ThothAmon

Re: Pulparize It! The Sweeney - two-fisted hero cops Reagan and Carter smash their way through the 1930's London underworld whilst their boss Chief Inspector Haskins fends off the politicans and the yellow press. Nobody is safe from this reckless crime-fighting duo - Fascists, Bolsheviks, Chinese Triad dope-dealers, Nazi mad scientists, 1000 year old sorcerors, Ancient Tentacled Horrors From Beyond - all of them live in fear of the words "Shut it! You're nicked!"

Re: Hyperdrive! This series is dross. Very bad. Can't believe it got the green light. It is to Red Dwarf as excrement is to a diamond. Avoid.

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? I'd pull on the tights and go carve myself a small empire in a badly-run Third World country i.e. go where I could do some real good rather than whupping muggers on a part-time basis. And anybody who didn't like it could go talk to the hand / fist / laser eyes / mutant radioactive breath. Facetious? Possibly, but I'd look at things on the grand scale. And no, my secret ID is not George W Bush

Re: post-apocalyptic genre book A bloke called Michael La Bossiere did a nice post-apocalypse world ready to go in .PDF form. IIRC the background had humanity (and Earth) over run by Big Tentacled Entities from beyond space and time, with the PCs as part of the last surviving humans on a Martian colony. Nice blend of SF, horror and post apocalypse. !google

Re: Pirate Weapons? I'll also recommend On Stranger Tides as campaign inspiration As for stats the old 'Pirates' ICE/HERO supplement has powder weapons all the way up to culverin and cannon. It also has examples of blades but a distinct lack of focus on the fencing martial arts - there are plenty of good online martial arts resources for the period though

Re: Reality TV For Superheroes Yes - a major campaign (back in the late 1980's RealTime) based on publicity-hungry heroes. Lots of detail such as corporate sponsorships / advertising, superhero liability insurance, costume fashion decisions, team logos done by advertising firms, crack legal team to handle problems, biography / novelization / movie tie-ins, celebrity gossip, groupies, sex, narcotics etc etc. Much fun when done correctly. Many ways for the GM to screw a hero that don't involve rolling dice for attacks

Re: How to have long combats Skilled combatants can make a fight last for a long time if they fight defensively i.e. plenty of psyching out, taking cover, dodging, looking for an edge. If both sides play it as "Hulk smash puny enemy" then it should be over quickly. Long combats can be rather boring unless roleplayed well. All IMO and YMMV.

Re: If YOU have been playing Hero since the 80's why do you still keep coming back? All systems have flaws but 8 out of 10 GMs said their properly initiated players preferred HERO I come back because the system works.

Re: Building the Sliders timer I'd have the wormholes as GM fiat and the Timer as an OAF Dimensional Anomaly Detector - simple and cheap.

Re: Don't Buy Everything In a Good Story (Topic: Supers and the Law) I think Edna quotes death dates for caped supers as late in the 1950's (58? 59?). That seems resonably consistent with a Golden Age setup (and the rise of McCarthyism) and makes 1973 the year for Syndromes rather cynical debut. The timelines seem to mirror real-world loss of innocence for people of a certain age group. We don't see villains becuase they weren't there. Mr Incredibles 'Wall Of Fame' doesn't show much by way of supervillain activity. If we take him as 'The Man' you'd expect mention of a nemesis. Having said my £0.02 worth I must agree with the allegory comments. 'The Incredibles' is telling an allegorical story rather than setting up a fully internally-consistent world.

Re: Champs "Star Chamber" Steal from the TV series 'Mission Impossible'. Known heroes are contacted in exotic fashion by secret government agency. Missions are to take down villains who have evaded standard law-enforcement efforts. Sometimes that includes the death penalty...

Re: Character for Review: Elaine Nash I'd recommend additions to the JKD skillset - Offensive Strike (kicks), Martial Grab (locks and holds), Martial Weapons (clubs and knives). I've had some JKD training and these were taught from beginner onwards. At the level of skill your PC exhibits (2 additional damage classes and the somewhat advanced Counterstrike maneuver) they would be a non-trivial omission. You also seem to be missing Breakfall, even if just at the familiarity level. Anotehr thought. Never give a character Martial Escape without a complementary grab or choke maneuver. In my experience the grapple and escape techniques are taught together.

Re: How to use the President For my money any President has to be the ultimate pragmatist. If the heroes aren't 100% spotless and frogmarch the party line they won't ever meet the Prez for a photo op. In a similar vein, the Prez won't call on heroes unless really desperate. He'd have to exhaust PRIMUS and any other official sources first. As for making an enemy, well, a loudmouthed hero could realistically find himself on the Presidential s**t list. Look at the real life media circuses surrounding hot-topics such as the Enron scandal, BJs for cigars, inadequate disaster response, naming of spies or confidential sources etc etc. It would only take one Presidential aide to rubbish a PC and that person could be in significant hot water.

Re: Clever Future Weapons Knife missiles. Small fast sharp nigh-indestructible (semi)guided projectiles that fly at Mach 10 on an almost inexhaustible power unit. Rudimentary AI that stops them from targeting their user but targets everything else that looks vaguely threatening. Time bomb. Small anti-personnel grenade that teleports everything inside the explosion radius backwards in time by a predetermined amount. Used on conventional planets it can project the target area into vacuum - the planet moves forward on its orbital rotation during the time differential Wormhole projector. Opens the second end of a partially stable wormhole at the projected target location. Resultant gravitational chaos capable of destroying suns, planets or artifical habitats.

Re: SciFi Colonists Sociable personality, no personality extremes, robust good health. Dysfunctional geeks need not apply, especially at those travel speeds I recall a rather good classic SF novel (Joe Haldeman? Mindbridge?) suggesting that interplanetary explorers would be selected for such traits and would be required to breed at mandatory minimum intervals as part of their contract.

Re: Enemies of San Angelo I liked Enemies Of San Angelo. The writeups provide characters that are more human than the generic supers found in certain other supplements.

Re: Hard Science....easy descriptions. To a certain extent roleplayers come to play the game to escape from reality. If your group wants that escape and you don't, you may be heading for trouble. There's no reason why you can't have gunfights, romance and suchlike alomgside concerns such as pressurization, gravity, reaction mass, lengthy travel times et al. They are not mutually exclusive. Hard science SF is a possibility. First you have to decide the upper boundary where hard science becomes rubber science. The upper limit usually comes when considering such things as FTL travel, FTL communications, anti-gravity, inertia dampening, hyperspace, force fields, matter transmission, alien species, super-hydroponics and time dilation. Star Trek is a shining example of how not to do hard SF with big topics. Better examples are found in SF literature e.g. The Web Between The Worlds, Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Singularity Sky, Broken Angels, Red Thunder, Fall Of Moondust. There are one or two good movie/TV examples, often flawed B movies rather than blockbusters e.g. Pitch Black (gloss over the universal batteries and the weird conjunction), Firefly (zero-G was obviously too expensive to produce), Total Recall (decompression? nah!), UFO (future space chicks will wear purple wigs!) and of course 2001. Players generally don't want to be bothered with the small things that would be vital in a hard SF world - radiation shielding, vac suit maintenance, low-G movement restrictions. That's easily dealt with via appropriate background skills, and problems in these areas can then be saved for dramatic purposes. Hard SF space combat is a fantastic source of fun - good gunnery experts are mathematicians who sweat probabilities, the best pilots are healthy specimens who can resist high G without blackout and a good sensor ops man is worth his weight in meteoric diamond. Other good plot bits can come from survival scenarios, first contacts and so forth.

Re: Champions Christmas Adventure Seeds! Love it! You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to GestaltBennie again

Re: Cities of the Future Original post asked for a few suggestions. I'll fire off a couple of additional literary SF cities of note that may add something to the discourse: Firstly, the city of Oberon (actually Oberon II) as depicted in John Varleys fantastic work The Golden Globe. Oberon is the city on an artifical cylindrical habitat orbiting Uranus. The habitat is still in construction and so is the city. This has been the case for many, many years due to the size of the construct. Entire sections of the city are continuously, slowly being manufactured in giant factories and moved out into the partially completed arc-pieces of the habitat cylinder (think of the cross-section as a clock face with only 11, 12 and 1 and 5, 6 and 7 complete) on rails laid across the interior floor of the cylinder. The habitats moments of mass are constantly adjusted as new skyscrapers and city blocks are rolled off the production lines - the buildings are always on the move. Oberon also has an Edge which you can fall off (and be charged $100 for rescue from the skin of the hyperplastic bubble that keeps in the atmosphere). Also, since nobody owns the airspace above the Oberon cylinder floor, low-grav upside down 'Christmas tree' mansions are built suspended from the central hub by the wealthy and/or anarchic. Another important aspect to Oberon is the transportation system - fast anti-spinward Rim Trains, exotic elevators along the spokes to the hub, and lateral hub transports, everything timed and balanced to preserve the spin/momentum of the habitat. To quote Varley, "If you don't like the neighbourhood just wait half an hour". The second discussion point would be the cyber-city presented by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Virtual real estate and its associated technologies could be just as important in a high-tech setting as the physical spaces. The hero lives physically in a U-Haul shipping container but spends most of his interactive life in a virtual city running across multitudinous computer systems. If telepresence technology is ingrained in society then all bets are off - the laws of physics needn't apply to virtual worlds. A very unique city experience would probably be something from Dan Simmons Hyperion where each room of your house (or street in the city) may be on a different planet and doorways are actually gates between planetary systems. This could result in the ultimate distributed environment, a network of habitats spanning light years distance yet they are only a few metres / seconds walking distance apart. More fantastic ultra tech cities might resemble the semi-Utopian habitat described near the close of Charles Stross' Accelerando, a cylindrical habitat constructed and maintained by nanotech / nanocomputers - walls, ceilings, floors, furniture etc would be assembled and removed as needed, all basic needs likewise provided FOC but with space / energy at a premium for non-essential tasks. These cities are all relatively high on the Tech Level scale. Lower tech cities would be more orthodox e.g. a rotating ring of pressurized tin cans at a La Grange point. I guess it all comes down to the tech level of the campaign...

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Ah, fantastic stuff. I read them every time I get jaded. ATM I've just finished 'Down The Bright Way' by Robert Reed (rather intriguing SF with no interstellar travel in the established sense) and I'm just getting into '1610: Sundial In A Grave' by Mary Gentle.

Re: Who was your favorite and what made them so good? Money. Fit, oiled semi-naked chicks writhing in time to a hip hop soundtrack. And the odd bit of gaming...

Re: Help With Hydroelectric Dam Complexes In USA...? Thanks all for your responses. I originally chose the Hoover Dam because of its fame and gravity dam construction. Lack of nearby population centre was a factor against it. As to the physics of dam destruction, not really an issue when the Army Corps Of Engineers have been duped into running 'wargames' by a highly-placed mole. ATM I favour a fictional setting, with second place for Portland as the real-world city most likely to float into the Pacific in the next few months

European seeking assistance I'm looking for a suitably grand hydroelectric dam complex in mainland USA to use as a locale for an unusually epic set-piece. ATM I'm considering the Hoover Dam although I'm very open to suggestions, especially if there are alternatives that are close to large population centres. What would be the result of the Hoover Dam being destroyed? Other than the sudden draining of Lake Mead? What areas are likely to be flooded / inundated downstream from the dam? I've been touring the Wikis on this and have yet to come to a sober conclusion. Advice / suggestions from the natives would be most appreciated

Re: Mystic Team Vehicle? How about a wallet full of enchanted train tickets? Hold one up and your personal steam-powered express train appears, complete with dining car, smoking car and full waiter service

Re: Captain Jack It gets worse (or better if you are really twisted). Recent rumour has it that 'Torchwood' will also feature Rachel Stevens in a prominent role For those Merkins (or normal, sane, non-SAD people) amongst you, she's a former member of 'talented' pop act S-Club7. Representative image of her talents may be found here: http://the-victimizer.tripod.com/top25/Rachel_Stevens-2.jpg