Chuckg

Re: Double-Checking Assistance: X-Factor #87

re: Quicksilver quote -- watch this space for linkage to scans, will be up shortly.

(add) Like right now.

From X-FACTOR #87:

http://img230.imageshack.us/my.php?image=page061aa.jpg

http://img230.imageshack.us/my.php?image=page074bw.jpg

http://img209.imageshack.us/my.php?image=page084kz.jpg

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

There is a possibility for an organized society to remain, but that's only if the 4 billion dead are all on those continents over there, and the 2 billion survivors are all on this continent over here -- i.e., they exterminated by region, not with even distribution.

Of course, *that* runs perilously close into the territory of the players wondering if the DM just isn't living out a power fantasy by blowing up every country except his own, or that one that's his favorite, or whichever.

Edit -- plus, if the 4 billion or so died by orbital plasma bombardment, no corpses -- just ash.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

> Finally there's no reason why the aliens couldn't manufacture the evidence

> we attacked first as a propaganda machine.

For whose benefit? Is there an Interstellar Red Cross they have to be trying to lie to or something? The entire point of these guys is that they have the mojo to arsewhip the combined armed forces of Earth to teh point where our governments are gone, our society is gone, TWO-THIRDS OF OUR POPULATION is gone.

When you overmatch the other guy this badly, who the hell needs to head-fake him? Just run him over. The Rock does not need to put up a propaganda campaign to help him beat me up, he just reaches out and unscrews my head with one hand, 'cause he's the damn Rock and I'm... somebody a lot smaller.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

> I appreciate your point of view, but I was pulling the "nuke" thing out

> of the air. But you're assuming it's one of our nukes that gets

> launched. China, Russia, India, France, and other countries have their

> own nukes to use if they feel threatened. They may not have the same

> safeguards we do.

I addressed that point, actually.

The US is actually the country in the world /least/ paranoid about generals or government officials going rogue on it. Dictatorships like China, or the old Soviet Union, are the *most* paranoid. For example, the old Soviet Union nuclear weapons launch authenticiation procedures made ours look downright forgiving.

[snip]

> But they're not restricted to nukes. What happens when an

> ambassador gets murdered? It's what triggered WWI.

That's a vast oversimplification, actually. It was the catalyst that ignited a situation that was already looming on the horizon anyway, yes, but it no more was the sole cause of WWI than a spark is the sole impetus behind a bonfire. Y'all need *fuel*, too.

/But/ we digress here, majorly.

Especially since WWI was not fought with nuclear weapons, and trust me, the logic that starts wars and the logic that starts NUCLEAR wars are two totally different books with two totally different sets of pages. Nuclear warfare doctrine, in one sentence, is "We *never* want to actually use these damn things, we only keep them around in case we get nuked first."

[snip]

> If China attacked first the rest of the world is guilty of association. If

> humans demonstrate the willingness to use such weapons then it's

> better to take care of all of them first.

You are postulating aliens that are not only entirely unable to grasp that Earth is not a one-world state, but also unable to grasp the concept that one nation state is not responsible for the actions of another, especially one is not allied with. At this point, you are running them as either dumber than the Signs aliens, or simply not rational actors.

I might also point out that while China is hardly overburdened with morals, they *are* rational actors -- the depth of stupidity it takes to /start/ a fight with an alien race that has a starfleet orbiting you, at Earth's current tech level, is a depth deeper than the Marianas Trench. Even the /dumbest/ Star Trek fanboy can figure out 'do not try to nuke the giant mothership hovering over your planet when they're trying to be friendly with you', and contrary to popular belief, the collective wisdom of the Earth's nuclear powers is not, in fact, materially inferior to the bottom IQ curve of the Star Trek fanboy community.

You keep talking about 'beliefs challenged'. Contrary to your, well, belief, not everybody with a strong faith in something (whether religious or otherwise) is a suicidal fanatic when that faith is crossed. And attacking an entire alien race of unknown powers is, literally, suicidal.

Quite simply, no government in the world that actually has a respectable nuclear arsenal (North Korea has a few bombs, yes. It does not have ICBMs yet.) is this stupid. And even if you invent one that *is*, or give North Korea ICBMs, do you know what the other governments of the world have as their rational next move?

Aliens -- "You attacked us!"

Governments -- "Not us! That guy!"

Aliens -- "You're all in it together!"

Governments -- "No we're not, and to prove it, WE'LL NUKE HIM!"

*China, the US, everybody etc., throws nukes at North Korea*

Governments -- "See? We're on your side! We killed the guys that nuked you! Just like we would have if he nuked us!"

Aliens -- "You're still all in on it anyway!"

Governments -- "... apparently, North Korea was not the only psycho fanatic in this equation..."

Basically, you don't want your players wondering WTF they are trapped on a world where the governments, both human and alien, are acting like the Knights of the Dinner Table. Which is what you're saying, basically.

Re: [Compilation] Champions Campaign Journals/Logs/etc...

UNITY Prime:

http://chuckg.schtuff.com/main

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

Plus a more general logic -- specifically, "if you are capable of walking on the surface of Earth without a space suit and without dying, then your home planet was obviously quite similar to Earth".

Now, I *can* think of a possibility where a race could be entirely at home in our atmosphere but totally unable to handle our gravity -- but that possibility is 'the race has long since stopped living on the surface of planets and is a zero-gee spacer culture'. (i.e. -- they evolved on a planet quite like Earth, but it's been so long since they've lived on it they've lost the ability to adapt to its gravity. They've still obviously kept the same air and air pressure in their habitat life-support systems, though.)

But the problem with *this* is that zero-gee spacer cultures do not invade and occupy planets like Earth. They'd simply be strip-mining our asteroid belt. AAMOF, given that Earth totally lacks the ability to stop any hypothetical Spacer culture from stealing all the valuable minerals in our asteroid belt, on Titan, etc, etc., ripping off systems without space-flight in this manner could be considered the ultimately profitable and safe form of space piracy.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

Air pressure. If your lungs can handle Earth's atmospheric pressure, then your home planet's atmospheric pressure has to have been comparable. Your planet's surface atmospheric pressure depends on several factors, chief among them being its mass.

(Although Earth did have that oversized moon to skim off a lot of our atmosphere in its formative period -- without it, we'd be Venus II.)

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

IIRC, zero-gee causes actual deterioration of the bones (something to do with proper calcium replenishment), which was the main problem faced by the Mir guys.

Living in half your usual gravity, however, wouldn't do a damn thing to yoru skeleton, it would simply make your muscles all flabby. You might need reconditioning or physical therapy when you go back home, but you should always be able to go back home. "A Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" was mainly talking aobut the problems of people *born* in low-G environments going on down -- Manny was operating in a gravity field six times what he was used to.

Note also that if you're using anything but the rubberiest of SF, aliens who can breathe Earth's air have to have evolved on planets at least roughly equivalent to size as Earth, which means they'll have roughly equivalent gravity.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

1) Earth started it. If aliens were unknown on Earth (or plausibly deniable) then the sudden appearance of clear proof that Earth and humanity is not special would throw a lot of strongly held beliefs into question. When that happens' date=' some people will go to any length to defend them. It's possible in such a situation a rogue general tried to put a nuke on one of the alien ships. The armada retaliated and decided we were barbarians who needed to be reeducated or annihilated.[/quote']

 

Only if you're using bad action movie plotting. IRL, there are multiple and separate reasons why this scenario is as implausible as heck.

 

1) Generals simply do not have the arming keys for nukes. (And this is *more* true overseas than in the US -- the US is actually the least paranoid country about its generals going rogue. You can imagine what China feels like about that problem, and the lengths they go to to guard against it.)

 

2) Nuclear launch officers undergo the most rigorous psych eval imaginable. Given that your scenario posits the sort of irrational fanatic who blows stuff up when confronted with too much opposition to his religion or ideology... ummm, the sort of nutjobs who do abortion clinic bombings do not, contrary to oodles of bad movie stereotypes, attain 4-star general rank. This isn't just a guy who's a little cracked, this is somebody who is completely freakin' deranged, Osama bin Laden style. Osama bin Laden does not pass psych evals given by anybody who is not a complete idiot.

 

2a) Even at DEFCON-1, which is the only state of alertness at which it is possible to arm and fire a nuke without Presidential authorization, 4-star generals (the individual theater commanders, in fact) are the lowest rank with the arming codes.(*)

 

3) Even assuming you got past 1 and 2, there is no such thing as a nuclear missile that can be armed by a single man.(**) The absolute minimum, even for the President, is two. (Only the President has the authority to order a launch under normal circumstances... but to guard against the possibility that he's having a stroke or a fit, his launch order must be confirmed by one of several people on a very short list of names. The commanding general of NORAD is one of those names, but only in the event that the US is attacked first.)

 

3a) Even assuming that some general has gone psycho -- and we have already violated the suspension of disbelief in assuming this much -- they still don't personally turn the keys. Launch officers do. Are *they* all psycho as well? Note -- in the US, it takes a minimum of two to five people (two for land-based silos, five for subs, last I heard) to all turn the keys in unison before the bird can fly.

 

And one of the things they pick those guys for is the ability to tell when their chain of command has lost it, and to refuse to launch without further confirmation from the rest of the chain of command. That's why we use silo officers and keys at all. If we wanted the birds to be able to fly simply when one guy pushed a button, we'd only *HAVE* one guy and one button. The entire point of having humans in the loop at every level is that *ALL* of them have to go insane before insanity can launch the nuke.

 

Sorry, but this particular cliche has always really griped the heck out of me, even if it is a movie classic as far back as 'Dr. Strangelove' and 'Fail-Safe'. It's a *campy* classic, and unless you want a campy game, don't use it, that's my point.

 

 

 

(*) Exception -- captains of ballistic missile submarines, who are obviously intended to be thousands of miles away from HQ when it's time to launch, and don't have time to go back.

 

However, the safeguard *here* is that the missiles in submarines are not capable of being *targeted* by the submarine crew -- the missile warheads are pre-programmed using a geographic coordinate system that is *not* standard latitude and longitude, and the missile sub's crew doesn't have the map key. If the missile has to be retargeted at sea, they have to get the target coordinates via radio (or ELF) from the shore, and the coordinates are a purely arbitrary string of #'s to the sub crew. HQ is picking the target, the sub is merely going "ok, we're launching at target coordinates 12-23-999-1-slash-7-alpha-5-5-5... whereever the hell that is."

 

i.e. -- a boomer has only two choices -- launch (assuming all five officers w/ keys go turny simultaneously) at their pre-programmed targets (which are God only knows where), or don't launch. The third choice, 'launch at a target we pick', isn't really possible for them.

 

(**) Add -- while there may be backpack nukes, and this does get you around the 'multiple officers/entire chain of command must go insane', we run into the same problem of 'and you got the Presidential arming code how'? They're obviously not stored in the armed condition.

 

As well as a new problem... the aliens cannot plausibly misinterpret one lone idiot with a backpack or terrorist-built nuke as an official attack by the government or governments of Earth, given that said governments have a much bigger and better nuclear *arsenal*, and don't have to go for the improvised or pony bomb in a bucket approach.

 

Like, if half the US Navy attacks me, I can be quite sure that the US government authorized it. If six sailors in a patrol boat shoot up my waterfront, it is much more plausible to assume that six guys have just gone nuts, as opposed to immediately leaping to the conclusion that the President has ordered a strike on my coastline... 'cause if he really had ordered one, well, he's got a lot more than six guys in a patrol boat.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

I thought we were talking about a 4-Color here?

 

Sorry guys, but I think ChuckG and I have managed to lay the specefic issue of the dangerous ex machnia possibilites of this "smart" Earth race vs. rewriting the canon, to rest.

 

Or, is there more that needs to be addressed?

Whether or not the DM in question actually *is* going for 4-color, or serious sci-fi, or silly sci-fi, or whatnot?

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

On the flip side, one should not taunt PCs by creating big shiney toys that they then are prevented, via plot fiat, from ever using.

At least, not in the serious sci-fi genre. (The four-color superhero genre has supervillain plot devices get locked in the evidence vault and never seen again quite often, but genre conventions differ from place to place, and so do player expectations).

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

> However, the ultimate reason still remains: You merely need to provide a

> reason for the players to WANT to not abuse these advantages, by

> providing significant enough deterrents and consequences, while

> simultaneously allowing for them to follow other options.

Or you could simply not have the options available in the first place.

You are talking to a man who has heard of players killing themselves with a falling anvil trap, when the trap was 'cleverly' concealed by a big rope hanging down and a big neon sign next to it saying "DO NOT PULL THE ROPE."

I might also point out that there is no way, in the scenario you posit, for the players to find out about the fusion/shield interaction except by trial and error. Given that their first error will destroy the planet, this is obviously not workable.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

> I'm sorry, I wasn't sure what you first reponse was towards.

The whole 'their shields are so advanced that nobody's figured out the shield interaction problem' thing.

(As well as the 'if none of the advanced civilizations in the universe have ever figured this out, how the hell did EARTH figure it out?' thing. Seeing as how the planet ain't blowed up yet, we obviously didn't find out the hard way...')

[snip]

> Don't forget: Just because you are really advanced, doesn't mean you

> know everything, or even a lot. There are still tons of little things that

> can add up, such as "Holy Crap! Our shields go nova when in the

> presence of fusion energy? Why didn't the R&D geeks check this!"

> *Adjunt meekly raises tentacle* "Budget cuts sir, combined with the

> fact that fusion weapons are so outdated anyway..."

This works absolutely fine if you are doing the comedy genre. Indeed, if you're doing a comedy game, reaching this level of performance gets you an A+.

If you are doing serious science fiction, however, this is the point at which your players will probably be throwing their dice bags at your head. Or blowing the planet up just because they'll never get another chance to do it in a game. (Even in SF campaigns, the chances to play with planet-busting force are few and far between. Some players would never forgive themselves for passing up such an opportunity, even if it /was/ the planet their character was standing on, and even if it /would/ prematurely end the campaign. After all, new campaigns will be along soon enough. Campaigns that actually let them blow up the world in a chain reaction, however, somewhat rarer.)

> I don't care how you spell the situation, the only correct spelling for

> using a weapon that kills you as well as your enemy as anything other

> than a left is S-T-U-P-I-D.

And my point was that when you're at this level of desperation, any weapon potentially available on the game map will be tried at least once by the players, until they find something that works.(1) So if you have something you don't want them to try, don't fudge up overcomplicated or silly reasons why they don't work, but simply don't make them available on the game map.

Doing such may, however, require rewriting certain elements of the CU to be less sophisticated than they normally are, or simply writing them out of the plot entirely.

I also might repeat that if you give player characters the ability to blow up the planet, there's a 50-50 chance that somebody might do it anyway, just because they've never actually had a chance to blow up a planet before.

(1) For that matter, if you leave a fusion cannon lying around the game map, some player is probably going to use it at least once on a crippled kobold, even if they could've just beaten that kobold to death with a rock. After all, how often do you get a chance to use a fusion cannon?

(Edit -- no, I am not a munchkin, or a mindless gun bunny, or etc. OTOH, y'all don't *need* to be one of those to still feel the temptation. Besides, if you're being silly enough that your players want to throw their dice bags at your head, they might also want to take the opportunity to slam the Reset button and move on to another game... and by putting a big "SHOOT HERE TO END THE WORLD" opportunity right there in front of them, well, that's the reset button!)

Re: Geometric Spacetime

Hey, even if it's actually as fallacious as phlogiston, you could still do some wicked fun science *fiction* campaigns with this thing.

From Howard Tayler's blog, for those of you who have more mathematics than I, presented without comment.

He's linking to another post he saw on Slashdot.

The original website that started all this discussion is here.

An excerpt of his commentary:

A Schlocker emailed me a link to this PDF which describes a “solution†to some of the underlying cosmological puzzles of our day — puzzles which we’ve fudged solutions for using Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and singularities.

 

I think I can follow about 20% of it. Some of you can follow more. A few of you might be able to wrap your heads around the whole thing.

 

(Yes, this got slashdotted — I suppose you could wade through the comments over there to try and make more sense of it, but that’s as hard on my brain as any mathematics ever were.)

 

The conclusions suggested by the geometric spacetime model are pretty stunning:

1) the Universe is not between 12 and 14 billion years old. It’s pretty much eternal.

2) There was no “Big Bang.â€

3) There is no “Dark Matter†or “Dark Energy.â€

4) Red shift of distant galaxies is not caused by movement, but by a difference between their time vector and ours.

5) From our point of view, there is a “cosmological horizon†(see page 28 of the PDF), beyond which we cannot see. Any objects on time vectors offset from ours by 90 degrees or more are invisible from here

6) Black holes are not singularities, and do not locally conserve energy. They feed white holes (the cores of active galaxies) that are 180 degrees removed from the black hole’s local time vector.

7) We need more data (MUCH more data) in order to confirm the validity of the new model.

 

If all of this sounds like science fiction, well, that’s because I’m a science-fiction writer. Good. It’s working. Go check out the PDF — it reads more like real science, and the math will give you a good scare. But there are pictures, so we all ought to be okay.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

If they're so advanced that even other starfaring nations haven't figured it out, *AND* Earth has lost so much of its stuff, then the game is not rationally winnable.

[snip]

> The point overall is that you just need to come up with a

> semi-plausible excuse as to why people would CHOOSE not to use

> fullest assets of this technology.

Unfortunately, 'we're holding back' is not even a remotely semi-plausible excuse... not when aliens have conquered the entire planet and killed two-thirds of it. At this point, you use everything you got, 'cause your situation is spelled D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-E.

And don't forget, these are /player characters/ we are talking about here. They are not going to listen to any DM suggestions to hold back. They will gladly scrounge up and use anything you've left as potentially available on the game map. So, what the DM needs to do is come up with why certain things are not potentially available, as opposed to saying that certain things *are* potentially available but everybody is just ignoring them.

Otherwise, you get the Sunnydale Effect, aka 'the reason the players are necessary to save the place is because everybody except them has the IQ of a carrot'. Some players don't like this.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

> As a note on the tech difficulties............ Why use everything to its full

> strength?

Because the alien invaders have already conquered the planet and killed two-thirds of the Earth's population. At this point, who holds back anything?

> Think for a moment. In lots of situation, people and nations (stupidly

> or wisely) do not commit their fullest resources/arsenal/potential to a

> conflict, for a variety of reasons (stupid or wise). One example would

> be Vietnam [snip]

Vietnam is not the proper analogy for this conflict. (At least, not from the standpoint of the *Earth*.) World War III is. The sort of World War III where cities have already been nuked.

At this point, Earth throws everything it got, because they are fighting for nothing less than the survival of the human species.

[snip]

> Worried about the fusion cannons being an ex machina?

'Fusion cannons' was just one example. In canon, Arcadia isn't exactly known as a fusion cannon manufacturing center.

What it *IS* known as is a society that had CU-superhero-level-tech over sixty thousand years ago, and hasn't exactly been burning all its libraries down in the interim. In addition to their having inherited fragments of Progenitor technology. In addition to their habits of spying on the world, and collecting interesting things therefrom. In addition to their having major-league telepaths with which to do said spying, in addition to major-league lots of other stuff. Therefore, Arcadia can be reasonably presumed to have the potential capacity for any technology that has shown up anywhere on Earth-Champions, save possibly for the ultimate top-end one-of-a-kind unique-o items, such as the Mandralagore (they had to salvage the original, they couldn't build one).

This has an obvious potential effect on an 'alien invaders' campaign, if only for the simple reason that instead of the resistance fighters having to scrounge guns, Builder Zadin of the Empyreans could easily set up some secret underground robot mass production factories (and VIPER canonically had this capacity, i.e,. the Empyreans could easily do it if they ever wanted -- they don't do it now as they have no need) for building everything from cruise missiles to tanks.

> Fine. Have them react with the invaders' shields in a catastrophic

> manner: the energy principles involved means that the shields undergo

> a significant exergonic reaction when in the presence of fusion

> bombardment. I.E. They explode. They explode big enough to pose a

> real danger to destroying the entire planet. Like in the "Dune" setting,

> in which the Holtzman shields went nova when hit with a laser.

> This would discourage the use of these cannons except when in space,

> but boy oh boy when it is used........ your players will be

> cheering.

Actually, my players would point out that any race whose shield technologies had this kind of weakness would have never lived long enough to conquer Earth, as they would have been resoundingly obliterated in their first or second interstellar war.

The 'Dune' fudge worked because Dune had a monolithic empire in place *before* the development of the Holtzman shield -- the only kind of warfare they really worried about was inter-House warfare, wherein nukes are entirely verboten. And the Spacing Guild had a monopoly on space transport, so there *was* no interstellar space combat. What you call 'special circumstances'.

This is the CU, however, where neither condition exists, and whereupon the only logical result of having starship shields that explode when hit with fusion cannons is "As soon as anybody figures this out, the next fleet they send to kill you uses nothing but fusion cannons, and happily blows up your entire starfleet, all your starbases, and all your planets. From hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. Then they laugh."

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

> The races of the fleet will view humanity as less than barbarians. [snip]

Ah, racist supremacist ****tards then.

> One or two of the races: big-time superiority complex, if I go with

> these races, that's a definite. Most though will just be soldiers

> following the chain of command.

Remember that "I was just following orders!" is not a moral defense. Your players will.

[snip]

> Unfortunatley I don't have Galactic Champions; I don't recall if Hidden

> Lands says whether or not the Empryans of the modern day know

> how to reassemble the Mangralagore or not.

Given that the Empyreans spent the time between the end of the modern superhero age (2020) and the return of magic (Kolvel Event, 3001) in hibernation, they really ain't likely to have learned how in the interim. Especially given that V'Han attacked the GalChamps era within a year of the Kolvel Event, and that the last time the Mandralagore was seen was over 20 millenia ago or whatnot.

> If so then the survivors might be in the process of that, assuming the

> Lemurians let them anywhere near it.

The Lemurians built it for killing the Empyreans with. Their first shot with it backfired and blew up most of Lemuria instead. The Mandalagore wasn't seen again after that until the GalChamps era -- apparently, the Empyreans sifted through the rubble of Lemuria to pick up all the bits and carried them back to their equivalent of Warehouse 23. In the interim, they also appear to have fixed the bug. Then again, the Empyreans do have the better technologists, plus lots more time to tinker.

> I was thinking Lemuria woud sit this one out, hiding and hoping they

> could avoid notice, even though their magic might be very useful

> against the aliens. The Empyreans, meanwhile, did not expect to be

> detected and targeted during the bombardment so did not take

> complete precautions.

Eh? The Empyreans are grade-A isolationists who have been hiding from the world since before the Turakian Age. Doctor Destroyer can't find Arcadia, it's got so much cloaking tech on it. Nama can't find Arcadia even though VIPER knows it exists and have been looking!

Again, you might want to rewrite the Empyreans for your timeline, as your timeline has them operating well below their usual norms.

> Ideally I'd like to use the standard Champions timeline as the beginning

> of the game (though obviously it diverges from there pretty

> significantly) so I'll have to consider this some more.

Another thing to consider is that if you're using the standard Champions Universe, a lot of the galaxy map has already been filled in -- and since these guys obviously aren't the Varanyi, Perseids, Ackalians, Thorgons, Xenovores, etc, etc, then precisely who is they and where did they come from?

Also, now that Earth has had the bejeebers blown out of it, what stops any one of the other spacefaring powers from showing up and going 'Thanks for weakening it, now we'll finish the job!' I mean, the way you describe these guys, they are *not* in shape to survive a full-court press by *another* invading starfleet that *does* have a nice supply link to home... and the Varanyi and Istvatha V'Han, to name two, could arsewhip pretty much anyone who isn't themselves at ATRI 12 or higher.

> The truth is, I want the Empyreans to figure strongly into the story.

> I'm thinking of the average Empyrean being nore more powerful than

> your standard 350 point hero. That just leads me back to the

> question: okay, then how big would my alien fleet need to be to

> overwhelm them?

Depending on how much you're willing to lose in the process, you could 'overwhelm' them with a race as not-formidable as the Hzeel... you'd just have to be willing to accept massive casualties, and they'd have to be really stupid. The one Empyrean weakness is that they're *not* very numerous. There's only several thousand or so, after all. (Not counting the ones stuck in Silence, but they're a non-factor.)

The problem here is that the credible storyline options pretty much reduce either to "they never found Arcadia" or "they nuked it from space so hard that the entire place is vapor". This leaves your Empyrean PCs either with a solid support base and a lot of powerful NPCs, as well as a secret resistance HQ that can then proceed to organize surviving humanity and teach 'em how to make fusion cannons -- or else it leaves them homeless refugees whose leaders are now all vapor. (It's quite possible to nuke Empyreans to death, it's just not easy.)

There's not much of a middle ground, really. Gradually wearing Arcadia down doesn't work -- Empyreans have thousands of years of experience, and concentrate very much on survival. i.e. -- as soon as they see that they're seriously losing a siege of attrition, they'll pull the periscope down and run away to somewhere else, leaving Arcadia behind to blow up in the invaders' faces... and with the Empyrean tech base, you'd have to seriously tech up the invaders, to the point where they're not really beatable by Earth anymore, to say that said invaders would be entirely capable of preventing Empyreans with prep time from leaving an enclosure that they wanted to leave. (Given that their tech base can potentially be 'anything invented on Earth-Champions plus half of the Progenitors' stuff -- which most definitely includes teleporters!)

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

First thought that comes to my mind -- these guys are cut off from home, running entirely minus backup or any logistic support that they can't scrounge or make themselves, and the first thing they do is pick a fight rather than ask Earth's cooperation, and the second thing they do is slag most of Earth's existing industrial infrastructure and 65% of its available labor force? When most of them can't even breathe the air here unfiltered?

These guys either have gaping ideological psych lims (racist supremacy, innate savagery, drow-style civilization built so much on backstabbing that they can't even grasp the concept of 'asking nicely', etc.) or else they is just plain dumb. Even a species as amoral as the Ferengi can grasp the concept of 'the less stable your bargaining position, the more politely you ask'.

Second thought that comes to my mind -- umm, the Empyreans are capable of reassembling the /Mandragalore/. You know, ye ancient Lemurian planet-cracking weapon o' doom, that in the default Champions timeline was such a threatening force that Istvatha V'Han's entire invasion force -- the Galactic Champions one, i.e, the one that actually remembered to arrive in overwhelming #'s instead of pussyfooting around -- backed off from. (Not to mention that even without the Mandralagore, the Empyreans are possessed of a very nicely high tech level, as well as big fat loads o' metahuman power... and if Arcadia got bombarded from space, I somehow imagine their usual 'Prime Directive' policy would be rapidly replaced by a 'Screw this, let's just have Builder Zadin teach humanity how to make man-portable fusion cannons' policy.). Y'all might want to patch up your timeline a bit to explain why these Empyreans aren't quite as buff as the regular model. Or something.

Re: Ethics for mentalists

That might make an useful background detail for a tarnished Bronze/Iron Age campaign. The mentalist merrily went about having fun sex' date=' making the partner think it was their own idea, because "no harm no foul," right? Until of course they destroyed someone's life. So now the mentalist is much, much more careful.[/quote']

 

This sort of background detail actually makes me sorry that Headhunter wasn't carried over into 5e. (Well, yes, he was reincarnated as 'Witchfinder', but with a different focus.)

Re: Using Supervillain Psych Lims

Subject to GM intrepetation' date=' but I would portray irredeemibly evil as meaning, among other things, that the NPC has a real blind spot when it comes to the noblier virtues. Being totally selfish, villain might have trouble realizing concepts like self sacrafice, courage, and never giving up.[/quote']

 

The classic literary example is, natch, Lord of the Rings. Sauron's inability to conceive of a mindset that would *not* grasp the One Ring for its power, but would instead seek to remove it from the world, is the reason he lost at a time where he had everything going for him.

 

"He supposes that we are all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he would himself have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have /no one/ in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream. In which no doubt you will see our good fortune and our hope. For imagining war he has let loose war, believing that he has no time to waste; for he that strikes the first blow, if he strikes it hard enough, may need to strike no more. So forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended. Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded; neither the Ring nor bearer could long have eluded him. But now his eye gazes abroad rather than near his home..."

 

-- Gandalf, _The Two Towers_

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

Re: infrastructure...

OK, since these guys have crossed interstellar space and all, presumably they have handy-dandy fusion or antimatter power plants. This leaves out choking their fuel supply.

Likewise, since they presumably are nowhere near stupid enough to use Earth slaveworkers in factories for producing their bang-bang tech... after all, that would require them to teach at least some humans how it *worked*... we can posit that either their advanced manufacturing is all done at the homeworld and shipped here, or it's done in nice big automated factories.

Now, if the auto-facs are kept in the asteroid belt and use metal ores mined from said belt for production -- which would make the most sense -- y'all are kinda screwed, Earthlings. OTOH, if they're kept groundside, they're potential targets. So fudge up a reason to keep them groundside. Note, 'bureaucratic stupidity', aka 'cost-effectiveness', is a viable reason. *g*

OK, so we've covered fuel, boots, and bullets. What's left? Food.

Presumably, the aliens are eating local food, even if they process raw grain or raw meat into incomprehensible alien glop. I say 'presumably' because if they can't even eat the local nutrients, WTF did they come here at all? Strategic location in an interstellar war? Occupy one of the outer planets or the belt. Denial of resources to the enemy? That argues for a Base-Delta-Zero (bombarding the surface of the planet into lava), not an occupation force. So, whatever they're having ranched or grown for them, poison it. Steal it. Or just set it on fire.

And last, we come to 'stuff for export'. Since the aliens came here and occupied the planet, but didn't blow it up, presumably there's something here they want. Whatever that stuff is, it's presumably being harvested, mined, etc., and boxed up for shipping back home, aka 'colonial exploitation of resources'. Now this is a logistical stream you can have fun screwing up -- after all, if the aliens can't get a sufficient return on investment for ths planet, maybe they'll go away. The possible variants on this are endless, so long as you don't get truly silly and do something like 'V' did. ("They're here for our water!" "Water? Isn't that harvestable by the megaton from comets, the rings of Saturn, etc?" "Sssssh!")

Re: Best supporting non-super character in comics?

It was an Assistant Editor's Month gag, and a dream sequence.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

Timothy Zahn's 'Blackcollar' SF novels posited a rather effective form of conquest.

In 'Blackcollar', the aliens weren't really all that numerous. (They did enjoy the usual benefits of interstellar travel, big honkin' laser cannons, etc., but there were nowhere near enough aliens to actually hold down a subject population as large as Earth's.)

However, since they had a process by which human beings could be permanently conditioned into loyal slaves, they didn't need to be. Hence, the bulk of their routine administrative functions and occupation troops were filled by humans, humans who were permanently brainlocked to be incapable of disloyalty or betrayal. (Even if they were still occasionally capable of stupidity, laziness, and error, but hey, that's sentience for you.)

The series ended when a method for undoing loyalty-conditioning was finally discovered. It took two books before that happened, tho, and actually kinda happened by accident.

(Baen Books is selling the entire series in ebook omnibus form for about $5 if you're interested. Check Webscriptions.)

Edit -- although I find Eric Flint's & K.D. Wentworth's "The Course of Empire" to be a much superior alien conquest story, if slightly less useful for mining for gaming ideas... and it's available online for *free*, from the Baen Free Library.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

OK, off the top of my head, some classic methods in science fiction, with my own comments at the end:

1) The Alien Horde will all go away if you whack the Overlord.

1a) Variant: He who defeats the leader becomes the new leader of the Alien Horde.

Comments -- while both of these are sci-fi classics, they're also campy as hell. If you want a game with realistic thoroughness of concept, avoid like the plague. OTOH, if Silver Age is what you're going for, then these are just fine. It's all about what the players are willing to suspend disbelief on.

2) You don't need to defeat the aliens yourself, you just need to get the word out to those even bigger aliens over there.

Comments -- this reduces the goal of the game to "find a way to steal a starship, find a way to learn how to fly it, then it becomes a Star Hero campaign until you find the Galactic Federation and get their help."

Benefits of this approach are that it's one of the most realistic ways to get rid of an alien starfleet... by calling in another alien starfleet. Suspension of disbelief issues here are minimal. Drawbacks are that it's not exactly a valiant resistance fighters campaign if you spend the main amount of camera focus not valiantly resistance fighting, but instead doing a 'Farscape'-like saga navigating across a hostile galaxy in your little spaceship, until you reach the season-ender of finally arriving in Federation space.

3) The aliens aren't all evil, and if you can arrange for some Alien Regime Change, the new alien leaders will make peace with Earth.

Comments -- again, this is fairly high on the realism meter. If you make ye alien horde some interstellar banana republic dictatorship, then you can plausibly say that the current reigning dictator has rebel factions among his own people that already hate his ***. Perhaps that's why they're invading Earth in the first place... the old trick of 'find an external enemy to prop up your shaky rule'. Possibilities for this situation involve 'contacting the alien rebels and arranging a two-front war', 'if we simply hold out long enough the popular opinion on the alien home front will go against the war'(*), or a simple 'whack the dictator and enough of his inner circle to prevent an orderly succession, and the aliens will be too busy playing Throne War to finish up their Earth attack'. (This differs from scenario #1 in that there are actual analogues in history, as compared to the 'Scorpion King' or 'Chronicles of Riddick' ending.)

(*) Which has the odd effect of making this an interstellar version of the Vietnam War, with Earth as the North Vietnamese.

Drawbacks -- maybe your players won't *like* RP'ing the Vietnam War from the other side, or maybe they hate the idea of Earth being invaded by some interstellar banana republic. I dunno yer players, so you tell me.

4) The alien fleet is tough, but brittle -- once you get past the outer shell, you kills them easy.

This isn't so much an item as a category, so we break it down:

4a) The alien ships are great for bombarding from orbit, but they truly suck in space-to-space combat -- as soon as you figure out how to get an effective attack back up the gravity well, they die like flies.

This would mean that ye alien horde was not invading you with his best navy units, but was instead hitting only with troop transports and assault ships and suchlike. This is actually a defensible argument... after all, Earth is a primitive rock with no space travel. Drawbacks are, of course, that you then need to BS a really good explanation for why, after Earth has finally killed the 12th Planetary Bombardment Auxiliaries, the aliens don't then send over their 1st Invincible Superdreadnaught Squadron to Wave Motion Gun the entire planet into a radioactive glass beach ball.

4b) The alien ships are really really powerful, but there's only a few of them -- if you can figure out how to hit them from the inside, it only takes a few successes.

This is called "figuring out how to sneak you some nuclear satchel charges onto some alien supply shuttles", aka "take out the mothership". It's a bit of an 'Independence Day' ending, only without the part where the entire fleet dies to one computer virus. Since it can plausibly take a while for the players to a) find enough nukes and find ways to sneak them onto enough alien supplh shuttles, this might work.

5) By the time this mess is over, everybody will be superhuman.

Whatever beefed up the players into metahumans is reproducible -- only, the resistance don't have enough stuff to reproduce it wide-scale yet. The campaign then becomes a quest for the PCs to go out and beg, borrow, steal, or loot enough stuff so that the resistance can perform the Power-Making Process on a mass production level. Once everybody's a super-soldier, the aliens are of course smoked like beef jerky.

Drawbacks are, natch, that once you've done the end arc, the campaign can't really continue.

6) The Quest For The Power Booster Rod.

In this scenario, whatever made the players superhumans is not reproducble -- but if you can find the big macguffin, then their powers can get boosted from their current 'super-soldier' level all the way up to 'Fat Cracklin' Cosmic Power O' the Gods' level. Once they've all morphed into the JLA or the Authority in power-level, the alien fleet can be trashed in one glorious final battle o' ultraviolence.

Drawbacks are, natch, that once you've finished said glorious final battle, the campaign ends and those PCs are retired. OTOH, players generally tend to like storylines where they end up as demigods, so if you can fudge up a plausible and entertaining reason *why* this happened, then go for it.