BoneDaddy

The uniform makes the an - or woman. I was a totally different person in uniform than in civvies. Today, I don't swear when I wear a necktie - it just doesn't happen. I have coworkers who never knew I swore - for years, becuase they never saw me in a T-shirt. The same thing happens in any costume. I was the Joker one Hallowe'en in college, and I was FREE, so free for the night. I loved it. It was a total license to misbehave.

Same thing probably holds true for the tights. It helps the hero compartmentalize their lives. In this uniform, I can see human beings get killed and still go on. Outside of this uniform, I can watch a romantic comedy with my wife.

Chuckg - you'll never fly with that attitude.

Chainsaw. Groovy!

Whisper - an invisible spy? Can you describe his hat?

If you have nitrogen and methane, you have some of the building blocks of life on our warm damp rock. Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen (water ice, Good old di-hydrogen oxide. No meaningful charge at that temp, so NOT hydrogen hydroxide, IMHO). I imagine small creatures with low metabolic rates, capable of living on very little light, raw minerals, and the weak, thin atmosphere. Lichens.

They would be VERY sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum, since they would need to milk all they could get from the distant Sol. Sol is all that makes life possible in this sytem. The energy is needed to get past the 2d law of thermodynamics, so I feel the lichen would use the suns energy. This also means that they could bloom and thrive if provided with a relatively greater source of EM energy. Nothing like coming back to your landing pod to find it crushed under a mass of quickly dying plutonian lichens.

I'll call them Stygians. Maybe they aren't particularly intelligent. Like an collective INT of 1. But an EGO of 30. One power - mind control. All they want is a little EM. Like the induced current from your neuronic firings. Like the IR pouring off your bodies. Like all your tech. Call them desolid, buy all primary stats but BODY & EGO down to one.

The good news all the excess energy kills 'em after a quick, huge bloom. The bad news is you can't eat 'em after they kill your ship's engines and comms.

For a friendlier (maybe a little more gothic, though) version, create a slowly decaying copacetic relationship with the host. They want your induced currents, you get the counter-induction. Higher EGO, EGO defense, Telepathy, Images, nightmares, paranoia, obsessive thoughts, psychosis, seizures, amnesia, strokes, and eventually, death.

Its late, and I feel a little dark about Pluto. It isn't even a nice place to visit.

Marshall MacGyver shoots him with her GooGun. Its a continuous uncontrolled entangle (4 one minute charges, 2 clips). A ball of expanding, hardening, sticky foam hits the Turtle center mass, and even if he can shrug it off, he has to keep on shrugging it off every darn second.

(I got the idea for this late one night in the bathroom. I used edge shaving cream to disable a cockroach until I could find something more appropriate to send it on its way. Worked himself up quite a lather in no time. I didn't shave him.)

9 sorry, Charlie.

I've had very little sleep this week.

I got a flat tire

There was a flood.

It wasn't my fault!

Totally out of excuses. Yes, Scientologists. That's exactly what I meant.

Whats the point of having 12" of stretching and a martial grab if you won't use your tentacles once in a while.

Grab, grab, entangle, entangle, hoist, slap gently (I assume a mind control is at work - the FNG can't REALLY be that stupid.) Read the FNG's mind, find out if how much and what sort of control has been initiated. If none, correct. If some, repeat step six above as necessary.

Originally posted by Trebuchet

Remember how Caine was treated by most other Chinese immigrants in "Kung Fu" when they found out he was a Shaolin priest.

I thought it was the fact that he was a six foot tall white guy that threw them off.

my wiseass aside, good point

The may form as a counter-vigilante group, protecting themselves and their individual populations from a different vigilante group.

Carr's The Alienist is a great read, and should provide you with good flavor for the times. Seems NYC was politically a little corrupt back in the day.

The challenge with the ethnicly diverse group from the 1890s is all the other groups hateed each other. The Irish hated the Germans hated the Polish hated the blacks hated the Bohemians hated the Italians hated the French (and everybody hates the Jews, but during National Brotherhood Week....) What would compel a Mick and Wop to hang around with some Chinaman? (I apologize for the slurs, but I use them to prove a point). Would the supers find each others company safer than life alone at large? Why? Are they all supercompassionate and super-well-rounded?

I think it depends on how you handle it. A group of deranged skinhead christian racists is OK. A secret cabal of jews who run the world's banking systems and drink the blood of virgin christians is not. Satanists are always OK villains. Voodoo is still fare game, IMHO. If the villain is crazy, he can have any faith he wants - from anabaptist to zaroasterian.

It all comes down to acceptable stereotyping, which is kind of a shameful thing to say. Its OK to make fun of Dyaneticists. Its OK to have Voodoo priests running around with zombies. Its OK to have splinter cells of religious terrorists (just about any theology would have some basis in truth).

But note, in almost all these cases, the religion has been a symptom of a different disease, and not the disease itself. When you cross that line, you better have an evil god (Cthulhu, Baal, etc.) or a charismatic evil leader (Jim Jones, David Koresh, Kim Jong Il). Otherwise something ugly happens, and ANYONE who embraces that otherwise harmless ideology is suddenly suspect (take any current event for example).

You can create balance by joining with a good member of that faith. If Hiram helps you defeqat the evil cult of Amish criminals, thereby restoring his community to faithfulness, its an OK storyline. If the final moral in your world is "wipe out the Amish" you've probably created a bad storyline (If any Amish folks read this, I mean no offense. And what are YOU doing using a computer?)

furry Barabas is a dog. A mutt actually. Not a good looking one, either.

furry Marshall Becker is a furry octopus. yich.

Marshall Becker would lead the Galactic Imperial invasion fleet to Earth. It isn't a kindly Federation in the evil universe.

Barabas would have made his fortune as a free gladiator, burned Rome on his own, made himself emperor, waded through the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Gauls, Picts, Vikings, Egyptians, Huns, Russ, etc. He'd very likely rule humanity with an iron fist until some evil super usurped his throne of heads. Then he'd be imprisoned for a few centuries, until he was forgotten about, and escaped. Rinse, repeat.

Barabas. Tough one. If in alternate Earth all the males are females, weird things happen, particularly with Barabas. Biblically speaking, Barabas was the guy who was let go so Jesus of Nazareth could be crucified. Since Christ died quite literally for Barabas's sins, he can never die (its a great old movie with Anthony Quinn, that I took a litttle further.)

In this alternate Earth, christ would have been a woman, and as such had no formal standing to even touch the pharisees, much less piss them off. But She would have been a widely revered witch. She would have converted the Romans and the Philistines no problem as a living goddess. Throw in the holy ghost, and the Christian tradition isn't Judeo-Christian. Its Philistino-Christian. Additionally, as a woman, She probably would have been stoned to death rather than crucified. (Insert unPC joke here).

For better or worse, Barabasa's tale remains very much the same. Eternal life, oodles of luck (in either direction - Barabas will be in the worst possible place at the worst possible time, but survive unscathed and help people,) no other superpowers. Just an extraordinarily skilled normal with a penchant for killing anything evil and non-human. No human killing, though, because human's aren't beyond redemption.

Real tech. This exists today. Low level radio wave emmitter. Causes no damage, but amounts of pain sufficient to incapacitate all test subjects.

So does this. Hypersonics. 13000Hz range. Remains an invisible, inaudible beam. Unless you're the target. Now it hurts, and it deafens, and it burns. At a high enough level, say 20,000Hz it softens hard things, like your skull.

Why wait for lasers?

Another tale of the unfortunately named Flaming Justice.

Chasing two baddies who are in the process of getting away (taking the elevator deep into the underground lair) Flaming Justice talks the team wizard (an errant time traveler) into the teleporting FJ into the elevator shaft, to land on top of the elevator car. So far, so good. Except for the long fall onto the elevator car - that hurt a lot, and made a big noise. Arch bad guy and bad mentalist pop up through the access hatch to see who they're about to capture.

FJ had a number of unfortunate attack powers. One of them was a last ditch fireball - EB, no range, explosion, personal immunity, increased endurance cost, activation roll. He pushes it. Bad guy uses his held action to activate his force wall. FJ rolls miserably, does no damage to bad guy or bad mentalist. He does blow the doors off the elevator shaft up above him. Bad guy and bad mentalist watch as FJ utters an expletive and passes out.

Then comes the torture, brain washing, Manchurian Candidate, betrayal, and further misfortune.

Little Wooden Boy - the Tick's "other" sidekick.

Gleek - Xan & Jana's pet monkey.

Wraith. Desolid, darkness, and a stun drain (effects solid). He was crazy as the day is long, but well nigh invulnerable.

Strangely, my character had an area effect images attack limited to creating the illusion that everything around was on fire. Even more strangely, this coincided with Wraith's psych lim, and away he ran. It was a short lived moment of heroism for the unfortunately named "Flaming Justice."

on the Hero System Discussion Board, Lord Liaden has posted a link to an essay about the use of HUGE presence.

North Korea? Sleeper Agents?

"Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

Check out the Manchurian Candidate, GMs. A "how it works" of a great brainwashing scenario.

Peregrine - I was out of the loop for a while. What happenned at the end of the Days Of Which We Do Not Speak?I seem to recall a barbarian invasion of some sort...

an argument in favor of PRE attacks for the JMT. The JMT is immediate and temproary. You cannot JMT someone to do anything that takes more than a few seconds. Thus, the PRE attack is more suited. Make the PRE cost END to use, require a skill roll (force manipulation), gestures, whatever floats your boat.

"These aren't the droids your looking for," and "you will be rewarded" are forms of persuasion. This looks like a classic presence attack. That it is done so casually indicates that it is a LOT of presence.

my $.02

At the risk of offending a devout taoist sorceror, could a GM run a campaign by throwing the I-Ching to see what happens next? (6d2, essentially)