Lord Liaden

Re: He's twice the man you are! What is 2x normal STR? SPD? DEX?

Re: Enemies of San Angelo I've mentioned this to RPMiller before, but while I agree that individual illos for every character would have been nice, what bothered me the most about Denizens of San Angelo was the layout of the stat blocks and background text for characters - or rather, the lack of same. All the character info was crammed together, stacked up like cords of firewood. That not only made it more difficult to read, but made the writeups look hasty and not really important enough to do "properly." In my mind I could only contrast that with Normals Unbound, where even characters without enough game stats to warrant a fully formatted character sheet still had their stats laid out clearly and cleanly, giving the impression (justified or not) that their entries would be worth reading. That can make a real difference to someone just browsing a book off a store shelf, as to whether they buy it or not.

Re: Living Steel? Gee, as a HERO gamer that complaint sounds kinda familiar...

Re: Gravitar vs Graviton?

Re: Gravitar vs Graviton?

Re: Living Steel? Well, I can't fault you for wanting to convert from the game yourself. You're right that that's a great way to learn the system; and lots of HEROphiles find building and tinkering with the system to be a fun process in itself. However, I did get the impression from your request that you were looking for prebuilt items to use, at least for examples. If that's the case, is there a reason that the sites I linked to don't work for you? They contain HERO writeups for all the stuff you asked for: gauss, laser and flechette weapons, and various types of powered and nonpowered armor. Just because these items originally came from other sources than Living Steel doesn't necessarily make them useless for your purposes - these are all sci-fi classics that carry over from one source to another, and wherever they come from once they're translated to HERO they're all more or less the same. And the quality of fan creations from the HERO community is often very high. But the game should be used in whatever way is satisfying to you, so please don't let me stop you from doing what works for you.

Re: Living Steel? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the setting or with any direct conversions for it, but from your remarks about what you need technologically, I don't think the Equipment Guide will help you much. That book is for modern-day equipment and weapons; you'd be better served by the Spacer's Toolkit for sci-fi materials, or perhaps Gadgets And Gear for superhero tech. Now, that's for published HERO books. There are also a lot of fan conversions of tech from many other sci-fi sources. Below are links to conversions of advanced weapons, armor and powered armor from GURPS Ultratech, Traveller, Warhammer 40,000, and the novel Starship Troopers. Hopefully that will help you. http://www.geocities.com/ac_jackson/hero/ultrahero.html http://www.starherofandom.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=122 http://www.angelfire.com/ok3/markdoc/Inquisitor/inquistor_weapons.htm http://www.tigerseyemedia.com/tiger/40kequip.html http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35225 http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptionsbook/miarmor.html

Re: Revamping the Horsemen That's actually a pretty cool idea! If you change the source of the Crowns to the Kings of Edom or whatever Lovecraftian Elder Gods and/or their servants you want to use, that would make for a natural connection. Dark Seraph can then be searching for the rest of the Crowns just as Fear of the Horsemen searched for other Old Ones artifacts. Heck, the original adventure even features a Stone Crown. If you have access to Galactic Champions, you might consider something that I've been toying with for running this adventure: substituting Slug 3000 for the Prime. The Elder Worms were originally servants of the Kings of Edom, and this could be a good way to introduce them. If I needed more power I could add other lesser Elder Worms based on the CKC version of Slug. I might also substitute Maraud from GC for the Black Death, since in my campaign the Xenovores were created by the Elder Worms.

Re: Revamping the Horsemen Tom McCarthy offered some good suggestions as to how to bring the Horsemen up to 5E standards: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=35911 I used them quite a bit myself in past campaigns. They're a powerful, diverse, very striking group with strongly-defined motivations, who can be used singly or in any combination; and you never need to provide reasons for them to cause trouble. I did modify their character sheets to try to make each character's power set conform to my notion of their "aspects," i.e. fear powers, famine powers etc. I also increased the power level of the individual Horsemen, which IMO isn't as insane as it sounds. They're very single-minded and tend to work poorly as a team. I'm not going to post any writeups, though, because IIRC Hero Games still has the rights to all the characters from Wrath of the Seven Horsemen, and I think Steve Long mentioned that he'd prefer we not put them up here. As to the topic of this thread: frankly, beyond the PCs' ability to cope with whatever power level you give your Four Horsemen, I don't think it would matter a great deal whether you call them the actual Biblical figures or just villains styled after them. Superheroes in comics frequently interact with pagan gods, demons and conceptual entities, as both enemies and allies. And there have been many "end of the world" scenarios run in comics. If the threat is clearly out of their league the heroes may be frightened, but if there's a chance that they can stand up to it you can expect your players to roll up their sleeves and plunge in, whatever you choose to call the opposition. That's what superheroes do.

Re: Doomsday evolution power Well, Doomsday's ability to revive from death in general would probably be best modelled by Healing (Regeneration) with the Resurrection Adder. If I were dealing with his ability to adapt to what killed him, I'd just run it as a "radiation accident" scenario under the control of the GM. Essentially, whatever unspent Experience Points Doomsday has saved to that point would be used to purchase the appropriate new ability or buy off the pertinate Disadvantage. BTW this is exactly the premise used to justify "upgrades" to the Champions Universe villain Mechanon; after each defeat he rebuilds himself to counter what defeated him last time.

Re: Old Testament Hero Definitely not "what!" The Gestalted One's preliminary thoughts are worth most people's deep ponderings. Thank you very much, sir.

Re: your campaigns "Superman". In my campaign world the Superman role is probably filled by Dr. Hiroshima. As a young man he was caught near ground zero of the Hiroshima A-bomb blast, but amazingly didn't die. He was found unconscious in the ruins several days later, his body glowing with energy. He remained in a coma for several months; when he awoke he discovered his tremendous powers. The Japanese government concealed his existence for several years, wanting to use him as a "strategic weapon." But when Japan was attacked by a gigantic mutated monster in 1949, Dr. Hiroshima's battle to drive it off was too public to be ignored. Dr. Hiroshima continued to serve the Japanese government as his country's national hero, but grew increasingly frustrated by Japan's resistance to intervening against international supervillain threats, and disillusioned by the institutional corruption in Japanese politics (no offense intended to any Japanese here - it's a widely acknowledged flaw in the system). In 1956 he disavowed allegiance to any nation, declaring himself a servant of the world. He's been active on the global scene ever since, actively promoting peace and cooperation, but ready to defend against any threat to the innocent anywhere in the world. Dr. Hiroshima is the oldest superhero still active, and among the most powerful and respected. He has a strong personal code of honor with echoes of bushido, although he prefers to be a peacemaker and healer rather than a warrior. He's also the driving force behind a network of like-minded heroes and organizations which offers support to deserving supers: training, resources and intelligence. (It's in this patron capacity that he primarily interacts with my PCs.) Dr. Hiroshima has vast nuclear powers, including tremendous strength and durability, flight, and near-immortality. He can project various energy phenomena resembling a nuclear explosion: heat, light, radiation, EM pulse, and so on. Over the years he's learned to control the discharge of energy, from massive enough to melt a tank, to delicate enough to cauterize wounds or sterilize diseased tissue.

Re: Old Testament Hero Absolutely. Scott visits regularly and posts here fairly frequently, under the handle "GestaltBennie." You can ping him via Private Message or e-mail. I'd be surprised if he doesn't have some suggestions for converting Testament to HERO.

Re: Inner-Earth Update Ever read The Ultimate Super Mage? There was a group in it directly inspired by Bulwer-Lytton, "The Vril Society." It was the cabal that trained Solitaire of the (4E) Champions.

Re: Inner-Earth Update I think the Empyreans have called dibs on that one.

Re: Has Anyone Done...... It may be a bit more "superheroey" than you're looking for, but Ghost Archer's Wild Hunt campaign certainly has a strongly mythic/magical style and characters, pumped up to super levels.

Re: Astral Form as Duplication I suppose everyone will have different interpretations of how a "real" Astral Form should function, and what kind of Powers/Modifiers would be appropriate. Even in the source material we have variations between Western occultist Astral Forms, Eastern mystic Astral Forms, comic-book Astral Forms, etc. The Duplication approach has built-in assumptions, and if you accept those you have no problem. I can see why that wouldn't work for everyone, though. Personally I've always loved the Clairsentience approach first detailed in Mystic Masters for the comic-book variety, but again that's trying to duplicate specific genre conventions. Oddhat, is that targetting Advantage for Clairsentience that I highlighted an official one? If so, where is it detailed and how much is it?

Re: Characteristics vs Aid

Re: *inspired my other threads* Gravitar vs Crowns of Krim Atlas Games put out a very good adventure supplement for 4E Champs (SPOILERS!!!) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . entitled Blood Fury which featured Mechanon. In that adventure Mechanon used miniature robot spy drones disguised as flies. He also replaced various humans with robot dopplegangers during the course of the plot, including ones that he could take direct control of and act through in order to mislead players as to who the real mastermind was. That adventure expanded Mechanon's resources and MO in ways that fleshed out the character quite a bit IMHO.

Re: Enemies of San Angelo

Re: Enemies of San Angelo Most definitely. Lots of people like the option of creating legacy characters, or prefer to run supers campaigns set in earlier eras, or with that Golden or Silver Age "tone" to them. IMHO putting all the earlier-era characters into one book would make it more appealing to people who don't want "just" a Golden or Silver Age supplement. I would suggest not leaving it as just a character collection, though. I recommend including notes as to what was happening in San Angelo during each "age," including political and social developments, major events in the timeline, etc. The unique focus of SA has always been the life of the normal inhabitants, and their perspective on the extraordinary beings in their midst. Making the earlier eras in San Angelo's history live and breathe should appeal to those who loved the modern-day sourcebook. However, I would also suggest a World Of San Angelo sourcebook at some point. One of the wishes I hear expressed most often among SA fans is for more information about the Earth outside of the city, so that they could expand their characters' adventures into the wider world. If such a book could exploit the "normal perspective" that's so distinctive to SA - how the peoples of different regions view superbeings and how their presence has impacted those societies - that would help set it apart from other supers worldbooks such as Hero Games's own Champions Universe.

Re: Enemies of San Angelo Since you have declared yourself open to fan feedback, I hope you'll take the points I'm about to raise as constructive criticism, as they're intended. IMO The Dragons Gate is a quality game product, with fascinating details of that section of a great fictional city. However, the fact that it did detail only a section with a particular style and flavor made it a bit of a niche product within a niche product (i.e. city sourcebooks), not conducive to great sales. Also, the personalities and power levels of the characters detailed in the book made it seem more like a Dark Champions supplement, whereas San Angelo overall is definitely four-color in tone. It kind of missed the SA fanbase target, again IMO. SACoH 1.5 was of course pretty much the same material as the original, just with new non-HERO game stats. I'm sure you didn't expect to have HERO gamers who already own the book buy copies, but IME many gamers will buy a sourcebook just to mine for ideas, whether it's a system they play or not. With the original SA having been out for so long a lot of those gamers would have already seen it, cutting down the potential buyership even more. OTOH a new San Angelo sourcebook updating and expanding on the city and its inhabitants, with stats for 5E HERO and other systems like Mutants And Masterminds, would have far broader appeal IMO.

Re: Characteristics vs Aid I have kind of mixed feelings about 5E having eliminated the "points gained up to starting value don't fade" feature of Adjustment Powers from 4E, in favor of the new Healing Power and the restrictions on it. One the one hand, I appreciate the game-balance and mechanic-consistency issues that went into the decision. OTOH some constructs such as "recharging" yourself using Transfer and Absorption are now much more expensive and complicated to build (e.g. greatly extended Fade rates, or Linked Healing). Also, Healing imposes significant default limits on when and how it can be used, and I'm not sure I like game-balance decisions being made for me. I think if Aid had been kept mechanically as it was for 4E - Costs END, no Fade below starting values - but had its cost increased to 10 pts. per 1d6 as it is now, I'd have been quite happy with it. In fact I've toyed with a "Doesn't Fade Below Starting Values" Custom Advantage for all Adjustment Powers, which I've set at +1/2 based on Aid with such an Advantage that Costs END (-1/2). That would make Aid cost and function just as I described above.

Re: *inspired my other threads* Gravitar vs Crowns of Krim Mechanon still has the option of remotely downloading its current memory files into a new body, but this is a last-ditch tactic if it's impossible for its head to escape. Note that its head can be detached at any time, not just for a last-ditch escape. That could be very useful for scouting and spying; being much smaller than Mechanon's whole body, the head can get through small openings and easily conceal itself.

Re: *inspired my other threads* Gravitar vs Crowns of Krim I did notice that Dark Seraph's loincloth has a very long drape in the front. And I can't believe that my discourse has sunk to this level. Anyway, you must admit that having vast black wings goes a long way toward offsetting a lack of pants. At least pants won't be the first thing that people seeing DS are likely to comment on. BTW I compared Dark Seraph to Mechanon earlier on this thread; anyone have the time to run that fight? (I'm a little pressed right now - in fact I probably shouldn't even be spending time here.)