Michael Hopcroft

Re: Magic: The Gathering to Fantasy Hero I've always wondered why cratures summoned into a duel participate, particoularly if the aims of the duellist are incomaptible with their own. For example, a white/black deck could feature both demons and angels as creatures. If they are from the same cosmos, they woiuld not willingly ifhgt togteher, especially for a third party who seems to have no interest in the relattve morality of what he is doing. Also, where do the creatures come from, and do they stick around after the duel if their caster wins?

Re: High Fantasy - Low Fantasy Low fantasy seems to be getting a lot more prerss in the d20 icircles than it used to. Conan, which Mongoose has been having a huge hiit with, is a setting where magic is too fickle to be in the hands of player-characters. PCs might be mages in the Malhavoc game Iron heroes, but I would advsie it, as magic uselful enough to be effective in comabt wil backfire often and catastrophically.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The hobbits! The hobbits! The hobbits! The Hobbits! To ISendagrd! To Isengard!" Curse you, wabbit!

Re: Anyone get DC: TAS yet? Well, I bought the PDF. I was thinking of a one-on-one campaign with the Answer as thre PC would be interesting. He'd make a mind-alarmingly sane foil for Foxbat, and might actually try to cure him of his dleusions rather than simply lock him away. Anyone thingking of using Scarlet in a regular Champions camapaign? She has a neat little hook -- a spawn of evil who wants to eb good. Sort of like a much prettier Hellboy in that regard.

Re: The massively Multiplayer Snare Apparentl;y, if some of the other series are any indication, Tsubasa's player was not the only .hack player trapped in the World. She was just the one who was the center of the attention in that particular story. .hack//Luminality is a side-story series set mostly in the real world about the efforts of the World's creators to cover up what's going on. In a scienc-fiction world, one could build something like the World and have people enter it as their world deliberately, never logging out and using feeding tubes and catheters to keep their bodies alive. If it can be done cheaply enough, variations on this theme could be used as alternatives to traditional prisons and mental institutions (people who would be extremely dangerous in the real world are free to act out their violent impulses virtually and harm nobody -- theoretically.). It would have to be a life setence, though, because after a long period in VR it would be impossible for these people to cope with reality.

Re: Anyone get DC: TAS yet? I know there's a Beatles-themed villain in DC:TAS. How Hero got away with that one I don't know. But it just occured to me a perfect set of crimes for him. Basically a series of rovveries linked to the song "Taxman" (from Revolver), the link being that he only takes 95% of what is to be taken in each heist, leaving 5% behind. Not one penny more or less. I wonder how long it would take players to make the connection to the lyric: Of course, in the last crime he WILL take it all -- and it'll be something really big. To be really whimsical, the targets would be selected basxed on the lyrics of the other songs on Revolver in sequence. Finding suitable robberies for "Yellow Submarine", "And Your Bird Can Sing", "I'm Only SLeeping" and "Doctor Robert" should be very interesting. The spree would climax with a crime themed around "Tomorrow Never Knows" -- figuring out hat one and stopping it will definietly be a suitable climax! And imagine the Beatles-themed deathtraps! I just remembered that "She Said She Said" is on Revolver. "I know what it's like to be dead -- and in thirty-eight point six seconds so will you."

Re: Slayers Webpage needs help I will re-phrase what i just said -- spoilers for a fanfic? especially sinc ethe spoiler is for an event that hasn't happened in the original source material and that the original author will probably never get around to writing about? I laugh. "Ha Ha" i laugh. (Seriously, I have always said this -- anyone who thinks Slayers isn't a love story is not paying attention.)

Re: Chickens? And the influence of Animaniacs rears its head again! Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do! You wear a disguise to look like human guys But you're not a man, you're a Chicken, Boo! I wonder how many other Animaniacs references crop up in roleplaying? "Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?" "I fink so, Braiyn, but if the guy who bought the cow had the magic beans all along why didn't HE climb up to the sky and loot the Giant's castle himself?"

I would like volunteer help from one of the Fantasy HERO gurus. I am producing a page for my Slayers continuation series Slayers Inheritance, about the adventures of Lina and Gourry's daughter, Anya Inverse. In addition to the usual art, HTML and layout worries, I was thinking of putting up HERO System stats for the major characters on the site. So I was wondering if I could get some someone who could help both rate the characters and format the sheets in such a way that they'll look good on a stand-alone webpage. I'd also like HD files to be available for download as well.

Re: Firefly The stories I could tell from the more naive days of Doctor Who fandom. The late Patrick Troguhton and Jon Pertwee were extremely charming old men. For about four years they staged a mock feud whenever they had to go to events together -- but carried it out in such a way that it was incredibly amusing to the bystanders, so they got many such invitations. Evidently off-stage the two men became friends and, as their acting careers wre in twilight, relished these events passionately. The story has a tragic ending, however. In 1987 Troughtion was guest of honor at a convention in Atlanta, which he attended despite warnings that his health was beginning to fail due to his long-standing addiction to tobacco. On the first night of the convention he lay down in his hotel room, drifted off to sleep, and died from a massive heart attack. The fandom was utterly stunned. The remaining two days of the convention became a massive wake for Patrick -- Anthony Ainley (the third Master) made his reputation among the fans that weekend by holding everyone together and keeping their spirits up. And although Pertwee did fan events up until a few years before his own death, it was never with the same gusto (an alarming paralell to the effect that the death of his friend Roger Delgado had on his zeal for continuing in the role of the Doctor in 1973-74). The only way to describe this effect would be to ask you to imagine what would happen had DeForrest Kelley passed away at a convention.

Re: Starship of the Week: Fortress Class Command Cruiser

Inspired by svereal media things (The .hack//SIGN TV series, the Batman: TAS episode "What is Reality?", and a comment on one of the webcomic mailing lists i read) I've been pondering the idea of someone dveeloping an innovative system for nerual interfaces with MMORPGs. The trial game sel,ls gazillions of copies and becomes immensely popular. But there's a catch -- the designer of the game has sought out specific players and set a trap for them. One day, they enter the game, play their stuff, try to log out -- and can't. The players, a group of disparate people from all over the world, are stuck in the world of the game until the BBG is willing to let them back into reality. Meanwhile, as tiome goes on their bodies begin to fail from lack of food, fluids, sleep and human contact. If they don't find each other and find the solution to the puzzle the foe has set for them, they will lose their existence outside the game as eventually their bodies give up and die. Meanwhile, the game itself is going after them, in the form of both programmed foes and unscrupulous "player-killer" players. And if one of the players dies in the game -- he is really, finally dead.

Re: How can you feed this many people? There must be a flaw in the system somewhere, that a creative GM can exploit. How much variety would their be in the diet of the inhaibatants of said village? Relying on essentially one foodstuff inevitably leads to problems. And the miracle crop is essentially a single organism. Kill that organism and the village starves to death.

Re: Firefly She has other problems with the series as well. For one thing, the romantic portrayal of the "companion" character rankled her sensibilities. Oddly enough, she likes Blakes 7, which is the other sci-fi sereis I compare Firefly with most often. I guess I've been waiting for an American series as dark and lively simultaneously as Blakes 7 for two decades now.

Re: Chickens? I'd love to see a character sheet for that, actually. And the JP velociraptors were scary. Everything about that movie was scary as hell, actually. I don't think I've ever had that kind of gut fight-or-flight reaction to anything else I've ever seen in a movie theatre. And it was on a huge screen with a superb sound system> I could feel the T-rex breathe, like it was right on the back of my neck ready to bite me in half. I was damn scared.

Re: Question for you Traveller fans. Do any of you use the Classic Traveller reprints as a resource? I don't own any of them, but not for lack of desire to. I still have some of the original little books, and for nostalgia value they are great. Boy do i rememebr spending a lot of time rolling up characters, incluidng watching them die for no apparent reason.

Re: Firefly My sister (a big Buffy fan) and I came close to coming to blows over Firefly. She hates the show, calling it "derviative". I love it. The mention I made of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly only made matters worse.

Re: Chickens? Why am I reminded of the Real Ghostbusters episode in which a man summons a demon to get one wish, and uses it to make every chicken on Earth disappear. The demon, utterly humiliated, actually recruited the Ghostbusters to get it reversed. I don't know if JMSW wrote that episode, but it was a gem....

Re: Chickens? Is that a personal fowl, a team fowl or a technical fowl? Now, if there were a thread about eggs we could have quite a disucssion....

Re: Is Doctor Who pulp? Yep. UNIT, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stweart commanding. One of the few intelligent professional soldiers you see in this subgenre. He and the Doctor had a very interesting dynamic -- they respected each other, they got on each other's nerves, they sometimes violently disagreed, and sometimes one would do something the other would bitterly regret. And then there was the entire season that was taken up by a prologned duel between the Doctor and his nemesis the Master (as played by the incomparble ROger Delgado). Now there's pulpy goodness for you! Every time the Doctor would foil the plot, only to have his adversary blithely slip through his grasp.... (And, like many actors who specialized in villians, Roger Delgado was a true gentleman, one of Jon Pertwee's best friends in real life, and a man who had a fatal attraction to fast cars which led to his premature demise).

Re: Chickens? Broken up every so often by a mind-shatteringly brilliant chicken pun. "Now, tell me again, Klock-Bok -- why are we crossing this road?"

Re: Knocking People On The Head. Is there a way to specialize the power in such a way that you want to avoid doing lasting harm to the target? After all, real world concussions are serious business, but in the literature people even konk their friends in the noggin top serve as part of a ruse, as a form of primitve anesthetic ("he won't feel the pain from sewing his leg back together if he's out cold!"), or for myriad other uses.

Re: Folding, Spindling and Mutliating Settings I was thinking that the Mongols could have the backing of a power that forces the medieval world to ackowledge the existence of magic, and also forces the Christians and the Muslims to realzie they have a common enemy that alone one cannot defeat, but together they might have a slim chan ce of survivial.... Would it help if I told you where Ruth was?

Have you ever wanted to take a published setting and do something entirtely different with the material than what the authors intended? I've always wanted to use the bare bones of Harn (the map, the basic profiles, etc.) and do something different with it. Harn is low fantasy, but what I wanted to use it as the backdrop for something epic? I've also wondered about using Medieval Eurpoe for that sort of thing. Maybe changing the hisotry around a bit, and making the Mongol invasion into something entirely different.

Re: Chickens? Making them perfect pawns for Kvack, the Duck Lord of the Wastes! (Whose foes are known to complain, as he grinds them under his webbed heel, "Great -- we've been conquered by poultry!") Fixed.