liberties with this one. I figure this is Cantrip as she would be today, in her early twenties six years after the publication of Teen Champions. I wanted to get away from the manga style of the original but still keep the whimsical nature of the subject.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39834[/ATTACH] Black Diamond

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) Thanks to all for the feedback. Here are three more: Black Diamond, Cantrip (thanks to kahuna's bro) and Scorpia.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) That's all for now. I plan to add Black Diamond, Mayte Sanchez, Shrinker, and some more presently.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39826[/ATTACH] Istvatha V'han

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39825[/ATTACH] Lady Blue

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39824[/ATTACH] Galaxia

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39823[/ATTACH] Flashover

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39822[/ATTACH] Gravitar

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39821[/ATTACH] Tiger Lily

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) [ATTACH=CONFIG]39820[/ATTACH] Black Rose

[ATTACH=CONFIG]39819[/ATTACH] First: Witchcraft and Talisman.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]39781[/ATTACH]My interpretation of the greatest villain of the Champions Universe Golden Age.

Re: Champions Villains Volume 2: Villain Teams The Brain Trust: Individually, I like the members of this team, but I've never liked the obvious rip-off quality of Overbrain and Ape-Plus to Brain and Monsieur Mallah. Fine characters for seperate teams, bad together. Futurists: I like the concept, but not the name. I think you guys are missing the point with this group; the Fiend and Morticus may have genuinely idealistic goals in mind, but they are clearly rat bastards in an "ends justify the means" sort of way. I like that the Fiend, for all his grandiose ideas of social reform, is in fact a sadist who enjoys using his pain powers. Also, there was a void for a good sneaky group in the CU mix that they fill. Other than the unimpressive name, my only problem with the Futurists is that they are presented as the seed of a team and not a finished product. Deathstroke: I think this was a mistake. Frost and Requiem are interesting characters, but the whole "trying to get the band back together" thing seems a waste. Not least because of Slade Wilson coopting the name-- do we need more "Captain Marvel" name confusion? Frost and Requiem would be better served as solos in Vol. 3. Eurostar: this was a good villain team before the European Union was established, but now they are a little obsolete. Again, the individual members are excellent, but the team itself seems to have lost its entire point. Also, its notable that the most badass supervillain team in the CU isn't even included in this book: The Destroyers, which are partially documented in Vol. 1 instead. In the continuity clusterconfusion that is the Doctor Destroyer timeline, the Destroyers are ostensibly currently operating on their own under Gigaton and are not taking orders from Dr. D.

Re: Ok GM's weigh in. We've been talking players CvK...how do you handle these things I am a vocal defender of the use of CvK and have required it (or similar mechanics) in several games I have run, in and out of Hero System. In two games I announced that any intentional killing of a human would result in the immediate conversion of the killing character to NPC status, independent of whether the character had CvK or not. Thus, the CvK limitation mechanic is not necessarily mandatory but instead represents a free limitation that saves you points, since every PC is treated as having CvK anyway. Its just a campaign parameter that bypasses the optional mechanic of CvK entirely. Thus, if you really really want to have your character kill, I will let you -- exactly one time, after which you get the option of a rolling up a new character at a lower point level than the other players, or leaving the campaign entirely. And the former PC becomes mine as an NPC, and I do whatever I want with him. Maybe he dies tragically (karmic backlash?), maybe he's convicted of murder and gets sent to prison, maybe he becomes a villain, or maybe nothing happens to him at all, depending on what I think is appropriate for story purposes and my own sensibilities. I have come to refer to this as the "Back in Black" solution, since I based the idea off the Spider-Man storyline where -- SPOILER -- Peter Parker has some strong motivation to kill Kingpin's fat keester in violation of his own CvK. His solution? He announces his intention to renounce being Spider Man (presumably forever) and kill the fat bastitch as plain old Peter Parker, nonhero (he didn't follow through, however). This was also the solution Harry Callahan reached in the first Dirty Harry movie, where he murdered the villain in cold blood and finished the movie by throwing his badge in a river. Sort of undercut by all the sequels in which he retained his Detective status regardless, but it would have been an appropriate ending. Now, all that having been said, I have run 'antihero' games with absolutely no CvK or equivalent requirement at all, and I probably wiill again. I love stuff like Thunderbolts and Suicide Squad. But I also love stuff like the Justice League and Spider Man, in which the heroes really are held to a higher standard of behavior than the villains they fight.

Re: Is Kinetik a casual killer? I love CvK arguments. No, CvK is not uncommon in the real world. A historian named S. L. A. Marshall published a famous study that posited that about 75% of American combat troops in WWII, who had been specifically trained and ordered to kill other humans, either expressly refused to do so or had only pretended to shoot at the enemy while in fact never having even tried to hit somebody, even when their own chances of survival would have been improved by such. His findings were supported and expanded on by another historian, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman; although Marshall and Grossman's methodologies were sometimes criticized, other researchers have found a lot of corroborating evidence supporting their general points, and finding that similar figures apply not only to WWII soldiers but, as nearly as available data can ascertain, to most soldiers of most sides in most conflicts they have enough data regarding to analyze. The U.S. Army had enough belief in Grossman's conclusions that it changed its training methods in an effort to overcome what it recognized as a very real and powerful resistance to kill.

Re: Golden Age Champions Lots of Golden Age superheroes had Nazi villains of different stripes, especially the ones published by Fawcett Comics, original publishers of Captain Marvel (i.e., the Billy Batson-Shazam! Captain Marvel). Fawcett came out with Captian Nazi. DC/National had a few, most notably Wonder Woman femme fatale Baroness von Gunther. But the one that has really remained strong into the modern era is the Red Skull. Golden Age gangsters were often amazingly inventive in their battles with superheroes. The George Reeves Adventures of Superman series from the 1950s had a number of inventive rubber-sciencey ways to even the odds with the Man of Steel, like robbing him of his strength by spraying him with liquid nitrogen (because even steel becomes weak and brittle when frozen solid!) But there was more to the Golden Age than just mobsters and Axis supervillains. Basically, anything that took young boys' fancy from that period would eventually be reflected in Golden Age comics. Maybe the most common trope was the mad scientist who would wittingly or not unleash super-powerful monsters on an unsuspecting world; Lex Luthor was originally from this camp, and Doctor Sivana still is. Alien invasions happened, although become more commonplace in the Silver Age after the Soviet-American Space Race kicked in gear. "Lost worlds" were popular back then; invasions came not just from space but from underground, beneath the sea, mysterious islands not found on any map, or pretty much anyplace the typical American didn't know much about (i.e., everywhere but North America and Europe).

Re: Definitional Points for a Champions campaign Thanks for sharing that explanation! See, before I just thought you didn't want to play a game run in my style because you wouldn't find it fun. Now you've made clear that it is also morally repugnant and you find me vile and reactionary. So glad we avoided that little misunderstanding!

Re: Definitional Points for a Champions campaign A very fair question. When I started my last HERO campaign last year (which was the first I'd been in since 4th Edition) my only up-front limitation was a 12 DC cap on any attack powers. The submitted builds I got, retrospectively, were largely based around "exploits" that gave too much of an edge. In my naivete I approved some builds that I probably shouldn't have. I found that the ones that I did catch would often produce undesired debate/arguments when I asked for them to be changed. The conclusion that I reached was that the point buy system the HERO operates under had traded away game balance for extreme versatility. As I started pulling apart the rules I began trying to house rule a systematic way to restore balance up front. I started with a piecemeal way of plugging specific exploits, but there were always more that I missed, and trying to catalog them quickly became too complex. So now I'm trying to develop a relatively simple set of rules that would circumvent the majority of overly-efficient exploits while maintaining a reasonable if decreased amount of flexibility.