Markdoc

Or break - a not uncommon occurrence. The real reason for making Plate less effective against bashing weapons is purely one of game balance - sure the plate - once bashed in - would stay concave, but any blow strong enough to put a significant dent in normal plate armour would kill or maim someone in chain or splint armour - as well as driving bits of the armour into the wound: a frequent cause of blood poisoning. So what is the disadvantage of plate? Well, there isn't any really, apart from cost/heat buildup. It is maybe slightly less flexible than mail, but it handles all sorts of attacks better than mail or leather. So the "vulnerable to crushing attacks" was just put in there to make it a little different and give people reasons to choose something other than plate. Frankly I find almost all of the suggested alternate rules rather silly (adding bronze plates to the outside of your leather jerkin makes it less protective!), so use none of them. cheers, Mark

What I tend to do is have different levels of info just jotted down as brief notes. So to take the Nightling example: General knowledge: This is what everybody who knows anything at all about Nightlings knows. "Everybody hates Nightlings. They are disgusting, evil, repulsive, dangerous and should be killed on sight." Lore: This what anybody who has any knowledge about Nighlings knows (ie: has a Fam: Nightlings). "Actually, Nightlings are not inherently evil. They have a very bad rep., though, so watch out." Secret lore: This is what people who have a decent knowledge about Nightlings know (ie: have Nightlings 11-). "People hate and distrust Nightlings because they practice a dreadful form of Necromantic magic - they were responsible for the creation of the Deadlands long ago" Very Secret Lore: This is what people who have a detailed knowldge of the subject (ie: Nightlings 14- or higher) "The Nightlings used to practice a form of Necromancy (but don't any more) that let them call on knowledge from their clan ancestors. When they were attacked by the Birithani 1800 years ago they opened a gate to the underworld in self-defence and that created the Deadlands. They are not inherently evil - but nearly 2000 years of persecution has made them secretive and hard to deal with" I tend to use this general knowledge/lore/secret lore approach for many groups - and even magic items or people within my game, so that I can keep a good idea of what the players know. In turn, the players know that if they buy KS's that they will get extra information. Of course sometimes the lower level KS: might be wrong - tho' never as wrong as general knowledge - with the truth being revealed only to those who know more. And also of course some groups have no secrets, while other groups have secrets that can only be discovered by play - this category is listed as "unknown lore" To follow the example above: the Deadlands are maintained by the existence of the gate - and this depends on the continuing existence of the high priest of the old Nightling cult, trapped in a sort of Life in Death between worlds. Killing him will close the gate. But no-one knows this - not even Nightling cultists. So the players would have to find this out in-game. Simply buying KS: Nightlings 18- won't help (although it might help with finding his temple, his name, or other historical details). cheers, Mark

I use two simple rules. First, nothing stacks with "free" stuff. You can't add HKA to a normal sword to a bigger HKA and you can't add DEF (by any means) to normal armour to get tougher armour. You just get the best value of the two. You can however stack things you paid points for: a mage's shield (Force field) spell and his Phantasmal Armour (Armour) spell would stack. The rationale/explanation here is that a) this is part of the "real armour/real weapon" limitation and even if your magical armour overlays your real armour, it is no tougher - a little extra thickness has little extra effect. If your skin is as tough as leather, that's going to add little resistance to an attack that can punch a hole in chain mail, for example. The swift movement or "luck" that generally characterises combat luck is inhibited by the extra mass of the armour and so on. The second rule is that you cannot "stack" the same power. Two guys with 1 d6 heal generate a max of 1d6 healing. Two 1d6 RKAs are not the same as a 2d6 RKA and two sets of 8 DEF armour do not give 16 DEF - just 2 times 8. The rationale/explanation here is self-explanatory, I think. I've used these house rules for a very, very long time and they have worked well. You can, of course, with high pointage characters, get combat monsters with magical protection soaring up into the 20's: but then, at that point, they *are* supposed to be legendary heroes, and will be going up against foes who can generate damage sufficient to make them hurt. Uninhibited Stacking: just say no cheers, Mark

I'm a cruel GM, but a fair one So I give everyone 10 points of everyman skills, but vary them a lot from culture to culture, or even within cultures: a noble will not have that many things in common with a peasant. In general, in my game an everyman skill is those things that EVERYONE *will* have, not things that people might have or generally have. to take a few examples: >>Animal Handler<< This means the character is wise in the ways of training animals. Based on my own experience of farm life, you could live your entire liffe around animals and never gain this skill. It's doubly inappropriate for most urban-based characters. >>>Climbing.<<< This, on the other hand, everyone can do from the time they are old enough to lift their own weight. You don't need any instruction on how to climb. >>>Oratory<<< Again: the ability to cast a spell with your words, to lead and influence with your voice. Based on real life experience, I have sat through way too many presentations and speeches where the speaker had no oratorical skills at all to believe that all people have an 8- in this skill. And so on. Most of these skills would not qualify for my game as everyman skills, although many would be nice to have some degree of. Of course, if you want players and NPCs to have far more everyman skills, I can't see that it is going to unbalance the game - especially if everyone gets the same amount. It will make FAM:s relatively unattractive though. Most skills a player might want to buy a FAM in they already have for free. cheers, Mark

Frankly, I'd rather play than GM. There's plenty of scope for invention as payer, and I enjoy the social interaction/exploration aspect either way But I'd rather GM a good game than play in a bad one, and not everyone is cut out to be a GM. cheers, Mark

I go out of my way to avoid killing characters just randomly in combat, but it does happen. In my opinion, it has to happen, otherwise combat becomes an amusing diversion that players engage in when feeling bored, like baiting the barman or buying nice clothes. I do like to describe the action in combat, as much as is possible. cheers, Mark

You can go here: http://www.angelfire.com/ok3/markdoc/Inquisitor/inquistor_index.htm It's a by-the-rules conversion - I've never read much WH40k fiction and what I did read - well, I'm glad I didn't pay for it. As for the Space Marines, I was a bit worried that they were too wimpy as well, but in my one-off games everybody always seemed to end up hiding behind the marines - even without horrendous stat.s, that kick-ass armour and some decent weapons seemed to be sufficient. cheers, Mark

Ooh! Here's where I can be helpful. Lich isn't derived from Anglo-saxon. It's derived from the nordic root, lich and means body or corpse. That's why the word is most common in the northern part of the country. It survives today in modern Danish (Lig) and Norwegian (also Lig, IIRC). Thus a lich-gate was the gate out of a church enclosure through which the bodies were carried: the term later became sometimes used for any small gate, or a gate through which the dead were carried. Likewise Lichfield - "body field" - a graveyard or sometimes a battlefield. cheers, Mark

>>> Actually, that's the theory that has been overthrown. genetic analysis has shown that homo sapiense neanderthalensis and homo sapiens sapiens could not successfully interbreed (though I am sceptical that the state of art can actually determine this from pure genetic analysis),<<< You are right to be sceptical. We don't know that they couldn't interbreed - merely that they didn't. On balance, the evidence would suggest that they could interbreed - the species are very closely related: but it is not clear whether the offspring would be fertile. OTOH, whatever the reason, we can be clear that no significant interbreeding took place - no neanderthal polymorphisms have been found in the modern human genome. >>>but the evidence is also clear that the two groups existed side by side without genocidal conflict for millennia until the neanderthals went extinct (for whatever reason).<<< Again, we can't be sure about this - evidence from the middle east indicates cohabitation for a very long time (perhaps as long as 50,000 years) which suggests peaceful coexistence. But in Europe and East Asia, primitive humans disappear from the record very rapidly as anatomically modern humans moved in. That suggests a less than peaceful meeting. We simply don't know enough at this point about the societies (as opposed to physiology) to be too sure about what happened. cheers, Mark

I control the DEF problem by not letting free defences stack with points-paid defences and (it's an old cliche, but...) controlling access to armour by GM'ing. The plate-amour clad tank who walks into a swarm of shortsword-wielding goblins will eventually get stunned, dragged to the ground and end up with a shortsword in the DEF 0 face under his visor. Realistic enough for me - and his surviving comrades will remember the lesson. cheers, Mark

My only suggestion would be that if you want wars to be fought with sword and lance, magic needs to be restrained. There are a lot of ways of doing it - you could rule that iron inhibits magic use (for example, each kilogram of ferrous metal exerts a 1d6 explosive Drain vs magic), or it could be that magic is hard to do (require skill rolls and go heavy on the penalties - for example rule that "in combat" is an inappropriate use for the skill) or it has some negative side effect (if it's Ch'i based, using Ch'i causes a Ch'i imbalance, etc). Doesn't matter how it's done, just so long as it's done. cheers, Mark

Inspired by Shelley's comment, one of the most fun evenings I had as a GM was through my Sengoku era Japanese campaign. Magic was not an option for starting players and the first 10 adventures (about 6 months play time) was resolutely non-magic. There were a couple of "early X-files2 adventures, where there was a dragon (which turned out to be some guys with a parade costume) and a goblin (which turned out to be a weedy guy with a bad complexion and an attitude problem). Then in adventure 10, the supposedly haunted temple turned out to to be a REAL haunted temple with a real ghost (actually a bunch of real ghosts). The expression of panic on the players' faces as they realized a) they were faced with a real ghost, not some ninja plot, and swords don't cut ghosts and all of their vaunted martial arts were of little use, and C) who knew what ghosts could do? was just priceless. Of course having opened the magic box a little at that point I allowed the players to add magical abilities if they wanted, though no-one really bothered. But that one adventure's play was worth the price of admission for me! cheers, Mark

As to the comments about how much you can lift, I know the definition in the rules - I tried to discourage Steve from putting it in there, since that's not how the rules work. OTOH, as pointed out, if you use the optional effects of encumbrance, then that comes closer to the idea that what you can lift is real strain - except that it really limits the time you can lift and carry things, not what you can do with it - you can still pick up your maximum weight and sprint - it's just that you'll burn out in under a minute instead of 4-5 minutes.... Having said that, I'm not a big fan of changing the rules in this regard: I've never really seen a case where this was an issue, gamingwise. cheers, Mark

Yes, the original FH discouraged power Frameworks, but it had a very limited approach to playing fantasy games (not necessarily bad - I thought the books were well-written - just limited) with fairly low powered or expensive magic and a limited selection of abilities /powers for non-mages. IIRC, there was poll a while back and about 2/3 of GM's used frameworks of some kind in their FH game. Like anything Hero, it's up to you, and personaly I like Frameworks in FH: but I tend to restrict starting points a bit to compensate. As to the power listed above, I'd be a bit dubious as a GM: not because of the power per se, but because I don't like "catch-all" frameworks. If the player has a psychic powers multi, then (in my mind) it should contain psychic powers. What the Sam Hill is a "Psychic Toxin" and how can you coat a blade with a psychic power? OTOH, I'd be perfectly happy with the same power in a alchemical multi. cheers, Mark

>>>My interpretation (your milage may vary) is that max lift in fantasy hero is much more along the lines of how much the person can get off the ground at all, not just lift over their head.<<< That's your interpretation (and a pretty common one, too) but it doesn't really match the rules. A normal man (STR 10) can lift 100 kg and hold it up for hours (he uses and recovers 4 END/turn). He can move at full speed. He can pick that weight up, put it down, and so on more or less indefinately. If he moves slowly, he can carry it for kilometres - OK, if he wants to save END, he's only doing about 2 km/hr, which is a very slow walk, but still... If he wants to make a more normal walking speed he can - in fact he can even jog with the 100 kg object for about 4 minutes, before he has to rest (in other words, he can jog with it for a few city blocks and keep up to a sustained speed of 7.2 km per hour). That's just doing things strictly by the rules and doesn't really match my picture of "can get off the ground". Any weight that you can pick up and transport a few kilometres before you have to put it down, you should also be able to lift over your head. The movement examples suggests that the lift is what you can get up on your shoulder and move around with - slowly and encumbered all to hell, or faster and sweatily, but definately not immobile and not going ARRGHH! and holding the weight off the ground like weightlifter. cheers, Mark

>>>Thirdly, NND in an fantasy hero campaign I find unrealistic, that is a Medieval Fantasy Hero campaign. Medieval campaigns that use NNDs instead of killing attacks, I find too comic booky. A hallmark of fantasy, is that your opponents DIE when defeated, not get knocked unconscious so you can arrest them.<<< Actually NNDs - in the form of sleep spells, mystic poisons and so on have been a staple of Fantasy for a good long time. Briar Rose's whole castle is NND'ed. Conan is forever "falling into blackness" only to wake up later in some dungeon or other. Morgan le Fay knocks both Lancelot and Arthur out in the classical romances. Orlando Furioso is magically rendered inconscious in the Castle of Bronze, etc, etc. So the limitation is "in genre" - depending of course on what sort of campaign you are running. cheers, Mark

>>>I've always thought that once a character goes to non-combat movement (the true test of fleet footedness) they were out of phase and moving on every phase.<<< Change moving every phase to "moving every turn" and this is what I do. That way a normal human (move 6", or 12" non-combat) covers about 7.2 km per hour at top sustainable speed (jogging, or run, walk, run, walk), or a bit less than 4 km an hour if they are walking and looking carefully about (ie: travelling at combat speed). Both are realistic. If the character is sufficiently encumbered that they cannot sustain full movement plus expend the END for the STR needed to carry their gear, then I just calculate how fast they can move, and take it from there - so carrying a lot of stuff can really slow you down on the road, even though you can move normally for short bursts. Of course you can move at non-combat speed IN combat (with appropriate modifiers) but in that case you stil move on your SPD. So SPD allows you to cover more ground in Combat, but if you want to cover more ground, then you need to buy up your movement. As far as I know, this is how it supposed to work. cheers, Mark

I tend to use PRE straight up for the reasons already listed. In general, an Ogre won't have Pre-based skills like Diplomacy, so it's not an issue - but if they did, all that extra mass and height is probably going to add to their Persuasiveness. Even in situations where physical violence is not a possibility, I've noticed that people tend to go off less on individuals who are physically imposing and/or charismatic/dominant. cheers, Mark

>>> I have, off and on, tried to convert Spirit Magic into Hero system; I took somewhat of a different tack. Would you mind if I posted some of my ideas to compare and contrast with yours?<<< Go for it! The more information/ideas /discussion the better, as far as I am concerned. Cheers, Mark

Instead of trinkets, why not steal a line from Card and call them Knacks? Whatever you call them it's a nice idea. And I'd buy the "clean clothes" knack for my adventurer - instant change, 1 set of clothes (whatever you were wearing, with extra time (1 minute, gestures throughout (patting into place) and Only to remove dirt and stains (-1/2)) to ensure you could stay clean and presentable even after wading through the bog of eternal stench. All the elves in the LOTR movies clearly have that knack, while the humans and dwarves, equally clearly do not cheers, Mark

Solomon has it right: the problem is that the linear chart is too little, while the geometric chart is too much. I do the same as Mudpyr8 - charge 2 points per point of STR and base encumbrance off casual STR. This allows strong conan-style characters who can lift huge weights when they have to, but without allowing them to waltz around with the same huge weight on their back. At the same time, it ensures that such characters are rare. Cheers, Mark

On the topic of bizarre currency, in my FH game, one culture uses "honour" as a currency. In the Halsing culture all property is owned jointly by the females of the clan and thus by default, economic power is concentrated in communal (but largely female) hands. Males can get a stake in this by marrying into a clan, but marrying is serious business and many people never marry, instead living in a sort of civil union, subject to easy dissolution. That works OK, because all clans need male members - to make babies, to act as warriors (generally a male-only occupation), messengers, etc. In general, males tend to travel between clans a lot, so all they own is what they themselves have made/acquired and can carry easily. But how do males acquire expensive items like a destrier, or weapons and armour? Many of them don't have much to barter with except their service and not everybody can make their own gear. The answer is what are called "honor tokens". Each male (who wants to) makes his own tokens, marked with his symbols and certain signs so that he can recognize them. Each token is unique and traditionally very precious and only given for major purchases, since when returned to the person who issued it, the person who returns it can ask for one favour. Anything at all, as long as they can trace the token's parentage (so for example "I got this token from Alred the smith, who had it for a suit of fine armour from Torlok the merchant, who had it from Siad the Singer for rescue at sea, who had it from her lover Aeral, who had it from you for a year's service!") If the issuer recognises the initial gift as accurate, then he is honour bound to pay the debt. The system to some extent can be seen as issuing shares in yourself! If your prospects are good, your tokens will be worth more (so a mighty Hero's token would be worth a fortune, while that of a wizened old man might be worth little or nothing at all). But if you give away too many, they will lose value (since the chance that you will be killed before people can redeem their tokens will rise!). Most warriors only give tokens very sparingly for the simple reason that they can easily land you in a lot of trouble, and also you have to keep track of the ones you have issued! And of course if you welch on a legitimate debt, your tokens will become worthless. Not only that, but since the clan system is based on trust, an honourless man will not only find himself unable to raise any kind of capital, but will find himself refused lodging, food or help. He must either leave the Halsing lands or perish. Naturally, Halsing legends are rife with stories of men who refused to honour their tokens and died miserable deaths, or who honoured their oaths and thereby ended up just as dead - but gloriously, attempting to fufil some mighty quest. cheers, Mark

I too use the "no stack rule", but with caveat, namely that the "real" limitation includes no stacking (as in real weapon, real armour etc) I have never had any player whine about this for more than 30 seconds, because: 1) real equipment is free. If you don't want to use it, fine, but you lose no points thereby. It makes just as much sense to whine that you are losing points because Brok the mighty fighter gets to use a 2d6RKA with his mighty STR, while Mouse the puny thief only gets to use a 1d6 shortsword. 2) this is how the rules work. You can't buy 1 d6 healing and 1d6 healing and get 2d6 healing. A 1d6 HKA and a 1 d6 HKA do not a 2 d6 HKAs make. Likewise 3 pD armour and 3 pD armour is 2 times 3 pD armour. not 6 pD. After all, would you let a player wear 6 suits of plate mail and have 48 pD? The plate mail is only a special effect, after all.... So the corrollary is that only defences (or attacks, for that matter) that a player buys stack - and he cant stack the same kind of defence. If you want 6 pD armour buy it, don't try to buy two lots of 3 pD. If a mage buys combat luck, he can stack it with his forcefield (different power) and magical toughness. After all, he paid for all that. He can't stack any of that with the free real armour he gets, however and he can't stack it with armour from another source. Speaking from experience, allowing defences to stack with free armour gets very rapidly out of hand. Likewise, I do not allow attacks to stack, which is why I hate the horrible kludge of deadly blow and ban it outright in all my fantasy games. And from the physics/realism point of view, doubling the thickness of armour (or any material for that matter) in no way doubles the amount of enegry needed to make a hole or deform it. Likewise in the real world, wearing plate over chain was not significantly more effective than plate alone, which is one reason (weight/comfort being the other) why chain in composite suits rapidly migrated to the places plate could not cover and then disappeared completely when plate evolved. cheers, Mark

Both are good. I've run and played in a number of games set in historical settings and they have all been great fun. These have ranged from games like my Sengoku-era Japanese game, which had accurate maps and history, with a few historical personages tossed in, but also a fictional family hidden in an obscure corner of the country where most of the action took place. It also had ghosts, demons, tengu, evil sorcerors and more martial artists than you could shake a jo at, so was not precisely Takeda Shingen's Japan :-) However, I also played in entirely historical games, with no magic, no sorcerors, no hidden history and that has also been great fun. At the other end of the scale, I like running Fantasy games set in my own (high magic) world. For there's the rub: most fantasy games, regardless of setting, have magic - and that tends to distort historical fantasy. So I alternate. Historical fantasy has the appeal that I can easily throw together a game: all the backgound material is there for the pinching, and as long as I stay close to the real historical material, players can get into it easily. The drawback is that the kinds of things you can do are limited (although that's also part of the appeal!) And when I've had enough I go back to my own fantasy world, or something else (next game on the slips, due to start in March, is a Gloranthan-based game using Hero system rules) cheers, Mark

>>>You wouldn't want to make money out of something that you use in your garden, or something that you eat!<<< Actually, several historical forms of money were based on these concepts. The japanese used rice as form of currency (and I'm not talking about barter here, but a fully fledged currency with laws regarding weight, purity and official price lists). The original coins were in fact denominated in amounts of rice and only came into use because it was impractical to transmit large sums of money in rice format. Salt was also used as currency (and in fact, still is, in some places: in Harrar, I watched people using salt to buy clothing and ammunition for their AK-47s). Almost anything can be used as money and at some point probably has. Except dirt. I really can't think of any dirt-based currencies cheers, Mark