Michael Hopcroft

If two characters are fixated enough on each other that it domoinates their thoughts, but are they unwilling to admit it even to themselves, can they take a disadvanatge to relfect such a 'relationship"? And if the nature of the relationship changes (i.e. they come out of denial) can they keep but alter the disad to reflect their new relationship?

I'm trying to model the "couple-in-denial" syndrome, a common anime trope, in HERo terms.

I have a question about this armor belt: if you are transforming your clothing into chainail armor, wouldn;t it be very uncomfmrtable to wear? perahps it would be better to write it up in such a way that is has some properties of armor (the protective one) but not others (it still "breathes", it still absorbs your sweat, etc.) so that you can wear it in comfort, especially in hot weather.

It would be even better is it still looked like your normal clothing. there may be areas it won;t protect (the head, the hands, etc.) but it would be an excellent form of discreet protection. Kings and other powerful nobles would pay parge sums for magical items with those properties as protection against assassins that get through their bodyguards or against sniping archers.

I haven;t decided on things like power and technologylevel, whether there will be magic, etc., but I just got a weird idea. Can you imagine a game world in which the USa had been dissolved and each of the 50 states was in indpeendnent country?

This would probably only happen if technology, transportation and communications had broken down to the point that such a large country could no lger be held together. And the sytats would not remain independent long if the saem phenomenon had not happened in the rest of the world. Transportation would be animal-profelled, sailing ships, and the like. Weapons might be the remnants of the weapons that exist today utnil the ammunition runs out -- after that, it's back to black powder and cold steel. I suspect one of the circumtances that would bering something like this about is the world running completely out of current energy sources such as oil and coal, making it impossible to do things like power vehicles or generate electricity.

The pricniple question is what would keep the large states like California and new york from swallowing the smaller states like Oregon, Nevada and Connecticut.

Of course, if magic returns this becomes a humans-only fantasy game (unless magic is used to create monsters).

Since books can still be read scientific knowledge, even though it may not always be usable, was not lost. Scholars know how petroleum products were made, for example, but with no petroleum the knl\owledge is useless. less useless is the cultural heritage of the past -- and I can imagine that as 'the end" approached a massive effort was made to convert all the digital and film history into a form that can be disseminated without expending energy. Thus, Casablanca still exists, but instead of watching it on a screen you read it in the form of a comic book. You don't listen to the Beatles, but you read theyr lyrics and play the sheet music on your acoustic instruments. Minstrelry is back, with two hundred years of pop music hisotry to draw on.

if everybody is in the same boat, will there be new 'wars between the states" or is there a diferent dynamic going on?

I could have given Xellos another 5 disad points because of Filia. It would be Rivalry with the Dragon shrine maiden, but the question is what kind? Professional? or Romantic?

Let me explain. the usual definition of a Romantic Rivalry is that you and your rival are after the same person. Like two ace pilots after the pretty nurse back at the base. But Xellos and Filia fight with such gusto that many fans suspect an underlying attraction. It's the "couple-in-denial" syndrome that is very common to anime, of which there are too many exambples to list.

There are two couples in Slayers that are regarded as 'canon". that is directly supported by the source material. Xellos and filia is more of a 'fanon" couple -- the fans suspect but there is no direct proof.

Here is my first attempt at Slayers most imafm\ous mazoku -- Xellos the Trickster!

Xellos the Trickster Priest

Player: NPC

Total Character Cost: 499

Disadvantage Points: 70

Base Points: 75

Experience Required: 354

Total Experience Available: 354

Experience Unspent: 0

I have this idea for building as a superhero character for a Golden Age-style game Cogito -- the Smartest Man Alive. I'm trying to figure out what to buy for a character whose only superpower is an amazing intellect. No Mental powers -- he's just smart.

Naturally he would have a very high INT -- just how high is open to debate. But he would have a lot of knowledge skills, a lot of the INT-based skills, a lot of sciences and the like. And he'd have detective skills up the wazoo.

The problem is what would he do when he had to resort \o physical violence, as all superheroes have to do at some point? Hhe could certainly learn martial arts manuvers, but a supervillain with powers would wipe the floor with him unless he somehow managed to psoition himself to ALWAYS have the advantage.

I'm going to have to try to create this character sometime, but I have a feeling he would be very difficult to play properly. I may be smart myself, but am i THAT smart?

One of those hero books that i wish i still had was Aaron Allston's book describing his classic Stirke Force campaign for 3rd edition. Strike Force was a team that, instead of being created for a specific book, had acvtually evolved over the course of a long campaignt hat had run for several years. Thus the whole team had backstory and history that few supplements could match when done out of whole cloth.

The book is now one of the rarest and most sought-after Champions collectibles. Has anyone ever figured out how to convert any of the characters to 5th edition? And is Strike Force part of the Champions Universe ocontiuiity in any way?

My favorite character from the book was the seemingly useless but surprising effective Stunner.

Originally posted by Brandi

The next Pixar film, The Incredibles, is also about a family of supers.

And given that it's Pixar, they might actually get it right.

I still lvoe the seuqence in the very first Tv episode of Babylon 5 when Garibaldi got Ambassador Delenn into his quarters to show him his "second favorite thing in the universe" -- a Daffy Duck cartoon. It's somehow reasuring to think there's a chance Chuck jones might survive into the far future and that when we go into space we might not leave all of Earth;s cultural heritage behind. (This seems to be one of Stracynski's ongoing themes in the seires -- it pops up again and again, especially in the first season.)

Have the British finally given up on contacting the Beagle probe?

I still think there are some areas of space exploration for which there is no substitute for having people on the scene, so I would really like to see a manned mission to Mars succeed in my lifetime. but every step forward helps.

Darn those Martians hide real good. We haven't found them yet.....

I like Slayers for a lot of reasons. one of them is that they had a really cool concept of a race of demons called "mazoku", which simply means "demon" in Japanese (they are referred to as "Monsters" with a capital M in the sub to distinguish them from such "mundane" monsters as trolls and berserkers. Collectively they are reffered to in the dub as "the Monster Race".)

Mazoku live off pain, anguish and suffering. it's their food. But their natures and personalities are as variable as those of people. They are evil only because they are in opposition to the needs of humans, and some are more vil than others. Mazoku has astral bodies rather than phsyical ones, and whoile some are quite hideous others are indistinguishable in apparance from humans. One was able to pass for human (posing as a priest, which was actually true -- he just happened to be the general/priest of one of the four Great dark lords in that world) among the hero party in the series for a very long time, and manged for the most part to be more annoying than frightening. You can't damage them with purely physical weapons or magic that works purely on the physical palne, but magic or weapons that reach into the astral can harm or even kill them. In Hero terms, Mazoku would have large VPPs with few restrictions on their use -- the more powerful the mazoku, the larger the power pool.

The mazoku's greatest rivaly was with the Golden Dragons, who could assume human form. A thousand years ago a war was fought between the mazoku and the Dragons, which ended pretty much in a bloody draw. Is was then that the great dragon-goddess Ceiphied managed to split the Dark lord Shabranigdo (that world's Auron analogue) into sven pieces and spread the parts all over thw world. The is some question as to whether the crator of that universe, referred to as the lord of nightmares or LON, is closer to being a God or a mazoku -- she certainly bears a kinship with the Mazoku and is refrred to by them as "the Mother of All".

Writing up mazoku as a race would be impossible because every one is different in just about eevry way. Which actually makes for a great idea for use in just about any fantasy world -- a race of ultra-powerful beings that you don't place a finger on because each one is so different in nature, pwoers and temperment.

Originally posted by Blue Jogger

Destroy the Mountain

20D6 Blast with Area Effect (200 Active Points)

Limitations

-5 x10 END (paid off with an END Reserve) 225 END

 

33 real points, 11 real points in a x3 game.

Does this spell actually destroy the mountain, though? Would it really do enough BODy to blst the top off the mountain?

I would think mountains had more BODY than that, Maybe if you made the attack megascale -- but then you really would have the magical tacnuke that animewizards are so fond of.

Where is it?

Quick question: where on Earth (I'm assuming this is an earlier age of Earth) does the Turakian Age setting take place? I've always thought it would be cool to have a fantasy setting with the grography of North America. there are tons of fantasy eruope settings but no Fantasy America ones. You can use some sort magical hand-waving to explain whey there are no elves in the Americas anymore....

Originally posted by Mark Rand

I don't recall seeing much anime here in Pittsburgh. My favorites are Robotech, Voltron (lion force only), and, assuming they're anime, The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers and Voltron, the Third Dimension.

Galaxy Rangers was an Ameritoon, and a darn good one. I don;t know anything about the other show you mentioned.

Given your tastes a smentione, you enjoy any one of the Mobile Suit Gundam series. Gundam Wing blew me away for a cartoion that could get shown on American television with its shades-of-grey morality. In fact, I doubt you could show Gundam Wing on American television after September 11th.

P.S. Stay away from SD Gundam Force, though. i watched part of an episode of that tongith while caught oin a snowstorm. My brain still hurts...

Another thing to keep in mind is the Tri-Stat concent of "Shock value", which is not used universally (it's an optional rule) but figures in many of my games.it is a fraction of a character's HP that detremines what it takes to put down a character with a single attack. makes combat much brisker and makes it a lot esier to put down scores of lesser foes. You won't neccesarily die if you lose your Chock Value worhth of HP in a single attack, but you will be out of the fight.

HERO characters are therefore somewhat tougher even though they have less points in BDOY.

Originally posted by Monolith

Reality Storm, coming in March will have a converion system for HERO and SAS. I do not know enough about SAS to make any educated guess about it. So if you can wait until March your questions might be answered.

SAS and BESM, although they both use similar system, are different animals.

What is the most effective way (and I know there are no published guidleines for this for various reasons) to convert BESM attributes and special attacks to HERO powers and spells?

Some things do not trnalsate. For example, in BESM after your frist Special attack you get all your other Speical Attacks at a SUBSTANTIAl discount, which encoruages characters to have a "attack for every occasion" at avrious power levels. Also BESM uses fixed damage unless you roll a critical hit, while HERO rolls dice on all attacks 9although once you get to a certain dice level you can reliably determine how much BODY you'll roll on a specific attack when you hit) and you can tone down some attacks if you want to do less damage than stated int eh attack description. And as for characters,m Tri-Stat's three brpoad catgegories and HERO's twleve standard Characteristics plus figured characteristics do not translate well, especially since the BESM stats are a lot less granular. And skills work in an entirely different fashion in the two games (and BESM skills work in a different fashion even from Silver Age Sentinels and Tri-Stat dX skills.

I'm thinking of running an online Slayers HERO game at HERO Central (just discoevered the site and it looks really cool -- wish I knew how to dveelop a site like that to run PBEM games of the Seraphim Guard line!) and I just realzied that before I seek out players I am going to need some help developing the grimoire. Slayers has a set list of spells that are commonly used in the series, with some impromptu magical effects, and I'd like my players to be able to choose from the established spelllist in addition to creating their own spells.

I'm also trying to decide on the power level. Unless i simply want to use characters from the series, which would limit the size and scopr of the campaign (the series is very much the story of a core group of four to six characters, all of whom are fairly powerful mages or warriors), I'm wondering whether 75+75 characters with a x5 magic modifier would be able to do such essential things as be able to plow through entire gangs of bandits unaided (bandits are a minor distraction inSlayers compared to dragons, Mazoku and powerful rival mages but they are a good source of petty cash). But I was wondering if I should open the floor to original PCs and, if so, how they should be constructed.

what I was wondering is if I could get some advice on these questions from the experts on his board (such as Susano). One thing to note about a Slayers campaign is that PCs might have access to magic powerful enough that would not be availabel to PCs in most fantasy camapigns -- Dragon Slave is a well-known enough spell that even a "third-rate" sorceror like Zolf can learn it (although he does not exercise good judgement on when to cast it, and it costs him his life).

It would also help if anyone knew of a good system to trnalsate BESM Tri-Stat ifnroamtion to HERO so I can model the series characters (at least from the first season) and the spells baed on information from the first GoG sourcebook (which has flaws but is a valuable resource).

Gourry's OTHER sword

later on in the novels Gourry picks up something called the Blast Blade, a weapon that absorbs magic and makes itself sharper by doing so. It is so sharp that lina has to enchant a scabbard just to prevent the Blast Blade friom cutting it open when Gourry tries to sheathe it! And it's getting sharper all the time.

(I think if somoen w\could get the rights to translate and reprint the original Slayers prose novels, they'd be sitting on a gold mine. The series has been runoing for over a decade now in print and shows no signs of slowing down or losing its quality.

Did i hear HeartQuest?

Did i hear someone say they picked up a copy of HeartQuest? I should be blushing and would be were I Chiharu or Yuuko.

I don't talk about my own work much on this board because, well, it's the HERO board. I stayed away fro a while over the last couple mponths because I was really busy, but now I'm positng again and I was surprised to see my game mentioned in this thread. What did you think of it?

I wish Mike good luck on his pitch to Hero Games. From what i've learned talking to Steve Long, he has his own ideas on the subject of anime, none of which are printable.

Since I am asking about opinions of my work, by the way, I might as well mention that Seraphim Guard's mecha game is coming out in early 2004. I'm expecting the manuscript in tonight, in fact. And HeartQuest is already going into its second edition, which is called HeartQuest Revised Edition for the record. later on we're doing an anime fantasy game called Spell-Slingers & Sword-Saints and a cyberpounk game called Cyberaktive is due in the second half of the year. Thank the heavens for Print-On-Demand and PDF or we could never be nearly so active.

for the record, I'm trying to figure out a way to bring Lina inverse in under 500 points and make her at least theoretically possible as a HERO player-character.

Re: It's been a while

Originally posted by Kevin Scrivner

I, too, hope it lives up to its promise.

 

The last good pulp movie I saw was Disney's "Atlantis: The Lost Empire." You have to go back to the trio of "The Rocketeer," "The Phantom," and "The Shadow" before that. You're right about the critics. Reviewers of "Atlantis" kept trying to compare it with Japanese animation, never realizing its family relationship to "King Solomon's Mines" and "The Lost World."

That was probably the reason i avoided "Atlantis" -- that and the reviewer i read who said it was one of the most racist films he'd ever seen. (How could a people forget how to read their own language?) Then again a lot of the pulp writers WERE racist, often viciously so. The anime comparisons were more a case of films like "princess Mononoke" having raised the bar for cel animation so far that Disney could not keep up.

I ADORED "The Shadow". I loved the idea of a secret conspiracy of do-gooders, Alec baldwin wasn't bad as a hero with a tortured, secret past who nontheless perissted in doing the right thing in spite of all temptation, and the ending was absolutely delicious. And it had ian McKellan in it! That it never made it at the box office is a great pity, and I'd buy a copy on DVD if i could find it.

Other films are pulp movies in disguise. "Big Trouble in Little China" and "The Last of the Dogmen" (good Western) fall into this category. And "Dark City" certainly had its pulpish elements. I'd probably include "Pirates of the Caribbean" here, too, because of its army of zombie pirates.

Many have described ian Fleming as a pulp writer after the age of the pulp writers (he certainly made more money and more best-seller lists). The James Bond series certainly has many pulp characteristics, from the incredibly competent and seemingly omniversally appealing hero (How Bond can get even his enemies into bed with him is one of the great mysteries of the universe) to the outlandish plots of his adversaries, a tendency exacerbated in the movies -- the first few, which stuck close to the novels and were made during Fleming's lifetime, were restrained by comparison to the outlandish villains and apocalyptic schemes of the Bond films of the '70s. In a sense Michael Myers is satritizing the pulps as well as bond with the Austin Powers series.

One could also describe the original Star Wars trilogy as pulp SF with mystical trappings, that just happened to latch onto something universal. the fact is that many of the themes that are common to popular fiction, especially to the kind that is turned into Hollywood movies, originated with the pulps. every genres, from fantasy and science fiction to superheroes, was influenced by the writers of the '20s and '30s, whether or not they are willing to admit it.

And if Stephen King had been a contemporary of lovecraft he would have been doing exactly the same sorts of work lovecraft was doing. The only difference between the two is that King wins more awards in his lifetime, gets filmed more often, and makes a ton more money than Lovecraft ever did in his lifetime. Lovcraft was a pulp writer. So was Howard. So was Robert Bloch back in the day. And so it goes. The infleunce of the pulps is inescapable.

how much STR or TK would be required to hurl a person into orbit?

Few people could survive being tossed into orbit, of course -- if the air frinction from being thrown so hard doesn;t kill you, oxygen depirvation or explosive decompression will. Still, this seems like a bizarre but amusing way fro ultra-tough master villains to dispose of no-longer-wanted henchmen or simialr NPCs who don;t get much say in the matter.

You'd probably have to be about as strong as Superman to do it with sheer physical force, though. But a telekinetic could probably manage it if he was powerful enough, and the look on the victim's face as he unexpectedly made like a rocket would be priceless.

One thing that occured to me in another context but might work well in Champions is designing a PC hero team that is an actual family unit -- father, mother, and children 9with possible other relatives or adopted children on the team as well).

Soem possible ways this might occur:

1. Powerful hero reforms and marries powerful villain. their children have superpowers.

2. Two superheroes marry and their children are born with power.

3. A family are all together when they ahve an "origin incident" and each person gets powers.

4. Married superheores adopt super=powreed orphans that nobody else wants (perhaps they live in a world where people with superpowers are feared by socoiety until they show they aren;t criminals).

5. The family itself is the result of an experiment specifically designed to create people with superpowers.

How would this dynamic work in a campaign? Would sibling fights end up becoming superbrawls? How do you control your teenager when your teenager can bench-press Buicks? what if you really COULD know what your children were thinking all the time (through telepathy)? how do you hide your porn collection from a daddy who can see through walls?

Some types of FH magic give a x5 modifier for points spent on spells. other slist only a x3. And others have no modifiers at all -- a point is a point mo matter what you spend it on.

This leads me to the conclsuion thtat a tool is being provided to balance the relative power of magic ic a campaign. So you could in theory have:

No adjutsment: magic is weak, difficult and not alwasys worth the trouble. You have to spend a lot fo REAL points to get much in the way of power. A fireball may be beyond most 75+75 point characters.

x2: magic is somewhat more potent, but not powerful enough to be a major factor in most camapigns. Few will bother to learn spells of any power.

x3: magic is moderately powerful. Spellcasters can be more flexible and have access to greater and more powerful spells than before.

x5: magic is a force to be reckoned with. magic users are potent and versatile, more so that other charactres of the same point level.

x10: magic-users are such a force in this world that they have a huge advanatge over all other adventurers. An experience wizard can put enough oomph into his spells to level mountains. At this level non-magic-using characters can barely particpate in the campaign.

x20: Wizards and gods are practically the same thing. major contrstaints will have to be imposed by the GM if he wants any PCs in his canmpaign who are not magic-users. Enter here at your own peril!

Originally posted by Captain Obvious

I suppose the easiest way to handle this would be to say that there are sentient humanoid animals and regular animals. The regular animals have the same rights that real world regular animals have....

aka slim and none? Beat a dog in this world and you get a foine. beat a person and you go to jail.

The comic Kevin & Kell posits a world where all animals, including insects, are sentient and predation is big buisness. When a lady wolf defies the customs of her species by marrying a rabbit, all sorts of complications ensue. For a while her brother kept trying to kill and eat her husband -- of course he was such a bad hunter that he was less like a wolf and more like The Coyote.

Hunting is also a varisty sport at most high schools and colleges in that world.