Steve

Cursing the top thousand wealthiest people in the world so that they all have the Curse of Midas. All that directly touches their flesh (food, clothing, living things) is turned into pure gold. This curse lasts until they die from either thirst or starvation, as everything they try to consume for sustenance also transforms.

Other than death, it can only be stopped by them sending one billion dollars to a bitcoin address. Instructions are given via an internet video.

3 minutes ago, steriaca said:

Hopefully not THAT Neverland from the anime. What shock for the kids to learn they are being fattened up for a monster's feast.

 

(I'm talking about the Promised Netherland here. Not that the other one wasn't spooky.)

I was thinking more like a Neverland out of classic fairy tales and not the Disney version.

Wonderland in the books can be pretty scary too.

The Shadow Realm could be a very fairy tale-like world, filled with moral lessons and rewards for good children and horrific, perhaps fatal, endings for those that are bad.

13 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

The beginning of what I was thinking. Shadow Queen's powers increase to the point where she can access their source, a "shadow dimension" which she can enter, and into which she can draw others. The dimension is inhabited by shadow creatures who can care for the orphans, while SQ can steal all the food and other supplies they need.

 

What happens next depends on what you decide the true motivations of the shadow creatures are.

It could be like a form of Neverland, perhaps with a gothic horror tinge.

Maybe Lady Blue could team up with Shadow Queen to help with robberies that fund caring for the children.

Even if they are stopped, the publicity could get interesting.

I always find package deals in the books helpful for this. Pick the archetype and take the disadvantages associated with them. Tweak as necessary.

I’m happy to be just an idea guy. Use some, all or none of the suggestions I’ve made.

I’ll keep throwing out more because I love world building. It’s why I GM.

Another option is the Expert, a skill cost modifier introduced in Dark Champions which costs three points and works like Linguist or Well-Connected, reducing the cost of each skill in a related list by a point each.

There is also Jack Of All Trades from Traveller Hero which works a bit like the OP wanted to do with skill levels.

Neither of these suggestions is RAW, but they could be used in a campaign with GM permission.

1 hour ago, Nermbley said:

Several people seem to be saying that one advantage of Damage Negation is that it still applies to NND attacks. This disagrees with my previous Intuition, which is that using AVAD to create attacks based on neither ED nor PD causes them to cease to be considered Physical or Energy damage, and thus Damage Negation, which has to be specified as being either vs. Physical or Energy damage would not apply. Is there a developer statement or player consensus to the effect that AVAD attacks still retain their designation as either physical or energy for purposes of Damage Negation and similar effects? If so, that seems like it would require you to choose one for attacks that are properly neither, such as an NND vs. Life Support based poison, which seems like a strange and arbitrary distinction.

Mental-based attacks would also seem to fall into this category of ignoring Physical or Energy Damage Negation.

On 7/25/2022 at 7:19 PM, Lord Liaden said:

Part of the Champions adventure Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth involves King Cobra unleashing a zombie-virus type "Ophidian Plague" transforming its victims into berserk snake-people. In his case that is at least consistent with his conviction that a blend of human and reptilian represents the next step in human evolution (But he is unquestionably nuts.)

 

The Champs master villain called the Slug's main shtick is transforming large numbers of humans into Elder Worms like himself, stimulating the latent Worm DNA left in humanity after forced interbreeding experiments when the Worm ruled prehistoric Earth. (Best not to think about that too much.) 🤢  In the past he's done that to New York and London.

A socially-conscious supervillain unleashes an airborne, easily transmissible, delayed effect virus that rewrites the chromosomes of all humans into a single racial type, effectively homogenizing all of mankind.

How does the Mayor and the city council view superhumans? Are they pro-superhero sorts, giving a team of heroes a taxpayer-funded base or anti-superhero types that think the likes of J. Jonah Jameson are speaking the truth? Somewhere in between?

Are there individual police detectives, or maybe a dedicated unit of police, trying to root out secret identities and arrest the masked vigilantes?

How about the state government? They have more funding than a city would, so maybe they have a task force that interfaces with superhumans.

Or maybe it’s all federalized, and local law enforcement is constantly running into jurisdiction spats with the feds.

2 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

It would have to be general labor, as the smiths, the masons, and carpenters are skilled trades and would have to be paid to leave the business in the larger towns and cities.  

I imagine they could be conscripted too by more tyrannical types, but it isn’t a good idea. Such experts could secretly build in flaws intended to make it easier to take the structure down, kind of like what happened with the Death Star according to the plotline of Rogue One.

That’s awesome.

18 minutes ago, steriaca said:

Right now it is the Spooky Kabuki's show. But yes, Melody is posed to take over when Melvin graduates. But being twins, Melody is only a year behind her twin, so they have to do something to keep Melody around.

 

But Melody and Melvin are a package deal. She won't accept stardom without her brother. Besides, this was Melvin's idea in the first place. 

Twins graduating a year apart? Sounds like Melvin is the smart one and got advanced a year. Maybe he writes most of the show’s dialog.

Their program could be a draw for supernatural hijinks now and then, like being forced to interview Nightmara or one of the dark magical girls in the city. Imagine if one of those villainesses becomes enamored of Melvin’s persona and want to make him their Dark Prince.

Some drama could also evolve if Melody ends up becoming far more popular than Melvin ever was, even if the show was his idea.

58 minutes ago, steriaca said:

The Spooky Kabuki is Melvin Smith, a fan of bad horror movies and bad martial arts movies, he developed the identity of Spooky Kabuki to host public domain horror and martial arts movies. His twin sister Melody Smith sometimes joins him as The Ghastly Geisha (and when Melvin is sick, actually host).  They both also write and produce various shows from PPDTV.

 

The Spooky Kabuki's costume is basically Kabuki makeup, lion wig, and makeshift komodo. The Ghastly Geisha's outfit is a lacored white Geisha wig, outrageous Geisha style makeup, and female komodo. (I'm probably mispelling komodo)

I really like the name of The Ghastly Geisha, and it sounds much better to me than the first one. If she’s well-built, I suspect Melody could build up a pretty decent fan base. Her clothing choices could also branch out into various kinds of cosplay outfits.

Did you mean kimono for her clothing?

12 minutes ago, steriaca said:

There are also a few public assess shows also (akin to Wayne's World, local concert shows showcasing local struggling musicians, and a Kung Fu Theater and Horror Theater host [in fact the host by the name of The Spooky Kabuki does both shows]).

The Spooky Kabuki could easily be an Elvira-like persona, since Elvira gained her fame working as a schlock horror movie hostess. Her type of snark would work well for both bad horror movies and bad king Fu films.

1 hour ago, Mark Rand said:

I doubt it.  They were under the various buildings and not connected to any other.  There are, as far as I know, no entrances to the coal mines in or around the city.  While there are subway and utility tunnels, they don't connect, in real life, to something like the Morlock tunnels in Marvel comics.

That’s fair, but in a Champions Universe more fantastic things can be going on down below. There could be an under city in the nether region between the coal mines and the subway tunnels.

Perhaps one of the high-tech companies in the city has  a sprawling underground research facility where they conduct illicit experiments.

Maybe VIPER has several active Nests going on deep beneath the surface.

Maybe this is where Nightmara maintains an Earthside court for her followers.

12 hours ago, Mark Rand said:

Parts of the city are over old coal mines, a few theaters were built below ground level, and some buildings have underground parking.

Hmm. Perhaps Underburgh for a name for it?

As a side note, some interesting builds can be done by selling off normal senses and buying special ones. For example, selling back Normal Sight and buying IR Vision or selling back Normal Hearing and buying Ultrasonic Hearing.

The prior post makes me wonder if there might be an Under-Pittsburgh where mutants and monsters lurk, or perhaps an entire community, some good and some bad, all going about their business in abandoned tunnels beneath the city.

Generate artificial earthquakes beneath the ocean that will unleash tsunami waves able to bury coastal cities beneath hundreds of feet of seawater.

13 minutes ago, Opal said:

In my old champions campaign, since so many mutants were the result of environmental contamination, the EPA was given jurisdiction over superbeings...

I’m curious how they enforced their will on superhumans. Did the EPA have their own superhumans or agents armed with high-tech weaponry? Or were they able to use resources from other agencies for this?

Ms. Might is an older teenaged girl a little over 16 and one of the few heroic Boom Juice recipients in the city. She is a flying brick still learning her powers, roughly at the same ability level as DC’s Wonder Girl/Donna Troy was when she was that age.

Her accidental exposure to Boom Juice transformed her overnight from a mousy, brunette teenager with glasses and a rather plain face into a supremely well-built young woman for her age and also added a couple of inches to her height. Although she no longer needs them, she still wears her glasses and has also taken to wearing baggy clothes in her secret identity as mild-mannered Sally Sanders, high school student.

This was just a random thought I had.

What kind of special measures for dealing with waste disposal might need to exist in a world with superhumans?

Do fans dig through the trash of the local superteam looking for souvenirs? Maybe there are people searching for things to sell? How much would an old mask go for?

What might show up in a supervillain’s trash? Failed experimental weapon prototypes? Items of alien origin? What might Eurostar be putting in their trash? How about VIPER?

Could alien microorganisms be getting released into the sewer system every time a team’s alien member uses the restroom?

Could there be companies that provide specialty waste disposal services for superteams? How do the regular trash disposal companies work with them?

I found the medical debt concept to be a good replacement for the death during character creation notion of Classic Traveller, and dying appears to have been done away with after first edition. I think it’s called “Iron Man Traveller” now, for the true hardcore Traveller fan. Nothing like needing to pay your bills to motivate a group of adventurers to get out there and do something.
 

Group character creation was actually a ton of fun for everyone, and it was like a mini campaign played out in a single session.

The remaining characters have since been converted over to Hero, and we played the first session as the group started their pirating career. Since all three PCs were marines in the service until their forties and retired, they all worked out to be about roughly the same points, so everyone started at 225 despite having pretty modest stats.
 

The crew of NPCs is starting to assemble as well. Our illustrious PCs are also using fake names as pirates, with Brigadier Meson now called Captain Nemos. He even started wearing a cape to present a more dashing figure.

3 hours ago, Mark Rand said:

Which one?

 

The bridge closest to the blast furnaces is the Carrie Furnace Hot Metal Bridge (also known as the Union Railroad Rankin Hot Metal Bridge #35).  It is out of service and it hasn’t seen a train in almost 40 years.  The other bridge is the George Rankin Jr. Memorial Bridge.

 

I was looking at the furnace site. It seems like the sort of place that a freak like the Scarecrow or the Joker might use for a lair.