Michael Hopcroft

Did anyone ever do 5e writeups for the cast and mecha of Gundam Wing? I don't even know if this series, which turned out to be ground-breaking when it was aired on Cartoon Network five years ago, could be shown even on cable now. It would be too controversial. Are the Gundam pilots heroic rebels or murderous terrorists -- or both? Ir Relena Darlian/Peacecraft idealistic, incredibly naive, a romantic, a masochist, or all of the above? Is Une a patriot or a monster? Is the Romefeller Foundation a dangerous conspiracy, or a genuine force for peace? Very few series deal this intensely in shades-of-grey morality.

Re: Heroes By Gaslight As a Holmes buuf it is a p[leasure for me to see "The Woman". As an anime fan, it was espeically pleasant to see a whiteup of the original Lupin. I don't know what kind of circumstances could draw all these characters together, but it would be a fine adventure that they all shoiwed up in. Kudos all around. And consider yourself repped.

Re: "24" Challenge I would agree -- Jack Bauer has such a flawed personailty that he is almost an anti-hero. Some of his actions indicate that he has a very flexible morailty -- if he sees something as a greater good, there are no lengths to which he will not go, or depths to which he will not stoop, to achieve it. This is also one of the few adventure series where the President of the UNited States is a viable character -- and also a signficantly flawed and ultimately tragic one.

I recently got to rent a few episodes of the anime series Lupin III, which ran for about 250 episodes and alos spawned numerous theatrical films (including the legendary Castle of Caglisotro, one of the first feature films directed by Hayao Miyazaki.) As I saw the various capers in the episodes, I thought "This would make a smashing RPG campaign, but it may be hard to handle". The setup: Arsene Lupin III, grandson of Europe's most famous thief, travels the world searching for the bigger and bigger scores, not to mention hot babes. He is assisted in his crimes by Jigen, a master gunfighter, and Goemon, who can cut through anything with his sword and is a deadly martial artist. He is sometiems aided and somtimes hindered by his One True Love, the gorgeous and mainpulative Fujiko Mine. And an Interpol officer, Inspector Zengiata, has devoted his life to bringing him to justice and follows him everywhere he goes. Although Lupin's heists never turn out quite the way he intended (more often than not the prize slips through his fingers at the last minute), he has over the years managed to put a lot of much nastier criminals out of their misery and even bring down powerful crime syndicates, all in the pursuit of the one score that will make his name forever. Lupin's main abilities are unyielding determination, the ability to come up with extremely clever and audacious plans, and the ability to think on his feet faster and better than almost any man alive. To Zenigata's endless frustration, he is able to slip out of restraints the way most people take off gloves. The inteerelationships, while not as complex as in many other anime adventure series, are quite interesting. Jigen can't seem to decide when Lupin is his best friend or an annoying jerk. Fujiko leads Lupin on outrageously, but is always working to her own advantage. And Zengiata has an almost symbiotic relationship with Lupin, because without the goal of putting him in prison his life literally has no meaning, and Lupin in turn feels that no job is compkete unless it ends with Zenigata hot on his trail.

Re: "he's Dumb as a Sack of Hammers...."

Re: Dolls I just finished a marathon of sorts, watching the final seven episodes (out of twelve) of Rozen Maiden. I was blown away by how good it was, by how involved I got in it, and how they pulled everything together at the end to show that this was, essentially, Jun's story. Jun turned out to be much more interesting than I thought he would turn out to be. In fact, I recognized many parts of myself in him. Jun, it turns out, isolated himself because he was afraid of a world that he believed had rejected him, that he had failed once (due to illness) and felt himself to be utterly unworthy of being loved (or even liked) in consequence. shinku coming into his life and giving him something to fight for is the only thing that saved him from complete despair and ultimate suicide. Indeed, the villainous doll Sougin Tou came very close to driving him to such total despair that he was ready to curl up and die. (Sougin Tou is a clasic example of a character with a noble desire -- to be loved and admired by her "Father" -- that led her to commit horrible, sadistic acts to others.) The dolls all have the power to enter "N-space", an alternative dimension in which they can fight their battles without outside intereference. Each of them has her own version fo this space, just as every human has a dreamscape in their hearts (which the dolls can also enter) -- Sugin Tou's version of N-Space in full of the ruins of dolls that Sougin Tou has "killed". The dolls also have a verity of special abilities, many of which are directly related to the dreamscapes in the heart of humans. Susei Seki, for example, has the power to nourish the "heart trees" that everyone has in their dreamscape by watering it, which her twin Sousei Seki has the power to trim the weeds that might choke it. Shinku herself is a natural leader (despite her imperious nature), is surprisingly empathic when she wants to be, and is capable of some formidable combat effects. She fights several duels with Sougin Tou, some of which are quite spectacular, and also has a unique 9among the Rozen Miaden dolls) capacity to make others of her kind want to fight by her side even though only one of them can truly win the Alice Game (the goal of which is to gather all the Rosa Mystica and be reborn as the perfect, flawless maiden Alice). Jun, it turns out, is extremely speical. He has a gift with objects, and can repair a living doll to the point that it functions perfectly even if parts have been seemingly destroyed. Ironically, this quality is why Sougin Tou wants him dead so badly.

Re: "he's Dumb as a Sack of Hammers...." The prime example that leaps to my mind is Gourry Gabriev of Slayers, who totally forgets earth-shaking historical events in which he was a direct participant. Some would say something similar about Trigun's Vash the Stampede, although in his case it's more that he plays the fool. Which can be an amusing type to play (if the rest of the group finds his off-kilter random comments amusing rather than strangulation-worthy, that is). I think in these cases it's more a question of the character not paying any attention to things that aren't important to him -- and in this case what is important to him is being as effective a combatant as he possibly can and protecting his friends. You could use a smiliar model for other specialized skillsets such as burglary, mechanics, and countless other things.

"But Gods Above can he fight!" What is the best way to built a character who is excaptionally skilled at everything related to combat in his chosen style of figthing, but who has probelms with things like remembering past events, getting names wrong, not having very good overall judgement (although when it comes time for a battle he can assess the situation with an eerie near-prescience), saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, etc. Simply giving him a low INT wouldn't do it because in combat situations his perception skills would be virtually uncanny. But he would be a constant struggle to deal with outside of battle, because no matter how often you explain the overall situation the party is in to him he'll never get it. He doesn't even neccesarily know who he is fighting from one situation to the next -- but when he has to fight, he shows amazing expertise for someone supposedly so dense.

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions One fun variant on that is the teenage character who is a racing-caliber driver but who doesn't have a license to drive on the street in his secret identity. Robin may have tacit permission to drive his motorcycle at insane speeds while pursuing criminals, but if Dick Grayson still has his learners permit he can't legally drive the rest of the Titans to the movies. Sailor Uranus didn't even bother trying to get a license -- she just drove around anyway (and raced cars and motorcycles comeptitively in her Secret Identity). Keep in mind that most jurisdictions today place extremeyl heavy restrictions on young drivers, and place requirements on them that young superheores might not be able to meet. (A teenager who lives by himself because his parents have been killed doesn't have a legal guardian with which to log the required training hours to get a license, for example). One other thing about teen superheores who use vehicles is that they may get into a lot of trouble driving normal vehicles if they never get out of combat mode. Just because you have the skill to do all srtos of flashy manuevers doesn't make it a good idea anytime you feel like it.

Re: Ultimate Thief/Scout Although they are less useful as scouts, there is a sub-set of thieves that rely on misdirection 9aided at times by various powers) to cause people to look in one direction while they are doing their dirty work somewhere else. Powers that enable one to diguise oneself, cause objects to seemingly move by themselves, or create false images on security devices are handy for these types. A classic example is the anime character Kaitou Saint Tail, who used a wide variety of effects inspired by stage magic. When designing such a character as a PC or NPC, one has to think about why they steal. A character who only takes back things that were wrongfully taken, or who only robs criminals as a sort of vigilante justice, would be a viable PC. So is a PC who acts like he's just out for himself but who in reality ends up fighting the good fight in the process (such as Lupin III).

Re: Different Kinda Dark Magic It would be a strange campaign if this were the only way to do magic. It would mean that magic simply could not be used by morally good people because you have to do unacceptable things to do it. If all practicing mages had to perform murderous blood sacrifices to use their powers, one could build a camapign around player-characters who hunt down evil mages, even in cases when the mages are in control of the society and manipulate it to maintain their power. (In which case you have a "rebels against the Witch-Kings" campaign.)

Re: Hey kids! I don't know if this tale was ever published professionally, but it has a long hisotry at science fiction conventions. People would get together and one person would read from it until they couldn't stand to anymore, then pass it along to the next person. Sometimes they inhaled helium to add to the effect. I get the feeling that if one of those groups were to ever FINISH the thing, the world would come to an end ala Ray Bradbury's classic story "The Seven Billion Names of God".

Re: Orson Scott Card To Write Ultimate Iron Man... Outdated. it has been more than ninety-five years since the mainstream of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints practiced polygamy. Only fringe groups still cling to the practice. The rest of us get a little bit tried of the jokes.

Re: Gun multipower I've wanted for a long time to play a rifleman who uses trick ammo. Sort of a Green Arrow type who uses a gun rather than a bow. Sometimes he uses lethal rounds, but some of his rounds are also designed to do things like kock people out, knock them to the ground, or entangle them. easy enough to do in game in theory, but trying to eplain the concept in such a way that it makes sense is difficult. There's only so much you can cram into a bullet, after all. Even with supertech, can the contents of one hollow round of ammunition really fill even an entire HEX with gas?

Re: XXXholic The more I think aboutit the more experience I realize CLAMP has with the Urban Fantasy genre. Into what other genre could you put things like Tokyo Babylon and X/1999? So it's obvious the ;ladies from Osaka know what they're doing. I still wonder if we'll ever find out what Yuko is smoking....

I've been thinking of one way to present the traditional animosity between Elves and Orcs as possibly a tragic metaphor. I don;t know how many roleplayers are into tragic characters, but it can be a good plot hook if nothing else. Orcs, in this example, would be relentlessly expanding outwards because they are so fertile. orc women are baby machines who give birth in litters of eight to ten. An orc population will soon outstrip the ability of the lands it inhabits to support it -- thus it will ahve to expand relentlessly or the whole community will perish from starvation. And this naturally will have a negative effect on everything in their path that isn't an Orc. The Elves, on the other hand, have been dealt an even crueler fate. Since they will never die of natural cuases and do not age, their reproductive cycle (which was always slow, with the typical elven woman giving birth only once eveyr 20-30 years) has slowed and, finallly, stopped. No new eleves have been born in five hundred years. This means that when the last of the elves who is alive now dies, there will be no more. The race is staring extinction in the face.

Re: Does My Brother Have "Right to Marry"? It depends on what you mean by the term "to marry". In soceties where a ceremony is not required to have a legally binding marriage, the perk is useless and should not really be worth points. On the other hand, if all marriages require the direct sanction of a religious or governmental authority, and that sanction requires a public ceremony, then yes the perk is worth the points. This is especially true if the person holding the perk has the right to deny permission for a marriage (in other words, it is definoitely worth the points if the person has the power to tell a couple "you cannot be legally married, and I am not going to perform the ceremony"). So, to answer the original question, the person in the exmaple would not have the perk "Right to Marry". The marriage ceremony he performed had no bearing on whether, in the eyes of the law, the couple was actually married. If, based on the nature of the society, the character's approval did have an effect on whether the couple was legally married, then yes he would be entitled to the perk.

Re: Character Post: Buck Rogers Rep for you -- very good work. You even managed to make Gary Coleman reasonable -- no small feat.

Re: Roman Mecha - your comments please This is a very interesting thread to read. Yoru "doctrinal" assumptions on how mecha are used is quite interesting, in that it makes mecha a powerful support weapon but not one that takes the place of infantry on the ground. However, since the mecha fight in formation, do the infantry still ifhgt in formation as well? Formation fighting tends to break down as technology advances -- there was a point in about the 187\60s in our world when formations began to be abandoned in favor of trench warfare. thsi was because the technolgoy of ranged weapons had gotten so good that standing out in the open, in formation, was a very good way to accomplish very little except get killed. And this was before the invention of things like machine-guns, which turned standing out in the open firing your rifle at the enemy into near-certain suicide against a well-equipped foe. (instead, you found what cover you could, fired from behind that cover, and tried to reach the gunner before he tore you to pieces). Roiman infantry fighting in formation assumes that most of Rome's enemy would not have devloped machine-guns or simiar technology, or have very limited access to them. If firearms are prevalent, or some variation of firearms, eventually the infantry would carry them in place of the pilum that classical Roman infantry used as their main ranged weapons. That doesn;lt mean the leigonaire won't still have his sword for close combat. I could say the high-tech battlefield would be a more chaotic place, except for the obvious fact that all battleifleds are chaotic and the side that perseveres most effectively in the chaos of battle is the side that wins. A few other thing to think about for your roman mecha world is what other battlefield technolgoeis exist. Air power, for example, is another force that changes the battlefield, even if it only exists in the form of a few spotter planes to tell you where the enemy is. what it sounds like you want, though, is a battlefield where formation effects are preserved while still enabling the use of higher-technolgoy weapons. Which leads to a very bloody battlefield.

Is it possible in Fh to build a "Flesh to Stone" spell that is either reviersible (you can use a spell to restore the victim to living fhesh with his soul intact, rather than truning the statue into a corpse) or reverses itself after a given period of time? (The latter effect would enable a mage to cast the spell on HIMSELF and come out of it, say, a hundred years later).

Re: Establishing an economy A lot of trade in worlds with fantasy-level technolgoy is done in barter. Contrary to what some mvoies would have us believe, the typical farmer or farm worker in meideval times never paid his taxes with money. Instead he paid them with labor (spend a set period of times working the lord's fields rather than your own, or take time off from farming to serve in the lord's levies during wartime) or in goods (Give the lord a portion of your crops). Tithes to the church were often paid the same way (give the first tenth of your crops to the local monastery tof eed the monks). Selling a share of the crops was about the only time the faremr saw money, which he then used to pay for thinngs that he couldn't make himself or barter for directly. It's easier to give the blacksmith some coins to fix your plow than to figure out how much barley fixing your broken plow was worth. And a farmer never sold ALL of his crops, he alwasy kept some for himself to feed his family, not to mention store as seed corn for the next year. for there to be much actual money circulating pretty much requires the presence of cities, urban economies, skilled trades and a powerful merchant class. Since these are all present in most fantasy worlds, you will find money in cirulation. Howveer, almost nobody will carry a fortune on their person iof they can possibl4y avoid it. the rich moneylender keeps a lot of coins in his counting house, but only enough to meet his immeidate needs. The rest he stores in a bank, where it accrues interest and is safe from robbers. the King may have a lot of gold coins in his basement, but usually that's where they stay -- they'll only move if the LKing needs to make a really big transaction, usually with another giovernment. Many other things that we do today as monetary transactions might be in the form of mutual favors. we see it all the time in fiction -- "I will do X for you if you will do Y for me first". A person who deosn;t ahve tons of actual money might still be in a powerful enough positioon to grant very potent favors. Money would only be a side effect of that kind of power, not the source of the power itself. There are innumerable forms of wealth. A powerful wizard may have little use for money but have other ways to recompense PCs for services rendered. (the classic example is from The Wizard of Oz, where the Wizard offers to perform a variety of services for Dorothy and her friends if they do a service for him first.)

Re: XXXholic I'm hoping to get my hands on the next two volumes sometime soon -- I have only the first -- as I suspect those could tell me a great deal more about what Yuko can do with her powers. In the first volume, she doesn't do anything massively potent except display extraordinary knwoledge of the universe (and a whole bunch of other universes as well, it would appear). Her house/shop would be a base, and may have trancendntal porperties (another Doctor Who paralell if the house turns out to be bigger inside than out). She is evidently able to create living creatures; as evidently she fashioned her childlike companions Maru and Moro in much the same way Clow Read created Cereberus and Yue and Eriol Hiiragizawa created Ruby Moon and Spinel Sun. She can change the properties of certain objects -- changing a metal bat from a HA to a HKA, for example. Most importantly, Yuko KNOWS tons about an amazing number of things. All she needs is a name and birthday to know everything there is to know about a person. As far as disadvantages, there is the question of what she is smoking in her omnipresent pipe. Some fans have speculated that she is actually smoking opium. Watanuki has never dared ask her, and probably never will. We know that Yuko likes to have a good time, and every so oiften Watanuki has to get her hangover medicine after one of her drinking binges. And Yuko will NEVER act unless she recieves some sort of compensation, even when lives are at stake. The price she demands of Syaoran when he asks her help (in the crossover with Reservior Chronicle Tsubasa) is amazingly difficult to imagine him being able to bear.

Re: Robbers on the Road That must really hamper plotting. Imagine how many classic stories would be derailed if the heores foguth to the death every single time and if nobody took priosners! Unless there is a very good story-based reason to give no quarter, there is no reason every ifhgt has tobe to the death. After all, if no player-characters are ever caputreed, they will never get free tickets to the bad guys' lairs, where they can do a lot more damage than if they'd tried to walk in the front door. Even in wartime, most people will not fight on hopelessly if they're losing. That's why armies take prisoners in the first place. the people in places like the Gitmo detenion camps are their because they had decided not to die fighting pointlessly. bandits, if they see they have a foe that will not roll over and give them what they want, will flee unless the odds are overhwlemingly in thbeir favor. And they really have no reason to kill people who reisst even when they do have overhwelming odds -- bandits are not assassins unless they have been specifically employed to be. Their goal is not killing travelers -- their goal is to separate travelers from their valuables, and if the word gets out that a bandit gang kills everyone they encounters they will either be hunted down by the King's army or will find that everyone is avoiding their territory otu of fear -- both of which are very bad for business. Not everyone always behaves rationally, but everyone has motivations for what they do. It is bad GMing to place foes in a given location only so that the players can kill them unthinkingly, just as it bad GMing to set up a situation in which the PCs' only option is to fight and fight until they are exterminated.

Re: Robbers on the Road Robbers, like everything else that happens in a game, ought to hapoen for a reason. Random encounters do not make for good roleplaying. Random-seeming encounters that are, in fact, not random at all can. Is there a reason bandits are on this road? If the local government is not as beenvolent as they would claim to be, those "bandits" could in reality be rebels. Or they could have turned to banditry because they wouldn;t make a living any other way -- maybe an army disbanded recently, and soem of the soldiers who know no other trade than fighting were abandoned to fend for themsevles. Maybe the bandits are soliders, supplementing their meager pay. If robbers are picking on avdeturers, who would be the hardest and least rwearding of the targets they COULD pick, maybe it could be a sign that there is no other prey. Or the ambush may itself be a deliberate attempt to harass or misdirect the PCs -- in that case, if the players exterminate the bandits they will never find out what's really going on. Finally, bandits will try to avoid fighting to the death. they want money, but they also want to stay alive. If they can't intimidate a target itno giving them what they want, they are more likely to vanish into the forest than to stand and fight.

Re: "Fantasy" withoiut Magic This implies a defintion of Sicence Fiction that does not involve techologies higher than those that are already known. Which is entirely possible and capable of producing very interesting stories. Alternate histories that do not involve the intervention of outside forces such as time travelers are perfectly valid as science fiction. Indeed, you can create a science fictions tory that features a "Science" of magic -- it would require a different definition of magic than "that which violates cuasality", but it can be done. randall Garret's Lord Darcy series is such such a fantasy/SF hybrid set in an alternative version of the late 20th century. Why a Born Again player would insit on a mgaic-free cosmos in a game is beyond me. Most of the religious people I know have no strong feelings one way or another on the subject, and the book-burning fundamentalist who limtis his reading to the Bible and Chick pamphlets is very rare in real life. The religious objection to the practice of magic is based on the idea that it is Man attempting to do something that only God should do -- that is, that only God has the right to step outside the phsycial laws of the universe because He created them. the same objkections were raised to attempts to understand the universe in some circles.