Koshka

Re: Galactic Champions vs 2K Master Villains The book's at home, but I recall the AI taking the armor out for a spin being one of Defender 3K's plot hooks. Now, whether Mechanon would check for AI presence ....

Re: Exotic Methods for Executions? There was a variation on this I saw in a book on the Gunpowder Plot. Noose around neck, pull up to dangle for a bit, cut down before complete unconsciousness or death ensues. Chop off genitals, burn in front of victim. Then draw and quarter. IIRC (I should check that book out again), the crowd took pity on one of the men being executed for that plot. During step one, they swarmed the execution site and pulled on his legs hard enough to strangle him before the rest of the process occured.

Re: Is this a good idea?: Killing heroes I'm having enough trouble getting "four-color heroes don't kill people" across to one person in my current game. If I killed off an NPC, his reaction would be "OK, killing that villain is now legit". Now, if you have players with a better grasp on the genre (or you're running a little darker game than I'm trying to), this would probably work.

Re: What Do You Want To See?: DC: The Animated Series A discussion of running CvK heroes against non-CvK villains. If you're running standard Champions, and your heroes are going against Foxbat, they can feel relatively confident that he's not going to use nerve gas on the hostages. In this subgenre (if I'm on the same wavelength as Allen and Steve), your CvK heroes could go against someone easily as bonkers as Foxbat, but who doesn't have any objection to killing. Even if the heroes do everything right, there's going to be a good chance of hostage fatalities if the guards have machine guns covering those hostages instead of tasers. How does a GM run these types of encounters, keeping the villains in character, but not dumping piles of corpses on the PCs' consciences when they didn't do anything wrong to deserve it?

Re: How to: Three guy's with one bullet. Possibly a Sweep?

Re: Do you use the official Champions Universe? I'm running a Golden Age game that is starting out mostly CU. I am using a modified Hudson City as home base for my heroes, mainly because I don't feel like letting one of my players (east coast background and biggest mouth of the group) overrule me on what New York City is "really" like. Now, whether it stays CU is up to the players. I've got one (not the one mentioned above) who doesn't have the greatest grasp on Code Versus Killing, and he's running a brick. I have a personal side bet running on how many game sessions before his character offs a normal and tries to duck the responsibility. If the rest of the players back him, the logical governmental reactions will take us out of the CU timeline pretty quickly. If they bring him in for trial, we'll see.

Re: Next Book? With a lot of magic in your game, both Mystic World and Arcane Adversaries would be good buys. My personal opinion is that you should get Mystic World first, as some of the characters in AA refer to the MW cosmology without any explanatory notes. (Of course, since AA was the second half of the MW manuscript, this makes sense.) But DEMON is a must-buy. As soon as my nephew's Halloween costume is done I'm starting on a review .

Re: DEMON: Opinions (some spoilers) Nah, just summon up a minor spirit before the sacrifice and tell it to start invisible mystic CPR as soon as the guy on the altar croaks . That should keep everything in reasonable shape for transplant.

Re: Dark Champions Review It's a short review, but Ken Hite discusses Dark Champions in his latest "Out Of The Box" column over at gamingreport.com.

Re: Asterix the Gaul A few more ... the blacksmith is Fulliautomatix Chief Vitalstatistix's wife is named Impedimenta Obelix' dog is named Dogmatix the oldest villager is named Geriatrix the fishmonger is Unhygenix, and his wife is Bacteria EDIT: I just remembered that there are two different English translations out there -- British English and American English. To the best of my knowledge, all my copies are British English translations. (IIRC, in the American English translations the chief is called Macroeconomix or something like that.)

Re: Disease Vector control should be within Pulp-era science. When the Panama Canal was being built before World War I, anti-mosquito efforts almost wiped out yellow fever and dropped malaria considerably. The mortality rate in the Panama Canal Zone (all causes of death) in 1914 was 6 per 1000, as compared to 14 per 1000 in the US or 15 per 1000 in London. The last fatality from yellow fever in the canal zone (during the construction period, when there was the most work done on vector control) was in 1906.

Re: Wedding Bells Are Ringing! My current character is a GM-PC in a Golden Age game. Assuming we can line up enough cross-time adventures for Falcon to have met the happy couple, it'll be something traditional. Probably a silver service large enough for everyone in the team plus, oh, maybe 6 guests. Bought from the best place she has time to get to, of course; she has the Filthy Rich perk. While I love the Foxbat suggestions, another option would be for him to organize a chivaree (sp?) -- or whatever that old frontier custom was called where a bunch of the couple's friends raised a ruckus outside the couple's bedroom window to try and get them out of bed on their wedding night. Cateran might show up to dance at the reception. What could happen if Mirage was hired in her secret ID to provide lighting, sound and camera services for either the service or the reception?

Re: Any Heros with secret villian IDs? One option in The Great Supervillain Contest is for the PC heroes to go undercover as new villains looking to make it big by winning the contest, and in Strike Force , one of the heroes was brainwashed into becoming a villain. I don't think either of those is what you're looking for, though.

Barring massive player screwups, we should be finishing off the current scenario next session. The session after, we will be starting a new campaign -- Golden Age supers, set in the CU. I'm starting them out with the "Martian" invasion in 1938, and I already have GRG's War Of The Worlds sourcebook for that part. Once they've driven off the invaders, though, I'm going to need villains for them. Since I don't have a TARDIS in the garage, jumping forward a year or so and grabbing the 5th edition Golden Age Champions isn't going to work . While I have the earlier versions of that book, several of the characters are way too silly for my tastes. My current idea is to trim down some of the guys from CKC, but anyone have ideas on who would be workable in this setting? My Guidelines: 1) Anubis is definitely being brought over -- one of the bricks gained her powers from an Egyptian amulet, so it's an obvious tie-in. 2) Captain Chronos will appear at least once in his full CKC writeup. One of the tech-users literally found his supertech in the woods ... let's just say VIPER has a lot of bugs to get out of their time travel device . 3) I'd rather not run them against Nazi villains until the war starts. 4) Between the leftover Sirian tech from the invasion and the accident alluded to in note 2, I can justify super-tech villains; but for plausibility reasons I'd like it to take a while (at least 6 months game time) for supertech to "leak" out to villains. In other words, superrobots controlled by a mastermind are fine, but not for the second adventure. Any ideas?

Re: Pulp Discussion Head to http://www.blackmask.com and scroll down to the Pulp Fiction link. Lots of stories for free download.

Re: What Would Your Fantasy Character Do? : Good Overlord Only playing in one fantasy game at the moment, and it's Forgotten Realms D&D. Tactics might differ if we were doing FH. Arielle is probably one of the least paranoid characters in the game, but even she would want to know just what's going on. As a wizard/loremaster, she doesn't have to go there to check matters out. Load up on divination spells and let 'em rip. She would be willing to cast "overlapping" divinations (different spells going after the same basic information) just in case there's something going on that would interfere with her spells -- and with a Knowledge: Arcana of 17 odds are she could figure out if that happened. While all that's going on, she would be using her Loremaster Lore ability to see if something strange happened in the area that might be a cause. We (finally!!!) finished the Time of Troubles a few game months ago, if the guy was caught in a wild magic area it might have scrambled his brains. She'd have no objection to going there in person to investigate as well, she would just want to get as much information as possible first .

Re: When I Am the Benevolent Ruler.... I won't take any actions that could result in a bastard child until I have at least one legitimate heir, preferably two. My country doesn't need some noble (especially one related to the Queen) claiming that the reason there's no legitimate heir is because I've been too busy chasing other women to have sex with my wedded spouse. If my Queen and I have fertility problems, I will get them taken care of promptly. Adoption is good, if nothing else works.

Re: HUDSON CITY: What Do *You* Want To See?

Re: Must-Have Books of 2004? Hi, Todd ::waves:: There really weren't that many changes between 4th and 5th editions, so you could still use your 4th edition books. I'll agree on the UNTIL Superpowers Database being a must-buy if you're running supers, though. Lots of inspiration for new characters (or new players trying to come up with a character), and you can also use it as examples of how the powers that were tweaked work now. You already have several of the villains from Conquerors, Killers, And Crooks in your 4th edition books, but I'd get it anyway. It's still fun to write up a character with paper, pencil, and rulebook; but Hero Designer is a godsend for anyone who needs to write up/mathcheck lots of characters. I was just at The Game Shoppe in Bellevue this morning for my copy of DEMON, and IIRC they still had a copy of Ultimate Martial Artist on the shelf. That one's going out of print, so I'd grab it while you can. I'd add the UNTIL sourcebook, but then I'm in that one

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Not a gaming group per se, but it was at the most recent meeting for the Nuke-Con staff and it got everyone laughing, is that close enough? We have a contact with a local print shop who is willing to take homemade baked goods in partial payment for minor jobs. In the course of some discussion of who was delivering the brownies to him, we had this comment: "There are two things that make the best bribes for a single man, and since we're a family-friendly convention we'll stick with food."

For a street-level game, the character concept includes the fact that he has a knack for finding his way around a city. For a single city, this would be the SFX for a ridiculous City Knowledge roll; but he's probably going to be visiting more than one city and buying that many CKs would be pricy. Navigation (Land) doesn't quite fit, because outside a city he's as likely to get lost as the rest of us. Would Navigation (Urban) be a valid subcategory?

Re: Telepathy Defense : I'm thinking of an Elephant! That one was used in one of the Serrated Edge novels -- I don't have the book handy, but IIRC Tannim slagged three Unseelie telepaths with a marathon sing-fest of They Might Be Giants. In Hero terms ... well, at the least the telepath is having to dig deep to get any useful information ("surface thoughts" would just pick up the tune). I'd probably add in Levi's suggestion, or adapt the PER modifiers for cover to reflect the fact that the mentalist has a lot of junk to peer through to get to the useful information.

Re: Thoughts on Arcane Adversaries(Spoilers) Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec are easy, but if the last one isn't Coatlicue I'm going to have to dig my books out.

Re: Adventure Dilemma-Help(GMs only) Assuming Omegaworld's grand opening runs like most businesses, there's still workers putting finishing touches on just about everything. Odds are the hostages aren't there yet (I'd want them kept someplace safe). It's probable at least some of the boobytraps aren't set up, because it would be too easy for them to be detected/messed up by the workers. Unless they're planning to search the place right before the opening, there won't be much (if anything) to find. And of course, searching the place depends on convincing the appropriate people that there's probable cause. I don't know how much evidence the team has already found, but unless it's solid or the team is vigilante in outlook they may have trouble getting into the park to look. If all else fails, you can always distract them by dropping them into the middle of Let's Go To The Maul. As written, it's not going to be a long distraction, but you might be able to pad it out a bit. "Why did GRAB want to steal worthless costume jewelry?" might be a place to start.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... This one may need some background. It's D&D in the Forgotten Realms. About a year ago the GM was running the Time of Troubles modules. (Don't bother with them, they're heavily railroaded.) One of the PCs is a hothead with little sense of tact; combine that with all the players being long since ready to finish these modules and go back to adventures where there's a point in our showing up. We finally get to the "dramatic conclusion" in which the GM is supposed to read us some of the concluding paragraphs from the novels. Ao, the head of the Realms pantheon, has made his appearance. The player of the hotheaded PC decided to tell off Ao, and actually got three words into her rant before most of the other players simultaneously yelled "Shut Up!" (The GM ruled that we acted in time, and therefore Ao wouldn't vaporize that PC.) Fast forward to the last game session. Since then, my mage/loremaster has acquired a pseudodragon familiar. We met up with a major NPC, and the hotheaded PC got into an argument with him. Partway through, the GM paused the argument to tell me that my familiar was looking back and forth between the two characters like a tennis spectator. Me (over the mental link with my familiar): That's right, you weren't around when she tried to tell off the head of the gods. GM (as familiar): Wow. I thought she was only stupid.