Tom Cowan

I don't have an ounce of compassion for those who refuse to learn the metric system.  They must be a quart low when it came to intelligence.  I mean, i can't fathom why they still use imperial measures.  With such people, you just have to pound sense into them.  Because if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. 
 
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go have a pint.  This stuff is giving me a brain acre.

without him I sincerely doubt there would be too much interest in a CHAMPIONS game

To Stan "The Man" Lee,
You helped teach us that with great power must come great responsibility
That a man who had become a monster could still be a hero.
That even a blind man could see that we should strive for Justice.
That even when the world hates and fears you, especially when it hates and fears you, you should try to make it better.
 
and so much more.
Excelsior, sir
 
 

"I feel that voting is like being part of a group project.  I know I got my part right, just waiting to see how badly the rest of you F****d this up!"

In Warhammer Fantasy, casting spells are both very powerfull, but also have some severe failure mechanics. The more dice you roll the more likely you are to succed, but the more likely you are to get the warp striking back in intersting way. Our Elven Mage Player has GM'd the System before and he told us of the anticlimatic ending of a master villain:
 
"After a long campaign the Heroes had finally cornered their advseary. This was to be the epic conclusion. As the combat had been going for a while, the villain choose to renew his armor spell. One of hte earliest spells mages got. But I rolled a failure. And ended up rolling on the "Catastrophic Chaos Manifestations" table." And at this point, I am simply going to quote the rulebook:
"Called to the Void: You are sucked into the Realm of Chaos and are forever lost. Unless you have a Fate Point to spend, it’s time to roll up a new character."
 
And now picture it from the view of the players:
A epic battle
The enemy casts a Level 1 spell
And reality just eats him, no saving throw.

Speaking, of Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints don't work. We ate a whole box, and neither of us is any thinner.

This has been attributed to Martin Luther King Jr., but there is considerable doubt that he actually said it.  Nevertheless, it seems appropriate as a superhero aphorism--
 
“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

The depressing thing about living in a world where superheroes are constantly saving the day is that this means we are living in a world where the day constantly needs saving.  

NASA has been using the Canadian North to develop training regimens for future astronauts to Mars. Portions of the landscapes are very similarly bleak.
 
Decades ago I used to live and work in Sudbury, the heart of the mining region in northern Ontario. NASA sent their Apollo astronauts into the old strip mines there in the Sixties, to prepare them to walk on the Moon. It was the closest match to the lunar surface they could find on Earth.
 
Some of us Canadians take a strangely perverse pride in that.

The difficulty here arises from the fact that we need another tool in the toolbox -- Stops Teleport + Transdimensional isn't going to get you what you want. Instead, we need a new Advantage:  Cannot Be Escaped With Extra-Dimensional Movement (+1/4). That solves the problem nicely.
 
Alternately, the GM might allow a character to create an Anti-Dimensional Travel field using Change Environment. Establish a cost for that effect (let's say 20 points, just off the top of my head), apply Area Of Effect, and voila.

Or let’s try an opposite approach: Mutants are new and truly random. For one thing, that means most of them don’t come from the Western world, and most of them come from poor or modest backgrounds. Gravitar and Menton aren’t scions of old aristocracy; Gravitar comes from a village in Mali and Menton was born in a Mexico City slum. A third of all mutants are Chinese or Indian.
 
Globally, mutants represent the Rise of the Rest. Power is no longer restricted to a few hegemonic states that use the rest of the world as the playing-field for their competition. Within countries, it means power is no longer limited to people from the right families or castes, the people with money or connections, who went to the right schools or came up through the company or the Party.
 
And the gatekeepers of the old order are scared spitless.
 
Some of them try to coopt the living weapons of mass destruction. Recruit them into the military or spy service, give them jobs in the company or the crime syndicate, whatever. Pay them well and hope they don’t try to take over. But a lot of the mutants won’t let themselves be bought off so easily. Even the heroes are laws unto themselves.
 
That’s where IHA comes in. Its financial and political backers vow that random individuals will not become laws unto themselves. Governments and corporations will not negotiate as equals with Wal-Mart greeters and peasant farmers. This version of IHA might go after other supers who seem dangerous, but it concentrates on mutants precisely because their appeaance cannot be controlled. In ostensibly democratic countries, power elites cannot come out and say, “Serve or die.” IHA supplies the threat to supers who won’t be coopted, but it’s deniable.
 
Heroes who delve into IHA's backing don't find it easy. While some of the money comes from direct donatins by bigoted believers, a lot of it comes from blandly named shell companies and foundations that don't have to disclose their own funding sources.. If the heroes can penetrate the black boxes, they find a remarkable collection of business leaders, sovereign wealth funds, PACs -- even crime bosses. The list might even include their own country's military, or a company that touts how it hires mutants and turns their powers to profitable use.
 
Anyone else?
 
Dean Shomshak

When adapting IHA to different campaigns, it may be useful also to the role of mutants. As mentioned, Marvel uses mutants as a metaphor for socially disfavored minorities. (I would debate the appropriateness of Marvel’s execution, but that’s not relevant here.) Or as LL mentions, mutants can represent the fear of hidden Otherness, especially in one’s own children. (From what I’ve seen of very early X-Men, I actually think this “atomic horror” aspect was more the original intended meaning.) But those are not the only possibilities, and what you choose can influence how you treat IHA – including the very important matter of who funds it. Maybe it’s my own prejudice, but I think that whatever their prejudices, people with big money tend to be rather calculating in the causes they support.
 
Let’s start by looking at the big-name mutant villains of the CU. Three of them (Graviton, Holocaust, Menton) are white people from privileged backgrounds. Not exactly great stand-ins for oppressed minorities. (Okay, I’m guessing about Holocaust’s race. His 5e and 6e write-ups don’t say. Geoffrey Haganstone, son of a Pennsylvania senator and his socialite wife, is not provably white. But that seems most likely.)
 
But they are excellent characters for a theme of “Born To Power.” In this treatment, mutants are not as new as people think. Past mutants used their powers to become rich and socially prominent, and their descendents inherited that social status as well as a chance of developing super-powers. The model for mutant villainy is less Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and more Hellfire Club: Many of the world’s mutants act covertly to protect and increase their wealth and power, as their ancestors have done for generations.
 
(See also the classic Champions module, The Blood and Dr. McQuark. The Blood are exactly the sort of super-powered lineage I’m talking about, albeit of different origin.)
 
The rate of superhuman mutation is greater now; increasing numbers of mutants appear outside the old families and knowing nothing about them. For the general public, the paradigm for “mutant” is the teen whose suddenly-activated mutant powers cause havoc. But some people know differently. And some of those people fund IHA.
 
The backers of IHA are very rich, but they have seen some avenues of social power closed to them. They found there’s more than old money behind the business and political dynasties that balk them: Those dynasties have powers that these nouveau-riche entrepreneurs, financiers and politicians can never gain. And they hate it. IHA is their weapon against the mutant dynasties. Attacking some shmoe who used his pyrokinesis to rescue someone is only a means to an end. The battles against mutants who go public, whether hero or villain, are just practice for the real battle when the soldiers and Minuteman robots descend on the Hamptons, the artificial islands of Dubai, and other haunts of the super-rich and the hidden mutant aristocracy.
 
There's one different spin on the IHA. Let's see some more.
 
Dean Shomshak
 

Yes, they can be a bit niche.  The Ultimate Martial Artist is good for any hand to hand skill type (wish I still had that book) Both show how to tune powers for different settings from pulp to scifi and low power to high end

lets see, the is the Ultimate Mentalist -512 is 4th?  All of the Ultimate series are useful.

How is an angry mob pelting the lobsters with rocks in any way humane?

I think this is a bad idea because it hides the complexity of Limitations. "Laser Pistol (-2)" sounds simpler than, "OAF (-1), 6 Charges (-3/4), Beam (-1/4)," but it doesn't tell you what the restrictions actually are. Players might also want similar powers with different Limitations, and then the GM has to keep track of, "Tom's Laser Pistol (-1)," "Dick's Laser Pistol (-2)," and "Harry's Laser Pistol (which is different from Tom's) (-1)."

as you said -3/4 or -1/2 or at least link to the DS (no boom no shield)

I would think that most people who end up in combat often would naturally seek to become more efficient in combat, out of a sense of self-preservation if nothing else.

have you read AoE damage shield from the rule book?
place a attack with limitation that only vs foci on a disspell/HtH KA or what ever damage shield linked to a Force Field
 
I have 6th with me but 5th... hmm

"Preventative vengeance.  Hm.  That's a concept I have to remember."

There's an unwritten rule that superheroes always arrive in the nick of time no matter how slowly they travel. The only problem with that theory is that some GM's don't always follow the unwritten rule.
 
(My post originally said "superherpes" rather than "superheroes". Sorry for any confusion.)

A friend of mine organized a surprise 50th birthday party for me last year, which caught me totally off guard.
 
 
 
 
Mainly because I will turn 50 in about 3 months from now.