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AlHazred

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Everything posted by AlHazred

  1. 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!
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?
  5. 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?
  6. 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.
  7. So would the reentry be a Gliding power, or would you just handle it as a long, somewhat-controlled fall?
  8. 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? I'll be looking forward to that one! Definitely feel I'm getting more than my money's worth on Digital Hero so far. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. After rereading Star Hero and The Ultimate Vehicle, and giving Terran Empire the once-through, I have come up with my one and only quibble with these excellent sourcebooks; my hope is that this will be addressed in The Hero Vehicle Sourcebook. Each of the aforementioned books contains a vehicles chapter with dozens of spacecraft. The first two, in particular, have a wide variety of starships and bases to suit just about anyone's campaign. I say "just about" because it seems to me that the low end has been ignored. Now, I realize that most people who buy Star Hero aren't going to need it, but that just means it should have been in The Ultimate Vehicle. I'm talking, of course, about modern space craft: the Space Shuttle, Saturn rockets, etc. Or even something a little more primitive: a Solar Sail yacht, an Ion-engine freighter, whatever. Not that I can't make them on my own and post them here, I just wish one of them could have made the book. Anyway, keep up the good work! P.S.: So, Steve, when will we have a Hero products subscription service, so that you send me new product when it comes out and automatically bill my checking account? It's inevitable that I'll get everything anyway, and that way I save on gas...
  11. I use a really simple yardstick for aliens. After doing preliminary design on an alien, I try to find a single terrestrial analogue as a nickname for it (like "cat-men", "caterpillars", "spider-bears", etc.) If I can't, then I figure I'm doing my job. Personally, I think too much thinking leads to unconvincing aliens. There has to be an organic, intuitive process involved, since there should always be unexplainable elements in any species (just look at our own, for instance). I highly recommend the alien-oriented works of Wayne Douglas Barlowe (Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, Expedition, and to a lesser extent The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe) as inspirational material. Barlowe's folks taught him proper anatomy and ecology, since they're Audobon-style illustrators. His stuff has a very natural feel as a consequence.
  12. I think that's related to Bob's point in TUV that vehicles don't need Environmental Movement for an environment it was designed to work in. If it can handle multiple environments, then you should figure out the primary environment, and buy Environmental Movement for the other environment(s). Nothing is said about Life Support, except that, obviously, it doesn't have to pay for Usable by Others to apply it to occupants.
  13. There's a page with Hero System Farscape characters somewhere, but the page escapes me at the moment. Time to Google...
  14. It's true that it couldn't have relaunched itself if need be; the boost needed to escape Earth's gravity was provided by regular chemical rockets, which were provided in three stages. I'd count that as a 1 Continuing Charge, Charge Doesn't Recover, that lasts as long as needed to reach that speed, and has Side Effects (the exhaust) and probably Vehicular OAF. For greater realism, you could find out how long it took to reach that velocity and work backwards from there. Attitude control jets would be a separate power, maybe 1" of Flight, Cumulative to a smaller max than the rockets, probably with No Turn Mode, and consisting of a single Fuel Charge.
  15. My favorite GURPS books are Illuminati and Discworld. I've been looking for Fantasy II so that I can get the Madlands stuff, but that's a tough one to find.
  16. I wouldn't worry about it too much. I've got dice old enough to vote, and I've ripped off... pardon me, borrowed... a large number of ideas from many sources. For many of these ideas I had heard only the vaguest description and was forced to come up with my own interpretation. In those cases where I did that, I've often found my interpretation to be more interesting to me than the interpretation given by the original source.
  17. Out of intellectual curiosity, I wonder how much it would cost as a vehicle... Hmmm... Let's see. That's a little more than Size Category 1 (200 kg, or Motorcycle size) but much less than Size Category 2 (400 kg or Chariot size). Size Category 1 translates to 1.25 game inches (2.5 meters) long and .64 game inches (1.3 meters) wide. Size Category 2 translates to 1.6 game inches (3.2 meters) long and .8 (1.6 meters) wide. I'd call it Size Category 2, but with a weight of 270 kg. Since attitude control took a long time, I'd say it had a SPD of 1. With a velocity of 32,400 mph, that comes out to 86,886" noncombat. 10" of Flight with 13 doublings costs 80 Active Points and comes to 81,920" noncombat, or 30,548 mph. Alternatively, 5" of Flight, with MegaScale to the 10,000 km level costs 22 Active Points and, with the Extra Time limitation, comes out to 50,000 kph, or 31,250 mph. For those using the "more realistic" optional Cumulative Flight advantage, 5" of Flight with the x16,000 multiple has an Active Point cost of 45 and leads to a top speed of 80,000" or 29,832 mph. I wonder what sort of Enhanced Sense powers it would have... [Edited to add: On consideration, I'd use the standard Sensors VPP option from Star Hero to simulate most NASA probe sensors. Those geniuses at JPL have been able to pull quite a few rabbits out of quite a few hats by correlating individual elements from the eleven instruments carried aboard...]
  18. Sure. When the UNTIL Superpowers Database hits the shelves...
  19. In relation to my last post, I found this today. Wonder how my brain conflated this with Mavnn's post... Anybody out Missoura way? Is this company still around?
  20. Okay, you forced it out of me: Blackmask Online. It's got all kinds of etext goodies segregated by category. And one of the biggest categories it has is Pulp.
  21. Keep in mind from the description of the power, that "You can force a particular event to happen again." (Emphasis mine.) It's not limited to Attack powers only. Your ally does a Full Move but is still in radius of the AE Dragon's Breath, you can use this to give them a second phase of movement for free. This is an extraordinarily powerful ability, ideal for a console computer game where you're limited to a set of pre-defined moves, but not very well adjusted for a tabletop RPG where anything is possible... That said, I'd do it as a VPP to cover all the bases...
  22. Used to be, you could find all that stuff in the Discussion Board archives. I hope someone saved the info...
  23. There was a sequel called The Unforsaken Hiero which came out in 1983. The first book came out in 1973. I remember being excited when I found the sequel in the stores, and thinking, "Wow, just have to wait another ten years and he'll come out with the last one in the trilogy." How could I realize that was wishful thinking? Unfortunately for gamers, Gamma World is considered the "baseline standard" for post-apocalypse game settings; I say unfortunately because GW is a really high-fantasy, wierded-out setting, and it shouldn't be the baseline for these things. It is basically a rewrite of the older Metamorphosis Alpha rules with some adaptations to make it similar to AD&D, which had just exploded on the gaming scene. Other games have been produced in the setting, but GW is the most popular - it's gone through four editions from the first in 1978, to the latest one in the early 90s. With the demise/transformation of TSR, it's really unclear whether it will ever be redone. A list of post-apoc RPGs would include: The Morrow Project (Timeline, Inc., 1980/1983 - probably the best post-holocaust game), Aftermath (FGU, 1981), Living Steel (Leading Edge, 1987), After The Bomb (Palladium, 2001), Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (GDW, 1990), and the famous Tribe 8 (Dream Pod 9, 1998). Games I've heard of but never seen include: The End (Scapegoat Games, 1997), Mutazoids (Whit Productions, 1989), Age of Ruin (Cutting Edge Games, 1990), 9th Generation (Jeff Siadek Enterprises, 1986), and Blood Dawn (Optimus, 1996). [Edit - I forgot one of the first such games, Twilight: 2000, which has also gone through a number of editions and spawned a spinoff game, Traveller: 2300. Better late than never.]
  24. Oh, Lord, where to begin. The Flux and Anchor series (more correctly the Soul Rider series) by Jack Chalker comprises five books: Spirits of Flux and Anchor (1984), Empires of Flux and Anchor (1984), Masters of Flux and Anchor (1985), The Birth of Flux and Anchor (1985), and Children of Flux and Anchor (1986). Mr. Chalker has been quoted as saying, "SOUL RIDER is probably the best saga, and the most complicated thing I ever did, but it was very controversial and you either got it or you didn't." That's putting it mildly. Many people put him in the same category as John Norman and Piers Anthony as a writer of fiction aimed at pubescent young men; he's somewhat stronger than Anthony, but not as out there as Norman. Definitely not the sort of thing I recommend to female acquaintances who ask for Sci-Fi recommendations, although the men don't really come out much better in most of his books. Where Chalker differs from the other two is that he has some really good, eminently game-usable ideas in most of his series. Haven't been able to find the "Shattered World" background yet, even on the best remaining Fuzion sites I could find. Maybe it was called "Shattered Sky?"
  25. I believe that's G-8 and his Battle Aces. That's another interesting one, much more supernatural in orientation than most of the Pulps.
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