Michael Hopcroft

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?

I was wondering how one would design (hopefully as an NPC) a little girl with the powers of the Elder Gods. Maybe she's the unfortunate product of interbreeding, or maybe she's an Elder God herself in human form. If she were evil, she would be a truly firgihtening character indeed. But what if she were just curious about the world, inexperienced, or didn;t know hwo to use her powers yet?

Change Whether a Magical Girl has powers out of costume depends on the character concept. In the first episode of Sailor Moon S, a monster destoryed Sailor Moon's tranfpormation pendant (one of the most powerful artifacts in the universe) and Usagi immeidtaely transformed back and had no powers until the pendant was replaced. On the other hand, the heroine of Card Captor Sakura has the same abilities no matter what clothes she wears. She does not have a single costume and transforms the same way everyone else does -- by going somewhere and changing clothes, which given the complexity of her battle costumes usually takes a while. Many of her most important battles were fought in street clothes, and she's even captured a card in her pajamas. How the card got into her pajamas I'll never know...

aka has anyone ever done writeups of the cast of Bubblegum Crisis? It would be interesting to see what the Knight Sabers are like both in and out of the hardsuits, what the AD Police write up as (and how you avoid a high body count when running them) and how powerful the Boomers are in HERO terms.

Teen heroes in RPG campaigns often display an alarming tendency to ignore their hormones in play. I'm wondering if there are possible ways for players of teenage PCs to roleplay the things real teenagers go through in addition to adventuring -- like falling in and out of love, having to make up an explanation why you didn't make your date without revealing you're really part of the sentai team that stopped that giant monster from trashing the city, magical girls who get crushes on their protector-type characters, that sort of thing.

Linux Is there any mapping software (free or otherwise) for Linux?

Example Character: Lina Inverse Lina has a TON of spells in addition to her "sure-kill" Dragon Slave. She has a whoel array of attack spells -- Fireballs, Flare Arrows, Dil Brando (causes the ground under the target to explode, propelling them high into the air -- naturally what goes up comes down hard so ti does damage twice!), Freeze Arrows (an Entangle that does cold/ice damage), you get the idea. She also has a whole bunch of little spells (like a spell to attract fish to her fishing line and bait -- I'm surprised fish are not an endangered species in any area Lina passes through, as she loves fish and catches them in huge quanitities).. She also posees healing magic that she can use both on herself (to heal wounds as long as she's still consicous) and on others. There are several possible ways to construct Lina. A very large Multipower with numerous Ultra slots is one (teh effectes of the spells are rather predictable within the range of the dice). Another is to buy the big spells separatelky or in a multipower and give her a VPP to represent her encyclopedic knoweldge of the spellbooks of evergy mage she has ever come across. I'd like to see someone try a 450-point line, especially if you can find a way to fit the Giga Slave (a spell that can slay gods but has Side Effects so severe that casting it risks world obliteration). This would represent Lina at the beginning of the Tv series. She earns 40-50 experience or more per season of the TV series (or 2-3 Experience per episode, plus I'd award her an experience bonus for defeating an enormously powerful foe like Shabrandigdo, Copy-Rezo or Hellmaster Phibrizzo). The end-of-TRY Line woudl easily be worth 600+ points because fo her earned experience and has learned many more spells. She'd be a perfect candidate for some sort of Dependent PC disavtantage, but she would not get point sofr it because it is earned during play (it becomes obvious after a while hat she is in love 9and denial) with Gaurry but assuming the TV series is an active campaign this is a disad she picks up no points for.) Possible disads are Physical limitation: fast metablosim 9she burns a lot of food and thus has an enormous appetite), Psych Lim: greedy, Hunted: the Mazoku Race (Mo pow, harshly Punsih, 8- at the start growing to 11- as she becomes more of a nuisance to them), Psych Lim: various phobias (Luna, Slugs, Naga) 8- (they don't appear very often individually but a single one of the phobias could occur every so often.) Alternatively, since the mvovies and OVAs come before ther TV series is Slayers continuity, the 450-point Lina could be the one who avdentures with naga and she';d have about 40 points of experience to spend by the time she meets Gaurry.

I don't think my idea was fully understood Everybody is talking about peoiple using superpowers in a fantasy setting. That wasn't what i had in mind at all. What I had in mind was having only the stahdard fantasy abilities available, but building characters on 300+150 disads or a smilar point level with Normal Characteristc maxima enforced but not counted against your disads. If you have access only to standard fantasy abilities, how would you spend all those points? The characters in a series like Slayers are built on an even higher point level (I can't see how to build Lina Inverse for under 700 points), but they don't conquer the world. There are a lor of beings as if not more powerful than they are to give them trouble (high-level demon gods, dragons, that sort of thing).

I never realized That the Missile Deflection power (hitting a very hard pitch and sending it in a direction the pitcher did not intend) was the most important skill in baseball.... Assuming that all baseballpkayers aren't supers (although supers playing baseball among themelves could be interesting), are they all issues Midsile Deflection OAF baseball bats, Fragile (bats break all the time), Easily Replacamble (there's a whole rack of bats the player can use if one breaks) -2 Limitation; only vs. baseballs? Since the bat could in theory alsot be used as a melee weapon as well (although if you tried it you could forget about the rest of the seasob) or even a missile weapon (if you throw it at somebody) maybe it has a Multipower.... But we're getting off the suibject. Back to Fastball. what other physical characteristics would he require to have the 1400 MPH Fastball make sense? Some suggested that he may not be excessively super-strong, but have truly mastered the art of pitching at extrame speeds which would require superhuman reflexes. He would need a very high DEX for the CV to place the ball accurately (do you have any idea how hard it is to hit the strike zone from 60'6" away?) and a high END to withstand the strain of throwing as many pitches as he would throw in a typical combat.

A little historical perspective In 1920, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was hit in the head and KILLED by a fastball thrown by New York Yankees pitcher Carl May. This was in the days when batters wore no protection at all and is the only time there has ever been a fatality during play in major league baseball history. It was not until the 1960's that the plastic batting helmet was developed. May's fastball couldn;t have gone more than 95 MPH. Of course, they didn;t have radar guns in 1920 so there was no way to tell just how fast or hard that pitch was. Fastball's pitches would be about 14-15 times faster and harder than the pitch that killed Chapman. And Fastball WANTS to kill you....

An Android PC is built the same way as any other PC -- same poitn base, etc. But what speicial abilities would an adroid have to buy to represent his android nature, and would they make him less effective a character than a human character of the same point base?

How would one effectively run a campaign using time travel over which the PCs have no conscious control? The basic idea iwa first described in a Different Worlds article by Tony Lee that I still wish I have. Basically this fantastically powerful being has recruited agents to go all over time and space to 'fix" what he sees as having gone wrong. They go on their mission, leave the area through a "nexus" portal, and emerge fully healed, rested, fed and recovered 9but with no conscious memory of eating, sleeping or healing) at the site of their next mission. Since the portals are completely under the control of the superbeing, the PC agents have no control over where or when they go next. Sometimes they would be fighting an enemy organization of time travelers trying to change hisotry in their favor, who have more control over where they go and would love to locate and kill the superbeing. other times they would just go someplace, fix whatever is wrong, and leave. Would players put up with a campaign in which theyhave no control over what happens next after the adventure? or would the right sort of players roll with the punches and keep going, hoping to either meet the superbeing face-to-face or return to their original homes? Since the superbeing bought the time portals, the PCs might not need time-travel pwoers of their own besides a device that tells them where the next nexus point in the world they are currently in is located. Basically nexuses appear where and when the superbeing wants them to -- and only then. Possible storylines include preventing the extinction of Neanderthal Man, stopping someone from completing a 'supertask" experiment and thus destroying the universe, and preventing the use of anacrhonstic technology to change history. The scope would be the entire omniverse, but the GM would only need to plan one adventure at a time -- there need not be an overweening plot arc. Great TV series, but terrible RPG campaign?