AlHazred

One indispensible resource is The 1920s Investigator's Companion for Call of Cthulhu. It has a great deal of carryover to the 1930s, but it can only cover a small amount of ground within its pages. It's got info on a large variety of personalities, as well as price lists, the state of forensic science in the era, and, I believe, travel times and firearms. You should be able to find a copy cheaply online.

For more detailed travel info, I recommend looking into period travel guides. I've been lucky enough to locate a period guide from the Automobile Legal Association, but I'm confident I'll find something covering air and ship travel as well, as long as I stick to it.

For vehicle data, I recommend checking out the coffee-table books at your local Barnes & Noble or Borders. There're books out with titles like Cars of the Thirties which might be good (don't own one, so I couldn't tell you). One that I do own is The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Motorcycles by Tod Rafferty. It's a great resource that covers every time period.

Ah, Fallout Hero, that's a good idea.

After FREd, number one on the list is The Hero Bestiary for the weird creatures. Star Hero has mutant stuff and a great section on alien environments (like wastelands and such), not to mention its coverage of post-holocaust settings. Come to think of it, it also has small sections on Sci-Fi weaponry.

Of the stuff out right now, those are the only ones you really need. If you want to adapt the vehicles from Fallout or Fallout 2, you can't go wrong with The Ultimate Vehicle. If you want more options in combat, The Ultimate Martial Artist is your way to go. And I always recommend the Hero System Resource Kit, since its such a great overall GM tool; saves wear and tear on the books, too.

Better yet, don't try Bio of a Space Tyrant. Not one of Piers' best works, IMO.

I think TE looks a lot like the Traveller setting, from the Rule of Man era -- a vigorous Earth overthrows an alien foe and carves out their territory in space, the admiral assumes imperial power, alien territories like bubbles surround the humans... Yep, very Traveller-esque. But with the stupid parts removed...

Part of the problem with Comeliness is in the scaling. All of the non-physical stats are difficult to easily determine; yardsticks are easier to come by when it's a matter of statistics.

What real-world examples are there? Superheroes are celebrities in the Champions Universe; what COMs do real-world celebrities have?

Personally, when designing NPCs for my Golden Age campaign, I use Marilyn Monroe as a guide. By giving her a 20 COM, I allow for easier comparisons. For men, I use Clark Gable.

The trick, of course, is to come up with a name that members of that country would call their Captain America clone, not what the American comic book makers called them.

Frinstance, the British had a character named "John Bull" who showed up on their posters, urging their young men to join the military; he was the prototype for the "Uncle Sam" character who showed up on the US Army posters. (For a nice pair of images to compare, check out the banner at the top of this page.) "John Bull" is not a name that inspires great reverence among Americans, but to the Brits, he was the right man for the job.

Most attempts by American comic book makers usually seem pretty lame to me, and that's even ignoring the ridiculous caricatures that showed up on the animated series of the 70s.

As a science-fiction fan, I've often considered the merits of a campaign which combines two of the "Giant War Machines" series: Bolos vs. Berserkers.

The Bolo series by Keith Laumer was one of the inspirations for Steve Jackson Games' Ogre game. In the Bolo future, humans have made giant robot tanks to do their fighting for them; the humans wrought better than they knew, for the Bolos were honorable, just, and self-sacrificing in the defending their charges.

In the Berserkers series by Fred Saberhagen, some alien race had built these immensely powerful robotic warships which were programmed to destroy all life. They are single-minded and very, very competent.

Having reread Farscape d20, I'd say there's enough detail in there that it would be easy to do the characters and ships up in Hero. Especially with TUV out. You just have to use your head and say, "That's stupid!" for all the little stupidities they left in there.

What about a poster-sized map, in color, available in the online store? With cool high-tech-lookin' doodads as the margin-separators?

Star Hero handles this on page 53. I'd tell you what it says, but, you know, it's copyrighted and stuff...

Originally posted by MisterVimes

My campaign has an 'Unlimited Class' Wrestling Federation.

At one time, I thought about demoing the Hero System at local cons (MonCon, ShoreCon) through a multiple-heat Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation. You play a 350-point brick* and fight a number of matches until you're eliminated. Considering the number of people likely to show up, though, this could be unexpectedly labor-intensive. My idea was to have an actual belt made for the winner...

* My original idea was to use bricks from the Hero Universe; thus players could try Ironclad, someone can play Tachyon in disguise, etc. The problem was the lack of 350-point neutrals/heros. On the one hand, that would make it require a bit of work; on the other hand, it also lets the GM make analogues of Thor, Hulk, or whatever else players might like to play.

I saw the movie Showtime on cable the other day, and while the movie didn't impress me much, I thought the guns were nice-looking. I didn't catch all the details on them, but I gather they're fully-automatic submachinegun-type weapons that fire depleted uranium slugs. I heard one character say something like "12-gauge" but surely what was meant was something like ".50 caliber". Has anyone worked up stats for it?

The Vigilance League has been given a headquarters across the street from Central Park in New York City. But they can be found wherever danger threatens.

Of course, the current campaign year is 1938, so they might be a bit too old to play with the young'uns...

While considering this idea, I had another thought. This would be an alternative method of defining an elevator. I love the "Vehicles within Vehicles" discussion in TUV; it seems to me that elevators that depend on cables could be defined as Limited Movement Swinging, perhaps with No Noncombat Multiple (normal elevators in shorter buildings/vehicles/whatever wouldn't have a Noncombat multiple, ones inside tall whatevers would).

I think perhaps Swinging needs more space devoted to it, like maybe a Heroglyphs column. It's a pretty ill-defined, yet interesting movement power. While all movements except Flight are dependent on a medium to transport through/over, Swinging is the only one that provides its own medium.

Say I want to build a Power to represent a firemen's pole. I know normally most would say to represent this as Gliding 5", Limited Movement (character cannot gain altitude or move in the horizontal plane; -1), Immobile OAF (-2). Total Cost: 1 point. I wonder, what would be wrong with representing this as Swinging? One could then take the idea and make a "Movement Pole," say, which a character has practiced sliding on.

I find it interesting because it ties the movement directly into a physical object (defined in the power as the "swingline"). What would be objections to this sort of thing?

Originally posted by Mutant for Hire

You're missing senses and limbs.

Not even the most munchkiny, cheese-weasel, no-talent ass-clown player I've ever seen would think he could get away with selling back his limbs...

Originally posted by JmOz

Actualy a little more, a rarely remembered option is to sell back everyman skills at 1 point each

I don't remember that option. Is that a house rule, or is it in FREd?

Originally posted by Zaratustra

Actually, [normal senses] cost a bit more if you build them from scratch, but we'll just pretend now.

Actually, you're supposed to use the given 55 point cost, at least according to Steve's sidebar.

Originally posted by DarkGreen

I never thought of handling booster rockets as OAFs (delicate and expensive as well). That's great.

There's a good discussion in The Ultimate Vehicle about what constitutes a Vehicle and what's just a Power Focus. I almost think Bob could have gone maybe a paragraph further in encouraging serious thought about how parts of a vehicle that aren't reusable should be Foci.

I love how you and Derek post the same thing within hours of each other. Hero fandom has gotten so used to the Bad Old Way of nothing happening that we instantly begin hyping stuff as soon as we see anything new...

Also, I felt bad that you weren't getting any responses; hey, you posted first, after all!

Having reread the relevant section, I'd also give the Shuttle Limited Maneuveravbility to reflect its heavily decreased Turn Mode. It makes four S-turns to bleed off speed during the twenty minutes or so of descent; that sounds like 1 Turn per 5 Minutes to me.

If we treat all one-use booster sections of the Apollo spacecraft as 1 Fuel Charge OAFs, and consider only the Apollo capsule as a Vehicle, then it definitely has the same Gliding as a parachute - less than the Shuttle, but better than falling that distance.

Check out the Time War RPG site for a pretty good handling of Time Travel in an RPG; since it's freely available, I figure it shouldn't count against your limit.

Since we're discussing reasonable aliens, I'd like to say that Keith brings up a good issue. One reason many GMs fail to make aliens alien enough is because of a lack of visual reference. It's not that their players lack imagination; rather, I think it's because if the GM puts a lot of work into an alien's design, he wants the players to see exactly what he's talking about.

Are there any good resources for GMs who want to have their aliens illustrated? Is there a utility?

Originally posted by keithcurtis

Sorry, I agree with your points except on Barlowe. While I find his rendering technically flawless, his creations look stilted, forced and unnatural.

To each his own. Personally, I prefer Expedition. I think it's really creative imagineering. But then, it helps to have a visual reference to how alien the alien is.

Speaking of which, nice illo on your example alien. How/where did you get such a great image? Your own work or someone else we can patronize/exploit?

Try this link:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=uim1dpp5uu53ec%40corp.supernews.com&rnum=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dfarscape%2Bhero%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3Duim1dpp5uu53ec%2540corp.supernews.com%26rnum%3D2

Sadly, it never went any farther. Still, it's a start. I'd forgotten some of the details they bring up.

So would the reentry be a Gliding power, or would you just handle it as a long, somewhat-controlled fall?

Originally posted by Geoff Speare

I'm working on a "Orbital Mechanics Hero" article that will include writeups for contemporary spacecraft: the Space Shuttle, Saturn rockets, Russian rockets, etc. I'll be proposing to Dave for Digital Hero, but if it's turned down (it is a wee bit specialized ) it'll show up somewhere.

Having attempted to reflect the Space Shuttle on my own today, to see how complex it would be, I'm very interested to see this article. Maybe for a Digital Hero Near Future special issue?

Originally posted by mattingly

Also, next week's Digital Hero will include the write-up of a near-future space station orbiting Mars.

I'll be looking forward to that one! Definitely feel I'm getting more than my money's worth on Digital Hero so far.

Originally posted by BobGreenwade

I'm reasonably certain you can expect to find at least a Saturn rocket and Space Shuttle in the HSVS. Even if it didn't stand to reason on its own, I know that Steve initially intended to have them in TUV, so I'd assume they will be in HSVS -- and very well done, with Steve at the keyboard (even if he just edits what Geoff and/or I have cooked up).

You included all the information needed to create these kinds of things, then I didn't see any in the examples; I figured it had to be a space constraint. There's a great deal of room to develop, Science-Fiction-wise, between the Space Shuttle Enterprise and the Starship Enterprise. The better hard Sci-Fi books explore those areas, but I've noticed many games are lazy when it comes to that; I'm glad to see that Hero can take on the challenge.

Originally posted by Steve Long

LOL. That's an interesting idea, but I don't think we're set up for the administrative burden -- and I'd rather not bring the collective wrath of gaming retailers down on Hero's head by implementing it anyways.

FWIW, I don't think it's helped Columbia Games any, judging by the vast amounts of Harn stuff I find at my FLGS... not.