Whitewings

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) Tombstone, despite her ominous name, is not a particularly gloomy person; she doesn't even affect a dark and brooding persona. Tombstone Research is a small RD& compnay run by Carol Cunningham, a multiple doctorate holder despite being only 23. Her secret? She has a unique psychic gift, a combination of mediumship and psychometry: By touching someone's grave marker, she can absorb the skills and knowledge they had in life. In principle, she could probably get a "read" from a corpse or a skeleton, but that's a bit too icky for her liking. She hasn't dared try a funeral urn yet. By this point, she's made pilgrimages to the tombs and graves of every renowned person she can manage. Now if she could just get the certifications to go with the skills...

Re: WWYCD: Lost in a world without Supers; 9/11/2001 Extremists of any stripe are by definition incapable of settling for less than "everything we want and more." If you prevent incident X, than will do *nothing* to prevent incident Y, or to encourage it, other than the effect on a given group's credibility and manpower. In the specific case of the WTC attacks, forcing the planes down and arresting the hijackers, so they can be tried and convicted like common criminals, is the best possible action: It will save many lives, and it will send a clear message to those responsible and others who might be thinking of joining or forming similar groups "You're not soldiers. You're criminals, nothing else." Also, stopping the planes and forcing the authorities to treat the hijackers as criminals, period, will make the "War on Terror" a much harder sell, maybe even impossible.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book Remember: If you steal from more than three sources, it's research.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book How about a real sea monster, one that's actually recognized as extant by the scientific community?

Re: Class of the Titans To be fair, the Kraken is only the Scandanavian name. The basic concept of an impossibly huge sea-going monster is found is almost every sea-going culture I'm aware of, including Greek. The writers simply chose to use familiar name (presumably, the gods chose to refer to it as "kraken" so the heroes would more readily understand the threat).

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book Yes indeed.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book In Africa, there's a volcano that spews lava with a melting point so low, it routinely freezes solid in mid-air, like water in a Warner Brothers cartoon winter.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book Don't forget the lost city of Petra. Or on a different note, the log cabins of the redwood forests: There are several houses made from fallen sequoias. So? What's so unusual about that? The houses in question are built *inside the fallen trees.* The trees were left where they fell and cabins carved into them.

Re: Unused Adventure Concepts A "Tunnel of Love" would be a travelling attraction, which means the PCs (assuming Vancouver natives) would never have seen it before. This could be a distinct advantage for planning. As for the roller coaster, the Big Dipper (aka Old Rickety) is the tallest wooden roller coaster in Canada. Wooden coasters are not quiet; they creak, they rattle, they groan and flex. Unlike a steel coaster, a wooden coaster makes noise from every single part of the structure, and that structure is dense. It is not light, it is not open, it is not airy. It is wooden. It is flammable. Blasters might want to keep this mind; heroic noes will have to be careful, villainous ones might use it for a distraction.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book Another example of real world stuff that only sounds like a comic book would be the case of the 100-pound housewife who was able to lift a 2,000 pound car to free her trapped son (and I do have the attribution and full particulars, I just can't find the book at the moment). Technically, she rolled the car, rather than lifting it, but it's still an incredible feat. Similar feats of strength, endurance and courge, equally astonishing, can be found with some research. Howard Hill, the man who did the actual shooting for Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, once killed a tiger shark at a distance of fifty feet with a single arrow - fired while he was underwater. He may have been the greatest archer ever (but he never split an English arrow nock to tip - the arrow in the film was a bamboo "stunt double" ).

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure....

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book That's right. They knew of the companion star, Sirius B, and incorporated its motions into their "siggi" ritual, which seemed to date back to before the "pup's" orbit was plotted by any known astronomical traditions. They also knew of Saturn's rings, Jupiter's moons, the elliptical structure of the Milky Way, and the existence of other galaxies - all of which information appears to predate its discovery by known astronomical traditions. Yet at the same time, they didn't know of the planets beyond Saturn, which if their information came (as hypothesized) from parties of astronomers who vistied the area in the 1920s, one would expect. They say that their knowledges came from beings who came from a far place, but that "far place" is not defined. The information can be gathered from right here on earth with moderately powerful reflecting telescopes, but if it was gathered by an ancient civilization... which one? You might be right, it might have been the luckiest guess in history. But it's a great source for speculation, espcially in a superhero campaign.

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... I seem to recall reading that the luckless Joker in question was shot "by persons unknown." Nobody ever found out who the shooter was because nobody wanted to have to prosecute them.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book It's important to note that the Volantor doesn't yet work. It can lift off and stay stable, it can manage aerodynamic flight in wind tunnel tests, but so far Dr. Moller can't get it through the transition between vertical and horizontal. Unfortunately.

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... True, the memberships requirements did change over time. Wildfire was actually rejected initially becaues he couldn't demonstrate a unique power (his suit's allowed under the "life sustaining equipment" clause of the constitution), only existing ones; he describes himself in his spotlight issue as "a one-man Legion of Superheroes." Blok can communicate telepathically with other silicon-based intelligences (which Saturn Girl can't), and he can increase his density. And Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl founded the Legion. They predated the membership requirements Superboy's membership (and Supergirl's) was actually addressed in the Legion Outpost: Being in effect both permanent and honorary, his membership doesn't exclude others from possessing similar powers (Mon-El, Ultra Boy). There's also the "suitable character" clause to consider. Fire Lad was rejected because he was too much of a hot-head (pun unavoidable). And Stone Boy... well, if you were on the membership committee, wolud you induct a statue?

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... Chemical King was enormously powerful: He could speed up, slow down, or even induce almost any chemical reaction, to the point where he could set a steel gun on fire by accelerating its normal oxidation rate. Anyway, the Subs failed to make the grade either because they didn't have a unique power (Night Girl, for example, was a brick, but only when she was out of sunlight - they already had Superboy and Mon-El), or weren't able to fully control it (Infectious Lass, Porcupine Pete), or it depended on external items (Chlorophyll Kid needs existing plants or a supply of seeds).

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book The Coral Castle. Its construction methods are unknown, and the entire structure was assembled by one man, working alone, with no power tools or heavy equipment, and with no known assistants. Some of the blocks are so large that in a test performed in the 1970s, a replica could not not even be extracted from its quarry bed.

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure....

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... And the dissolved oxygen in the water she absorbed passed into her bloodstream slowly, extending how how she could hold her breath and allowing her to stay submerged indefinitely.

Re: Campaign Launch: What Would You Think? The man will be destroyed. Every possible charge, civil and criminal, will be filed against him by every possible person and agency. The end result is that no super-being with any sense will attempt to operate openly, meaning that the only super-beings who will do so are idiots, mostly thugs I suspect. Welcome to a world with no superheroes and vicious anti-super legislation, at least in the US.

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... I think we have a fundamentally different view on "FTL vision." FTL vision, meaning you can somehow see things at greater-than-light velocities, means you can see objects before the light from them reaches us. Therefore, you see things with less of a time lag than normal light-based vision. Therefore, on the astronomical scale (where this becomes significant), you can see a more recent image of nebulae, stellar nurseries, et. al. subject to the limits of your ability to resolve them. So if you can use this ability in conjuction with a regular telescope, you can observe a thousand light year away object and see what was going on, say fifty years ago instead of a thousand years ago.

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... Perhaps you've heard of these interesting devices called "telescopes?" They come in many sizes, and I understand that some of them can even be used by the public.

Re: WWYYCD: The Rally Faye would just groan, "Do you people not learn? Why am I even asking?" and haul the whole lot off to one of the uninhabited islands off the coast (there are a few of them around), then call the cops. Henutsen would make a show of protecting the Klansmen, but her heart wouldn't be in it, so she'd be less than effective. If men who preach treason and sedition in general, and her murder or enslavement in particular, are pummeled into oblivion, well, somehow, she just can't really get upset over this.

Re: Wow....that is a useless power for sure.... FTL Vision would be a *great* power for anyone with any interest in astronomy. Think about it: You could see what's happening in, say, the Eagle Nebula *right now*, and compare that to the images from regular telescopes.

Re: Real World Stuff That Only Sounds Like A Comic Book Don't forget the Antikythera device. It's an ancient Greek analog astronomical computer, which forced a complete revision of our views on the era's sciestific and technical abilities.