AlHazred

Re: FTL Newsfeed I always thought the Traveller News Service in Traveller was an interesting idea; considering that in that setting information travels only as fast as people (1 to 6 parsecs a week), you get a somewhat analogous situation to the news media during the Civil War. They should really have done a supplement with news snippets that might or might not be adventure seeds (maybe in the style of 76 Patrons).

Re: Historical Late Medieval Period RPG As a "Hero Zombie" I think it would be unfair of me to comment on the "cultish" fanaticism of fans of other systems.

I figure it's time to try something new. So, some background. James Blish was a well-known speculative fiction author. He is primarily known for a few things: he coined the term "gas giant" and wrote a large number of official Star Trek episode novelizatioins. Most importantly for the purpose of this thread, he wrote a series of four novels set in the same universe: the Cities in Flight series. The series explores two technological innovations and their ramifications: the spindizzy is an anti-gravity sub-light drive that works more efficiently the more mass it must move; and, drug therapies that drastically extended human life to potentially thousands of years. Between these two inventions, mankind is able to colonize the galaxy. The Cities in Flight series had some interest among fans: the first and second books are decent science fiction. However, IMO the third and fourth book fall flat -- they're mean-spirited and somewhat silly. Nevertheless, the books routinely show up in the middle-lower portion of "Top Classic Science Fiction" lists that include the Golden Age of Sci-Fi. What I'm interested in modeling here is the spindizzy itself. Here you have independent engines which can affect their surroundings. Presumably the size of the engine(s) affects the size of the landmass it can lift. I propose the following: I'm not sure if it's ever established how fast the spindizzy will let an object go, but since it builds its antigravity with the mass it carries, it stands to reason that the larger objects will travel considerably faster than the smaller ones; the island of Manhattan, for instance, might be capable of 0.4 or 0.5 C.

Re: Eberron Hero

Re: FTL Newsfeed For a minute there, I thought this was going to be a thread about the ansible!

Re: Potions and Scrolls with a Framework Magic System I usually give Potions a Gestures limitation. They're not quite as easy to use as a gun; you can slap your hand over somebody's mouth to prevent them drinking, but sticking your finger in a trigger is much harder.

Re: Historical Late Medieval Period RPG Oddly, there's an even better source albeit not from an RPG. Frances and Joseph Gies wrote a number of books on the subject of life in Medieval times, but three of them were wildly popular among Medievalists when I went to college: Life in a Medieval City (1969), Life in a Medieval Castle (1974) and Life in a Medieval Village (1990). All three were collected in one volume in 2005, Daily Life in Medieval Times. They're not too deep, and focus on ordinary life as opposed to famous people. They also span a decent chunk of the Medieval period. Google Books links: Life in a Medieval Village, Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle.

Re: Shadow World setting Shards were interesting from a difficulty standpoint, but they never really grabbed me -- they had no cool back story that I ever heard, and aside from the difficulty of hitting them, seemed not to have a lot of combat options. I like my monsters with a little more meat. They need a great origin. Any takers?

Re: Eberron Hero That's okay, I think. With the resurgent possibility of a Wonder Woman movie, the Brelish Bravura comes once more to mind.

Re: Shadow World setting I believe ICE also used Kulthea for a miniatures-based wargame whose name escapes me at the moment. It came in a boxed set and was placed on a single island continent separated from the rest of Kulthea by Essence Flows and pounded by storms of discarded weaponry on occasion when battle occurred.

Re: STAR HERO Reading List I've been gradually inputting my library into a book database, and if it's not too late to add some books to the list, I have some suggestions (name links go to Wikipedia, most story/book links go to the ISFDB, for assistance in tracking them down): Keith Laumer: I'm surprised and saddened not to see him on the list. He wrote lots of great sci-fi stuff in the 60s, and is responsible to two great (and antithetical) series, Retief (light-hearted social sci-fi about an interstellar diplomat) and Bolos(military sci-fi about gigantic autonomous robot tanks). If you end up having copious free time, A Plague of Demons (a protagonist given super human powers by surgery battling against alien dog-creatures and their apparently "human" allies) is probably also worth checking out, as is the The Ultimax Man (similar to the above). He also did a universe-hopping series worth checking out called Imperium, but that's probably a different genre book. In all cases, his earlier stuff is better -- around 1971 he suffered a stroke and, while he continued to write, he was a different author afterwards. The Retief stories in particular suffer. Laurence Manning: He wrote only a few stories, including The Man Who Awoke. If you manage to catch this one, it's a great example of 30s sci-fi, about a protagonist who figures out how to sleep away ages of time. Awakening every 5000 years, he tries to find out how it will all end. Very interesting example of some ttanshumanist thought from the dawn of Science Fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin: Kind of surprised not to see her there, though admittedly much of her sci-fi is heavily fantasy-tinged and pretty much defines "soft sci-fi." Nevertheless, her Hainish cycle is worth checking out, containing unrelated stories set in the same universe. The Left Hand of Darkness is one of those, and regularly makes "Top 100 Sci-Fi Novel" lists. While I don't care for some of her work, Rocannon's World (or even the short story on which it is based, "The Dowry of Angyar"/"Semley's Necklace") is an excellent display of the effect of high-tech space-faring people can have on a low-tech native culture. Charles Sheffield: While he wrote a lot of excellent short stories that I can't find collected in one place, his Heritage Universe novels are worth checking out. Essentially, while they're somewhat repetitive, they are also excellent examples of the "Long-Vanished Ancient Technological Race" concept.

Re: Side effects of eating alien fauna and flora? I was going to say exactly this. If you want story-elements from the consumption of alien bacteria' date=' the TV show [i']House [/i]is a great place to go for some of the weirder potential side effects -- like the radical personality changes from brain lesions or chemistry alterations, or that woman who couldn't sleep who turned out to be infected by the Plague.

Re: Is there a semi-plausible way for battlesuits/powered armor to do HVAC? I did a little research at one time into spacesuits, which turned into this post here. Part of it is a Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), necessary because (as folks have said) there's no medium to conduct heat away from the body in space. You'd think it would be cold, but assuming you had some sort of air supply to survive and adequate sustenance, you'd feel just the opposite -- your core temperature would rise until you perished from fever. In the old Battletech game, which I never played, I seem to remember that the mechs had immense heat exchangers and many a battle was lost when one's mech overheated and shut down.

Re: Space fightercraft in RPGs. The way this discussion is turning out puts me in mind of Keith Laumer's BOLOs -- autonomous AI-guided supertanks. As time went by, they got more and more independent. There's one story ("Ploughshare" by Todd McCaffrey) where The Bolo stories kind of point to where such craft would be most useful -- in an arena where the enemies are nonhuman (and therefore can be killed with moral impunity) and the distances are great (thus malfunctions have little chance of rebounding on the generals). Ultimately, I think it's going to come down to a lack of preferred resources. Sure, I'd love to have remotely-controlled drones in LEO under a human command; but, up in Titan orbit, you might need to make use of multipurpose autonomous robotic craft, just because you lack other options.

Re: PC that can see death on people I could see it as a suite of powers. For instance, does the character suddenly have a skull superimposed over his own field of vision if someone plots his death with 24 hours? That would be Danger Sense to distinguish it from the Precognition, since they do different specific things.

Re: Need help with race names Shadowsoul's last notion is the tried-and-true method used in many fantasy novels -- to have race-names that sound similar to proper English, but are also "in their native tongue." So, for example, the Panthryn, Leonyn, and Tigryn could be the race names (for some reason, Ys are very popular with the run-of-the-mill fantasy authors (or as I like to call them, "Sturgeon's Legions"). Another way is to make "poetically-translated" race-names. For instance, there's no reason frog-fish people would have a name pronounceable by humans; so, in my fantasy campaign, outsiders called them the Deep-Folk (and since my players are all humans, they did too) while they call themselves something that translates to "People of the Deep Wisdom." Keep in mind that homo sapiens has as a root the word homo, which came from the Old Latin hemo, meaning "the earthly one," so even the word for humans has a "poetically-translated" meaning. Yet another way is to riff off of things your players know well, even if there's no real reason for it to be so in your fantasy world. For instance, say one of your PCs plays a lion-headed Sachalin, and has a cat named Whiskers; perhaps the lion-headed Sachalin call themselves the Wis-Kar, or have the "poetically-translated" name of "Long-Whiskers."

Re: 1927 Cartoon Map of San Francisco Another style of map popular at the time was the panorama map. Kind of a like a pre-computer version of Google Earth, I suppose.

Re: Your favorite SF gear. Did no one mention The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (besides the towel reference, I caught that)? Well, then, I want one. If I'm to be in a space operatic future setting, I need that, a towel and a bag of peanuts, and I'm set. Granted, a Lens does all that and more, but it's not like you can just buy one even in the setting where they exist. And you can't steal them, since they don't work for anyone besides the owner.

Re: Religions in SF settings. I enjoy crafting intelligent, thoughtful, yet "realistic" religions for my games. (Okay, let me rephrase -- I enjoy trying to craft etc. etc.) I have a few I developed for my Traveller Hero campaign, as religions in the standard Third Imperiumsetting never struck me as sufficiently well-developed for deep play. Yes, I-as-GM don't expect the players to bother delving into religion in my games. But if the religion is a shallow mock-up, I have a hard time making it play as a plausible motivation for my NPCs. One that I tend to use as a generic religion (as in, I want to have religious NPCs but haven't given any thought to making a distinct religious culture for them) is the Universal Church of Gaia. This is based on certain modern ideas (i.e., the Gaia hypothesis) taken to a logical religious conclusion (something Dr. Lovelock, who proposed the hypothesis, strenuously objected to). There have been several Gaian Churches in the modern day which have all had neo-Pagan roots; I envisioned something more like a quasi-religious scientific organized belief system adhering to a simple set of precepts: namely, that the biota of living planets organize themselves and self-regulate in order to reach the Omega Point and Singularity, at which point they will have manifested the divine in the Cosmos. I don't specify the core concepts further than that, because it allows me maximum flexibility to make sects and offshoots. For instance, what about "dead planets"? Many may have the capacity to sustain or develop life but haven't; should life from other planets jump-start the process or supplant it? I could see two schools of thought on this that would lead to different (even competing) religiously-backed scientific colonies.

Re: Help Needed Locating Generator I like AutoRealm, but I've gotten the most use out of the roleplaying city map generator mayapuppies posted. It's fast and (assuming you put a little thought into the parameters you enter) can be used to generate a bunch of distinct maps in a short amount of time. Handy for the GM on the go.

Re: Tintin Adventures that never were Well, he's up to five now: At the Mountains of Madness Tintin and the Reanimator (Herbert West: Re-Animator) Tintin in R'lyeh (The Call of Cthulhu) Tintin in Innsmouth (The Shadow Over Innsmouth) From Beyond Narratio called it! Unless you meant The Shadow Out of Time, in which case you didn't.

Re: Planets of SF Author Hats

Doc Savage can't have all the fun! This guy's making some covers for hypothetical Tintin adventures in Lovecraft country, thus approaching a different Pulp mainstay! He's only got four so far, but they're perfect. http://muzski.darkfolio.com/gallery/470268 [ATTACH=CONFIG]37524[/ATTACH]

Re: Doc Savage Adventures that never were Thing is, while this is a wonderful idea, many of these fail to completely capture the style of the Doc Savage covers. The Monster Maker is perfect, for instance, while Ant Hill Horror has perfect composition but an inaccurate pencil style. Many have photos composited which don't look "right" as Savage covers. I'd still like to read them.

Okay, I changed the Recovering From Stun power to the Automaton power. It looks like it should work now as intended in the Werewolf game. I've also updated the Package Deal and the attachment to my original post. Let's see how this flies. Obviously, the big thing here is the werewolf's magical Gifts. Eyeballing them, it looks like the Level 1 Gifts should be about 10 Active Points. There's little in the way of Limitations on them, so perhaps some sort of divisor (like 5E FH spells) would work. It looks like Garou should find it difficult to learn new Gifts, but it only costs them a few experience points, so dividing the costs by 3 or 5 should work. I've got too much on my plate just now to work on them, but maybe someone else will pick up the gauntlet.