red_eagle123

Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!! Oh... where to start: I did not like the remastered Battlestar Galactica. I have never seen any of Monty Python's movies from start to finish (Although I'm pretty certain I've heard every single freakin' line of dialogue ever!" I too have never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Read the Hobbit. Enjoyed that. Got about 50 pages into Lord of the Rings and stopped. I have never read any of the other big fantasy series either (Song of Fire and Ice, Game of Thrones, etc etc). Saw the HBO series for Game of Thrones. I'm sure there will be more later.....

Re: The cranky thread My condolences to you and your family CC. And in my own little slice of hell..... the Hits just keep on coming. The divorce got finalized. yay. Still haven't seen dime 1 of the settlement. And then I had to have abdominal hernia surgery. The first day back to work from surgery (today).... I found out my entire department has been eliminated. Go home. Yay me. FML. It's really getting hard to stay positive.....

Re: Tell me about your campaign world. My current campaign world is a home brew. The setting is modern day 2009. We started out only a month or two behind real time but that gulf between game time and real time keeps growing. People with powers didn't exist before 1989. The very first person publicly acknowledge to have powers appeared during the Loma Prieta earthquake. After that more and more people started showing up. Where these powers came from isn't known, even the players aren't 100% sure. What the players have started to figure out, and will eventually find out is that super powers came to Earth due to the Moon missions. The first landing brought back moon rocks, and unprotected exposure to these rocks causes mutations. Unfortunately these mutations don't show up until the next generation. Specifically children born after a person is exposed will develop powers. Of course, the transport taking the moon rocks cross country for study spilled some near I-70... oops. Additionally, powers won't develop until the person is in their late teens, between 17 and 19 years old. Also, if the aforementioned moon rocks do come into contact with those with powers, it boosts their powers 1000% percent, but this also causes the rocks to drain themselves of whatever it is that boosts/causes powers. Due to the severe delay between exposure and manifestation, people haven't quite figured out the cause and effect yet. Although they're starting to add things up. Manifestee's (my term for those with powers) were mostly secretive until recently. The Manifestee population is growing as more and more people hit that magical age and start manifesting. The game world setting has also necessitated certain setting changes, including: Comic Books are no longer published about Superheroes. Any comics published after approximately 1991 do not exist in my game world It's become common place for students graduating from High School and entering college to take a year off. Additionally Colleges no longer allow Freshmen and Sophomores onto their sports teams. Manifestee's are banned from all sports. There is no way to easily test for the existence of superpowers however, so it is possible to hide a Manifestation. The campaign primarily takes place in/around a school for Manifestee's located on part of Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Certain big events have ties to Manifestation (Timothy McVeigh was a mind controller and the Oklahoma City bombing actually occurred while people were trying to stop him). In addition, the players have recently discovered the existence of alternate dimensions, running across Istvatha V'han herself (and unfortunately drawing her attention to their home dimension, which she's now searching for). I have also hinted at the existence of Skarn and Tyrannon, and the PC's have twice traveled to the Shadow Dimension, where one of the PC's powers draw their energy from.

Re: The cranky thread I don't like to complain. I really don't. I prefer to be zen and just let life bebop along. However life has been most unkind to me lately. To whit, last friday (the 8th) was my birthday. In the span of time from then to now, I have: Been diagnosed with an Umbilical hernia Burned the bottoms of both feet (blisters are slowly recovering) gotten an eviction notice (Newly moved into a place, this was the first month they took rent out, it turned out to be a computer glitch) Slowly drowning in debt with GenCon still looming And the capper of it all is... tomorrow morning is my divorce trial date. I don't normally drink, but in the past week I've drained a bottle of rum and a bottle of whiskey.....

Re: need more than plot hooks! Some other points I'd like to bring up for your consideration. When designing adventures for your super-hero campaign, depending on your setting it's possible to pull in material that isn't strictly capes and tights. Magic beings, aliens in spaceships, multi-dimensional invaders, evolved animals, etc etc. These can all fit within a super-hero campaign. As an example: In the game I'm running right now, I imposed a strict No-Magic rule. Superheroes only appeared in the past 20 years, and prior to that it was history as it appears in the history books. Despite all this, I managed to work in some multi-dimensional travel for the PC's, including taking them to a dimension where magic works just fine. They even ran into talking dragons on their little adventure. Another point to consider, when designing an adventure, as hinted at above by Pizza Man, consider why the PC's would get involved in the caper by the antagonists. Specifically, are the PC's full fledged superheroes who will stop any crime? Or are they a bunch of super-powered teenagers who would rather be left alone? In the first instance they will go to the adventure. In the second, the adventure has to come to them. The last point I'd recommend is to make it personal to the PC's. Give them personal connections to the adventure somehow. Maybe they know the victim of the crime. Or they suspect that one of their Dependent NPC's is involved somehow. Or the building that just got destroyed is in name of one of the PC's. Etc etc. Small connections help build players (and PC's) interest in the adventure, which helps lure them in. Superhero stories also can take a bit of time to setup, moreso than D&D games (in my experience). Once the party forms in D&D games, they can go find a dungeon to raid or some monsters to kill and allow the campaign to grow from that. While the same formula can work with superheroes, it can just as often take longer to do the initial setup (introducing significant NPC's such as a mayor or police chief for instance, relationships between the PC's and other authorities, reasons for villains to do the things they do, etc etc). You might consider just running a game or two pitting the PC's against random villains with no connection, with some 'downtime' between adventures to help set up these sorts of relationships and start to build the world around the campaign.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From last nights 4E D&D Game: Grai: Half Orc Warlord Torinn: Dragonborn Warden Guin: Elf Ranger Marygold: Human Sorceror Marygold: So you're saying the mad god is related to Alowen? Grai: Owlbears? They make great pets, but you have to release them after a couple years or they get nasty. Torinn: I once knew man back in village, kept owlbear pets much longer than he should. Was big man, named Haggard. Guin: Was he related perchance to a bard named Merle? GM: . o (When did I lose control of this game?)

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Best without context, said in a D&D game: "So Mr. Arcanist Guy, do these bouts of vertigo and color flashes mean we've found the far realm incursion, or have we just all discovered medieval cancer?"

Re: How much do you customize the setting? I'm currently on my second champions campaign. My current campaign has zero influence from the printed Champions Universe. The /only/ think I've used was that there used to be a group of superheroes operating out of New York calling themselves the Champions that the PC's met briefly. Of course these particular Champions were more like a modern day boy band group, formed for media purposes than anything, and all the members of the Champions were names/powers I made up based off artwork by Storn Cook. My original Champions campaign on the other hand, got tons of inspiration from the printed Champions Universe (circa early 5th edition). The PC's were C-List heroes, and I lifted villains straight from the various enemies books wholesale and threw them against the PC's. The PC's eventually wound up having numerous ties to various published groups, including becoming friendly with the Champions, and co-sharing the name Protectors with the San Francisco team (The Players independently chose that name for their group and it was only after that I discovered the published Protectors).

Re: Creepy Villain Time Depending on your definition of creepy: The Excremental - A poor young man whose power manifestation turned him into Swamp Thing like being composed entirely of, well, excrement. I never really did a back story for him, so how he discovered his unfortunate powers was never really decided but, imagine having to fight him? Four Horsemen - Pestilence: The same group that fought the Excremental above also eventually had to fight the avatar of Pestilence. I created his body to be composed of bugs, a living swarm that gave him damage resistance as well as limited desolidification and AE attacks as his swarm... well, swarmed. Bodyjacker - A shadow king like being, with no body existing solely on the astral plane. A former soldier in the Anti-Mutant league before manifesting powers himself, he very much hates both himself and those with powers. He sees it as his job to show just how evil powered people are. His M.O. is to take over a large crowd of people and use them to spread terror.... the few times he manifests physically he appears as a giant pink cloud.....

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Sorry, no. Maybe if you had pictures and diagrams?

Re: Interactive Sky Map Now that is way freaking cool! I could play with that all day....

Re: What sort of technology do you use in yiour games? Like CrosshairCollie above, I also use HeroDesigner for character sheets. For a time I used my laptop at the table, I'd created a html page that let me track whose turn it was and what segment it was. However the laptop was a bit bigger than I liked, I felt like I was hiding behind the screen too much. I also write up post-game recaps and post them on a wikidot page open to all the players. And they occasionally post player-perspective recaps as well. I've been looking for a good solution like a tablet PC that will let me have present artwork used in the game as well. A tablet PC of some sort may work, as well as I see there's a laptop out there with a flippable screen that looks promising.

Re: So how does Champions compare to Mutants and Masterminds? I would say that Hero System actually gets two scores Character Generation & Setup - Low 8, high 7. There's a lot of crunch, and it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. Especially for someone coming into it blind. However this crunch allows for a LOT of flexibility in the system. I've tooled around in other hero genre systems, and Hero has the best flexibility I've seen yet at all power scales. Gameplay - 3. Once you've finished character generation, the actual gameplay is really easy. I've run two campaigns now, one of which had 8 people wholly unfamiliar with tabletop gaming at all, and they were able to pick up the mechanics of playing the game within 5 minutes. It was only the character generation that gave them pause, and I always helped them work through that.

Re: Super Heroic Behavior Welcome to the Hero System, it really is a great toolbox to play with. The rules governing the behavior of a Hero are not something that would be addressed in the core books. The reason for this is simple, Hero System is a toolbox design, and as such any game system can be played. This includes playing Spies, Bloodthirsty barbarians or even Supervillains. Having a pre-defined morality code woven into the rules structure from the start would hamper some of the ability to play such off-kilter games (from the perspective of a superhero). The morality of a game system, and the heroes within, are something the players and Gm should discuss before hand. This will ensure that the players know what the GM envisions, and that the Players don't go create Punisher and Wolverine clones when the Gm is hoping for a Silver Age Comic book feel. The supplement, Champions, which defines various specific super-hero tropes usable in the game (as well as being a great resource all around) will have more information about the various ages, and other items of interest for what you may be looking for. I highly recommend it myself.

Re: Kill the Dude with the Thing Is the thing still the thing? I thought we killed all the dudes with the thing and the thing no longer is important because we have the thing and there are no more dudes to take it?