Lord Liaden

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game Regarding the disparate power levels of characters in team comics, Theron Bretz wrote a thoughtful and practical article in Digital Hero #3, "Pointless Champions," on how to make this function in a game format. There's a substantial free sample from the article here on the website: http://www.herogames.com/digitalHero/Samples/dh03pointlesschampions.htm

Re: Golden Age Champions Quite understandable, but hopefully a little bit of info about the Russian Front, the French Resistance and the Axis-occupied countries, as well as a few NPCs from the other Allied nations, will also find their way in there.

Re: Help with Werewolves And here's another: http://members.tripod.com/~HRClark333/Wrules.html

Re: Perils On Planet X That grand old pulp HERO campaign website, The Empire Club, features extensive and entertaining campaign logs covering several different pulp subgenres. One extended story arc dealt with this kind of "planetary romance" story - very cool: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/2687/ad23-29.html

Re: Silver Age Villains? I recall a Saturday-morning cartoon series from the 1980's featuring a 30-foot purple gorilla: The Great Grape Ape.

Re: Silver Age Villains? Villains with a recurring identifying motif, something that's a signature of their crime and often the clue that leads to their capture: always leaving riddles or puzzles pointing to their next crime; crimes involving toys, jokes and gag items, articles of clothing or the like; animal-themed or -powered villains whose activities revolve around similar animals. Old-world aristocratic villains with castles or manor houses and various minions, and titles such as Lord, Baron or Count. Villains who use high-tech or magical gadgets - often a gun-like device - with a single Special Effect, such as light, sound, adhesives, alchemical transmutations, etc. And of course, Nazis. Usually super-scientists who are WW II refugees or their descendants, or the product of experiments by same.

Re: Mystic Masters campaign (old vs. new) Never said I wouldn't do that; just that since it would be a house rule, I can't recommend it to others over the official version.

Re: Mystic Masters campaign (old vs. new) Although I have a great deal of respect for Allan Varney, I never really agreed with the double-effect Mental Powers premise from Mystic Masters. I can't recall seeing MP being portrayed as more innately effective in that supers subgenre than any other, except for supermages' ability to make normal people forget having seen manifestations of the supernatural. Then again, at the power level where most of those characters operate, they can usually rustle up the points to make that happen even with standard MP rules. OTOH I greatly prefer the Clairsentience-based Astral Form from Mystic Masters to the later Duplication/ Desolid designs. IMHO it perfectly captured how Astral Forms are depicted in comics, particularly Dr. Strange (the king of AF), without having to modify how the base Power works. If not for the default rule in 5E that Mental Powers can't be targeted via Clairsentience, I would recommend the MM approach for this type of campaign.

Re: Villian Relocation Good call on Morningstar, and I forgot about Zorran. Black Paladin is French, not British, but that works even better for twshulz's purposes. It occurs to me that since no one knows the origins or motivations of the Monster, it could appear in Europe as easily as America. And who better to haunt Notre Dame Cathedral or the caverns beneath the Paris Opera?

Re: Using Supervillain Psych Lims Another way to look at it is that, if the villain is presented with an opportunity to perform a truly evil deed he will be compelled to do so, even if it's not in his best interests. For example, if the villain is in secret ID or working on a covert scheme, he can't resist causing suffering for the sheer joy of it, which may reveal his identity or draw attention to his scheme before he's ready.

Re: Villian Relocation Welcome aboard, twshulz. I think you're going to enjoy your time spent here - it's a pretty lively place, and we're a generally friendly and helpful bunch. As you say, a number of the master villains in CKC could readily be active in Europe, since most of them operate internationally and some have their roots in that continent. Dr. Destroyer, Gravitar, Menton and the Warlord could all plausibly be working there. So too could the villains with well established reputations and m.o.'s as international mercenaries: Lazer, Masquerade, Mechassassin, Shadowdragon, and Utility. Although the majority of the Crowns of Krim are from the Americas, Dark Seraph himself is British and maintains an estate in England, so it would be reasonable for all the Crowns to be assembled there from time to time. From there a short jaunt across the Channel to steal mystic artifacts, perform obscene rituals, or cause general suffering and mayhem, would be easy to justify. Speaking of mystic artifacts, any villains with a background in archaeology and/or secret ID as an archaeologist might arrive to investigate a new find or purloin a special exhibit or collection. From CKC that would include Black Paladin (a natural to return to France), Anubis and Howler. If such a discovery had something to do with the Elder Worms, it would surely attract the interest of the Slug. And let's not forget Cateran. Although she's spent many decades in the United States, she's travelled the world extensively over the centuries and may get a yen to visit the Old World. In their attempts to recruit impressionable young mentalists, PSI might well open a "branch office" in Europe, probably under the cover of their self-help group Mind Incorporated. Firewing will go anywhere in the world he thinks he can find a challenging fight - not much need for justification there. Holocaust has ambitions of ruling the entire Earth, and his wealth and Contacts mean he could have interests anywhere.

Re: Tremors 4 "The legend Begins" And if you want to run this in HERO, here's the beastie itself: http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptionscreatures/fiction/graboids.html

Re: Space Master by ICE Iron Crown Enterprises. Also publishers of Rolemaster (fantasy game), Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP, the first licensed Lord of the Rings RPG)... oh, and most of the Fourth Edition Hero Games.

Re: Custom Mechanon I agree with Sketchpad. Mechanon as designed in the genre book would make an excellent climactic confrontation for the group you suggest. He's more powerful and far more versatile than any previous version - fourteen offensive Multipower slots in two separate Multipowers, plus wide-spectrum Defenses and lots of other neat Skills and abilities - but his Defense level is such that a team of lower-powered heroes can still beat him with luck and good tactics. As for "Mechanon 3000" from Galactic Champions, your PCs will want to stay away from him for a long, long time. Try to picture the Death Star as Mechanon's head.

Re: Custom Mechanon Do you have the Fifth Edition Champions genre book with the latest incarnation of Mechanon? Because that book leaves Mechanon's true origin a mystery, there have been a couple of discussion board threads here exploring various origin concepts for him, with quite a few plot seeds implicit in them: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12908 http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37502 If you do have the Champs genre book, you'll notice that Mechanon has the power to Summon servant robots, assembling them from nearby technology. You can download the stats for his baseline robots as a PDF from this page in the "Free Stuff" part of the website: http://www.herogames.com/FreeStuff/writeups.htm As far as servants go, Digital Hero #12 features an adventure, "Unearthed Mechana," which besides being a good introductory scenario to a campaign, includes a less powerful "feminine" version of Mechanon. There was an IMO very good adventure for Fourth Edition Champions, Blood Fury, published under license by Atlas Games, which presents a mutli-session story arc featuring Mechanon, and which also details several robotic minions for him. It would take little work to prepare it for a Fifth Edition game. I can suggest online sources to buy it from if you're interested. Finally, if you haven't seen it yet Galactic Champions describes a massively upgraded future incarnation of Mechanon with plenty of lesser robots at his command. One of the origins in the discussion board threads above suggests how to incorporate that version into a modern-day Champions campaign using Mechanon. I hope some of that is of use to you.

Re: Land of confusion Another possibility would be an Entangle BOECV, with the Special Effect of the character's mind being clouded. Or, you could try Mental Illusions which must achieve +30 EGO level of effect, causing the character to no longer interact with reality.

Re: Creating the Silver Age Team As soon as you mentioned Silver Age and "cosmic character," I immediately thought of someone from the great multi-statted SA supers supplement Omlevex from Z-Man Games; specifically, Omega Max, the Blue Beam! A scientist who developed a powerful cosmic disc capable of carrying him to the stars, Max's planet was devastated by the awesome Grunn, Bridger of a Thousand Worlds!. The Blue Beam escaped his world's destruction and now wanders space. If you're not familiar with it, here's where you can read and view more about Omlevex: http://www.spectrum-games.com/omlevex/ Here's a picture of Omega Max than Z-Man publisher Cynthia Celeste Miller posted to the boards: http://www.herogames.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=2627&d=1072275224

Re: [Need Help] Thors from around the world. Well, lucky, from what you're describing I think I can suggest a title or two from the published 5E stuff. My first recommendation would be the recently-released Champions Worldwide. That has three god-avatars in it, quite powerful too: Ogun from West Africa, Maat from Egypt, and Ushas from India. You might also take a look at Conquerors, Killers And Crooks. The villain Anubis derives his power from an Egyptian god, and two Chinese god-avatar types, Lei Kung and Guang Di, are also portrayed (albeit not with complete folkloric accuracy). Both of these books have lots of other cool characters to steal, of course. I'd also suggest Digital Hero #31, which has writeups for superheroic-level versions of Hercules and Achilles, as well as Bielo of Euroguard, inspired by the Slavic Bielobog, god of life and the spring. Still in the DH vein, issue #14 gives you Beowulf, reincarnation of the ancient hero and member of the Sentinels superteam in the Champions Universe. Arcane Adversaries contains the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca. Although he's decidedly villainous, and even more powerful than what you're looking for, he might be used as a template for another more benign Aztec god. Now since you're also considering Vlad Tepes as a possible member of your group, I think you'll find that this writeup for a very similar character, Chuckg's PC hero Baron von Darien, would make a good template for him: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=155143

Re: [Need Help] Thors from around the world. These two threads contain a number of writeups of various mythic gods, and links to various others, as well as mention where gods have appeared in published Hero Games books in the past: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34391 http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34727 Would you be interested in obtaining any published Fifth Edition books with mythic character writeups in them? There are now even more than are mentioned on those threads. Also, here's the address to the excellent online Encyclopedia Mythica that Steve Long mentioned: http://www.pantheon.org

Re: The Marvel Magnificent Seven (Avengers) Atlatl was kind of my favorite due to an innovation I came up with. I happened to notice that an atlatl, with its handle at one end projecting outwards almost at right angles to the shaft-holding section, looks vaguely like a tonfa, the Japanese karate weapon. So I gave Atlatl a karate martial art package and let him use his modified atlatl like a tonfa in HTH. Made for an unpleasant surprise for the first PC who closed with him, figuring he'd be weaker than at range.

Re: The Marvel Magnificent Seven (Avengers) This is rather off-topic, but I thought some of you might find it of interest. Some time back I created a team of supervillains from Latin America who worked as mercenaries for various organized crime groups, revolutionaries and corrupt politicians from the region. I called them The Ravagers and based them off one of the classic Avengers lineups, but using names and themes from Latin America. My players had little trouble recognizing them (which was part of the fun of using them), and I doubt I'll have to explain them to anyone reading this thread: The Cartel Commando, a trained soldier with enhanced physical abilities gained from a refined derivative of cocaine; Thunder, avatar of the Inca storm god of the same name; The Golden Man, powered-armor wearer; Andes, brick with growth and density powers; Killer Bee, with shrinking and insect-based powers; Bruja, mistress of elemental magiks; Atlatl, highly skilled with that traditional Aztec dart-thrower, using gimmicked projectiles.

Re: VIPER's Draysha boosted stats... I have access to the VIPER book - looking at it now, in fact. I haven't run the Draysha, but I'll offer what observations I can. I don't know which of the Characteristic boosting descriptions is accurate, and there's no official errata for VIPER. I will point out, though, that Adjustment Powers have only half effect vs Defenses, so if the Drayshas' PD and ED are in fact being boosted, they would only gain a maximum +12 bonus, not +24.

Re: Help with Werewolves As usual, there's more than one way to do things in HERO. While I'm not presuming to speak for Matt Ignash, I feel confident in observing that the Package Deals he designed are for characters who can for the most part control their change from human to were form, and retain their normal intelligence, knowledge and personality while in a more bestial form. The advantage of the Package approach is that you can just graft this onto any other character template you like, quickly and easily. OTOH the writeups provided by Mike Surbrook aren't Packages but full character sheets, without any innate ability to change form (e.g. Shape Shift). These writeups would be suitable for use as an alternate form in a Multiform just by calculating the points required, and could be significantly different from the base character. You can also Limit the Multiform as with the suggestions for the Power in the 5E rulebook, to make the change partly or wholly out of the character's control. It pretty much depends on how you want lycanthropy to function in your campaign.

Re: Help with Werewolves Michael Surbrook wrote a fine article for Digital Hero #18, "The Beast Within," discussing various traditions of lycanthrope and how to portray them in HERO. There's a free sample from the article, including two different werewolf writeups, here.