Agemegos

Re: Superhero Images

Re: Whats your favorite Attack? 9mm Parabellum or 10mm Norma Auto.

Re: Clever Future Weapons The ice bullet trick is originally from a Dick Tracy comic strip.

Re: Clever Future Weapons RPG weapons. These fire miniature spin-stabilised rocket-propelled grenades, like a refined Gyrojet. The grenades won't cause a lot of blast damage unless you havea fantastical explosive, but you could use HEAT warheads (shaped charges) or thermite warheads, to deal with high-tech body armour. Low recoil: useful in free-fall. Soliton guns these fire a non-dispersing wave of sound, which ought to deliver all its energy fairly suddenly where it encounters a change of medium. I figure that this ought to have the effect of a rubber bullet/baton gun, without requiring bulky ammunition. I have heard that there is a version of this that is generated by a special cartridge that can be fired from a full-cylinder shotgun barrel, and that an electrical version built into a pair of binoculars was used to nobble a racehorse during a race in Hong Kong in the early 90s. Buzzknucks 'brass' knuckles that deliver an incapacitating electric shock to anyone they hit. Cruncheon A truncheon/billyclub/nightstick that delivers an incapacitating electric shock to anyone hit with it. Zaplathi A high-tech riot weapon: a long light staff that delivers an incapacitating electric shock to anyone hit with it.

Re: What the heck is BODY anyways? HERO System doesn't work that way. The design philosophy is that game features have effects, not fixed representations. And the users use the game features to represent what they want them to represent, reasoning from effects. The HERO System is a character description language, and the fact that a language allows you to speak nonsense if you wish is less of a problem than that it prevents you from saying something sensible. If you think that all large charcters ought to have high BODY and STR, nothing prevents you from designing them and insisting that they be designed that way. But if BODY were abolished it would be harder to produce a fair representation of the character whose body was reinforced or otherwise more robust than usual for his or her size. Myself, I consider that to a certain extent BODY does represent size. If a character-player presented me with a design for a big bruiser with low BODY I'd send him or her back to the drawing-board. But in a superheroic campaign it can also represent that the character's body is made of something tougher than human flesh and bone, so that it takes more energy to produce each square centimetre of lesion. And in my SF setting, where athletes, police, and soldiers have their bones reinforced with tough composites, their tendons and sinews laced with strong fibres, their viscera and blood vessels and the walls of their thoraces and abdomens encased and laced with syntheitc mesh, I represent that with high BODY values. In fact, I have more trouble understanding what PD and particularly ED might represent than BODY, which seems pretty straightforward to me.

Re: Name for a Future Tech Explosive

Re: Superhero Images Way back in about '86 or '87 there was a brief fad in the Champions group I was in for drawing the covers of the comics that our PCs were supposed to be appearing in. I'm not much of a draughtsman, but I ground out a series of seven satirical covers for my battlesuit characer, Colonel Carnage. Here is number 7, to make those of you who can draw look good.

Re: Name for a Future Tech Explosive I always use "DEXAX", a term used by Jack Vance in the Tschai novels and in at lest one of the Demon Princes novels (The Face). Mode of action: I always assume (without support from Vance's writing) that DEXAX contains a proportion of positrons chelated in molecules that act as tiny Penning traps. An electric field distorts the molecules and breaks the traps, the positrons annihilate nearby electrons producing gamma rays, the material of the traps absorbs the gamma rays and is violently heated, expanding explosively. If you suppose that a molecule the size of a buckball could trap a pair of positrons in opposite spin states this works out to 0.0003% conversion of the explosive to energy, which is several orders of magnitude short of nuclear explosives, but still packs a fair bang. It's 3.4 * 10^11 J/kg, which is about a hundred thousand times as much as chemical energy. If you want to tone that down you can suppose that the Penning-trap chelating compounds have to be be bigger than C60, or that they have to be suspended in something that more efficiently absorbs gamma-rays.

Re: What cities could Batman call home?

Re: Pulp Sci-Fi And the 'Family D'Alembert' series.

Re: Pulp Sci-Fi Not noticeably, no.

Re: Pulp Sci-Fi Actually he was a chemical engineer specialising in baked goods. Most of his career involved making sugar stick to doughnuts. But he did design land mines for the US Army during WWII.

Re: Pulp Hero Indeed. It got me in too. I eventually sent my copy to a bloke in Iceland who was complaining that there was no outlet for HERO products in Iceland (and this was before Amazon.com). I don't regret the generous impulse, but I do miss my JI materials.

Re: Super-strong ear muscles?

Re: Science Question for my Sci-Fi Game. (Haven Players, stay out!!!) Oops. I just figured out that I made a mistake in my explanation. It is the stone's velocity that returns to original value when it returns to ground level. Throw a stone 'north' and it will accelerate spinward while it is rising and then accelerate back to antispinward while it is falling, so that when it hits the ground it will be travelling north (and downwards) again. But all that time its velocity will be to spinward, so it will hit the ground to spinward. But if you throw it of a high tower then after it falls back to the level you threw it from it will start moving to anti-spinward, will cross the line due north of the tower well below the level of the top, and thenceforth will continue to move ever faster antispinwards until it hits the ground. Shoot an arrow on an upward trajectory and it will be deflected spinwards as it comes off the string. But shoot it on a downward trajectory and it will be deflected the other way. That isn't going to look like a 'temptation' to spinwards.

Re: Science Question for my Sci-Fi Game. (Haven Players, stay out!!!) The Coriolis Effect only affects things that are moving in the rotating frame of reference: motion parallel to the axis is irrelevant, but motion perpendicular to the axis feels a 'force' that attempts to rotate its trajectory antispinwards. So the pendulum would point straight down while it was still, but if it were on a lift going up it would be deflected spinwards, on a lift going down it would be deflected antispinwards. On a train going spinwards it would oscillate faster than when at rest, and when on a train going antispinwards it would oscillate slower. This is going to be a bitch to describe to the players.

Re: 'Empire': a cliché?

Re: This is Too Cool, and I Must Tell You About It

Re: When Heroes become Villians

Re: Is OAF worth a -1 limitation? Use more telekinetics and ranged grabs.

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Re: Genetic Tribalism? Well, reflecting that genes are not like blueprints, but more like a recipe, ie. that they encode in essence a set of instructions for development from a zygote to an adult, not the final form of the adult directly, I think that there might be some feasibility issues. In the first place, it is not at all clear that inserting genes into an adult is a promising approach to making substantial changes in the adult's form. It's like trying to change a sponge cake into a chocolate pound cake after you have baked it: the best way to start is to feed the sponge cake to a hen and start over. It isn't a matter of getting some genes 'for' a tail and patching them in with a retrovirus. Genes 'for' a cat's tail are instructions for growing a tail starting from a cat embryo, not starting from a human adult. You have to design a sequence of developments that will produce a tail starting with what you have, code those developments as genes, patch them in, then disable any genes that would cause problems if their expression were to start up again, then re-start development, let it run the right length of time, and then stop it. My guess is that this will get you a corpse rather than a living being. Cosmetic surgery using semi-synthetic grafts is a much more promising approach. Even if genetic modification of an adult is not lethal, your adult may very well be sterile. And if he or she isn't, his or her kids are going to have had a lot of important genes de-activated, and going to have a lot of genes expressing themselves that were designed to grow (say) cat's ears in an adult, but will have very different effects in a different environment (ie. zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent). So if anyone does genetically modify themselves, they are certainly going to have to modify their kids if they are to have any. If they get it right, though, they won't have to modify their grandkids. But their kids and grandkids are likely to modify themselves and their progeny at whim. You won't so much get a distinct type as a trajectory through fashion space. I think the only way you get a stable line of modified humans is if this technology is used and then lost.

Re: Why must humans rule? I had one once in which the elves were the Party officials in a quasi-Maoist empire (just now crumbling after a rule of a thousand years). The humans were the peasants and village officials under elvish administration, and the dwarves were a fiercely independent ("better to die in armour than live in chains") mountain people who lived just beyond the borders (and looked down on humans as spineless slaves). Is that the sort of thing you were thinking of?