Eclectic Wave

Anybody using them in the Fantasy hero game? I actually thought alot of the Black Powder rules, including making them all armor piercing. I actually feel that all firearms in Hero should be AP, with all modern armor built to stop bullets being hardened. It's always bugged me that in Hero, the killing damage from a pistol can be stopped with Plate Mail...

Re: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the HEROic Unbeliever Shouldn't that be his UNHEROIC stats? -- Couldn't resist the smart ass comment - sorry --- -- Actually I'm not sorry in the least. ----

Re: Gaming "Outside the Box" I started my current campaign by telling everyone that it was a typical sunny tuesday morning and for everyone to discribe for me what thier characters were doing. After they all finished, I said that everyones visions fades out for a moment and that you all find your selves in a ornate office at night with a number of well dressed thug types holding guns on you, and it's phase 12. The idea was that someone had broken a magical dohickey that had erased everyones memories of the last week, and they were in the office of the 2nd most powerfull mob boss in the city (The game is set in 1937). They had to fight thier way out, then try to figure out what had happened for the last week that was missing. Got everyone's attention let me tell you. I later introduced a villian who could "Steal your face", he had shape change, face only, with the added power usable on others, linked. He had to touch someone, and then his face would appear on you, and your face appear on him. I kidnapped a PC and then had the PC replaced with the face-changing villian, and told the player that he was now running the villian and to lead the players into a death-trap. He did a good job, and would have killed a pc, if he hadn't rolled a 1 on a KA for body (ah the fickle dice). A long time ago I ran a Call of Cthulhu game in which one character died in a remote location. Next week when the player came in early to roll up a new character I told him that his character stumbles into the hotel people were staying at, alive with no memory of what had occured. The PC's never figured out what that was all about before the campaign died, so that was one really good plot idea lost.

Re: Steve, you dirty boy!

Re: Spell for making a sailing vessel move more quickly Rather off the direct target, but can add a lot of fun/newness to a game... FLIGHT - only in a vertical direction (meaning you still need the wind to move) Water can be such a drag...

Re: What Books do I need for Fantasy hero Here is a slightly off target question for people here. I have the 5th edition hero, FH, Grimoire, and MMM. I do have the Besitary, but it's the 4th edition Besitary. Is it worth my while to get the 5th edtion Besitary? Is there anything new in it besides updating the creatures to conform with 5th edition?

Yea, well, we always invisioned our characters as rouge economicists, implimenting pratical use of our ecomonic theories by ransacking the gold depositories. Damn, I'm begining to sound like a libertarian now.

Midhir, are you still using the WFRP careers and careers path exits? I can see reasons for scrapping it, but the careers and career paths added so much flavor to the game. How are you handling the carreers?

You rock dude. WFRP has always been a great setting, I never had a great dislike for the rules (The careers list and concept was great... as long as you didn't get a whole lot of XP) I can see people having problems with it. Looking forward to seeing your material. There should be alot of interest for it too. There are several books that go for $60 dollars used on Ebay, so there is still alot of heavy intrest out there.

Right now I'm trying to convert a Tabletop minatures game into a RPG FH game. "Wargods of Aegyptus" a game of Mythic Egypt, with a dozen different races, and a very odd hero/super hero setup. Certain great leaders get "imbued" with ka of thier god, giving them extrodinary powers (Including becoming a scorpian creature like the Scorpian King in Mummy II) http://www.crocodilegames.com/ If I ever get the conversion done, I'll post about it.

What's even sadder in D&D is when you get to the point that you realize that it's cheaper to convert all your gold to copper, melt the copper down and make a copper castle, then it is to go buy one. The amount of coinage running around is scary, in terms of bulk tonnage of metal!

Simon Green has a very nice new series that is a modern fantasy. "Something from the Nightside" and "Agents of light and darkness". His setting is akin to Neal Giaman's "Neverwhere", although much, much, nastier. Would make a great setting for a modern fantasy game.

For a standard night 2 points. If it was a combat heavy, tough fight, a extra point. And a point at the end of a multi-part mission. The most that a player could get is 4 points.

For a 1/4 disadvatage, thats okay, but I would actually ditch the cold business and through in something like "Light illusions of fire run up and down the armor at all times" Very showy, very cool looking, makes one looks like they are on fire at all times. And makes whoever wears it the center of attaraction where ever he goes, not to mention easy to see (Gosh sneaking around in the dark is hard now...) I guess that if I'm going to be handing out magic items called "Armor of Fire" I expect it to be alot more showy then leather armor with 50% fire damage reduction. And adding a cold dis-add seams kinda... typical. I try to avoid dis-adds on magic items that only are going to apply often in combat. How about that the armor is made out of dragon skin or something (which is where the fire resistance come from) but that it makes all dragons or dragon related species inimicall to the wearer? You could also make it easy to recognize from others as well (Hey, isn't that Dragon skin?).

Ick. Ask a hard one why don't you. I'm assuming that you are talking about a conversion of the D&D reincarnation spell. i.e. the reincarnate doesn't find themselves being forced down a birth canal somewhere at the end of the spell, and have to go through 10 to 15 years of childhood again, but just suddenly find themsleves as a full grown "X", whatever "X" turns out to be. (Although having a 6 month old master wizard in a party might be fun... for the GM anyway. "It's time to change the mighty wizard's nappy!") Considering how unlikey the chance to get a new better body, compared to getting one that causes a lot of problems... -0 seems a little low (but that depends on how many different races a reincarnate can be doesn't it? If you allow reincarnates to have a chance to come back as say, a badger, -0 is far too low.) It really depends on how large of a group of races you can reincarnate into, and what kind of impact the reincarnation has. Does a new individual just appear out of the air, or is there a family around somewhere wondering why thier son/daughter suddenly want's to be called a different name, and is trying to run off and join thier friends nobody ever hear of before.

Jewelry has been considered coinage for all recorded history, and I don't mean in barter. Your basic gold chain "bling-bling" started as a form of currancy. Each link of chain is a set weight of gold (for the link size), and thus can be used as a monatary standard. It was common for the rich to wear gold chains, and when they needed to pay for something, break off x amount of links. The gold chain couldn't be easly lifted like a purse could be from one's belt, it was a symbol of status and your coinage, all at one time. This was common up to the 18th century! The Spanish went into this in a large way. Gold chains are recovered from ship wrecks in the Caribbian all the time.

I'm working on a adventure that has several different undead being run by a Necromancer. The most powerful undead are mummies who are decked out with full armor (why, because the undead never get tired wearing it, haha). To offset this I had come up with a set of embalmer's daggers that had penetration so the none uber-fighter types could have a attack that would get some damage by the armor. The problem I suddenly discovered was when I prepared the final battle phase when they face the Necormancer, and relized that I had designed him with Forcewalls as his major defense. Forcewalls that can be taken down now in one shot by the Embalmer daggers with penetration. I really didn't want to do something like adding "hardend" to the forcewall, that seemed rather heavy handed, and besides, the Necromancer would really have any need to. I was trying to think of a way around the problem, and suddenly came up with this. Forcefield vs living matter only. The undead can pass through, rocks and arrows can pass through, swords can pass through, but living matter cannot. So now the daggers cannot do any damage to forcewall, even with penetration, because the forcewall doesn't stop the dagger, only the hand (and body) of the person welding the dagger. Of course this means range attacks can get though, so how to stop those? And then I thought make the forcewall opaque. But how? Unless I've missed something (which is quite possible) , there isn't any option under Forcewalls to do that. Add light illusions to the spell? Or is it just a special effect? Thoughts anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

This plane of Sharpness wouldn't be pyrimid shaped would it?

Well... The last section of Monsters, Minions, and Marauders has some sample characters sort of. I guess they are the "Minions" part of the book.

You could also have other neat dis-adds like; "Spell cannot be modified unless has access to magical research library/Lab" plus "Needs extra time to make changes to VPP Spells" the extra time being days/weeks that the wizard has to spend researching the "new" spell.

Actually, after posting my ideas, the post regarding using just casual strength for determining encumbrance is what I'm going to use, it's much cleaner then my idea.

Carrying extra equipment in addition to the armor is what I was refering to with the mention of the casual strength (Funny how we both ended up at that), if your strength is equal or greater but less then 5 over then you would only use your casual for how much you could carry, and with 5 over strength, full strength. The problem is the encumbarance rules that use weight, are a pain in the ass. Yea, we found a treasure chest full of gold coins, after 10 minutes of figuring out encumbrance values and equipment weight on all the players, it works out that only 1 pound of gold coins can be picked up, and we have to ditch the rest. Oh boy. Hero at least addressed encumbrance of weapons in a new unique way, with Str minimums. Most gamers ignore the encumbrance rules, the Str minimuns are a lot harder to ignore.

I was creating magic armor and wanted one of the magic affects to be that the armor was weightless, so checked the encumbrance, which I had previously not really paid all that much attention to. I was less then thrilled when I read the rules, which is the standard how much can you carry business. It means that a charcter that has say strength of 9 (far less then the minimum strength needed for most weapons) can still wear full plate mail with no problem. Which immeditaly made me ask, why doesn't armor have minimum str requirements? It would be easy to use the exactly same rule setup for minimum strength for weapons. If your strength is 5 points below the str minimum, you take the full encumbrance penalty. If your less then 5 points under the strength minimum, you have a small encumbrance penalty (-1 from dex rolls? Use a end pre phase maybe?) If your str equals the str minimum or is higher by up to five points your not encumbared, but can only carry your casual strength before being encumbared. If you excedd the minimum strength by more then 5, then you can use your full strength for encumbrance. Right now, there are really two totally different rules for encumbrance, one for weapons and carrying things (encluding armor). I'm pretty positive that no one is ever going to use the current encumbrance rules on armor (Been gaming for over 25 years, I've yet to been in a game yet that the GM and players did use encumbrance rules). By adding str minimums to armor, it makes armor encumbrance a more important factor, adds more varity for magic items (this magic full plate mail has NO str minimums), gives a set of rules that will actually get used yet not impede games, and finally, makes armor and weapons use the same rules, instead of two different sets. Anybody have any thoughts or comments on this idea?

I am trying to do a conversion of Wargods of Aegpytus from a minatures game to a RPG using HF. It is of course based in Egypt with much more primative weapons/equipment, about 10 different races, but based off cat people, anubis, horis, ect. I'm trying for a vastly different feel then a standered fantasy game.