OddHat

Re: Susano Considers His Next Possible Projects (What Do You Want To See?) Personally, I'm really looking forward to Mythic America. The parts I've seen have been amazing, and it has been in the pipeline a while. So many ways to use it in so many genres. That said, the American Monsters book would also be fun, and it's potentially cross system as well. Once you've done the research you can just re stat it for other systems. I'd buy a K5 supplement. The Tarot Council sounds like good old school Champions.

Re: Religions in SF settings. Repped Vondy, for an excellent post.

Re: Character for Review: American Icon A great take on a classic archetype mix, and I like the origin. Should be a blast to play.

Re: Religions in SF settings. In my Alternate History SF setting, I took a real historical religious shift, added an SF element, and tried to come up with a good story about how adding that SF element to real history would have changed the development and spread of that faith. For my purposes at least, I think working from a real religion and then changing what you need (and only what you need) for the story gives a much richer and more authentic feeling to the setting.

Re: Examples of low-powered/street level supers not from comics Been having an interesting conversation for a few days with Bazza about using Stargate as a low powered Supers setting. You have warriors with low level Super Strength, Regeneration, and Martial Arts; Super Speed granting bracelets, personal force fields and other Super technologies; Psionics that are usually low level by Comic Book standards; a race of true High Powered Supers who have a set of rules that keeps most of them out of Human affairs. All sorts of potential there.

Re: One Sun, Many Sungods? Can't rep you, but no, they don't.

Re: One Sun, Many Sungods? Order was just an accidental manifestation of Chaos that managed to stabilize itself in the original Amber series; no reason it shouldn't be so in a Fantasy world. You'd be moving from Morecock to Zelzany, but most gamers won't mind.

Re: One Sun, Many Sungods? My default position in my Fantasy setting (Caelum Imperium) is that the physics and physical universe are only as different as they have to be to allow for the type of Magic I use. So, on a purely physical level, the Sun is the Sun, exactly as it is in our universe for all practical purposes. The various Sun Gods are spirits that feed off of human belief in a Sun God. Sometimes they merge and flow into one another as beliefs shift. Sometimes they change. Sometimes they split. The life cycle of spirits is not well understood by mortals, and can't always be explained in terms mortals could understand. In the Dream Lands, fragments of the Other World, the Sun is many things, as many things as there are different beliefs about its nature. A mortal spirit traveling in a particular Dream Land might find the sun to be a chariot, a ball of molten gold, even a smiling human infant. And in those lands, the gods of that land would rule.

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre Actually, I liked Howard the Duck as well. It wasn't the comic book character at all, but it had a Silver Age whimsy to it that worked for what it was. It died because fans didn't recognize the character and wider audiences weren't willing to go with the joke.

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre For me, they're part of "etc", just after Howard the Duck.

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre Batman Begins, Dark Knight Returns, Superman 1 & 2, Darkman, Spiderman 1 & 2, Arahan, Vampire Cop Ricky, The Heroic Trio, etc, etc. There's plenty of good Superhero stuff outside of comics, any of which can make for great gaming.

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre Superheroes: Saving the world, one giant monster at a time.

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre Have to spread rep before giving it again, Liaden.

Re: How to understand the SuperHero Genre I love your post, and I can hear its drumbeat and poetry. However, I do disagree with this part of it. Supers, even masked Super Heroes, are a world wide phenomena. Darna has been published in the Philippines steadily since 1949. Sure, you can point to her roots in Captain Marvel, but she is a true Filipina heroine. Ultraman has been flying since 1966, and he was not the first modern Japanese Superhero. Chinese Wuxia Supers have been exhibiting every sort of Superpower since at least the Tang dynasty, when fantasy started mixing with action adventure. I'm not down playing in any way the importance of the American Superhero story, which added its own elements to the mix. Just pointing out that the roots run deep and the branches spread wide, and that you can find stories of masked heroes fighting evil bandits and corrupt officials almost everywhere, in almost every period. Even masked hereos with Superpowers, though they were rare in Western literature until the American Superhero.

Re: Would a MP or VPP be appropriate for a purely martial character and, if so, how? I like Universal skills myself, though Universal Translator is by far the one I've used most. If your team Skill Master has invested over 20 points in a defined group of KS or SS, the player is asking you as a GM to make sure he gets some use out of them. It makes it easier for both of you, if it makes sense in the context of the setting and history of the character, to just switch him over to a Universal Schollar / Scientist / Traveller / Whatever. It saves you some time when planning adventures if you know "Jack has Universal Translator, so he'll be able to figure out the clue in the Ancient Runes, and David has Universal Traveller, so I can feed him the probable location of the Lost City after Jack lets him know that's what they're looking for." I don't feel obligated to let Universal City Knowledge Man have detailed maps of the Lost City; a certain amount of GM wiggle room is built into Universal skills. I would however let him figure out the city's lay out pretty quickly once he's there, again to give him fair value for that 20 point investment. Hero adventures are Heroic Fiction; in most genres of Heroic Fiction, Universal skills fit pretty well.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Now I'm hungry.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: Left 4 Dead Hero These are insanely good fun, and I'll definitely grab them the next time I need some zombies for a game. Nice job of taking shooter concepts and expressing them in Hero terms. I especially like that the Psych Complications leave them just a little space to express fragments of old personalities. Sure, their intelligence is reduced and they're incredibly hostile to non infected, but they're not mindless. You can still have Sean of the Dead / Fido style moments of comedy or pathos with these write ups.

Re: The Koyotie Project I'm also enjoying hearing your reasoning behind each revision.

Re: The Koyotie Project I'm loving reading these, and remember seeing her in 5thEd. Such a good character, and I like the idea of showing off how she looks at various power levels. I always thought she would be a good candidate for Multiform defined as going back and forth from one personality to another.

Re: Nazi Scientists Proposed Creating a Giant Space Mirror to Burn Enemy Nations This. Is. Awesome. And this is just what those Nazi flying saucers have been up to.

Re: The 20 Henchmen of the Sinister Skull must spread rep, but I like the plot seeds LB.

Re: Too versatile! There's a lot to be said for talking over party composition with the rest of your gaming group before the campaign begins. Even if you don't want to do a unified origin or link characters together, you can work out who will be best at what. Dave wants the Super Detective. Tom want the World's Strongest Man. Sasha wants Batman, and she and the Dave agree that her version of Batman will have minimal detective skills that he'll only use if Dave needs backup. And so on. If you want to be Mr. Can Do Everything, you can work out an agreement that you'll always accept stepping back and letting the Specialists have the first shot. It's all about not stepping on the other player character's idiom. This works fine even when coming in with a new character to an established team.

Re: Too versatile! I have the same bad habit. I've tried to deal with it in a few ways. One approach is to copy a literary or comic book character I like as faithfully as I can. Making the best Batman or Superman you can possibly manage will automatically limit your scope somewhat on most game budgets, but still give you someone who will be useful almost no matter what. Another trick is the PC as NPC. This is a mental shift. Stop thinking of the character as "me" and firmly think of him or her as "my NPC in the game". It takes some of the Mary Sue out of the build and lets you take pleasure in your character's limits and defeats as well as his powers and victories. Narrow Power plus Power Skill works pretty well. Build the very best narrow concept Brick / Blaster / Whatever you can, but rely on Power Skill rather than a VPP or huge MP for special occasions. It reminds you not to over use odd tricks, but they're still there when you need them. Finally, talking with the other players about Tropes and Teritories as you build helps. Make sure you're not stepping on their toes before starting the game, and step back intentionally to let others shine when you know that being The Smart One or The Ghost Savy One isn't really your character's role. There's a lot of fun in cheering on your team mates as they take the spotlight, and you're much more likely to get cheered yourself when the spot turns back to you.