L. Marcus

Gnap.

Those interested in a medieval England campaign set during the reigns of Kings Richard and John might be interested to know I'm working on a setting book for Chivalry & Sorcery entitled Sherwood. As well as C&S rules it will have an inbuilt system based on Colin Speirs' rules-light Essence Core and stats for HârnMaster. We've no plans to include Hero stats in the book, but as an old Hero fan I'd like to do a free PDF appendix with Hero stats (note that 'like' is not the same as 'definitely will'). Either way, setting information will far outweigh rules information.

You can see much of the raw research for the project on my World Anvil site, Fabula Mundi.

The baseline setting is built as far as possible on detailed historical and archaeological research. The setting covers everywhere from York and Skipton to the north and Lichfield and Grantham in the south, including the whole of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and parts of Lincolnshire (including Lincoln), Staffordshire and Leicestershire. The area is chosen such that the published map will print on A0 paper (c. 33 inches by 48 inches) at a scale of 2 miles to the inch.

The setting is being written with three primary modes in mind:

Historical - the baseline for the setting. As much historical and archaeological detail as I can squeeze in and make interesting. I'm knowingly allowing only three anachronisms, which I'll explain below.
Medieval Fantasy - the historical setting with the prodigies and wonders written about by chroniclers of the day: devils, revenants, sorcerers (low and high magic), saints' miracles, werewolves, and things 'neither of heaven nor of hell' (the fey, but of the medieval variety not the early modern variety).
Romance - modern ideas overlaid on the historical setting, such as the modern versions of Robin Hood, Saxon rebels versus Norman masters, powers of light and darkness, pagan survivals and so on. Think Ivanhoe, any Robin Hood film or book, and Graham Staplehurst's Robin Hood (ICE), or the Robin of Sherwood TV show that inspired it.
 
Within that there's guidance for several themes: the nobles campaign, the urban/merchant campaign, the outlaw campaign, the agent campaign (PCs working as troubleshooters for the crown, church or a great noble), and a little guidance on specialised campaigns (the monastic and the village life campaigns). 

Known anachronisms: The Trip to Jerusalem pub in Nottingham claims to date from 1189 and to have been a meeting place for crusaders heading out on Richard's Crusade. The first recorded pub on the site was in the 17th century, when it was known as The Pilgrim. Nottingham's two other pubs that claim to be medieval, The Bell and the Salutation. are in buildings dendro-dated to the 1440s. The Salutation claims to date from 1240, but its first recorded mention is in 1414, when it was known as The Archangel Gabriel Salutes the Virgin Mary. And that is a pub name I definitely want in the setting. Since I'll be including the Sal, it seems churlish to exclude the Trip and the Bell.

The attached map is a reduced-scale work in progress. It's built in QGIS. I haven't included the villages in this version as they clutter too much at this resolution. I've a lot more information than I can put on to the printed map, so things like feudal holdings, parish boundaries, rural deaneries and peculiars and so on, will likely be done as individual maps in relevant chapters. I plan to release the map alongside the book as a layered PDF, allowing people to turn the various details on and off.

Are you stuck in vapour form? You may be entitled to condensation!
 

In my opinion, video game magic was effectively invented by the very first editions of D&D.  I have an extremely hard time thinking of examples in pre-1970s fiction of wizards casting straight up battle magic like Fireball.  The best Gandalf could do was to turn pinecones into Molotovs, and he's one of the frickin' Maiar.  It is beyond ironic that D&D would later find itself having to make itself more video game-like in order to compete with the very game genre it spawned.
 
D&D has always needed improvements in balance.  5e did a decent job of improving that*, for a time, but balance promptly fell apart as more splatbooks and subclasses were published.  And that's an inherent flaw of any system that does not have an underpinning mechanic or rules philosophy to enforce balance.  This very debate occurs constantly on places like /r/dndnext.  "How can we make it so the classes and spells are balanced?"  "We just need a way to quantify the power of the various abilities."  "NO THAT'S POINT BASED KILL THE INFIDEL" and around and around it goes.
 
 
* Though hardly perfect.  Sorcerers sucked out of the gate and the subclasses for Cleric and Warlock vary wildly in usefulness.

"Really?  Nobody needs five of the same d@nnn#d motorcycle!"
 
"Boy, explain this to your momma."
 
"Well, you see, Mom, it's like this:
 
We don't have a a _blue_ one...."
 
Thanks, Boy.  Real helpful.
 
 

Christopher Lee did record a metal album ...

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.