Nyrath

Re: Getting rid of the {tech}

Re: Random Musing about PC Concepts I am facinated by the Dramatic Hook mechanism. However, since it is driven by the players, it would not solve your problem with every player having a murdered father/family in their background. You might want to look into the "Relationship Map" concept found in "The Sorceror's Soul" (supplement to the Sorceror RPG). There are some extended notes on campaign preparation here

http://www.20by20room.com/2004/01/practical_causa.html How to let your players figure out what they need to do in order to repair their hyperdrive.

Re: Building John Carter of Mars Now Barsoom is not Mars, but these maps might still come in handy. You might also want to pick up a copy of the out-of-print paperback book "A Guide to Barsoom". http://www.bookfinder.com has about ten copies, each under $10. Loaded with details.

Re: Building John Carter of Mars Here are some John Carter links that might provide background material: http://www.erblist.com/abg/index.html http://www.erblist.com/erbmania/index.html http://erbatlas.virtualave.net/barsoom.shtml

Re: light saber color signification

Re: Pulp Hero Resources Appologies if this has already been posted: Pulp Images http://pulpfengshui.tripod.com/

Re: Pulp Film Recommendations The though processes of TV executives are not ment for a sane man to understand.

Re: Time - Acceleration - Distance (and Velocity) A "Brachistochrone" mission is where you accelerate constantly to the midpoint, flip over ("skew flip"), and decelerate to the destination. I'm sure you could easily add it to your spreadsheet, the formula is: T = 2 * sqrt[ D/A ] If you wish to learn more than you want to know about such matters, read about it here on my web site.

Re: Sin City The movie was fantastic! But the real weird thing was that my wife loved it as well. She was never into comic books, er, ah, "Graphic Novels", but she like the play of light and dark (and always enjoyed those Charles Bronson "Death Wish" movies). She liked The Punisher as well.

Re: Pulp Film Recommendations I just got back from watching Sin City. I believe that everybody reading this forum should go and see it, it is fabulous! The closest a movie has yet come to a graphic novel. Having said that, it is quite definitely Film Noir not pulp.

Re: (OT) Extraordinary Gentlemen query And understand that Tom did not appear in the original graphic novel.

Re: Atlas of Medieval America This gentleman is putting a lot of thought into his world. I am impressed. Just look at his notes on the border of the South being determined by the growing season line. By the way, on that same page, notice the image of the man and the woman? Gee, it looks kinda familiar to me.

Re: Pulp Film Recommendations According to their sister site, the TV series was based on the previously mentioned movie Only Angels Have Wings. As a side note, I always thought that the TV series would make a cute campy Star Hero campaign. Replace the airplane with a spaceship, the islands with planets, and season to taste.

Re: What do you do onboard a starship? Yes, I too am suspicious of the April 1 article. But my links above are from March 22nd.

Re: Pulp Reading I suppose somebody has already mentioned the old TV show "Tales of the Gold Monkey"? http://www.goldmonkey.com/index.html Rogues, spies, nazis, samurai, expatriots, what's not to like?

Re: What do you do onboard a starship? Seeing planets by their light is a very recent development. http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2005-09/release.shtml http://space.com/scienceastronomy/030522_exoplanet_direct.html But for the most part they've been doing it by detecting the wobble, as you said.

Re: What we like about HERO I love the elegance of the toolkit. It handles anything. It scales nicely. If you can simulate a superpower by two different routes, chances are it costs exactly the same. There are little or no accursed "ad hoc" rules. And powers can be written in a remarkably concise form. This all came together for me when I read the original Fantasy Hero. The Dungeons and Dragons's Monster Manual was a clunky crude piece of work by my standards. All the monsters had several paragraphs of ad hoc rules that were unique to them. You were lucky to fit four monster descriptions on a page. I leafed through the Fantasy Hero book, and came across the monster table. Ohmygod! Each monster had a full description, with a complete listing of any bizzare powers and abilities it had and all of this was in a single line!!!. The equivalent of the entire D&D monster manual in two pages. I was in love. I jettisoned D&D for Hero and never looked back.

Re: What do you do onboard a starship? Agreed, gender imbalace is a serious problem. It is becoming especially bad in China, due to their "one-child-per-couple" policy and widespread availability of ultrasound for prenatal gender determination. In James Blish's ALL THE STARS A STAGE, gender selection becomes such a problem that society transformed into a matriarchy, due to men being a glut on the market. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=356 The traditional use for unlucky unpaired men is in the military, where their agression can be channeled and where mortality is elevated. Unfortunately this is probably not an option on a generation starship, unless the political situation has really deteriorated.

Re: What do you do onboard a starship?

Re: What do you do onboard a starship?

Re: What do you do onboard a starship?

Re: What do you do onboard a starship? Oh, there are things that are much worse. In Sir Arthur C. Clarke's THE SONG OF DISTANT EARTH, the stars are colonized by "seedships". These are slower-than-light starships carrying a semi-sentient computer, remote control drones, frozen human sperm and ova, iron wombs, and supplies. No living humans on board, or at the colony site.(this was because the technology was not up to the task of producing manned starships, and there were urgent reasons to colonize the stars ASAP) So the starship arrives, the computer lands, warms up some sperm and ova, uses the iron wombs to bring the babies to term and then uses the drones to raise the babies to adulthood. And quietly disposes of any that have suffered too much interstellar radiation to be viable. In other words, the colony is composed of human beings raised by robots. I leave you to decide how maladjusted or inhuman such people would be.

http://ralphaeschliman.com/id20.htm

Re: A Modern League of Extroardinary Gentlemen Showing my age here... From the 1970's is Lockwood from the short-lived TV show "Probe". He's a detective, but he's also wired up with a radio link and a miniaturized tv scanner, connected to a central base with computers, links to Interpol, and experts on any technical field you care to name. As a Captain Nemo replacement, the obvious tongue-in-cheek candidate is Admiral Nelson and the Seaview from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". Nelson was an inventer, and the designer of the Seaview. Mystical but perhaps a little too powerful is the enigmatic Dr. Lao from The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao.