Boric Slavelord

Re: FANTASY HERO Sneak Peek #1: The Cover!

Boric sooooo HAAWPPY!!!

Me get FH in pdf AND hardcopy !!! Yay!!!

Will there be a a HERO 6th Edition - GM Screen and Resource Book as there was for FRED?

Re: A Whole New World

I think I'll be calling this The Endless Sea campaign.

In a little town in Pennsylvania a young woman made her Papi happy by buying him the CHAMPIONS book for HERO Sixth Edition!

Got it in the mail yesterday, but that's cool!

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine

These should be worked up and put into some kind of netbook for Champions!

Re: Do I need a metaplot for Star Hero?

One could argue that firefly didn't have enough time for its metaplot to show. There were a lot of hints of stuff going on.

 

Most HERO campaigns have the understood meta of "We're here to save the world!" with arcs being filled with bad guys, threats, etc. The genre doesn't need a whole lot extra to make it work. Fantasy has the D&D roots of killing orcs/trolls/dragons and taking their stuff. This does not translate well into space, where killing people just because they are a race different from yours tends to cause problems with the cops.

 

Maybe not, maybe there's a war but because of the expense involved with space travel the PC's are given a small ship to go out and kill as many of the enemy race or races as possible.

Hey there's a metaplot. You could even set in some near future where the PC's could even be the "cops" more like some kind of alien killin' super cops fighting to make sure their race doesn't go extinct.

Re: A Whole New World

Have you ever heard of SpellJammer for ADnD? This reminds me of that.

 

La Rose.

Re: A Whole New World

You might also have really huge flyings ships flying over the waters of the "Endless Sea" between "worlds", built large and powerful to withstand attacks by the creatures below. Armed with "Fireball" cannons and as large as several city blocks.

Re: A Whole New World

If the pylons are tapered toward the top rather than straight up-and-down' date=' they could be built like a ziggurat, in ever-smaller flat sections with exposed "steps" around each level. Sapient beings could build their homes on these steps, and convert some of them into agricultural terrace-farms covered with soil from the world above. Since this "underworld" is sunless, the crops they grow would likely have to be some form of fungus rather than green plants, such as are cultivated below ground by some varieties of ants. Heck, they could even [b']be[/b] ant-like. Or perhaps mammalian, but resembling real-world species adapted to life in the darkness, like moles. There could also be owl-men or bat-men flying between the pylons.

I'd say the pylons are tapered for some of the distance down and then just drop off, each edge or level being between 20 to 30 miles wide, the inside of pylons are hollow and with different levels as well accessble by tunnels that wind down to each level.

Some of these races may have colonized the world above, perhaps producing offshoots better adapted to life beneath the sun. OTOH the descendants of humans could also have found their way down to the pylons, evolving into Morlock-like albinos.

I like this as well, I'd like to think of this world as having been around for eons with the rise of fall of not only civilizations but entire groups intelligent species with ages in between where there were none.

The dark, infinite sea may be the home of monstrous aquatic races or gods opposed to the deities who created the world. Just imagine some of the nightmarish-looking things dwelling in the deepest parts of our world's oceans, given intelligence and manipulatory limbs. As enemies, their most logical ultimate goal would be to destroy the sun permanently, allowing them to overrrun the world above. Those who make their way up the pylons into the surface seas and lakes might, rather like H.P. Lovecraft's "Deep Ones," seek to mate with humans to produce hybrid offspring who can function freely on land during the day.

The idea of monstrous races/gods is definitely something I'd like to use along with races of "deep ones" who "infect" and interbreed with surface races using some kind of dark magick. The "Endless Sea" idea also works toward something else I'd been considering. That this world is one of hundreds or thousands of "worlds". All built on the mysterious pylons separated by hundreds of thousands or millions of miles. Each one could have it's own sun and be surrounded by "planets" and "moons" each also built upon the pylons and each with it's own ecosystem and creatures.

Re: A Whole New World

Ah, my apologies for misreading your description.

 

The mythology of India has the Earth supported on the back of an enormous elephant, riding on top of an even bigger turtle, swimming in an infinite sea. Perhaps the pylons are holding this world above such a sea. The reason the sun "disappears" into them is because it's quenched like a flame when it reaches the surface of the water. That's also why the pylons appear to vanish into nothingness -- there's no light to reveal the surface of the sea.

 

The pylons are hollow, drawing water up to the land like pipes. The ones around the rim of the world have created an immense "river" surrounding it, like the River Oceanus in Greek mythology. Inland the pylons are beneath the seas and major lakes of the world. All the running water on this world eventually makes its way back to the girdling river, where it falls off the edge of the world into the sea below.

 

Perhaps the pylons are organic like trees or stalks of bamboo, and have immense "leaves" or "branches" upon which other beings dwell, like multiple versions of the World Tree from Norse legend. They may even be "roots" growing out of the bottom of the world, which is why they draw water up from the infinite sea. Other smaller roots could be tangled between and among the larger pylons, forming a "web" among which things dwell -- think of how the network of a plant's roots looks when you uproot it from its soil.

 

In fact, that could be how the gods formed this world... they pulled it up from the bottom of the sea, so man would have dry land to dwell on. The inhabitants of the underside of the world could be the equivalent of grubs and aphids, while the sea teams with creatures small or vast. Some of those sea creatures sometimes make their way up the pylons to the waters on the surface, drawn to the light and warmth of the sun.

 

Whew! Sorry, I don't mean to keep rambling like this.

I actually like the concept and the idea of immense sea sounds cool. However I do prefer the pylons be made of some inorganic matter that is mysterious in it's makeup being neither organic or innert. Cool ideas though

Re: LOTR Plushies

how cute!

 

 

funko will release four 5” plush figures based on characters from lord of the rings in september. The characters are frodo, orc, legolas, and gandalf the white.

 

Interest in the property remains high, both from the aftermath of the film trilogy and the anticipation of the two hobbit movies, currently in pre-production in new zealand.

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

Re: A Whole New World

IMHO the best way to make the 'bad-guys' original is to try a different approach to 'evil'. Don't have them as simple marauders or beings that are malevolent for the sake of it.

 

Perhaps they believe that their underworld is the true world and that the world above is the land of ghosts or illusions. They venture onto the surface world in search of certain resources and have no respect for the beings they encounter. Killing a ghost is no crime after all. And torturing one for information is no problem either, the creature may appear to be suffering but that is just an illusion created by too much exposure to the surface world. Their religion teaches that the surface world is the world of deceit and therefore a kind of hell, if you begin to believe in the surface world then your soul will become trapped there and you will cease to exist in any real sense. So, these creatures avoid feeling any sentiment towards the 'ghosts' and slaughter them without mercy if they begin to feel any sympathy for them. They will even kill those who begin to question this belief to save them from becoming 'damned'. Whether this religion is simply misguided or whether it is a conscious lie fabricated by this race's leaders is up to you.

I like! Maybe they're actually "good looking" as opposed to looking like the usual monstrous races.

Re: A Whole New World

That doesn't suggest a story. The sun disappearing into the pylons suggests a story at some point and something different about the world.

 

Right now I am thinking that this world sounds like a 64 pin computer chip....

Hmmm. Now there's a thought. 64 pylons hold up the World.

Re: A Whole New World

with the afterlife on the other side?

Re: A Whole New World

Hmm... flat world, pylons disappearing into the sky... the logical conclusion (from a mythic cosmological perspective) is that the pylons actually support the sky. This would lend itself to an almost Ptolemaic model of the universe, with the flat world at the center and the sun, moon, stars and planets on "crystal spheres" or some other type of conveying framework. This of course begs the question of what lies outside this framework.

 

Whoa, wait a second. I just got hit with the most bizarre vision. The pylons are actually the stacks of enormous furnaces and steam engines beneath the surface of the earth, which power the machinery that keep the heavens turning. What belches out of the stacks forms the clouds. The sun is an enormous ball filled with combustibles, which emerges out of the top of one pylon, tracks across the sky as it burns its "fuel," then passes into another pylon on the opposite side of the world, from where it's carried beneath the earth overnight to its starting position and refueled for the next day's run. If there's anyone living on the "bottom" of the world, they never see the sun at all.

 

I need to think more about the implications of this.

 

And BTW, Boric, welcome back to HERO and to our community! I hope you derive much enjoyment from both. (Might be a worthy occasion to consider emancipating those slaves.)

First off, thanks for the input and the welcome.

The pylons don't "hold up" the sky they seem to be holding up the world. A dweller ont he surface of the world would see the land, sea, and heavens much the way we do. He wouldn't there were pylons unless he went "below"

Re: A Whole New World

I'd suggest reading the page about Discworld ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld_(world) ) either for ideas-to-do or not-to-do

 

At least you'll be aware of it if a player mentions it...

Yes I know about Discworld.

Another idea is to have the world be very huge I was thinking it would be about say hundreds of thousands of miles long and wide. Make it square. I was thinking an immense river flows all along the edge of it.

Re: A Whole New World

...into the pylons??

Into that region beyond into which the pylons stretch.

Re: A Whole New World

This sounds a great deal like something Farmer did with his world of Teirs series... perhaps the "gods" are simply powerful beings identical to humans' date=' but far more powerful. One or more created the world, got tired of it and moved on. Just a thought.[/quote']

 

Or maybe just one god or Creator and the rest are just very powerful beings. The nature of the Pylons themselves I could keep mysterious. I'm thinking they're constructed of some strange stone metallic material.

Re: A Whole New World

Here's another one. The "Sun" orbits the world and disappears in the huge forest of pylons at night but doesn't shine there. It just vanishes.

Re: A Whole New World

I think Rex meant what was on the bottom of the flat earth (or that's how I read it)...

Oooohhh.

Haven't really thought about that but I'm thinking some kind of underworld.

Maybe some kind of Behemoth dwells there that's the size of a world. Worshipped by strange red humaniods with six arms.

Re: A Whole New World

Hmmm. Flat World, and a Non Orc Bad guy. First question then, is What's on the Bottom?

 

~Rex

Well the world sits on these HUGE pylons which seem to go off into infinity. What's below there? Probably some dark mind bending species. Haven't quite decided yet.

Re: A Whole New World

I'm trying to think what to put on this world insofar as races. All the standards have been done to death but at the seem time there's a reason they have been. Humans of course will be on this world but I want NO orcs but I really would like some kind of "bad guy" race. Any suggestions?

Re: A Whole New World

Looking forward to hearing more. And welcome aboard!

The bunny avatar is scaring me.....

First off let me say I'm glad to be here! And having been out of the HERO loop for quite some time. With the new 6th edition out and the new edition of FANTASY HERO coming out soon I'm looking to start new fantasy campaign and wanted to hash over some ideas here with you all. I want to do something kinda new but it seems there isn't anything really new. But to start lets say the new campaign world is set on world that is first off FLAT but supported by HUGE pylons that vanish off into infinity. Aside from that the world is pretty much like our earth in terms of climate and terrain. There are no gods per se but there are references to the ONE who created all things. Although there are various other beings of supernatural ability. There's magic of course but not everyone can use it except those few who are given the gift or talent. These we'll call Magisters who are born really powerful but need time and training to use that gift properly.

and that's just for starters.