chaos_engineer

Re: Necromantic Animal Handler: Deceased Equines

Re: FH Gripes didn't Champions 3rd Ed. have a different version of the hit-location chart? how did it treat Vitals? on a related note, all this talk of armor and hit-locs had me looking through the various house rules i've nabbed from the web. i recall that the now defunct Kestral Arts website had some good rules for sectional armor, but i don't have them archived. does anybody out there have a copy they could post or email? i'd appreciate it.

the Best Soundtrack for a sword & sorcery game is caustic Death Metal, like Gorgasm, Teen Cthulhu, Nile, and the like. if the players complain that they can't concentrate because of "that @!*# racket", just turn it up louder and throw more eldrich horrors at 'em!

don't forget the time travel aspect of wormholes, which the write-ups in Star HERO (pg. 235) take it into account. Stephen Baxter's novels Timelike Infinity & Ring are good hard-sf dramatizations of the wormhole concept.

hey. no fair! i was gonna say pirates. but i 'm working on my own setting based on the Elizabethan history, not a TE one. (yes, i know about David Drake's books, but it's not based on them.) and i don't really have any PC's since the only gamers i know spent so much money on M:tG that they don't want to play anything else. losers. the only suggestion i have would be accidental/reluctant involvement. in other words, a DNPC needs help, or the PC's somehow get shanghaied into the adventure, etc. not sure how applicable that is.

Re: Character: LV-426 Life Form excellent job, Mike. that's always been one of my favorite monsters, mainly because of Giger's influence. makes me want to game Batman: Dead End. since we're giving credit, it's worth mentioning that the idea for the film was taken from a scene in A. E. van Vogt's classic The Voyage of the Space Beagle.

lol! and that series is like Pelucidar in that some of the books are terrible. IMO only the first two Venus books are readable. and even that's mitigated by the fact that in the first one Napier forms a secret society with the initials KKK. yikes! i'm usually willing to wince past ERB's cranky politics, but that's going too far.

word. check out this awesome Green Martian sculpture. yes, in the Prelude to Chessmen of Mars would that be OIHID? after all, he can't jump that far when he's on Jasoom.

Barsoom gaming resources here's a few Barsoom gaming resources i've found. Kevin Scrivner's write-up of a Green Martian for Hero System 4th ed. -- but there don't seem to be any write-ups of John Carter. (are you listening, Surbrook? ) and we have the FUDGE-based Heroes of Mars, a GURPS Barsoom site, and the Palladium-based Barsoomian Wars. now we just need Barsoom Hero. and there's even Barsoomian Army Lists for Hordes of the Things, a great mass combat minis game. anybody have more?

Re: Other Sword & Planet authors? yeah, Brackett was great. her Mars books have a hard-boiled edge that appeals to me. Carter gets points for trying -- he also did a series set on Callisto -- but he wasn't a very good writer. there are lots of novels in the "Barsoomian" vein. two good pre-ERB books are Edwin Arnold's Gulliver of Mars & Fenton Ash's A Trip to Mars . Donald Wollheim edited a short anthology titled Swordsmen in the Sky. and even Mike Resnik wrote a couple, The Goddess of Ganymede , and Pursuit on Ganymede. but IMO the best of the Barsoom imitators (not counting Brackett) is Bulmer. his Dray Prescot series has done the most to keep the tradition alive.

but that's true of the bulk of pulp sf. you could say the same about Flash Gordon, Planet Stories...and modern Hollywood. IMO it's just splitting hairs to quibble about labels. it's all science fiction to me. agreed. he had an incomparable imagination. BTW, fans of Barsoom might want to check out Kenneth Bulmer's Dray Prescot series. they're well imagined yarns in the same style.

many of them are public domian and on the web. check The Online Books Page

or it could be used to ionize the air between attacker and target, allowing an electrical current to be delivered stunning the target. such a "wireless Taser©" is in the works. ok, enough about coherent light from me;) how about some more weird weapons? there's the loogie gun from Snow Crash: "Both metacops, under their glossy black helmets and night vision goggles, are grinning. The one getting out of the mobile unit is carrying a short range chemical restraint projector - a loogie gun. Their plan worked. The loogie, when expanded in the air, was about the size of a football. Miles and miles of tiny cables like spaghetti with sticky gooey stuff that stays liquid until the loogie gun is fired. The snotty, fibrous drops of stuff wrapped all the way around her arm and forearm, lashed to the bar of the gates." now that's an Entangle if i ever saw one.

bullets are lame. they're so overdone. seriously though, lasers are only "just another rifle" if you're unwilling to imagine their possibilities. (i can envision their uses as smart and/or non-leathal weapons quite easily.)

that's because they're so credible. besides, you could say the same about nearly all the other weapons mentioned so far. if i had a dollar for every time i read a sf story with a needler, vibro-blade, robot soldier, et al., i'd be livin' large. but you do see them running around with plasma rifles? if you've got something against laser weapons, that's fine. but the fact is they're just as plausible as most of the weapons mentioned so far, and hardly "lame".

the aforementioned needlers are a pulp-sf staple, and often shoot drugged rounds. another pulp mainstay is the disintegrator ray. Larry Niven gave it a hard-sf rational in his novel "Ringworld". "Where its narrow beam fell, the charge on the electron was temporarily depressed. Solid matter, rendered suddenly and violently positive, tended to tear itself into a fog of monatomic dust." Niven also came up with the variable sword, a mono-molecular wire kept rigid by a "stasis field" (although a piezo-electric charge would probably work) that's extendable up to several meters (say 15-30). The tip of the sword is marked by a small, glowing red bead (holographic?). (the wire itself, needless to say, is all but invisible.) cuts through just about anything like a hot knife through butter. however, i think it's pretty absurd to say it's "lame" to have lasers and particle beams in a sf setting, especially if you're striving for any kind of realism. and if you aren't, why not just transpose some flashy magic spells?

a few years ago i put together a bibliography of post-apocalyptic fiction. it contains scores of novels that aren't mentioned in the other thread. i've reposted it to the web here:

have you seen the anime Blue Gender? bug-hunt with mecha. good source for AW scenario ideas.