Michael Hopcroft

Another variation Another variation on the magical Girl that keeps coming up in stories like Saint Tail, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and, in a reverse take, Man of Many Faces (aka "Please Come, 20 Faces!") is the magical thief -- someone with magic powers and sometimes a transformation who uses them to steal, usually for a good cause. Saint Tail, for example, returns wrongfully appropriated items to their rightful owners, and Kaitou Jeanne (no, her hobby is not crashing into aircraft carriers) seals the demons concealed within centrain beautiful works of art. The series all have certain things in common -- the characters are Hunted both by the police and by someone close to the, usually a classmate or even their best friend, who has no idea of the thief's dual identity. There is a romantic element involved, sometimes involving a mysterious rival and other times something completely different. And the character usually ends up giving up their life of crime when forced to make a choice between continuing their thievery and true love. (the quest for love is an ongoing theme of any magical girl campaign, as any HeartQuest fan will attest.) There are many different ways to build a character like this. A Saint tail-style character has strong magical powers and can do almost anything with them, so she'd probably have a VPP, possibly with the limitation "No powers that cause direct damage". She doesn;t use her powers to fight, she uses them to get into places and evade pursuit. Flight (OAF Baloons) is such a favorite that she might buy it as a separate power. A Kaitou Jeanne type, on the other hand, relies on her acrobatic skills, a few powerful items (like the "Rebond Ball" that turns into a swingline and the pin she uses to seal the demons away), very high DEX and some Martial Arts (Jeanne WILL fight to get past the cops). One trait they all have in common is a tendency to announce their crimes in advance, for various reasons. Sometimes it's because they enjoy the chase (or the chaser!).

She probably has EDM to reflect her, um, swallowing abilities, but she does a lot of other things that can;t be explained by transporting someone to another dimension. She's displayed some disturbing Mind Control abilities, for example, which she uses on everyone other than the guy she ahrasses (apparently she thinks it beneath her dignity to control his mind). She can also change her own appearance from her usual somewhat weird-looking self into uber-kawaii (useful for conning adults) and into a gorgeous adult female with massive martial arts talents. The three people who live full-time in her stomach are loyal enough to Guu that she can take them as Followers. Guu is, in essence, an inexplicable force of nature. Everyone else in the campaign is a normal (at least in HERO terms).

Purt that on the list of about 20 anime DVD series i want (including the brand-new Sailor Moon uncut Japanese boxset from ADV, the rest of card captor Sakura, the two Magic Knight rayearth boxes, and all the Gundam I can eat, er, watch....)

I don;t know about that -- I've always wondered if Ed was really a Rubber Girl in disguise....

Imagine makind built start\ships to seek out new life and new civilizations,e tc. -- and didn;t find any? Carl Sagan theorized that is possible that all civilizations that reach a certain stage of tehcnological development inevitably destory themselves. For example, any civilzation that develops atomic power would inevitably obliterate itself in a nuclear war. If Earth were to beat those odds, but every other civilization that reached the Atomic Age wnet up in a string of mushroom clouds, than we would indeed be alone in the universe. What kind of starfaring camapign would emerge if this were the case? Many of the most theortically desirable worlds to colonize would be radioactive slag. The other worlds would be untouched by civilization, with only wild animals and such to encounter. Would Man split up into a lot of different empires and kingdonms out of lack of desire to live under one interstellar regime?

How would you, as a chartsacter constructor, model the abilityu to summon a mallet out pof thin air and whack someone who is annpoying you with it? Desite the massive weightof the mallet, you would have no trouble weilding it and, while being hit with it hurts like hell and might knock someone unconscious, it;'s nefer fatal. This power is frequently associated with anime, and linked to characters like Akane Tendo (Ranma 1/2) and Kaori (City Hunter). It is usually used as a resaponse to someone you care about (but are in denial about) looking at another girl or doing something equally rude.

The series Everything was Fine in the Jungle until Guu Came played the concept for laughs by presneting this obscenely powerful little girl who tookm it into her head to make live a living hell for one little boy in an isolated jungle. Her motives are inexplicable, her power is enormous, and there is an entire world in her stomach in which people can not only live but thrive. All speculation over what Guu actually was, or why she had chosen this particular boy to harass, was left completely unanswered. The series emphasized the comic chaos her powers caused. And it turned out the guy's life was a mess already -- his mother was a brillaint hunter but lazy at home and entirely too fond of beer.

I've wanted to see Saint Seiya for over a decade. But I'm an anoime purist -- I like my anime real, uncut and subtitled. Will there be such a release, as there is with the various .hack shows?

Thje Clow card in my Pajamas I was joking. In actuality, it was Sakujra wearing the pajamaas when she captured the card (the very first card she captured,"The Fly"). Later on, though, quite frequently "The Mirror" (one it was on her side) disguised itself as Sakura in her pajamas when it was neccesary to conceal a late-night outing.The poitn of this exercise was always lost a little, howverem, since Skaura's big brother could always tell the difference. (it didn't help that Mirror had a crush on him). And get your minds out of the gutter -- Syaoran wouldn't be fooled either.

I guess I should be kicked off the board for even brining it up then. Or maybe I should just leave and never come back. How about this. If anyone tells me in private messaging that they are sick and tired of my ideas and want me to leave, I'll leave and never come back. If I can be this offenseive, I obviously don't belong here.

How do I go about buiolding a schoolgirl vampire for a horror campaign set in a high school? She would have to be extremely attractive, immune to daylight (so she can go to school and pose as a student), and capable of seducing just about anyone of either gender. She would also have to be able to drink only some of someone's blood to divert suspicion and keep a teady supply. Her goal is to create a cadre of vampires at the school and turn it into a nest of the undead.

Has anyone ever played in a fantasy world in which there are no humans at all and human PCs are forbidden?

What would happen if tarkofanes or someone else with mytical abilities subbomned orcs from their home world and the orcs, unexpectely, developed superpowers? Naturally, they would all dveelop the same superpowers -- STR 35, damage resistance, +10" running (O End cost), etc. Can you oimagine a supertema having to face thousands of low-level supers who lvie only to destory? Would that be a 100% guarunteed homo sapiens is about to become extinct scenario?

Are replicators even possible? I've always wondered why SF assumes it is possible to convbert energy to matter. Hasn;t anyone ever heard of conservation of energy? At leats in the Terran Empire setting you don't have to mess with transporters, another device whose theoretical science borders on the delusional.

People always think of these super-dramatic things that they or their characters would do if they had access to time travel. Which leads me to ask what sounds like a personal question -- if you had access to time travel technology, what would YOU do with it? Personally, I'd use it for mundane little things which would hopefully not damage the timestream. If you can go back in time by a couple of hours, you'll never be late for work. And think of the boon for a game collector if you can go back to when your favorite game was in print and pick up a copy and carry it back to the present! I'd be tempted to go forward to hwen my favorite new movie comes out on DVD, but that would be cheating.

With the number of magic-using characters running around the typical superhero campaign, does any sort of natural rivalry develop among magic-using superheroes and supervillains that is distinct from the normal rivalries between heroes and villains, and among heroes.

How many superheroes use technology that either comes from the distant past or from the distant future? I don't mean things like super-archers or swordmasters -- arrows and swords are still used today, though not in battle by soldiers. I mean things like lightsabers, magic items from the distant past, and things you usually see in sicnece fiction or fantasy. Are these the superhero staples I thought they were?

Has anyone tried to run a game of Star HERO in the Traveller Universe? You know -- this big Imperium, ships that are realtively slow by FTL standards (it takes a dozen jumps to cross a sector), and no FTL radio so the fastest way to get a message acroiss the galaxy is to carry it across using the fastest ship (to the point that a war could end long before news that it had even started reahced the Capital). Or, if you want to play Traveller, do you play Traveller.

And Now.... Now that we've gone over Daleks and their clones, anyone a fan of Blakes 7 willing to figure out how to write up characters like Blake, Avon, Vila, Cally or Servalan? What is the Liberator like and why was it so superior to every other ship in the galaxy?

Why not have the best of all universes and run the campaign in such a way that you can go through time, space, AND paralell universes? The whole point is that the characters, once they are in the service of the FBE, never know WHAT they will face when they step through the next portal. They could go from a SF starship to a wizard's tower in a single step, and go from fighting Nazis one day to Orcs the next and Xenovores the next....

Since mana comes from the environment, not the mage, the character's END would have little to do with it. Maybe the character casts a spell that "taps" (to use MTG terminology) the native END contained in the land the mage is linked to.

And you still have a working spine? Amazing! My copy put me on Worker's Comp for a week.

The other side of the equation I've often wondered what it was like to have your own avdenture interrupted to be summoned into one of those stupid wizard's duels where your life doesn't mean a thing and you can't disobey or rebel. I've always had a lot more sympathy for the characters and creatures being summoned than for the summoners in M:TG duels.

Actually, that would be a Phsycial Limitation by the letter of the rules because it's not something that can be overcome with effort. She simpyl doesn't understand -- she can't will herself into being compassionate or empathetic. This is the same way Illteracy is a Phsyical Lim -- no matter how much you want to, if you can;t read you can't read.

Is it possible to designa campaign where the pCs start out with no greatert goal than making a buck int eh starlanes and then find themselves suddenly having the save the sector from some great threat? Maybe they've been shipjacked and, in the process of revoering their ship, but inflitrate and destory a nest of pirates that threaten trade throughout the sector? How well equippmed will characters built to be merchants be to cope with more serious threats? True, the starlanes are a danegrous place so an indpendent trader has to be tough, but what kind of essential skills will they lack? How amny ship's hands can transfer the skills of powereing an exoskeleton for loaiding the hold to driving a powered armor battlesuit?