Chuckg

OK, STR 25 I'll accept for Cap.

/nods/ That stops the pistol fire. It don't stop the heavy weapons or the grenades.

True, but he does /not/ have Resistant PD... and many, if not most, "Dark Champions" campaigns have as much gunplay as PUNISHER graphic novels.

Starguard -- wouldn't exist. Even Communist World has room for the 'innocent but misguided servant of the State she does not truly know the horror of' concept. Nazi World damn sure doesn't. Edit -- so she died in their dissection labs as soon as she first showed. With her initial naivete, betraying and trapping her was easy, Power Cosmic or no Power Cosmic. Baron von Darien -- see my post on 'Communist World'. (I know, this thread went up first, but I hit that one first.) Short version... imagine the scariest vampire elder you've never wanted to meet, with the willpower of Victor von Doom and the military genius of von Clausewitz, with an utterly fanatic devotion to causing the Nazis as much pain and destruction as he can possibly manage. The most hardened of the SS will soil their pants at the mere mention of his name. Dr. Pain -- a champion boxer and low-ranking foot slogger in the Wehrmacht, chosen for experimentation due to his having the proper latent genetic factors. Enjoys his new status and rank as one of the Ubermensch, but deep down inside, he wonders...

Starguard -- oh dear, it's a cosmic-powered Z'lf from Legacy World. What would be a good Communist name for her? "The People's Star?" "Bright Guardian?" Feh, I can't think in apparatchik fluently enough. Baron von Darien -- heh. Heh. heh. An 1100-year old German/Russian aristocrat? With the powers of a master vampire? In a world where the Communists won? The "Baron of Death" will be the nightmare of every commissar from Lithuania to the Chinese border, and a legendary figure of both awe and dread among those who still have the will to resist the all-crushing State. KGB men will have their careers broken for failing to catch him, and Politburo members will be found drained of blood in their most secure bedchambers... ... well, unless my other character dropped 16d6 Holy on him. Seriously, in Communist World, the Baron's on the fast track to being one of the most prominent -- and most ruthless -- resistance leaders. Dr. Pain -- becomes "The People's Champion", a famous Olympic athlete who gained superhuman strength and loyally chose to serve the State as one of it's metahuman protectors! *applause*

Somebody once showed me a page scan of Cap doing casual 500-lb curls. That's *not* STR 20.

Champsguy -- sheesh, sounds like even Millar's starting to hate the Authority. I remember when the Midnighter could crash an F-16 through the hull of the Carrier and stay conscious...

Or Doctor Destroyer, Tyrannon, the Kings of Edom, hell, even the frickin' Solipsist...

Baron von Darien -- indulges himself in a moment of petty amusement when he travels to the Buffyverse for the specific purpose of kicking the unholy living crap out of (insert long list here). And I'm not referring to the villains... He then does a brief shopping spree in various RPG universes and comes home. Dr. Pain -- hell, he /moves/ to Tertius. His kinda place. Starguard -- I tell you three times. Oz. Oz. Oz.

a) If you want Unsubtle, use the Warlord. He's got a helicarrier and an army, fer gossake. You misunderstand. Teleios is not the 'unseen figure in the shadows'... Teleios is "the Teflon Don". Everybody knows he's guilty as sin, but legally, nothing ever sticks. He's got Wolfram & Hart class lawyers on retainer, he's got genetic blackmail on key politicos, and his minions are all cloned slaves and mindless monsters anyway, so you can never get any of his co-conspirators to roll on him... or even to stay alive in jail longer than a week, what with their DNA self-destruct programming! Teleios is the smug, arrogant bastard who you'd give your left gonad to bust harder than anything... but who you just can't get an indictment on. Think like Ananias Topps from "Normals Unbound", only worse. Granted, this does /not/ work vs. 'vigilante' campaigns.

A hyper-intelligent Wendy Brooks wouldn't need to be taken under his wing -- when Nighthawk makes his offer, he'll find out that she's already been signed up for lessons down at Zsu Hsaio's for the past month.

Oh, heck, even using my logic, Teleios can be a /major/ player. He's the guy whose DNA blackmail has people up to and including Cabinet members scared to cross him. He's the guy whose control of the Elixir of Life Extension gives him billions in profits each year from anybody rich enough to afford it and greedy enough to want it. He's the supervillain who can openly walk down the Riviera dressed in the most stylish of fashions, beautiful women on each arm, and never get touched. He's the guy smirking as he lazes on the deck of his two-hundred-foot yacht parked in the city's harbor, daring you to prove that it's him behind your current troubles, protected by the full force of the law re: 'probable cause'. In short, what the other playahs do through great force, he does through carefully measured force... and that brilliant, subtle, maddening intellect. Let the other playahs be the unsubtle types. Teleios can be the Ra's Al Ghul type.

A 7-11 with a huge basement that doesn't show up on the plans. (And an escape tunnel.) ... what? It's a building that has an excuse for being open 24 hours a day, has an excuse for anybody not obviously meta walking into and out of it at any given hour, and nobody pays attention to them! Need a few loyal agents to be the counter guys, natch, but hey, henchmen are cheap.

It's 'out of scale' because Teleios does not have a massive Shadow Army or Destroyer Agent Bases -- he survives partly by keeping the level of government response down to a level that he can manage. i.e -- nothing that would get an entire army sent after him... and a massive biological warfare attack... hell, current US doctrine is to nuke whoever tries one. A few dozen or hundred at a time, OTOH -- dusting the country makes you the next Osama Bin Laden. Dusting a small village merely makes you yet another supervillain mastermind.

A bit large scale for Teleios... OTOH, I can see it finally being revealed that the reason Teleios has been such a low priority for investigation all this time is because the Attorney General's grand-daughter has been slowly dying of an incurable genetic disease that only Teleios' can deliver the palliative for... ... and, of course, he infected her in the first place. And has smugly informed the AG that any, err, disruption in his schedule will leave him 'too busy' to mix that month's doses. Remember in JSA recently, when Kobra walked scott-free out of a courtroom because he revealed that the entire crowd of bystanders outside had been infected with self-destruction nanites, and the spontaneous human combustions would occur one every 60 seconds until the bailiffs took the cuffs off and stood aside? (The Thunderbolt was /not/ on the line-up that issue, neither was the Spectre.) I can imagine Teleios doing something similar to the heroes... "You know, there are fifty people -- fifty poor, innocent, hardworking little people -- out there. People who are very, very ill. People who can continue to lead healthy and productive lives instead of being bedridden in terminal agony only because of the serums that I can make for them. And only I know how to make them. And I can't keep their supply going if I'm in jail, now can I? Are you willing to let them die just so you can win? Who are they? Where do they live? You know, I seem to have completely forgotten! Isn't that an odd thing for one of my intellect to have happen! Must be the stress of the moment. Terrible thing, stress. I much prefer to avoid it whenever I can. You foiled my latest Master Plan and defeated my creations. Now content yourselves with that victory... and get the hell out of my house."

*flips through his copy of CU* Going by the flavor text, it apparently came to Teleios' imagination as well.

Chromatic made a reference to something like that on the immediately previous page.

Anybody here ever read Jack Chalker's original "Well World" series?(*) Remember the 'sponge syndicate'? Synopsis -- a little DNA tinkering on an alien parasite organism produced a really nasty thing... ... 'sponge'. (So called because it vaguely looked like a sea sponge.) If you were infected with organism A, you would slowly die in unbelievable agony, that made heroin withdrawal pains feel like a steak dinner. The only palliative was regular applications of organism B, the 'sponge'. There was no known cure -- parasite A attacked on the genetic level, and it was really hideously sick. The 'sponge syndicate' made more money than the Cali cartels -- simply by infecting a *few* people (billionaires, heads of state... or one of their immediate family or loved ones), and then pointing out that they were the only people in the universe who knew WTF sponge came from, and could deliver the regular doses necessary. Oh, and don't bother arresting the bag men who come to take the cash and deliver the sponge every month -- they don't have a clue either. Better hope Teleios has never read Chalker... (*) Chuckg's Quickie Science Fiction Review -- great ideas, some interesting characters, several fun things to read now and then, but overall crappy plot execution and wasted potential.

Oh, if you want to go /that/ route, just have Teleios show up with his 'genetic pimp' routine. "The first DNA-spike's for free, baby, but after that, it'll cost ya..."

Again, for a good example, look at the 'New Sentinels' game logs... Jeff's been foreshadowing the huge big threat since session 2. (A possible re-invasion by Istvatha V'Han). All the while we've been trying to a) confirm the intelligence(*), figure out WTF to do to prepare, and c) make sure we're not being snow-jobbed by Doctor Destroyer or fill-in-the-blank. As well as, natch, dealing with all the /other/ ongoing distractions... The game logs for our campaign (it's done in AIM chat) can be found by looking at the thread on: http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=78583 (note -- you have to keep looking to find all eleven, we also use that thread for all sorts of campaign business and bluebooking) Or you can e-mail me and I'll send you the zip file. (*) Warmaster Fielan can't help us there -- while he was a senior flag officer under V'Han, Earth was not within his area of responsibility. He has confirmed that V'Han has been keeping deep-cover agents on Earth since the first invasion, and he's had full access to all the after-action reports of the first failure, but he does not know for certain if the Majestrix has authorized a second offensive, or what form it will take. Of course, given his skills, if he /had/ been in command of the first effort, the planet would've gotten stomped like a bug. The main inspiration for Bob's character was Grand Admiral Thrawn, and it shows up in the stats.

Her meta-gene pops and she develops speedster powers. Hey, she was always hyper anyway.

Check your Omnichronometer.

The "New Sentinels" campaign that we are in has the premise that we are the World's Mightiest Superteam, at 750 points, the guys who will get trouble calls when even Unity feels outgunned. Our team leader is the game world's version of Superman. So if any campaign was going to go really grand really fast, probably would be ours, right? We're eleven sessions into the campaign, and here's the score... * Firewing vs. "Superman" (Horus-Re), solo challenge -- our only fight so far that was 'epic' by any remote definition of the word Rest Of Team vs. the Ultimates -- a two-Turn curbstomping during which none of us were even Stunned, much less hurt. (Correction -- Thunderbolt got lucky and tagged our first martial artist. /Once/. That was the only CON Stun we've had so far in the game.) Entire Team vs. Some Teleporting Killer Robots That We Think Were Mechanon's But Could Have Been Anybody's -- they didn't even last a full Turn. And the only one of us who was Stunned was my character, when I deliberately RP'ed my "Novice Hero" disadvantage by trying to do a 60" Pushed Move-Through... straight down into the ground. (Long story!) Half the Team vs. Five Low-Rent VIPER Thugs With Reflex-Boosting Helmets That Gave Them Temporarly DEX 30 SPD 7 Martial Arts -- not only was this a curbstomping, but some of us literally just stood there and let the villains punch us repeatedly in the face (taking zero Stun, Body, /or/ Knockback) while politely asking them over and over if they wouldn't mind stopping now. The only suspense from that encounter was figuring out how to disarm the cortex bombs VIPER had rigged them with without killing the poor guys. That's all the fights we've had in eleven sessions. The rest have been talky time, personal characterization subplots, dealing with secret ID crises, and following up leads. Hope this helps. Edit -- Jeff, if you're reading this, you rock.

[Kiki voice] No, Sai, no! Keep away from the scary man! Stay good, Sai! Stay good! [/Kiki] Sluggy Freelance. Worship the comic.

ow ow ow ow ow... You keep this up and I'm sending in Starguard with her Cosmic Blazing Mallet-Sama Of Infinite Anime Justice.