Michael Hopcroft

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.

Re: Is Doctor Who pulp? There are a lot of Doctor Who episodes that have the pulp feel. A lot of the good ones are also riffs on classic hooks from earlier stories, rewqorked and given new life. Try and figure out where Robert Homes got the idea for The Caves of Androzani sometime -- it's obvious when you think about but there are so many other riffs that the source is somewhat ob scrued. Of the new series, The Empty Chilld/The Doctor Dances strikes me as a sort of "pulp with a brain" story of the sort Asimov would have come up with had the technical concepts existed. Of course, it's a little spicier than 1940s sensibilities would have permitted. (And I won't tell you why because it would be a couple of major spoilers).

Re: The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Wu Big Trouble in Little China was already very pulp in attitude, although it managed to avoid falling into the "Yellow Peril" trap quite deftly by refusing to make all the Chinese characters bad guys. Then again, most of John Carpenter's best work is pulpish. After all, didn't Campbell publish the original version of "Who Goes There?", the wondefully paranoid story that became The Thing? And Snake Plissken could have strode out of a dime novel without breaking a sweat, an action anti-hero with attitude to spare. (Kurt Russell and John Carpenter will probably be associated in the public mind to the end of time....)

Re: Announcing — HERO PLUS ADVENTURES! Are you going to be doing this with any of the other HERO genres? I think this would be a great idea for Champions, Fantasy HERO ("Tales fo the Turakian Age", "Tales of the Valdorian Age"), Star HERO ("Fall of the Terran Empire"), Dark Champions ("The Blue Moon Killer Strikes Again!").... well, you get the idea.

Someone is going to skewer me for this, but what would be a good racial template for a species of six-foot-tall sentient chickens? Assume they are either flightless or can only fly for very short bursts, and that they have some way to grasp and hold objects (maybe not enough to pick a lock, but enough to hold a weapon and not look any more stupid than giant chickens usually look). Chickens are pretty belligerent brids, and these would be no diffierent. If their non-sentient smaller cousins are on the menu of just about everyone else, they are bound to hold a grudge. They might even go berserk at the slightest opportunity.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: TV Teen Titans They recently finished off the fourth season (has it been four seasons already) with their take on the "Trigon Enters the Physical World" storyline. I don't have cable right now, so I am hoping people will inldulge me by sending me episodes, but I did get to see one of the foreshadowing episodes when visiting a friend. It's lovely that even demonic posession does not make Slade any less cold, calculating and even-minded even as he enters the service of the closest thing the Animacted DC Universe has to an active Satan figure. God, Slade chills my blood every time I see him. I love it. Ron Perlman is a god among voice actors!

How would you build a Tissue Compression Eliminator (the Master's grisly calling-card weapon) in Hero? And is it something you would want to make the Matser pay points for? The latter is as much a question of how you wopuld run a Doctor Who campaign in HEro than anything else. Should the Doctor have to pay for the TARDIS and his Sonic Screwdriver? Would you make Leela pay points for her Janus Thorns? Is the Time Lord GIft woth making everyone who travewls in time pay for Universal Translator?

Re: Firefly That must have been fun for the GM, al;biet he would have the ultimate setting lawyer on his hands. "Mal. Bad. In Latin." I wonder if Weis is going to send him a copy of the Serentity RPG coming out?

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat He didn't do it deliberately, but that sign that floated in mid-air saying "Fooey on Batman!" was definitley one-use. He didn't want to use it the first time, and he certainly wouldn't want to use it again.... That may have been one of the ten best episodes of the Adam West Batman series, by the way. It was based on the classic comic story "The Joker's Utility belt" and holds up extremely well.

Re: Meet the Enemy of the Fab Four- Cataclysm Darn! I can't help but think "This is how Stan Lee SHOULD have done Dr. Doom!". Not that the King of Latveria isn't a great character (and a mass of contradictions -- a benevolent ruler in his own realm who is fixated on an ultimately pointless revenge and will use every means fair and foul to obtain it....)

Re: Australia in the current CU On one hand, the Aborginal culture has some hooks that would make for interesting supers (a person who can interact with the other dimension known as the Dreamtime). On the other hand my understanding is that race relations have always been a very touchy point with Austrialians of all stripes (witness how reluctant the government has been to have any dealings at all with refugees). As for New Zealand, I can easily soo a Maori superhero winning a following.

Re: New-model Dalek Then you will be pleased to know that the Cybermen are coming back to harass David Tennant. If they are anything like the new-model Dalkes, you can forget about that gold allregy. Did you ever rent "Tomb of the Cybermen"? It's low-tech sci-fi by all means, but the Cybermen are chilling and the story has a lovely feel of utter claustrophobia.

Re: Firefly Hero "Your Bible was broken. I'm fixing it." "Mal. Bad. In Latin." River says very interesting things. If the Alliance "Acadmey" hadn't literally drugged her out of her mind.... I commented that the series remidns me of the ethos of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However, i was reminded of another film that is an even closer fit -- Clint Eastwood's first really good film as a director, The Outlaw Josey Wales. The paralells between Malcom Reynolds and Josey Wales are astonishing when you look at them -- a trible to Joss Whedon's amazing literacy in the art of film.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "What do you mean 'Greedo shot first?' Haven't you SEEN the MOVIE?"

Re: Judge Dredd HERO? Judge Dredd always struck me as one of those dystopic worlds in which committing a capital offense and getting the Judges to kill you would actually improve your situation and Judge Death, a being who insisted that being alive was itself a crime, may have been right on the money. Dystopias like that,m where dead was better than alive, were popular ion those days when it was assumed that mankind was always 45 minutes away from a well-deserved extinction at the hands of "that madman Reagan".

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Dakota Fanning as Chiyo Mhiama in Azumanga Daioh: the Motion Picture, with Anne Hathaway as Osaka and reese witherspoon as Yukari. NT: Signs the President's nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy is out of his mind,