Michael Hopcroft

Presdient Bush is about to annoucne his desire to establish a base on the Moon. fair enough, but I want it taken a step further. I want to see a COLONY on the Moon in my lifetime. Before i die I want to read in the newspaper about the first children born on other worlds. If you were to build a lunar colony with available-in-the-present-day technolgoy, hwat would life there be like? How can you build things so the colony is not totally dependent on resupply from Earth for survival? If someone were to move to the Moon permanently, what effect would lunar gravity and living in cotnrolled environments eventually have on their bodies? Can we put enough people on the moon that cabin fever won;t be a problem anymore, and you're not just talkigng with the same five or six people every day and never seeing anyone else?? How would you raise a family on the Moon? How would a child who has lived the Moon all her life "go outside and play"?

Sounds like something someone would cook up in the lab if he wanted to slay every psi in the world with impunity and make it look like a natural effect (or even "divine judgment").

You are the Seventh Doctor: Brooding, enigmatic, soulful, and occasionally silly. There are a great many mysteries lurking behind your ancient eyes, and even your closest companions aren't allowed to know the full extent of your schemes and concerns. You are often downright manipulative, using friends and adversaries alike as chess pieces in a private game against the universe. Your wrath is slow to build, but terrible when aroused, and you are slowly settling old scores with threats across the cosmos. I'm pleasantly surprised! My Doctor is the Real McCoy! And my personal favorite. Which Incarnation of the Doctor Are You? brought to you by QuizillaAnd as if i wasn;t feeling vaguely incestuous.... You've had the good fortune to set your heart on Ace, as played by Sophie Aldred! Rebellious, emotional, combative, and not as sure of herself as she wants to appear, this volatile young woman will knock you dead at twenty paces with a smile that promises trouble of the most fascinating sort. She's easy on the eyes, but you'd better be charming when you tell her that. Explosive demolition is her favorite hobby. Never happen. Not in a million years. But, surprisingly, spot on. My second and third choices would be Peri (she had the patience of a saint, and I cannot bear even the thought that she MIGHT have died) and Nyssa (when I was in college I had a major crush on Nyssa, even though she uttered the single worst-read line in television hisotry in "TGhe Visitation" Which Lovely Doctor Who Companion Are You Ashamed To Admit Your Crush On? brought to you by Quizilla

Normally you can "log out" of the World by going to a save point, saving your game, and exiting. You are also kicked out of the game when you 'die", and have to log back in (having lost anything you gained prior to your last save). the problem explored in .hack//SIGN is that of a player who is trapped in The World and can't log out, despite the efforts of the company that runs the servers to kick him out of the game. Essentially there is some evil 'virtual spirit" that lvies in The World and manipulates it for its own purposes, and was manipulating the hero(ine) until (s)he found a way to resist and was able to finally log out. One of the major characters was a notorious "player-killer" who acted out all his agressions in the World because he was utterly powerless in relaity. Another was a "gaurdian" type whose desire to ehlp other players extended into reality -- he ended up becoming the hero(ine)'s real-world guardian when (s)he finally logged out.

Re: NCM, Base Points The point is taken, but I still think it is aginst the spirit of the rules for Normal campaigns. Just because the maxima is different does not make NCM a legal disad in this case IMHO but YMMV. AYTOATA? A better way to do it might be to attach a Social Disad to reflect the fact that in on-Ocish lands just being an Orc often carries the death penalty. In other words, if you;re an orc by yourself who isn;t in the company of other orcs who can prtect you, anyone you meet can slay you on the spot with no legal repurcussions. Nasty? true. But so is the life of an Orc. I can easily imagine a fantasy world whose religion is based around reincarnation stating that the sould of wicked men, isntead of going to Hell, are reincarnated as Orcs....

The problem with Elemntal Evil I thought "only vs. evil" was one of those forbidden power constructions like "doesn't work against friends (or teammmates)". it removes the chance of accidentally hitting an innocent bystander with your attack, which encorauges you to throw powerful attacks around willyy-nilly.This is A Bad Thing. I incidentallyalso have a problem with evil being somehow elemental in a fantasy game. As faramir said in the extended version of The Two Towers (in a scnee that blew me away) Sauron's servants did not believe they were serving evil incarnate. I doubt that even Staan himself belives himself to be evil. (In the theology of my religion, the reason Satan was expelled from Heaven was because he lost an argument with God over the value of human free will aka "Agency". Satan probably still believes he was in the right as he sits in the Outer darkness working his wiles.) have you read your Milton?

Glorantha is a great world, and would be fun to play FH in! One thing of note in any version of Glorantha is that everybody knows a little magic. EVERYBODY. I can;t think of any RuneQuest or heroQuest character in which 'the gift had gone dead" and they couldn;t use magic at all. Reminds me that the current edition of HeroQuest is on my short list of Games I Want To Buy. I loved the system and wish it was open Content so that i could adapt the basic ideas of the system in other genres. How Robin Laws keeps coming up with all this brilliant stuff is as much of a mystery to me as how Hero games keeps up with its schedule.

Correct my if I'm mistaken, but if Normal Characteristic Maxima is the norm in a campaign (as it is in most fantays HERo camapigns), it isn;t worth points to the character, is it? So why give the orc 20 free disad points for NCM when PCs don;t get those free points? You could certainly base the orc on 25+25 (competent Normal) and have the same basic effect.

All this talk about swords has had me wondering what it must be like on the Elemental Plane of Sharpness. This would be a very hard plane for humans to survive in, as the very air cuts like, well, something very sharp. the ground cuts like something very sharp to. fact is, everything cuts. Still, you could summon things from the elemental plane of Sharpness that are, well, sharp. Sharp enough to be extremely effective weapons if handled very, very carefully. beings from that plane would be Sharpness elementals. Their touch is a potent HKA, Always On. Everything they come into contact with is cut. they can slice through armor like it was paper, and the only thing that stops them from being unsotoppable killingg machines is the fact that all they care about uis getting back to their own plane where nobody minds that everything is sharp.

Now that's a sword that needs a dulling spell to be placed in its sheath! What are the game effects of cutting the fabric of space-time? This particular sword is sharp enough that it can cut into the astral plane, affecting beings with astral bodies. You could slay Sauron with a sword like this.

If the theory is ture, and there is indeed an infinity of parallel universes, then somewhere everything happened. Now suppose there were things in these alternative universes that someone on this Earth wanted to retrieve. never mind how he knows about them. Never mind why he wants them or why they are of any value. The point is that you, P.C. Hero, and your colleagues have been given the task of retrieving these things for him. Oh, and did I mention you can;t go home until you have them all? The mechanism by which you go between dimensions is not that important, and is out of your control anyway. All you know when you arrive at a new universe is that there is a specific thing you are supposed to retrieve. You'll need the unique skills you were hired for to retrieve it, but first you'll have to find it in a completely unfamiliar world. Plus the people who have it now are unlikely to just give it to you. No, that would be too easy. Plus somehow you;ve got to stay one step ahead of the Dimension Police, an extratemporal organization whose sole reason for being is stopping people like you from doing exactly what you're doing. Who knows what those darn cops are going to do to you when they finally catch you -- you keep hearing rumors about how when they find out who you are and where you came from they can do something like prevent your birth or something equally nasty. So you'll just have to make sure they don;t catch you. Not that you were told in advance about them, of course.....

That's a good thought. You could have "Magical Ranged Attack" as the base power with Variable Advantage that enables the user to simulate the effects of fire attacks, cold attacks, lightning, blasts of pure mana, blasts designed to affect astral or ethereial bodies, etc. That still doesn;t answer the basic question of whether having Spells as a separate, cheaper (due to the multiplier) class of pwoers counts as a framework in itself. Especially if you allow a Limitation called "Spell" to reflect that the power is in effect a spell; it may be Instant (just say the word and the spell goes off) but it won;t work in any area where magic is nullified, is automatically affected by any Dispel Magic effects, etc.

Infintely sharp? As in "this sword was forged by magic on the Elemntal Plane of Sharpness" sharp? I have a hard time imagning something that shapr. At least the wielder should be greateful the hilt isn't sharp....

Would it be simply too much power for characters to take a Magic Mutliplier for their campaign and then be able to build power Frameworks such as a Multipower within that framework? I'm trying to model the effect of a wizard who has a basic attack spell with many variations on it, such as fireballs that do different things depending on the user's intent.

Re: Re: Re: So many possibilties I wish i knew more about the saying, but someone in the anoicnet world was quoted as saying something to the f\effect that the Egyptians were so obsessed with magic that"When God handed out ten parts of magic to the world, Egypt got nine". I wish i knew the exact quote or who said it. Egyptian fantasy would be quite fascinating, especially if you included the afterlife much as the Egyptians perceived it. A HERO equivalent of the d20 supplement Testament (it'sbeen on my to-buy list sof so long that by the time I get around to actually buying it it might be out of print) might also be very interesting, although how you do it without offending everyone is an interesting question. The conflict between the Israelite traditionalists and the Baalists who thrived in the Holy Land would be a quite interesting environment for replaying. Think it'd be easy to choose sides? Think again.

I suppose it's safe to mention this now I am publishing two different anthropomorphic games in 2004 that take totally different approaches to the problem of carnivores. In Fuzz: the Furry Police RPG one of the central tenets of civilized existence is that you don't eat sentient beings. It's a gigantic social and religous taboo; in the words of Ibrahim, founder of the first of the OVerfaiths, "Eat nothing that thinks". Not all the animal races rose to sentience, so there are plenty of non-sentient animals for the carnivores to eat. And those carnovires who do violate the taboo are considered the worst of sociopaths. On the other hand, the world of The Kevin & Kell Roleplaying Game (based on the popular online comic by Bill Holbrook) accepts predation as a fact of life. in fact, it's big business. The heroine of the comic is an employee of herdthinners, inc., leading supplier of groceries to the civilized carnivores. herbivores have come to accept that they might be eaten at any time, and it keeps them on their toes. The central theme of the comic is what happens when a wolfess and a rabbit overcome their natural tendencies, fall in love and marry. Kell, the wolf, remains a carnivore and a top-flight predator, who goes out into the wild every day to go to work (and her job comes with its own paid lunch!). But so far she has not eaten her husband (well, not in any manner he would object to:) ) and she restricts herself to prey that has chosen to live in "the Wild" and accept the risks therof. The circle of life is respected by all in that world, and it is generally accepted that the fate of the old and slow is to be, well, dinner.

Well, it certainly looks like a fun film if nothing else. It'll be interesting to see how close it strays to the dangerous territory of self-parody, though. I wonder how machine-gun bullets stand a chance against those robots no matter how good a pilot Sky Captain is....

Someday I'll have to go to one of the big anime cons. You get to see the most interesting stuff at the big cons, plus the license announcements are always made there. The thing about Voices of a Distant Star is that it is essentially a solo project. I didn;t think that was entirely possible in anime. In the meanwhile, thosemecha would be quite interesting. And I don't quite understand the ending -- is she alive of dead?

I just realized that the Xellos writeup needs -- work. He doesn;t JUST have a VPP to work with, although most of what he coes could be modleed with a VPP. I guess i had a problem with hero Designer when writing him up. I'll have to refamiliarize myself with the software again and make one more try to add a few of his extra powers. For one thing, Xellos has the annoying habit of teleporting all over the place for no apparent reason. That merits a separate power, especially since he can teleport ANYWHERE.

Is the advanatge of having a full 360-degree view of your surroundings in the cockpit of your spacecraft, mecha or plane enough of a combat advanatge to be worth points in the vehicle design process? I was inspired by this anime I saw (which i mentioned in another topic) in which the pilot of the space fighter appeared to be sitting alone in infinite space. She could see everything that was going on around her in all directions, which is actually something you really need in 3-D combat environments, when something could come up from beneath you as easily as from in front or behind. Of course that mecha also had a heads-up display and sensors that showed the relative position of the enemy.

I just saw an anime movie I had purchased, but had not watched for a while. Why on Earth was i foolish enough to put off wtaching Voices of a Distant Star? This movie, which was done by a very small crew, is utterly inredible. In one sense, it's a story fo a mecha pilot and the boy she left behind 9and it does have some incredible battle seuqences), but on the other hand it's a wrenching story of the effects of relativity on a relationship. Advanced cellphones can send messages light-years into space, but they can only travel at the speed of light so a message can take years top get from Sirius to Earth. Not to mention the necha are very cool -- especially the cockpits, which seem to be floating in the middle of space giving the pilot a 360-degree view of the surroundings. Strangely enough, the vision only reinformces the terrible isolation felt by the heroine as the film progresses and she gets farther and farther from the boy she loves.... It's amazing that all this was essentially done by one mand, working pretty much alone. make me wonder why I'm doing games when i could be making movies. Oh yes, i can;t draw. that's why.

Re: Re: Re: How does sharpness affect a sword? The magic on this particular blade from fiction amde it so sharp that a dulling spell had tgo be cast on it just so it could be scabbarded. otherwise, it was so sharp it would ahve cut right through any sheath you tried to carry it in.] Apparently this is an artifact-class weapon....

One thing I've been wondering is how a sword beign sharper than a normal sword affects the damage it does? Particularly if the sword gets sharper all the time as it is affected by the magic that makes it extra-sharp? In hsort, is there a real upper limit to the DC even a magic sword can have?

I blieve there is at least one thread on fertitlty magic on the board already. And if you don't want to make any religoous comments, then by allmeans don't. None of this is helping me work out the spell in HERO terms, however. perhaps we should ahve a separate topic, "Mage's Workshop", for people who have a spell efect in mind but are having trouble working it out in game terms to get help.

A piece of fanfciton I just read had an extremely interesting "Clerical" spell that played a central role in the story and which certainly surprised the charavcter it had been cast on. basically it's a spell that is part of the standard wedding ceremony of a particular culture that binds the couple for lfie magically as well as socially. In toehrwords, once the sepll is cast on you you WILL NOt part until death. Nor will you want to. further, there is no undoing the "binding" spell. The race that uses this spell is extraordinarily long-lived, and this spell was designed so that a marriage could theoertically endure formillenia. The spell does nothing to prevent disputes, arguments, fights, etc., between the couple. It does not enrue they will be especially "happy". But it does prevent the marriage from being broken up -- even if you try to leave, you will always come back. One could make ths epll even more intense by having it enforce fidelity as well. those it is cast on lose sexual interest in all persons except each other (and have continuing, intense desire for each other). This could be even nastier when cast on someone who was not expecting it.