gregghelmberger

I'm relatively experienced running Hero, but always at heroic levels. Recently I started a supers game and I'm not sure how tough to make the opposition. I have 6 PCs made on 350 points with most attacks in the 12d6 range and defenses usually around 25 or so. They do have access to a variety of additional attacks such as Entangles, and they're a pretty versatile group. In addition there are two more characters who will be with them: a GM PC built on considerably more points but with considerably lower combat abilities (he's the team detective, so he can handle agent-level opposition but not superpowered, as a rule) and a sidekick (a heroic-level martial artist). Given that, how tough should I make a villain/monster/invader from the Zth Dimension to give them a fair fight but not overwhelm them? Roughly how many points, how high an attack, how high defenses, what active point levels in other abilities, etc. I want them to have to extend themselves to win the day but (usually) win in the end. All advice is welcome. Thanks in advance.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever Getting away from the Spidey-Firelord fight (for the love of God, PLEASE!): Has anyone yet mentioned the fight waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in Avengers #4, when the Incredible Hulk was knocked out cold by Ant Man when Ant Man convinced a bunch of ants to tunnel underneath the Hulk and drop him into a very shallow hole? That wouldn't even knock me out, for pity's sake.

Re: Help with a Power Construction Yep, she was/is. Thanks for all the feedback on this issue. It's one of the great things about Hero thatba given effect can be achieved in so many different ways.

I'm about to run my first-ever superhero game and I'm debating the utility of putting out a sheet for campaign power levels. It has pros and cons, obviously, and these are perhaps exacerbated by the nature of the game. It's going to be a PBEM game that is going to involve at least two threads for each character. Basicially I'm going to be taking inspiration from books like The Avengers or JLA in that there will be a thread, or "book" for the team, but then each PC will also have a solo thread or "book," like how Captain America, Iron Man, Superman and Batman have their own solo books in addition to their team books. This places unique demands on character creation, since characters have to be able to function solo as well as in a group context, and make me wonder if campaign sheets are the best way to go. On the pro side you will wind up with characters that you know will be capable, but not overpowering for the challenges they will get. You know that you'll wind up with characters who don't blow their wad in overwhelming attacks, unassailable defenses, or whatever, so they'll have enough points to be versatile (an important consideration given the nature of the game). Another important point for me, being a first time GM in this genre as well as at this power level, is that having definite limits on Active Points and combat values will make me calmer and more sure of myself; I'm already nervous about it as it is. Balanced against that, I think, are just two points, but they're both extremely important. First, some character concepts absolutely demand certain builds that would exceed the 60 or 75 or whatever Active Point cap, but wouldn't necessarily be terribly imbalancing, and thus limit player choice and freedom in character creation. Second, having those sorts of limits tends to promote a uniformity in characteristics, damage classes, combat values, etc., which chaps me considerably. For me, the cons would clearly outweigh the pros except for the fact that I am new to the genre and not entirely sure of my footing. I'd appreciate advice, either about general campaign guidelines as a concept or about other specific approaches I could take. Thanks.

Re: Help with a Power Construction Aha. Well, serves me right for not going down to the basement and rooting through my backissues.

Re: Where did the idea that Bricks are usually slow come from? I agree with this. It's a dilemma. In my upcoming game I plan to do a campaign sheet, just because I don't want people going all whack-a-do with their builds and giving me characters that are so minimaxed as to be impossible to set up adventures for. On the other hand, there's nothing worse than all the PCs having the same darned stats. I almost want to suggest that everyone pick an archetype they intend to build and give a separate campaign sheet for each archetype, but that stifles creativity as well. I'm not sure how to address the problem.

Re: Help with a Power Construction Nexus very kindly posted this in response to a question I asked him about how to make this power. I was thinking about the character Inertia from the old Squadron Supreme limited series and I realized that his power was tricky to make -- and it's even trickier than I thought it was at first when I asked the question, because I thought the power in question applied only to Inertia himself, when in fact he could channel inertia from apparently anywhere, to anywhere, at least within LOS. IIRC, in the climactic battle, Hyperion (Superman, basically) was attacking an enemy brick named Redstone, just hauling off and swinging on him as hard as he could. Inertia took that kinetic energy and transferred it to Power Princess, with the result that PP was nearly killed by several of Hyperion's full-strength punches. The effects were both invisible and indirect. This one's a doozy, I know, and very expensive. But then Iniertia didn't have any other powers, as far as I could tell, so maybe he could afford the points.

Re: Retcon the CU That would have been preferable, Nexus. I'd still rather see no metasetting at all -- I just don't feel it's necessary. But if you just gotta have one, I'd rather it be in as many parallel universes as necessary to comfortably accomodate all the settings, instead of seeing everything jammed into one mismatched jumble.

Re: Retcon the CU I dislike them both. Others (OddHat and Nexus spring to mind, but there were many others) have gone into depth on why magic is unsatisfactory as an origin. I wouldn't say anything that they haven't said, so we'll leave it at that, and I've made my objections to the metasetting clear. The thing is, I would dislike (and change) the magic thing even if I were running CU divorced from the metasetting because it just isn't the source I want for superpowers in my game. As I said earlier, magic is Dr. Fell and I do not like him.

Re: Retcon the CU The magic thing is an irritant, but it's easily changed. Far more problematic for me personally is the whole metasetting concept that ties together fundamentally disparate and dissimilar settings. This is one of those things that probably seemed like a good idea in abstract -- giving a grand sweep of history and epic scope to any game set in any period of the official universe -- but frankly I think it's a failure in implementation. The various settings that have been crammed into a single pigeonhole are not only so dissimilar as to make association uncomfortable and problematic, but the very association itself is unnecessary. Why does a sci-fi game set in 3000 AD need to be linked to a high fantasy game set in 40,000 BC? Why does a globetrotting pulp game need to be tied to a four-color supers game set in the modern day or a brutal vigilante game in the streets of Hudson City? Why does Hudson City need to be in, and ignored in, the supers world? It seems to me that the problem is that once the decision was made to strive for a metasetting, a whole raft of really unfortunate design decisions was more or less forced on the writers. If Hudson City has to exist in the same time and place as Dr. Destroyer and the Champions, then those truly powerful types just have to ignore it...for some reason. If Kal Turak is indestrictible and exists in the same continuum as supers, then he has to interact with supers in spite of how jarring it might be. This is to cite just two examples. In practice, what seemed like a good idea has become a burden both to writers and players. It doesn't seem to me to add anything worth keeping, and it saddles the designers with the odious task of cramming their products in the official timeline and creating superfluous or pernicious ties from one setting to all the others. If a design decision doesn't add anything but negatives, why keep it? I think the good people at Hero Games need to nix the whole metasetting concept for the next edition of the game...whenever that comes out.

Re: Retcon the CU The metasetting and the resultant "waxing and waning" of magic to explain it all has always seemed forced and extremely uncomfortable to me. The fantasy worlds of the Turakian and Valdorian Ages seem sufficiently dissimilar that they demand separate universes -- to try to shoehorn in everything else, from pulp to Dark Champions to supers to sci fi...well, it struck me as an extremely shaky intellectual construct from the first, and nothing I've read from Hero Games or in this thread has made it seem more sensible or solid. So, were I to retcon the CU (the ostensible topic of this thread...remember? :-) ) I would sever the connections with the other settings, first and foremost. Dark Champions would stand on its own, which would eliminate the tortured rationales necessary to explain why supers don't go to Hudson City and why Harbinger of Justice just doesn't pop a cap in Dr. D's butt, as he's capable of doing in that obscene writeup that was in 5th Ed DC. It would also eliminate the need to say that "magic fades away" in a few years, thus rendering the PCs superfluous. Gone also would be the backflips necessary to explain why humans weren't desperately seeking lost supers technology during their alien wars (after all, the imperative of being in a life-or-death struggle with evil replicants from beyond the moon would serve as MORE of an incentive to recover lost technological glory, not LESS as some have argued). Secondly, I would do away with magic as the motivating force behind all supers. Even without the waxing and waning, I don't like it. I could go into my arguments about why I don't like it, but really, what's the point? Others have said it before, and there's no point in my saying it again, so I'll simply say that I do not like magic, Doctor Fell, and leave it at that. Thirdly, as was raised earlier, I would have liked to see more connections to previous editions, though I understand why they aren't present. Ah, well, at least they kept Mechanon and VIPER. Fourthly, I agree with the previous statement that DEMON was more compelling when it was a technomagical cult than the band of Cthulhu-worshippers they are now (another unfortunate side-effect of the metasetting and the need to shoehorn in the Kings of Edom). I'd change that in any CU game I ran. That said, apart from the issues raised by the metasetting (which are very problematic for me, though easily enough solved) CU is a darned fine universe for supers.

In casting around for a good, distinctive basis for a PBEM Hero game, I thought back to the old Crimson Skies setting. It seems to me that this is a setting rife with potential for adventure of all sorts, not just aerial combat, and with just a few changes it could be made to serve all sorts of characers and adventures. There are two issues with this, though: first of all, regardless of what changes are made, there will still be considerable emphasis on aerial combat, and I'm fine with that. However, how do you do that in PBEM and have it interesting? I don't want to ignore game mechanics and just do text descriptions, but in PBEM it would be very easy to get bogged down and confused with which plane is where and how and doing what. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to handle that? The second is, has anyone done any work transferring CS planes to Hero stats? The aircraft would be a major part of the game, and so it would be important to give them all the correct and disctinctive personalities and abilities, but we're talking a ton of work here. If anyone's done some of that word for me, that would be great. Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Re: Is Mind Scan broken? And of course, in a world where telepathy was known to exist and be in the hands of their enemies, any organization would have to be idiotic not to compartmentalize information as much as possible, or even implant false memories. That's not 'screwing with the mentalist,' that's just taking elementary precautions.

Re: Is Mind Scan broken? Hmmm, OK, there's another one I have no experience with, although the difficulties for the GM seem manifest with that Power. What are some of your horror stories around Telepathy?

Re: Is Mind Scan broken? Good points, all! This does ease my mind considerably, so I don't any longer think that the power is broken. However, the threshold for attacking through it is still a little low for my taste. I might push that up to, say, EGO+30 or maybe even a bit higher. I think that would make me calmer and more sanguine about having the power around.

Re: Is Mind Scan broken? I suppose this does pretty much just come down to GM vigilance, then. I guess the reason it makes me nervous is that, having only run heroic level games and never having had the experience of dealing with lots of Powers, I see so many ways that the players can break the game by exploiting loopholes like this. I just hope I'm smart enough to catch them all.

I’m preparing to run a supers game – my first after a series of modern-day, no-Power games – and I was reviewing the various Powers for potential problems and conflicts. During this process my eye was drawn to Mind Scan, and it struck me that there are some potentially very serious balance issues with this Power. However, I’ve never used this Power in a game and I thought I’d better check with the experts before tinkering with the cost or function or outlawing it altogether. Basically, my concerns come in two areas. The first and probably most serious is that it allows the user to project other mental abilities at any distance and from a place of complete safety. Since relatively few villains have extensive defenses against mental powers, it’s easy to achieve the EGO+20 level necessary to allow other mental powers to be used remotely; the same rarity of mental powers among villains means that the mentalist has little to fear from such a remote attack. In the most extreme cases, a mentalist could, at least in theory, sit in the comfort of the team’s base watching beach volleyball and scratching his copious backside while laying low every member of a villain team and never being subject to any danger himself. The problems associated with this (Breakout roll, endurance, the victim knows who’s attacking him) seem relatively easy to overcome, and certainly don’t seem to me to balance out the manifest advantages of such an approach. Another problem is that it makes designing certain types adventures very difficult, since the mentalist can find anyone, anywhere, with minimal effort and almost no time. That means that a whole range of scenarios – those that rely on having the players do detective work or legwork to find a specific person, especially on a deadline – become much more challenging to create and run unless the GM relies on a very limited bag of tricks to make them challenging. This might not seem like a big deal to some, but since I love those kinds of scenarios, both as player and GM, it seems to me to be a serious issue. Of course, it’s when those two problems interact that they become most serious: Emerald, the team’s Brick: Oh no, GRAB just robbed the bank and got away clean. Brainscan, do you copy? Brainscan, team mentalist, back at HQ: Copy that. Let me find them… (Two minutes later) All right, I found them and knocked them out. They’re all unconscious at the corner of 5th and Elm. Better go pick them up quick though because I’m almost out of endurance and can’t keep pummeling their helpless, unconscious forms with Ego Blasts much longer. Whee. What fun. Now, since I have no actual experience with this Power, my fears might be completely overblown. But from reading the book, Mind Scan looks not just flawed but actually broken. What am I missing?

Re: Just testing interest:Would you would you be interested in this game? I think it sounds like a brilliant idea for a game. I was in a generational fantasy game back in the day, and it was loads of fun. it really gives a different perspective on things when you're trying to accumulate a legacy to pass on to the next generation. It's a very interesting thing when you're used to playing "live for the day" heroes. The only caution flag I would throw up is that such a game requires tremendous commitment from players, and an awful lot of work from the GM -- by an order of magnitude, it was more work than any other game I've been involved in. That was why mine died, in fact, because people just didn't have the time to put out the effort necessary to keep it going.

Re: First Superhero Campaign, please advise That's very good advice, Roth. My rationale for not having mutants was that I didn't want to deal with the "mutant hysteria" aspect of it -- supers are going to be freaks, but not ominous vanguards of a race of freaks, basically. But I was concerned with the rationale of why some people became supers and others subjected to the same circumstances did not. I'm planning this as a limited-scope campaign -- a single storyline, relatively brief, and the game would conclude when that storyline was finished. If it was a rousing success I would consider running a larger open-ended supers game either in that or a different setting. So for that condition, I suppose having mutants around wouldn't be catastrophic.

Re: First Superhero Campaign, please advise Nexus, there are two reasons I have for excluding magic. The first is that it doesn't fit the flavor of what I want to do. Magic tends to lead to arcane adversaries and mystic adventures and that doesn't mesh with the Fantastic Four vibe I'm aiming for. And the second reason is that, from a gameplay standpoint, magic tends to be overly powerful and versatile to the point that the other PCs can be rendered superfluous, which I wanted to avoid. Doc Democracy, that's excellent advice. I will have to clear the tone with the players. I know I don't want to run some grim Iron Age slog, but if that's what they want to play then I probably need to reconsider whether I should do this at all.

Hi all, I'm considering running a small supers game, and although I've run plenty of Hero stuff, I've never run a supers game or even played one. I haven't been conversant with comics for at least 15 years, and frankly I'm alittle intimidated by the whole thing. What I decided on was something that captured the flavor of comics 1972-1974, which was when I first started reading them. In fact, I intend to set the game in an alternative-history 1973. This was the transition from the Silver Age to the Bronxe Age, and so I'm going for something that's largely Silver Age with a bit of the Bronze Age grit. The following is the background I've written for the game, in which I tried to both set out the history of the game and give the flavor. However, I'm not satisfied with it, largely because it seems depressingly generic. I'd be delighted with any advice people could give me on this topic. Thanks in advance. Gregg The First Supers The first known superhuman was the result of twisted Nazi superscience. Codenamed Aryan, this individual first appeared during the battle of Stalingrad, when he single-handedly (albeit briefly) turned the tide with his near-invincibility and astonishing strength. Although victory proved impossible even for Aryan, he was quickly joined by other superhumans on the Axis (e.g. Totenkopf, Ubermensch, Blitzen, Bushido, Il Sole) and Allied sides (e.g. Lord Albion, Liberty Lass, Captain Victory, Bricktop, Tovarisch, Le Feu). These superhumans fought each other in many epic battles, but historians believe that their impact generally was minimal, as their overall efforts cancelled each out. At any rate, the Allies prevailed, and by September of 1945 the world was at peace again. Right from the first, certain things were noticed about these superhumans. The first thing was that all superhuman powers were caused by the intervention of an outside agency, such as chemicals, radiation, or other energies; in no case was there a spontaneously arising “mutation†that produced any superpowers. The second thing was that exposure to the same conditions would not reliably produce superpowers – for example, the burst of radiation that produced Atomica merely killed her Manhattan Project coworkers in a terrible fashion, and the immersion in the strange chemical brew that turned Ernst Banner into Swastika agonizingly dissolved every person that his Nazi overlords subsequently subjected to it. Because of this, there was almost never a way to reliably predict what set of circumstances would give rise to supers, and it was almost never possible to replicate those circumstances under controlled conditions. From the earliest days, the creation of superpowered beings was a matter of bizarre coincidence and unrepeatable fluke. The Cold War During the 1950s and 1960s, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union came to dominate world events, and it came to dominate the activities of superpowered humans as well. In the West, much of the 1950s was consumed with one Red Scare after another, and supers seemed mostly involved in fighting off one Communist plot after another and rooting out spies and saboteurs. During this period, there were relatively few superpowered beings in existence. In 1960, for example, the United States government gave an official tally of 98 supers then currently active. Of those, approximately 17 were categorized by the government as “Allied/Adjunct,†(in the vernacular “superheroesâ€), while the remainder were categorized as “Metacriminals†(or “supervillainsâ€). Though the numbers have increased in the decade-plus since, that ratio has remained roughly stable. Project META Dr. Walter Heller was a physicist of remarkable knowledge and insight who believed that it was possible to build an apparatus that, under the right conditions, would permit the piercing of the "transdimensional membrane" to reach into other dimensions. Under controlled conditions, Heller believed, it would be possible to transfer essentially unlimited amounts of energy from other universes to our own. Dr. Heller was a unique genius and the only scientist who truly understood the process of creating and "resonating" these machines, however. Dr. Heller's early experiments with transdimensional energy revealed the practicality of his scheme, but there were many problems, not the least of which were that there was as yet no way to utilize transdimensional energy, and that the transdimensional membrane appeared to be non-uniform in "elasticity;" that is, in some places on Earth, the membrane was easier to pierce than in others. While interesting, these experiments were esoteric and didn't seem to promise useful results any time in the foreseeable future, so Heller's project was on the verge of being shut down entirely by late 1970; it was then that Heller accidentally exposed a room full of laboratory animals to the transdimensional energies in their raw form. Most of them were not changed in any particular, but one, a white rabbit named Animal Subject J1196-C (aka Flopsy), quickly developed extraordinary powers: it gained the ability to chew almost instantly through nearly any substance known to man, up to and including diamond, and the ability to leap extraordinary distances (up to 283 feet). This result, accidental as it was, was of great interest to the United States government, which was at that time engaged in a hot war in Vietnam and a Cold War with the Soviet Union. It was believed by many that the Soviet Union had discovered a semi-reliable method to turn suitable normals into metahumans, and the United States was eager to close the presumed “superhuman gap.†In order to allow Dr. Heller to explore these fascinating facts, the government of the United States established Project META, converting an unused Air Force base in Nevada into a top-secret experimental laboratory employing several score scientists and technicians and hosting many dozens of volunteer test subjects. Over the course of nine months, Turgeson Air Force Base was transformed into a warren of underground tunnels and chambers carved from the bedrock of the Santa Rosa Range of mountains. The heart of Project META was the largest transdimensional resonator Heller had yet built, one designed to reliably and predictably pierce the transdimensional membrane and drawn forth consistent and controllable amounts of energy. The base was powered by an on-site nuclear reactor, and resonator itself was a titanic structure over seven stories high. The initial three months of Project META were the buildup phase, as Heller calibrated his equipment and fine-tuned the operating systems, trained his personnel and deliberately exposed scores of volunteers to small amounts of transdimensional energies. Although this phase proved routine and fruitless, an event both more tragic and more productive was to come. The first full-scale test of Project META’s resonator was scheduled for April 7, 1972; this was to be the first time that the gigantic resonator was fully powered up and channeling energy at its maximum capacity; however, during the runup to the test, Dr. Heller noticed mysterious energy spikes and shut the resonator down for testing. During the next two weeks he pored over the data again and again and made minor adjustments that he believed would stabilize the pattern, and on April 22 the full-scale test was attempted again. Exactly what happened that day at Project META has never been satisfactorily established, but there are a number of theories (since Heller himself was killed instantly in the blast and his monitoring and recording equipment destroyed beyond all possibility of recall, the facts of the case will remain forever obscure). It is possible that there was some flaw in the transdimensional resonator itself; since Heller was the only person in the world who truly understood the nature of transdimensional energy and the function of the resonator, no one could have uncovered an error in his calculations. Some believe that drawing so much transdimensional energy into our universe so quickly created some instability in the resonator and sent it into a cascading overload, while others have speculated that the alien nature of transdimensional energy is simply fundamentally incompatible with our universe and, when present in sufficient amounts, caused a chain reaction. Whatever the truth, at11:19 AM on April 22, 1972 a titanic wave of pure transdimensional energy ripped through Turgeson base, blasting three-foot thick rock walls into rubble, rupturing the nuclear reactor core, and pulverizing everything and everyone that lay in its path… Everything and everyone, that is, except for about a dozen individuals who somehow, miraculously, survived the blast and the subsequent radiation bath and emerged with remarkable superpowers, many of them among the most remarkable and powerful abilities ever catalogued. Most of them – such as the diabolical Dr. Bloodbath and the vicious Caterwaul – were so angered or twisted by their experience, or so overcome with their new powers, that they leaped into the role of supervillain and hurried off to terrorize the world with their nefarious schemes. However, four people – the four of you – walked out of the rubble of the tragedy that had overtaken Project META with a renewed sense of purpose, and pledged to continue their work to defend freedom, thwart evildoers, and spread liberty across the globe… In the Past Year When rescue teams sent by the government discovered the four of you in the ruins of Project META, the immediately realized that they disaster was at least not unmitigated. Your devotion to serving mankind and its best impulses immediately attracted the attention of various members of the US government, who offered to provide you with elements of a base of operations and other infrastructure in return for “considerations†from time to time. The base they provided was on a government reserve on Otisco Lake in upstate New York. This base included extensive above- and below-ground facilities, and was easily modified for your use once the deed to the land was transferred. This base, called Serenity after the name of a resort that used to stand on the site at the turn of the century, provided the seclusion necessary for any scientific work to take place, without sacrificing a central location on the East Coast. Although the team was sponsored by the United States government, the government did not exert any direct control over the team or its actions. Three times during the last year, the government has urgently called upon the team for assistance (once when the Soviet superteam Red Star kidnapped the Secretary of Defense as he witnessed a demonstration of a new class of nuclear submarine, once when the evil supergenius Cranium used his mental powers to cause mass riots in Washington, D.C., and once when Dr. Skull triggered his Tsunami Engine to send a thousand foot high wall of water thundering toward New York City) but otherwise the team has been left to its own devices to fight superpowered menaces where and when they occurred. And it has been a busy year. The team has battled the band of supervillains known as The Claw, conflicted several times with the mysterious organization known only as D.O.M.I.N.I.O.N, stopped the mighty Landslide on his rampage through downtown Philadelphia, and destroyed the death ray cannon of The Professor in his secret Papua headquarters. And who can say what the future might hold, or what threat your team will face next? ****************** This is to be a superheroic game using the Hero System rules. PCs will be built on 350 points (200 points base + 150 points disadvantages); since the “average†super is based on approximately 250 points, PCs will be considered among the most powerful superpowered beings on the planet. In general the flavor I’m going for is late Silver Age – around 1972 or 1973. Characters can have problems, but they shouldn’t be all dark and angsty. In addition, they should all have some disadvantage similar to Code of the Superhero – that is, they shouldn’t be amoral, vicious thugs or entirely self-motivated. Characters will be built using the Standard Superheroic guidelines in Champions, but for ease of reference I have included them below: (Here I will list the info from Champions on Standard Superheroic guidelines) The only way I’m inclined to allow the above-listed limits to be exceeded is in the creation of complex but in-character powers that simply can’t be simulated within the prescribed point totals. These are generally “miscellaneous†type powers, so I’m not at all inclined to let anyone have an attack power that exceeds 60 Active Points, for example. There are no magic or mystical powers in the game, so no magical special effects/power frameworks will be allowed. As far as permissible character types, I’m essentially open. Of the archetypes listed in Champions, only the Mystic is forbidden outright (since there’s no magic to be wielded). However, since all the PCs gained their powers at the same time and by the same means (the accident at Project META described in the background document), some character archetypes are more entirely appropriate than others. The accident granted superpowers, so a gadgeteer or powered armor character will have to be justified in that context (for example, the powered armor suit runs off of the transdimensional energy that the accident imbued the character with); similarly, a martial artist or weaponmaster character would need to have special powers/abilities beyond those possessed my highly-trained humans. The only character types I think the team definitely, absolutely needs are at least one brick and at least one flying character. Other than that, I look forward to seeing what characters you come up with.

Re: A new Dark Champions game looking for players Sure, come and apply to the game. We're getting pretty much filled up, but there's room for one or two more.

Re: A new Dark Champions game looking for players Thanks, Steve. And here I was thinking you'd be peeved because I whacked Harbinger.

Dark Champions: Hudson City Chaos is PBEM game set in Hudson City after the assassination of the Harbinger of Justice unleashes anarchy on the streets. Rival gangs are in open war, criminals of every sort are flooding in from around the country and the world, the police and the courts are utterly overwhelmed and helpless, and the tide of lawlessness threatens to swamp the city entirely…unless a new generation of vigilantes can turn that tide and restore order. You are those new vigilantes, men and women willing to risk their lives to turn back the darkness and bring justice to those who think themselves beyond the law. Hudson City Chaos will be using Hero System 5th Edition rules. Characters will be built on 100 points base + 100 points in disadvantages, plus a further 30 points that can be spent on “Character Hooks†to allow the PCs to exceed normal human maxima. Many Super-Skills will be allowed, but the PCs are intended to primarily be “normal people,†although certainly ones a cut above the common run of humanity. Because of the general dangerousness of this genre, players will be allowed to have 2 PCs if they choose. One of your PCs may, if you wish, join “teams†that are being sponsored by various mysterious benefactors – however, this isn’t required. The game will be just as friendly to solos as it will be to teams. The overall tone I’m shooting for is something like a really good action movie: Die Hard, Desperado, the Dirty Harry series, Bullitt, The Getaway, Lethal Weapon, the original Shaft, Hong Kong action masterpieces like Hard Boiled, City on Fire, and The Killer, and even the entire genre of films where kickboxing cops knock the crap out of gun-wielding thugs. The overall tone will be rather darker than many of the American films, however, since you’re fighting incredibly violent people in an urban cesspool and permanent victories will be hard to come by. The game will be moderated and run from Yahoo! Groups. I’ve placed it in the Adult section, since the game is likely to be extremely violent and bloody; also, a variety of adult situations and themes, from drug abuse to sex, will almost certainly be explored. I understand that some gamers don’t want to deal with sex in their posts, and nobody will force you to write anything along those lines that you don’t want to, but I want the option to be there for people who want it. Because of this, all players must be 18 years or over to join the group. To apply to the game, visit the group site at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HudsonCityChaos/ or, if you have questions, feel free to email me at theuglyamerican@comcast.net.

Re: Help me populate the Seeds of Change Universe The first thing that comes to mind when reading Ran's writeup is that she's a very...touchy character. If she gets emotionally stressed, she "goes off." This seems to me to be the central issue with the character, or at least the most potentially interesting issue. So, my advice is to put the character in an extraordinary number of stressful situations. Make her DNPC's pains in the ass, when her plans go awry have them do so in a stressful way, etc. Pile on the stress and don't let up until the character reacts in some way. I don't know, maybe that seems obvious, but with this character I would try to play on that and get underneath her skin. What are Masked Marvel's disads? Most of my character plot seeds, I get from disads. Huntress...Huntress seems like a nut. The central thing about this character seems to be the paranoia about the conspiracy. If it were up to me I'd focus on messing with this player/character's mind around that central theme: who's inside the conspiracy and who's not? If the character is truly played as paranoid, all it will take is a suggestion on the part of the GM to turn a trusted friend into "one of them." I'd play on that. This character should have a very difficult time trusting anyone, even the longest-term confederate. I'd also make a point of having unexplained, semi-mysterious things happen around this character, and have her make repeated sightings of similar-looking people who may or may not be her enemies, etc. That alone ought to keep this character busy indefinitely. :-) I don't know, maybe this isn't the sort of feedback you're looking for. If not, sorry to waste your time. :-)