Michael Hopcroft

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Miss Williams and Miss Sharavpova, your tops and bras are far too distracting. Remove them immeidately please. Oh, and the customary congratulatory handshake for this match will be repalced by a congratulatory make-out session. Yes, you will be permitted to use your racket handles -- enocrauged, in fact."

Re: Dukes of Hazzard Hero IIRC, there were a lot of complaints about the recent Dukes of Hazzard movie, unviersally agreed to be an utter fiasco. But i was surprised that the most important complaint of all was never addressed -- they got the main characters completely wrong. I remember having to watch that show. the Duke Boys were not ignorant hicks as protrayed by Johnny Knoxville and the other guy. In the actual show, they were actually clever, resourceful, and well-spoken. They could have gone to a college and fit in, except that there wasn't one on Hazzard County and one of the ongoing plot hooks was that if they were ever caught outside the county lines they'd both go straight to prison without even a trial. They must have been under a rather bizarre sort of probation, and their crime and whether they actually committed it was never specified. It might have had something to do with bootlegging -- their family was hevaily involved in the moonshine trade and they certainly had the skills of effective rumrunners. Both of the Duke boys would have stratopsheric Combat Driving skill, Skill Levels for hand-to-hand combat (they were unscientific but effective bare-knuckle brawlers), some good Range Skill Levels speciifcally for archery (apparently another condition of their probation would have been that they couldn't carry guns, so they used longbows with explosive-tipped arrows instead, usually against vehicles or buildings), and very good Skill levels in Conversation, Deduction, Seduction and several other social skills. Here's a point to remember when designing any sort of campaign: "rural" and "ignorant" do not go together hand-in-glove in every case. A "hillbilly" or member of a similar culture who may not have a lot of formal education can still be intelligent, cunning, extremely resourceful, a gifted improviser, and have an extremely strong sense of personal ethics and loyalty.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "And if they start throwing around the neighbor's houses, here's a glowing green rock. Expose them to it for no more than forty-five seconds. Any longer and they'll get really sick, so be careful. Oh, and they're vulenrable to magic -- you aren't a mage, are you?" NT: Signs that you dialed the wrong number when calling 911 when your house is on fire.

Re: The Treasure of Emperor Qin If the existence, much less location, of Qin's tomb complex is not public knowledge in the campaign, then it could add to the adventure as well. The locals might not want to deal with anything resembling an archeologist, based on a whsipered fear that even they do not comprehend -- only that there is something great and terrible in the vicintiy that must be left alone.... Bad idea for the Chinese. Comapred to Qin, Tarkofaes was a Boy Scout.... Trying to revive Qin would be like summong the ghost of Hitler. Again, bad move for the Triads. In life, Qin viewed every human being in the world as a disposable pawn to be used and discarded as he saw fit. In unlife, this trait is likely to be even worse.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

I finally got my hands on the fansubs of this series, which got some fairly good press. It looks like it has some interesting hooks for a game -- and, on the other hand, a few serious moral problems with the premise. It's the story of a girl named Mai. we meet her and her brother (who suffers from a serious heart condition) on a ferry to their new school, a boarding school called the Fuuka Academy. we see her looking up at a red star that nobody else appears to see, but her borther does not think she's hallucinating. However, he in turn sees something that everyone sees -- a girl floating face down in the ocean. The girl is pulled out of nthe water, dressed in a cut-up middle school uniform and holding a huge black sword. Her rescuers try to pry it out of her hand, and find their lifeboat cut in two and plunging in the ocaen. The girl herself isn't breathing, and after some misunderstandings involving the guy who originally tried to rescue her Mai ends up performing CPR and saving her life. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake. Because a speedboat pulls up alongside the ferry, another girl leaps on board and hunts down the girl who had the sword 9which has somehow come back to her) They have a spectacular battle with Mai caught in the middle, and suddenly she finds herself exhibiting a strange power of her own. which leads the attacker to tell her "Don't go to Fuuka Academy! If you do, you'll die!" next thing Mai knwos, she and the girl have plunged into the ocean as the ferry sinks (being cut in two tends to cause a seagoing vessel to have difficulty staying afloat). Instead of being dead, she wakes up on the Fuuka Academy campus with the sword-weilding girl in her arms and surrounded by smoke and general damage. The Student Council hauls Mai in front of them, and one girl in particular vows to see her expelled with all possible prejudice. After she meets her classmates, including the guy from the ferry (whom Mai has become throguhly convinced is an utter creep and pervert) she disocevers that the girl who had threatened her is actually a student at Fuuka, albeit one who almost never goes to class. Eventually, Mai discoevers the terrible secret. She is a HiME, capable of "making photons solid" and using some rather impressive powers, and she has been brought to Fuuka because the Director of the School wants her to fight monsters from outside of reality who are infesting the island where the schoiol sits. Both of the other powerful girls are also HiMEs: the sword-weilder is powerful but almost feral, and the other girl (who weilds pistols and commands a mechanical being with powerful guns) is convinced the whole setup is a trap and that they are all going to die horribly. And here is the problem I have with the setuip. The girl who runs the school essentially tricked Mai into going there and forced her to reveal her powers. Worse, there are about 1200 students of Fuuka Academy who have no powers at all and no clue about what is going on -- and they have all been placed on an island full of murderous monsters. If Fukka Academy existed before the monsters were discoeverd, the ethical thing to do would have been to close down the school and completely evacuate the island. And if Fukka Academy was established because the monsters were there, then all of these kids have come to the school for the purpose of being bait. In other words, the whole student body has been marked for certain death. It makes me wonder if there are any morally decent people in the whole thing -- even Mai, who should be smart enough to realize what is going on and doesn't get at least her brother off the island.

Re: The Treasure of Emperor Qin

Re: Complicate the Person Above Enforcer84 dare not rest in his quest to hunt down and destroy Enforcer742, Efrocer8168, and EnforcerPi before they combine their incredible cosmic powers to destroy him -- and the rest of the Universe with him!

There is bound to be a pulp adventure somewhere in this: archeologists using magnetic imaging technology have discovered that Qin Shihuangdi, the ruthelss tyrant who essentially created a unified China, was buried with his entire treasury. And it's still there, untouched for two millenia. Mind you, the bulk of the mountain of coins are bronze, and there's no gold in the hoard at all (Qin's regime didn't even use gold as money), but the adventuring possibilities are amazing when you think about it. Qin was able to build an enormous empire (especially for his day) essentially on his own resources, guile and utter disregard for the dignity of any other human being. The secret to his power might well be buried with him, and some people (Nazis? Japanese agents? Mao Tse-Tung? Ruthless American businessmen?) would stop at nothing to obtain that power for themselves. And Qin's tomb is guarded by thousands of terra cotta soldiers, who in a game might do considerably more than just stand mutely. Then there is the fact that Qin spent the b etter portion of his life on a quest for immortaility. Can we really be sure that he failed? What if the adventurers open the tomb and find that some men are far too evil to truly die....

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: Comedy Pulp ideas and resources

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "I'm on the Kate Moss diet. I drink nothing but Coke!" "I don't think that's how it actually works, Sue...." NT: TV Spin-Off Ideas that Didn't Make the Cut

Re: Good News For Time Travelers! OK, that was a model of coherency. I wonder what would make it easier to understand -- a Ph.D. in Temporal Physics or a few doses of Prozac?

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUSS!

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat .... the episode doesn't end in a cliffhanger. NT: Signs your signficant other watches way too much football.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Ten of us, twenty-five thousand o0f them. No problem. Frontal assault all the way!" NT: Signs the owner of your local professional sports franchise is out of his mind.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Every inter-office memo you recieve is written in Esperanto.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat I wo0uld say "Kogal Strip Mah-Jonng", except that there are about eight varieties of this available already.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Give it for M.C. Adolf and the Klan!" NT: Signs that the coach of your son's football team has missed the point of the exercise.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?" NT: Signs that ther Apocalypse is not imminent.

Re: Pulp-style Anime Sakura Wars, about demon-fighters in steam-powered mecha whose cover is as an all-girl theatrical troupe, is very pulp. It's even the right time period (late 1920's). Porco Rosso is a great example of a pulp-style advenmture film. A flying bounty hunter protects the Adriatic from air pirates as World War II looms on the horizon. Of course, he happens to be a pig, but who says heroes shouldn't have flaws? If you want to be independent of time period, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned The Big O. Roger Smith, Negotiator, is very much a pulp hero, down to his flawless black suits.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Honey, I'll be home late tonight. I told the Jarinov twins I could make them supermodels, and the hotel reservation can't be canceled. Say, could you swing by the office and drop off the camcorder?"

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Look, there's a big red button on my desk! What does it do?"

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "You can't audit me -- I'm a close personal friend of President Gore! What?

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Don Corleone, it's true I did take all that money from your gambling operations, but no I can't give it back. You see, good cherry pies are both expensive and non-recoverable once used for their intended purpose. The same is true of Dom Perignon '47 and Acapulco Gold. Say, you wouldn't happen to have any extra cash lying around? I sure could go for a pizza...." NT: Signs you're at the wrong convention.