L. Marcus

Christopher Lee did record a metal album ...

Obligatory
 

So many strongly held opinions about magic!  Although that is pretty normal--in the fantasy fiction discussion groups I frequent, "hard" vs. "soft" magic systems are always a topic of lively discussion. Naturally that would carry over to RPGs.
 
My preferences tend to come down on the "soft" side of the spectrum, i.e. mysterious and poorly understood.  I find that more well defined systems, in fiction, are uninteresting--being fully understandable, they become esoteric.  In some cases this also leads to some strange inconsistencies with the setting.
 
As others have mentioned, mysterious-and-poorly-understood magic is tough to do in any RPG that attempts to be balanced.  Hero manages to at least sort of address the subject with skill rolls, Side Effects, and other disadvantages.  Other systems, like Ars Magica, address it by leaving a certain amount of wiggle room in the effect.  Or in the more lightweight systems, almost not having a system at all.
 
What really sets Hero apart is that its flexibility allows it to cover multiple magic systems.  You can have the wizards of the Fire College go up against the Wild Pool Magicians with the assistance of the Vancian Amnesiacs.  After four decades of fantasy gaming I have yet to see any other system that can really do this.  Usually the best they can do is have you pick spells from a different list.  But the point is that Hero can really do both hard and soft magic, and I'm frankly astonished that no other game system has really tried.
 
Clerical magic is a whole other ballgame, as it directly involves the theology of the setting.  It's hard to be an atheist when priests are slinging flame strikes and blade barriers.  At that point, religion becomes less a matter of faith and more one of devotion and adherence.  It's a weird side effect of D&D video game magic, and to me it smacks of football teams granting magic powers to its craziest fans.  I have toyed with the idea of requiring clerical spells (prayers?) to be bought with Invisible Power Effects, just to make it a teeny bit less obvious to onlookers that The Gods Walk Among Them.  That only works for certain effects, but it does maintain a lot of the mystery.  Arcane magic might benefit from the same.

Less, in fact.  Software engineers would be like wizards isolated in their towers, conducting bizarre rituals and never interacting with the real world.  Whereas cloud engineers would be hedge wizards, knowing a hodgepodge of random spells that actually get things done.

Mingy would be chunky salsa in a second.

From the February 2024 issue of Scientific American: The world uses enormous quantities of sand, construction to silicon chips. This makes illegal sand mining one of the biggest rackets in the world, far exceeding other forms of illegal mining. Since this is Scientific American, much of the concern is about the resulting environmental damage -- but the big money in sand mining can corrupt governments at every level and fund other unsavory activities. Googling "sand mafia" turns up many other articles for further research.
 
Illegal sand mining might be difficult to work into the usual urban vigilante Dark Champions game, but you might fit it into an international espionage game. Imagine a James Bond-style mastermind who uses sand mining to fund his terrorist scheme, coup plot or diabolical weapon. The death trap for captured agents should be obvious.
 
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sand-mafias-are-plundering-the-earth/
 
Dean Shomshak

They dropped the trailer for Deadpool 3

The largest crime a villain ever attempted in play in any of my Champions campaigns was Doctor Thame's attempt to destroy the universe. There's a hypothesis in physics called the "decay of the false vacuum": in brief, that space itself has an intrinsic level of energy, but this could be lower; and if something happened to convert even the tiniest speck of the universe to this lower energy state, the rest of the universe would nigh-instantaneously drop to this lower energy level as well. This would of course destroy all matter in the current universe, as there would be entirely new laws of physics. Or none, if the new energy state was in fact zero, meaning no matter or energy at all. Thane wanted to test the hypothesis by inducing such a phase shift. He was highly confident his dimensional force field would keep him alive for at least several seconds, long enough to observe the result of the experiment if it succeeded. No, he did not have someplace else to go afterward: He fully expected success to kill him, but at least he would know. Anything for Science!
 
The PCs of Avant Guard got their first clue what Doctor Thane was attempting when their precognitive leader, Doctor Future, made a routine look into the future and saw there wasn't one. So the universe was saved, apparently at cost of the life of Doctor Thane and Doctor Future. Both were time travelers, though, so either of them might reappear in the campaign.
 
(I admit, LL's plan for Xarriel does top Doctor Thane's.)
 
Dean Shomshak

I am just go8ng to throw rhis out there, because apparently in all the years since Naked Advantages became officially endorsed, only my players are the kind of creative jerks to try this:
 
 
Personal Immunity, Ranger, useable as attack.
 
 
Suddenly  you are untouchable by at least one opponent's favorite attack.
 
I didn't allow it, obviously, but it was fiendishly clever.
 
 
 
 

Any number of places this could be posted here, but here's AI making an opportunity for all of us.
 

my Wedding Pictures

Kelvin-Helmholtz Clouds
 
I got to see those a few years ago when a coworker was driving me home. We both thought it was they were pretty cool.

Okay, I have run The Blood through Google Docs to edit the content and fix errors. The final word count is 34,142 words. This puts the project at 50,091 words so far.
 
 

This popped up this morning when I clicked the "Random Article" link in Wikipedia

Canada: Like the US as if run by Scandinavians.

I would never complete this set-up.  DEX 6 and so on.*
 
Might be amusing to compute the entropy in domino arrays and then examine probabilisticly what the largest array your DEX permits you a reasonable chance of completing rather than having a catastrophic failure during construction.  A rather roundabout way of finding a conversion between DEX and energy, kind of, in HERO terms.
 
*EDIT: this leaves out the three feline chaos emitters I dwell with.

"Lord, I'll never pick another pocket again as long as I live. I swear it. But here's the problem: You've got to let me live. How can I prove my good faith to you? If you've heard me, this ledge will remain steady as a rock, and that thing coming at me won't be what I think it is. If it is, there's no hard feelings, of course, but I'd be very disappointed."

Steve Jackson and his Games