Howdy, everyone! First post, so please go gentle-like.
This is really a very vague question, and I apologize for that. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to frame the "real" question.
Haven't RGP'd in about 15 years. A friend suckered me into his D&D world one night, so I figured I'd return the 'favor' and introduce him to my personal favorite. Couldn't find my old HERO books, so I broke down and bought the new ones.
We've been doing mostly role-playing and making things up as we go. But we've hit a spot where numbers matter.
1) (This is pretty much just completely for my benefit and doesn't really matter) One of my major NPC's is pretty much a druid. He has a valley where he's mostly stuck. The trees and animals there are his friends, and they protect him (there was a recent attack, and the trees at the entrance killed everyone involved).
I'm thinking of this in terms of a Base. It has a Computer (aka an old oak) at its center. The oak has Clairsentience for the roving bands of deer/wolves/squirrels/termites/dandelions/whatever that patrol the place. I was planning AE Entanglement for people who tried to sneak in. And the main entrance has already established that it has some pretty nasty HKA's.
I figure that the NPC should spend about an hour or so a day communing with the oak to establish a Mind Link, and the dynamics seem to be working out so far.
Does that seem fair/reasonable, or am I completely looking at everything from the wrong direction?
2) One of the PC's is more or less that druid's apprentice. He doesn't know it, but he's starting to suspect (and the player's figured it out). He just established some sort of bond with skunks (it was too early, but he rolled a 3).
I'm tempted to give him a "skunk attack": some sort of high-power AVAD, indirect, AOE, DOT, with a really low Requires a Roll limit. 1 Charge per adventure, with a really long delay built in (to reflect the time it takes the skunks to show up). But it would also need to be extremely variable in effect, depending on where you are.
And this is a mostly Heroic campaign (so far), so I really don't want to give that many active points to any player.
I'm also thinking more along the lines of just having it be a Perk (Contact). There'd still need to be some sort of mental link involved, and I still need to decide what the skunks can actually do if they happen to get mad, but that approach seems both safer and closer to what's really going on.
Am I missing some basic point in the rules? Should I just buy the Bestiary?
TIA,
James
