Lord Liaden

Re: Modern day Angels? Some time back our boardmate Kristopher started a thread, here, brainstorming a background for a NPC, an Angel of War. Interesting ideas were exchanged, and eventually Kristopher came up with an impressive writeup, which I shall link to directly: Saviel, The Scourge of Heaven BTW should you come across a copy of the 5E Champions sourcebook, Vibora Bay,

Re: CHAMPIONS OF THE NORTH -- What Would You Like To See? Or at least until spelling does.

Re: Mexican Vampires You're more than welcome to use my concept. I always assume that anything I offer on the forums is fair game (in a non-profit format, of course). I'm always flattered when someone finds something I create useful. Do you have access to any of the compilations of spells and creatures written for 5E HERO? That would make it easy to suggest some readymade things that might be appropriate to use.

Re: Normal-proofing your Bricks? Nice approach. I use a similar system, which I posted to the boards recently: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1235256 I have to think more about integrating my rules with your NCM scaling. Perhaps it could even be extended in the other direction, with supers characters buying Perks to represent them being more effective against mundane people and objects.

Re: House Rule: Instant Kill Well, not exactly, no. The Impairing and Disabling rules are used in conjunction with Hit Locations, and some gamers prefer to avoid the complexity of those. The death result is GM discretion and conditional on hitting particular locations. Coordinated attacks aren't dealt with, and with Hit Locations probably wouldn't make a difference. What I was going for was something simpler, faster, not needing Hit Locations and that could also scale up to supers if desired. I won't fault you if you just prefer Impairing for your games, though.

Re: The Echoes of Heaven House Rule Contest Got mine in.

Re: Frameworks modifying frameworks Could it be this?

Re: Mini Reviews needed on 3 books In that case I say go for it.

Re: What would you like to see in Enchanted Items?

Re: Mexican Vampires In a past campaign of mine one of my major villains was a pre-Aztec era vampire and sorceror who had masqueraded as Mictlantecuhtli, God of Death and the Underworld. Mictlantecuhtli attempted to create an empire worshipping him as a living god, but was overthrown by his own sorceror-priests and entombed in a step-pyramid lost in the jungle. In the late 20th Century he was discovered and accidentally revived by an archaeologist. Escaping into the strange modern world, Mictlantecuhtli concluded that organized crime was the quickest way to gain power. He created the identity of Miguel Mictlan and began to muscle his way into the Mexican drug trade. By the time my PC heroes encountered him, Mictlan had largely taken control of the country's drug trafficking. He had a number of bought operatives highly placed in the Mexican government and business community. Mictlantecuhtli had also revived his old cult, and his followers included other vampires, spell-casting priests, and were-jaguars. Miguel Mictlan's drugs were tainted by Mictlantecuhtli's spells to bring visions of the "god" to its users, as a way to lure vulnerable people to his cult and keep them physically as well as emotionally hooked. By this means he had expanded his powerbase into the United States, which is what brought the PCs into conflict with him. Mictlantecuhtli's ultimate plan was to gain enough of a following to overthrow the Mexican government, and then round up some of the country's teaming millions for a mighty blood sacrifice that would return the country to its pre-Columbian state, with himself as its living god. As it turned out the PCs thwarted the first part of his plan, which didn't stop him from trying to skip right to the second part.

Re: Mini Reviews needed on 3 books Corporations: Advertised as a sourcebook primarily for Dark Champions (4E version), but also usable for Champions. The primary focus of the book is a fairly detailed overview of corporations as they exist in the real world - history, definitions, function, structure, officers and so on - with some consideration of how corporate entities can be used in a game world, as allies, enemies and resources. There's also a lengthy listing and capsule descriptions for major corporations in the 4E Champions Universe. One small supervillain team, a high-tech group of corporate spies and thieves called the Corporate Raiders, is included, plus a few new equipment and vehicle writeups. If the corporate background info sounds interesting to you you'll probably enjoy the book; if not you could safely give it a pass. Shadows of the City: This is a collection of three loosely-linked adventures which can be played separately or combined in a mini-campaign. Again, these were marketed for DC, but pretty high on the "super" end of the DC scale, and all the character writeups include notes to upgrade the characters to full four-color Champions. Each of the adventures has a different tone. The first one is fairly gritty street level stuff, and the antagonist team, the Pack, are high-end normal to low-powered super in composition. The second adventure (my personal favorite) introduces the Nocturnals, a hidden race of cannibalistic mutants with greatly varying powers and appearances. They feel much like Marvel's Morlocks, but with a more gothic-horror style. The concluding adventure brings final conflict with a new master villain, the Reverend M, a religious cult leader not unlike the old Teen Titans villain Brother Blood, but with his own distinctive style; as well as his superteam backup. This is the most focussed adventure in the group. Overall I found this adventure pack to be worth buying, with good mood-rich stories, interesting characters, and plenty of reuse potential. Blood Fury: This is a pretty substantial Champions adventure revolving around Mechanon, and introducing a major scheme by him to eradicate the hated organics. It provides an alternative writeup for Mechanon, as well as a few automated operatives for him. The adventure mixes mystery-solving elements with action. IMHO this was the best of the Champions supplements published by Atlas Games. The adventure is well paced, is good for a few game sessions, it helps flesh out Mechanon's resources and modus operandi, and actually gives you an example of the sort of scheme Mechanon would attempt. I'm glad I bought this one, too.

Re: Frameworks modifying frameworks

Re: House Rule: Instant Kill And that's your right. However, I've received a lot of positive responses when I mentioned this rule here in the past, which leads me to conclude that no few HERO gamers feel that this part of the system does need fixing, at least for some games. Since HERO purports to be the Ultimate Toolkit, usable for just about any style of gameplay, IMHO it's perfectly reasonable for such an option to be included. Like all the other optional elements it's there to be used or not, however an individual group wants to play the game.

Re: What would you like to see in Enchanted Items? Going back to the old Magic Items supplement again, there were a couple of ghastly weapons created from something called "blood iron," i.e. iron mined from beneath a battlefield. The idea was that as it was used over time, the metal would gain powers based on how it was used. My favorite item from that book, a great battleaxe called Harvest Moon, was made from blood iron. It was fashioned by trolls for their wars against humans, and had absorbed the trolls' hatred of humans. Humans wounded by Harvest Moon bled at twice the normal rate. Conversely, the axe constantly exuded a Mind Control aura which caused humans to become angered toward the bearer of the axe. Actually, this talk of blood iron reminded me of another thing I really liked about the Magic Items collection: rare materials with interesting histories used in the crafting of various artifacts. IIRC these included "cold silver," silver dug from beneath a glacier, from which a magic wand of cold generation was made; a fire-powered ring of "volcanic gold," taken molten from an active volcano; and a necromantic staff of meteoric iron, which gave off emissions which sickened the target. IMO details like this add a lot of color to a writeup, which otherwise would often be just a collection of stats and specs.

Re: Mexican Vampires A similar topic came up on the boards not long ago, resulting in lots of good discussion, plenty of suggestions and examples, and links and posts for several writeups. I recommend checking it out: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50328

Re: Shapeshift: Still having trouble adjusting from 4th to 5th. Since certain folks insist on pronouncing judgements critical of the new Shape Shift , I suppose I should describe why I like it. I like the new granularity. The old Shape Shift left one to make a lot of assumptions about what was or was not covered when someone changed shape: Did a person who looked like a rock feel or smell like a rock? Does that hold true for every Shape Shift build, or did you need Limitations to not smell like a rock? What if someone tries to scan the rock for a mind? With the new Shape Shift you can define precisely how you want this effect to work in individual cases. Shape Shift now makes for easy builds to fool targeted senses, such as Sight to create holographic disguises, Radio to change the radar silhouette of your airplane, or Mental to deceive telepathic scans. I would consider Limitations on Shape Shift for this purpose to be more of a "kludge." (I hate that term, but someone else already brought it up.) In Fourth Edition one often did such things with Images, but Shape Shift has no Perception Roll associated with it as with Images, so it's an automatic success. If you just don't like the standard 5E Shape Shift (which you certainly have the right to), The Ultimate Metamorph introduced an optional "Simplified Shape Shift," which is essentially the 4E version of the Power brought into official status for 5E. So you can have your cake and eat it, too. If all that still doesn't satisfy you, I can only repeat, with the utmost respect:

Re: What would you like to see in Enchanted Items? Large, immobile structures or places with magical powers that characters have to travel to to gain their benefits, such as: pools that heal people immersed in them; gates through which one can pass to other locations or worlds; groves where nature-related spells are greatly strengthened; statues of gods at which one can can commune with the deity; desecrated graveyards where corpses can be raised to unlife; towers from whose windows one can look out across the world, or into the future or past. I don't want to claim credit for this concept, though. The old Magic Items supplement for First Ed. Fantasy HERO contained several such constructs.

Re: House Rule: Instant Kill OTOH it can force heroes who tend to blast first, ask questions later to exercise a little more caution when dealing with those fragile normal people, or suffer the game-world consequences. I've also found that this rule adds a lot of appropriate tension to hostage-taking situations. I've seen metagaming players who will try to take out a hostage-holder who has someone covered, figuring that they can save the hostage before he or she bleeds to death.

Re: Shapeshift: Still having trouble adjusting from 4th to 5th. By the new Shape Shift rules (which I happen to like BTW, although I may or may not be in the minority), Shape Shift to the Touch Sense Group will allow someone to alter their configuration to appear to have the outline, contours, and possibly texture of whatever they're imitating, to any Senses capable of perceiving such details; but not the color, scent, quality of sound and radar reflectivity, etc., so those senses can immediately tell that this thing is not what it's shaped like (assuming they're sufficiently Discriminatory). However, this change in shape is essentially cosmetic. While it may grant some small benefits based on Special Effects, it can't duplicate the game-mechanic effects of any other Powers, e.g. no major mass increase or decrease, greatly extended stretching or the like. Conversely, having a Power to, for example, Stretch yourself like Plastic Man would not require Shape Shift to give you the appearance of a physically distorted human being. That's just the Special Effect of this particular iteration of that Power.

Re: A tip OIF the hat: How to remove Crowns BTW has anyone come up with additional Crowns with their own distinctive themes? So far I've introduced The Coral Crown with powers over water and sea-life; The Glacial Crown with cold and ice powers; and I had planned to bring in The Forest Crown controlling wood and plantlife including a variety of spores and pollens, but never got around to it. Both the Coral and Glacial Crowns were worn by women, because IMO the Crowns of Krim could use some gender balance.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Thinking about this, it just strikes me as odd that Grond is one of the few classic Champions villains that didn't receive a significant powerup in the transition to Fifth Edition. Dr. D, Mechanon, Firewing, Dark Seraph, and plenty of others got major upgrades, but Grond didn't keep pace. Ironically, in Fourth Edition and earlier Grond really was just about the strongest guy around, because STR 90 was treated as the maximum for characters who weren't kaiju-class. Fifth Edition has raised the bar significantly, though. The true Hulk-class menace in publication now is Fracas, from Galactic Champions. No humanoid creature in any current book can match his STR of 120, and his Defenses and other combat capabilities are equally impressive. He serves much the same function of near-mindless wrecking machine as Grond, and he's even amphibious like Grond. The last time I used Grond I just grafted most of Fracas's character sheet onto his.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Of course we can rewrite Grond to turn him into the terror that matches his reputation; I've done that for my own campaign. I guess what's bothersome is that so many of us feel we have to, to make him fit in with other major menaces of the Champions Universe as they're officially written up. I remember the chapter in Champions Universe describing "Significant Superhuman Threats." They mention Dr. Destroyer, the Crowns of Krim, Takofanes, Gravitar, Mechanon, Firewing, Menton, Teleios, Istvatha V'han, Dr. Yin Wu, the Warlord... and Grond. Does anyone seriously believe that Grond as statted belongs in that company? If Grond was at least the top brick on Champions Earth, that might be enough, but he isn't. Both Ripper (from the VIPER sourcebook) and Gargantua are stronger as well as faster, and Ripper in particular would manhandle Grond one-on-one.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Lots of folks around here would agree with you, myself included. Grond isn't near the top level of published Champions Universe bricks. A few people have mentioned their hope that Grond will be experience a "radiation accident" upgrade in the upcoming CU update book.

Re: Variant Rule: Self Inflicted Damage I should clarify that I generally use this rule in heroic-level campaigns, or occasionally in supers campaigns where I impose qualitative differences between normal people and supers, so that it happens to normal people but not to supers. CrosshairCollie, in practice I've found that there's little bookkeeping involved. The rule is fast and easy to use; you just need to note whether or not Body damage has gotten through - you don't even roll again for self-inflicted damage. I've found that it doesn't come up that often, unless a character wants to do something that in the real world logically should hurt him, like punching a wall to borrow Amadan's example. Supreme Serpent, I would suggest that fantasy characters who attack someone in full metal armor barehanded (I'm assuming the armor has no limited coverage so that some of their blows would hit unprotected areas) deserve to knock themselves out, or at least feel some pain. More likely, though, they would just stop doing it when they started hurting themselves. Note that if you're using Hit Locations, assuming the attackers are striking with their hands the damage they take would be halved for that Hit Location. And as I mentioned, I don't recommend this rule for use with supers. As you point out, Resistant Defense functions like a Damage Shield under these circumstances, and IMO it should. Hitting something that's really hard is going to hurt in the real world, and you shouldn't have to build a Damage Shield into every wall, car and cast-iron pot in order to stat out that effect. It helps to simulate a realistic effect, and some folks want to have the option to put that into their games. I know some gamers are perfectly happy with hand-waving these situations, and if that works for them I have no problem with it. However, other GMs and/or players prefer to have details like this follow known and predictable mechanics. Self-Inflicted Damage really doesn't factor into situations often - in settings where people wear armor they usually attack each other with weapons, and otherwise hitting nonresistant flesh doesn't hurt - but on those occasions when it does come up it adds flavor. IME, IMHO, YMMV etc.

Re: Thread Linkage: New Power Ideas May I offer a couple of potential additions to the Combat section? Self-Inflicted Damage Instant Kill