Mutant for Hire

Re: Complicate the Person Above death tribble. A genetic engineering experiment to produce a more useful breed of tribble as a food animal gone very very very very very very very very very very wrong.

Re: "Shallow" Purchases So how do you build "hung like a horse" in HERO terms?

Re: Disadvantages giving xp Er, Mentor, having Disadvantages giving xp instead of starting character points has absolutely nothing to do with how powerful starting characters are. If you don't have 200 + 150 cp characters, you just start with 350 cp characters. It's all up to the GM and the players and how powerful they want to start out with.

Re: Liefeld's Titans Hmm. Actually, that's probably a good idea for a punishment until he learns to draw his characters properly.

Re: Disadvantages giving xp Who sets up the scenario to ensure that a player's disad is taken advantage of? The GM. It comes down to being a variation of the fact that the GM has to make sure everyone is equally contributing (or at least contributing to the level they want). Disads switch to "plot hooks to make the GM's life easier", and the GM can make sure that a scenario gives opportunities for everyone to play up their disadvantages. An extra challenge for the players to overcome. One player can have fifty disads and another one can have only one, but it's not likely that the GM is going to have all fifty of them come into play at once. Look at it this way, how often has Superman had to deal with the problem of his vulnerability to magic and his vulnerability to Kryptonite at once? Yes, Spiderman has a very large rogue's gallery, but how often do all of his enemies come into play all at once?

Re: Turakian vs Valdorian? In the end, the ordering really depends on whether one goes for a Romantic timeline or an Enlightenment timeline. Romantic Timeline: Once mankind lived in Eden, once there were great men and women of incredible wisdom and lore in the world. Then everything went to heck and we live in a fallen age of petty men and women and vast amounts of ignorance. Magic fades from the world and there are wonders lost that will never be again. This is the timeline that tends to crop up in mythology and romantic fantasy worlds like "Lord of the Rings" where every age is clearly cruder than the previous one. And hence in that sort of timeline you have the Turakian Age before the Valdorian Age as the magic goes away. Enlightenment Timeline: Mankind used to be brutal and ignorant savages, but by the study of the cosmos by learned men, by the struggle to develop laws and moral codes against the chaos of the jungle, we have raised ourselves up from brutish beasts, from savage barbarians to civilized man, and we will raise ourselves up even higher and create wonders in the future. In short, there is a sense of actual progress. This timeline is somewhat rare in fantasy, though it turns up a lot in older school SF and the "Singularity" touches on the idea in a fashion. A few fantasy works have played around with the idea of progress and civilization, but in general the two are often considered to clash. Still, in this sort of concept, the Valdorian Age preceeds the Turakian Age, as mankind moves beyond simple pacts to learning how to work with mystical forces more directly.

Re: Liefeld's Titans

Re: What Other Pulp Hero Books Would You Like To See? I'll back the folks who want a Mars/Venus/Hollow Earth supplement, outside of the Champions Universe, but then I've never been a fan of the concept that everything has to fit into the CU. Mars has an ancient if decaying civilization, using technology they've forgotten how to produce. Venus is more or less in the stone age, with dinosaur like creatures all over. Oh yes, and Mars destroyed what used to be the fifth planet to produce our asteroid belt.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Amused is the love child of Mightybec and Kara/Rachel, conceived in a night of forbidden passion.

Re: Turakian vs Valdorian?

Re: Is a Jedi reasonable in a Marvel Avengers campaign?

Re: Complicate the Person Above L. Marcus is one of the most accomplished porn actors in the industry under a pseudonym that he has killed over a dozen men, three sheep, two bunnies and a cat to keep secret.

Re: "Radiation Accident" in my email?..

Re: Sharing the Campaign ideas you can't use... yet Bad news, Hermit, but this has already been done. The infamous "Macho Women with Guns" game which had as sequels "Renegade Nuns on Wheels" and "Batwinged Bimbos from Hell" with disads like 'topheavy' and skills like 'run in high heels'.

Re: Is a Jedi reasonable in a Marvel Avengers campaign? I wouldn't build a jedi per se, but rather I'd build a martial artist with advanced chi powers, which Lucas pretty much ripped off in order to produce his Jedi. As for the light saber, I'd let our martial artist compose a blade in his hand of pure chi energy, which more or less has the same result.

Re: Liefeld's Titans When I ascend to godlike powers over all of creation, I'll smite whoever I feel like it, though in Liefeld's case, I'm probably not going to simply smite him but instead stick him someplace unpleasant until he learns to: 1. Draw human anatomy in proportion in natural poses 2. Learn to draw a range of body types 3. Learn to compose scenes without copying them from other people.

Re: "Radiation Accident" in my email?.. Of course you realize that spam like this is a classic trick of organizations like VIPER and ARGENT. Small chance of survival and if you do, you're immediately enslaved to do their bidding. Sure, you can always break out or be rescued but do you really want the Hunted that goes along with it?

Re: Liefeld's Titans

Re: Liefeld's Titans

Re: Complicate the Person Above Cancer has at least three secret identities which through clever time management he keeps separate from each other. A mushroom cloud will indicate when each of his wives finds out about the others.

Re: Liefeld's Titans All right, Captain Pants, let me give you a counter-example: Byrne. Byrne gets flamed a lot on the boards for the things he's done to a lot of characters he's gotten his hands on. However there are comparitively few flames about his artwork because most people consider him a professional artist. Perhaps nothing brilliant to write home about, but his artwork doesn't get in the way of the comic. Liefeld is another story. He's a bad artist. And yes, I'm a worse artist, I admit it. On the other hand I'm not trying to pass myself off as a professional artist. Nor are most of the people on these boards, with the exception of the artists who've done work for HERO games (and there's a bit of difference between illustration for RPG books and doing full comic book illustrations, which I think most of the artists here would conceed). However one does not need to be a professional writer to critique writing, nor does one need to be a professional artist to critique art. Liefeld has a very poor sense of anatomy. His bodies are all distorted. The proportions are all wrong and they're typically contorted. You can call it stylistic, except for the fact that I've never seen him do a body that wasn't physically distorted, even in single panel 'still' shots. I have yet to see a piece of art from him that wouldn't get a 'D' in a regular art class, which I think he needs to enroll in. There are artists who've done stylistic artwork, like Bill Sienkiewicz, but he's also shown himself capable of doing straight illustration. And his stylizations show that he has some sense of how to do it. Liefeld just looks like he does bad traces of existing artwork (and there are plenty of examples of cases where he has ripped off scenes from other artists). Or the effect that he's going for is completely off for what the scene is all supposed to be about. Then there's his writing, the less is said of which, the better, but needless to say most of my criticisms of Byrne pale in contrast to Liefeld.

Re: Complicate the Person Above keyes_bill used to be the mascot for Playboy magazine. (I never let reality get in the way of my compliments)

Re: Mars Colony by 2025? What happened to the future predicted by all those old school SF writers? It boils down to a few factors: 1. Power technology The old SF writers knew, or could calculate how much energy it would take to accelerate a ship to Mars at one gravity (technically, accelerate half the trip, decelerate the other half). The problem is that the SF writers assumed steady progress in power plant technology, when in fact nuclear power stalled due to social factors most of them thought unimaginable. Fusion power has been the power source of the future for fifty years now, and unfortunately, it looks like at least fifty more if not closer to a hundred before we get commercially viable fusion power, at least from my own pessimistic viewpoint. First we gotta get a sustained fusion burn, then we have to get more power out than we get in, then we have to find a way to build a fusion plant that can stand up to the neutron flux the fusion reaction will be producing. 2. Underestimating radiation issues Using lead shielding against cosmic radiation isn't a good idea. It produces cascading secondary radiation that is pretty unhealthy. Incidentally, it isn't just the thin atmosphere on Mars that's an issue. There's the little problem of a lack of a magnetic field to shield people on the ground as well. 3. Underestimating the complexities of manned spacecraft The shuttle is one of the most complicated things that mankind has ever constructed, period. Hence the maintenance on the shuttle is completely horrendous. NASA tried to cut costs by creating a reusable shuttle only to find that the complexities involved pretty much negated any advantages given by reusability. The successor to the shuttle is a CEV system which can be roughly described as a next-generation Apollo module. And look at all the problems that the ISS is having right now. Until we can create self-maintaining/self-repairing spaceships and space stations, having human beings in space is going to be expensive and dangerous (and that tends to cut down on commercial development). My own feeling is that by the end of the twenty first century, there will be a manned Mars expedition, but it's going to be a pure "we can do it" sort of thing. Frankly the money would be far better spent on a fleet of unmanned vehicles to Mars, but when you get ego involved, economic sense matters little. The whole Cold War space program was more ego than anything else. I don't think we're going to see a real space age until we get a working space elevator up. Once that happens, other nations will want to get in the space elevator game, and the cost of sending stuff into orbit will plummet. Even then, I don't see much actual development outside of geosynchronous orbit, with a couple of research stations at L4 and L5, launching points for deep interplanetary probes. Most exploration will be done by increasingly sophisticated robotic probes with increasingly powerful onboard computers and flexible robotic limbs.

Re: Too many points? If you want to stick with the bird motif, I'd put some claws on the character to allow some nice raking fly-by manuvers. Either that or go with a nice melee weapon in the Hawkperson style.

Re: Liefeld's Titans All I can think of is that he has some interesting photographs of one of the editor and some farm animals myself.