AlHazred

The artist used photos of his two daughters for the many of the images. Those are some creepy schoolgirls.

I was thinking 2 to 5 is "realistic" but if the little girls are going to be showing up in a game where they need Martial Arts, they can probably be assumed to be at least 5. In any case, as Lunch Money is about beating your opponents unconscious with little to no finesse, there's no lethal maneuvers and few that have special functions; mostly it's beat-downs over quarters during recess. If I were to run a Hero System campaign (or even just a few games of it at a Con), I'd give the characters anywhere from 50 to 75 points -- that puts them in the "Competent Normal" range or thereabouts, which is about right for combat-trained schoolgirls. Like I said, it'd be a nasty shock for, say, tough guy Dark Champions characters trying to question schoolgirls for info. If you were to use this Martial Art, I highly recommend the players use the actual Lunch Money cards to duke it out; if you've got the card in hand you can use the Maneuver, but otherwise you're out of luck.

Expect version 2 by the end of the day. I've got ideas for Time Out (+PRE, Only For Fear/Intimidation-Based Presence Attacks, Instant), Hippy (Trigger, Usable By Others), Imaginary Friend, Backlash, and a bunch of others I missed the first time around.

EDIT: Version 2 now up. EDIT2: Version 3 now up. This is the final version. I don't know how many are familiar with the Lunch Money card game. It's a vicious game that's supposed to reflect the murderous intent of preteen schoolgirls fighting in the yard over lunch money. It's a fun game, but the replay value isn't as high as I'd like. They made an expansion (Sticks and Stones, which I own) and a follow-up game (Beer Money, which I do not). Anyway, my buddy and I were considering which board game to play yesterday, and came upon my Lunch Money cards. I idly speculated that you could turn the game into a decent Hero System martial art. So, here it is (the prefab, that is). Keep in mind, it's designed for little girls (probably 5 STR average) fighting to unconsciousness over lunch money. It's not designed for any other sort of standard martial arts trope, though I dare say you could surprise the crap out of a tough guy with a little girl NPC built with 50 points of maneuvers and powers... Martial Arts - Lunch Money.pdf

Re: Sherlock Holmes? Nobody's ever going to do a version of Holmes that everybody can agree on, similar to how there are 250-point and 1500-point versions of Batman floating around. I think the main idea to go with a writeup is to consider things Holmes is reputed to have done, versus things you actually see him do.

Re: Things that trigger Complications / Limitations This is a legitimate question that comes up because of a particular optional Hero System mechanic. The problem exists when one plays Dark Champions and uses the Resource Points method of allocating resources. According to this method, you have a pool of points which has to contain all of your equipment (guns, armor, radios, etc.) that you don't pay for yourself. How does one define mundane substances in this mechanic? Water, for instance, is a completely mundane substance that isn't worth any points. However, if I apply the Dark Champions mechanic to my "realistic" Star Hero campaign "Let's Try To Survive Alone On Mars," then it becomes a resource that has to be carefully husbanded. I'm using the Resource Point mechanic to limit my High Fantasy PCs' access to magic items; how do I define holy water in this regard? Is it a consumable (I don't require players to list consumables in their Resource Pools, so long as they don't abuse it)? What about wooden crosses and stakes?

Re: Sherlock Holmes? Interestingly, Bartitsu (or Baritsu as Doyle inadvertently popularized it as) is in Hero System Martial Arts. Holmes is less of a brawler in the series than in the Downey movie. How good a brawler he is is also in question, as he's much too smart to put himself in a position where he must resort to bareknuckles fighting.

Re: Supers and SF characters from 70s TV. I like his Saturday Morning Action-Adventure Heroes image as well.

Re: Sherlock Holmes? This is an interesting project idea, and one I've started and stopped many times previously. Owning both the original stories and the Granada DVDs of the Jeremy Brett interpretation, I'm inclined to give it a shot.

Re: Public Domain Extraterrestrials It occurs to me I did a 5E Green Martian writeup on this forum but never updated it to 6E. Here's the update.

Re: Your Top Ten Science Fiction Writers, and then some. When these "your favorite author" lists come up in the Forums, I'm usually at a loss. I mean, I haven't met any authors in person, so I don't really know how they are as people and am unable to make any value judgments based on personality. And it's possible to like some books an author has written, and despise others - some authors write far better short stories than books, or vice versa. So, my top authors list has qualifiers (books/series that I thought were fantastic) and sometimes caveats (books/series I would rather forget). These are the Space Opera/classic Sci-Fi guys. Jack Vance: This is the one sci-fi author I recommend with no reservations. The Demon Princes, Planet of Adventure, and Cadwal Chronicles series are fantastic Space Opera. One of the few authors where I must own all of his books and stories.* Keith Laumer: A profoundly influential author in two wildly different sci-fi movements: military sci-fi (with the excellent Bolo series) and sci-fi humor (with the Retief series -- the picaresque adventures of a space diplomat!)** Isaac Asimov: While there's much from this author I didn't care for, he also wrote much I did. The original Foundation trilogy and the Robot novels (including The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun) are classic sci-fi. I, Robot deserved a much better screen treatment than the Robots Gone Wild movie we got. Robert Heinlein: His juvenile fiction is better than his serious sci-fi, in my opinion -- Have Space Suit—Will Travel sparked my early love for sci-fi -- but it's all gestational material for later liberal sci-fi themes. That reminds me, I must read Podkayne of Mars; meant to for some time, but haven't gotten around to it. James P. Hogan: The Giants series (Inherit the Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, and Giant's Star) stands as the exemplar for changing Space Opera genre of the 80s -- action and romance, but also plausible physics and logic and tactics from his characters. Code of the Lifemaker and The Genesis Machine are also recommended. Stanislaw Lem: His Cyberiad reshaped my idea of robots at a young age, and his other works are influential sci-fi. A challenging author, but highly entertaining. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The John Carter of Mars series -- enjoyable space yarns. Turn your brain off before entering. James White: The Sector General series is excellent Space Opera with a twist - since it was written by a sci-fi fan author, it has gems in it that refer to the bits you liked of other authors' works. Alan Dean Foster: I grew up reading the Flinx series, and it shaped a lot of the ideas I had for what sci-fi should be. Gordon R. Dickson: Spacepaw and Spacial Delivery are underrated classics. Also, some of the themes therein weren't further explored by sci-fi authors for decades, until transhumanism made the truly alien a subject of conversation again. * He's remarkably consistent in style, and while it's not everyone's cup of tea, its sufficiently different from what most people write to make it stand out. ** The early Retief stories are far superior to the later ones, sadly. Laumer suffered a stroke that severely affected his ability to write, but he forced himself to do it anyway. The Retief stories that resulted are... not good...

Re: Ioun Stones [6E] Hmmm... the prefab already has that. I didn't redo the pdf when I redid the prefabs -- mayhap I had missed that the first time around. I'm considering doing the Pathfinder ones next -- they decided that ioun stones were a signature item for their in-game Pathfinder Society, and have an extensive set of them, with variations for flawed or cracked stones, in the Pathfinder Chronicles - Seekers of Secrets book.

Re: Hero Dice ...collector's item, but still in demand. I (usually) love my 24d6 in black-and-green -- they have a tendency to totally rip up certain PCs while going easy on others, damage-wise. I would be up for buying 24d6 more (or even 30d6) in blue-and-yellow. Among other things, that would let me have a half-die that matched schemes but was a different color.

Re: Challenge: Build the AC-130U and A-10 Assault Aircraft (for shadowcat1313) My understanding was that these are US Army support vehicles. The Air Force deprecates them because the service is about air superiority, while these craft are unlikely to ever down an enemy jet.

Re: Infographic: 120 fake sci-fi events on a real-world timeline PPS: What with the love Hollywood has for recreating old hits, you could pretty much write your own timeline with slight differences by picking your favorite version.

Re: Magic Sword help 6E If you want something more like Stormbringer, where every person you kill increases your strength, it's bought as an Aid, Trigger (+1/4), Linked to the HKA (-1/2), Only If HKA Brings Someone To 0 BODY (-1/4 to -2, depending on how big the HKA is). If you want something where the sword seems to get lighter as you kill people, but you don't actually gain any STR, then it's more like a separate Proportional STR Minimum -- figure out what the "normal" STR Min is for the sword (say 12 STR, for a -1/2 Limitation) and then adjust according to how often you think it's going to be lower than that. If we go by the above example, where I'm an adventurer and I achieve the greatest effect when I kill 128 people, then it's Very Common. Let's say every 10 people I kill, the STR Minimum goes down by 1, to a minimum of 1; I would value the STR Minimum at -1/4, assuming that it's going to be fairly infrequent that I kill 128 people, and most of the time the STR Min is going to hover in the 4-8 range by the end of the day. Now, all of this post and the last one is predicated on the idea that you have a group of bloodthirsty sociopaths like the standard group of D&D adventurers. If that's not the case, then these Limitations rise somewhat in value since it's unlikely the PC will be killing vast hordes of monsters.

Re: Ioun Stones [6E] Prefabs have been modified.

Re: Ioun Stones [6E] The way the Focus rules are written (6E1 376-380), they assume the character is holding the object. Let us assume an attacker is trying to deprive a defender of a Focus. The attacker must make an attack roll to hit the defender's DCV+2, and then makes a STR vs. STR roll to see if he knocks it out of the defender's grasp. The Advanced Players Guide goes into more detail, explaining that the GM may adjust how hard it is to hit the Focus, and that in cases where a Focus is not held, he may assign an effective STR that the Focus has to remain with its owner. With Ioun Stones, it would seem that they must be harder to hit than normal. They circle a character's head, so they have the owner's DCV, but they're really tiny -- a little more than an inch long maybe. That's about 1/64 the size of a human being, which is worth -12 to OCV (or +12 to DCV, depending on the way you do it). They also seem unusually tough; Vance's story puts their origin at the heart of dead stars, so they would seem to be Durable Foci, with PD and ED (Resistant) equal to 1/5 of the Active Points in the stone's largest Power. I'll have to modify my write-ups accordingly. Thanks, guys!

Re: Ioun Stones [6E] What do you guys think of the Focus limitation? I'm waffling between OAF and OIF. According to the description in D&D and in the original novella "Morreion" by Jack Vance (from which it made its way into D&D), you can grab an Ioun Stone from its orbit around a person's head or even damage/destroy it, but they're really hard to hit and tough enough to withstand some punishment. The Focus rules don't really say anything about the difficulty of removing an Accessible Focus. In any case, I worked out the 4E Ioun Stones. They're going with a far more utilitarian feel for them, which I think robs them of flavor. Also, they're now definitely "head slot" items as opposed to being "slotless" as in earlier editions (in D&D, the game limits how many magic items you can use by giving you "slots" corresponding to body locations where you might use said items). The prefab can be found here.

Re: Magic Sword help 6E I'm going to suggest the Proportional Advantage/Limitation from the Advanced Players Guide, page 139-140. It's built for this kind of thing. You figure out how powerful you want the power to get, and slide the advantage or limitation value over depending on how often the condition that triggers it is going to happen. For instance, let's say I have a magic longsword dedicated to an evil Sun God. It does 1d6+1 HKA (4 DCs) all night long and first thing in the morning. If I kill people with it during the day, it gets more powerful. So, I define that by saying the first person adds +1 DC, the second adds +2 DC, the fourth adds +3 DC, the eighth adds +4 DC, and so on, up to a maximum of 4d6 HKA (12 DCs, when I've killed 128 people); whenever it reaches a milestone, it stays that way until the sun sets. That's a tripling of power, worth +2. Now, if I'm in a campaign where the setting dictates that what I'm doing would be murder and it frowns on that, then the circumstances under which I'd get the boost would be maybe Very Uncommon, which reduces the value of the advantage by 2, to +0. If all I have to do is draw blood from opponents, then it might be Uncommon, for a total value of +1/2. If I'm an adventurer or soldier and the chances of me drawing blood/killing people rises to likelihood, then it's maybe Very Common, for a total advantage of +1 1/2. Applied to an HKA of 1d6+1, bought with Reduced Endurance (0 END, +1/2) and this Proportional Advantage (+1 1/2), I'd have an Active Point value of 60.

Re: Traps? While I love Grimtooth's (I own The Wurst of Grimtooth's Traps, which collects many and gives them d20 stats to boot), there's not that much usable material in there. Many of the traps require more magic than is feasible for a Low Fantasy campaign, for instance. Many are absurdly complex or require particularly stupid actions (like sitting in a provided chair and picking up the available fishing pole to go fishing... in a cavern-dungeon.) Some are mean-spirited enough to make players reluctant to return to the table to create new characters. Others are merely there to provide a punchline to a joke, or to use some vile pun. On the other hand, a few are Pure Gaming Gold. I'm not sure what kind of traps you're looking for. For instance, like this? Too elaborate?

Worked this up for my home game, and figured it might be useful for some other folks hereabouts. These are based on the d20 SRD, so they are open content, adapted to the Hero System 6th edition; you could easily use most of them as-is in 5th, except the costing changes for some of them -- not a problem if you don't make characters pay points for equipment. Prefab can be found here.

Re: Vehicle - WALKING HOUSE [6E] I was going by the general rule: "If it moves, it's a Vehicle."

Saw this while browsing the Technovelgy website and thought instantly of statting it out for modification and eventual inclusion into a campaign. Maybe when my Star Hero campaign starts up again? In any case, I thought it could be applied to a lot of settings and was too good not to share. The character file can be found here. [ATTACH=CONFIG]36510[/ATTACH]

Re: I wonder how much Antique's Roadshow would appraise it for... And to answer the question in the title, since there's no certificate of authenticity, Antiques Roadshow would appraise it for between USD 1000-5000. Rick Harrison (Pawn Stars) would probably go no higher than USD 100, maybe USD 150 if it's a pretty woman who brings it in. Paige Davis (Trading Spaces) would get a redneck couple from Alabama in to wallpaper it with 70s-style tapioca brown/lime green stripes. Of course, it being an amphitheater makes it a bit difficult to carry.