Chris Goodwin

For those who want to continue following Duke's postings directly from him, there's a thread here at the unofficial forums that I run.

Duke says: Okay, then. No guesses. Fair enough! Clearly the reluctance is a personal. Issue that I'll just have to work on. HA!Current update:Things are crawling. Had a thing yesterday that took longer than it should have, and I came back feeling ill. In an hour, I had as as sick as I've been in years. Finished #18 last night, but in the past few hours, I've barely made a dent in nineteen. Set a page, preview, go spend forty minutes selling Buicks. GOTO 10. I feel thinner at this point, and I've bruised some intercostals from the endless useage.Scared I won't make the deadline like this.Increase your character roster with #19! Before My Super Ex-Girlfriend I troduced us to G Girl, there was G Maid! Turn to page 47 and learn all about this fascinating and edgy new Sidekick!Who is G Maid? Why has Heroic Publishing never made cheesecake from such a fertile source? The answers to these questions are in a vintage add that was so out of skew it took twenty minutes to straighten it enough to work with!Are your players abusing your good nature and the Vehicle Building rules? Maybe you are without really realizing it. Step I've to page 32 to find out.#20 steps the size up a bit beyond the "comic format" to begin a short-lived run of what I actually thought _was_ comic sized. But hey: I have never made a secret out of being relatively ignorant of all things comic book.Dark Champions was a big hit, and the cover was recycled and cropped to use on AC 20. If that makes you think about an issue filled with Dark Champions-oriented ideas and articles, you are as wrong as I was. Unless Grond is part of your Dark Champions game. If so, Dean's got some ideas on the best way to throw him. Or maybe your DC game needs more membership for CLOWN. Issue 20 has you covered. and don't forget: this is _the_ source for CyberHERO errata!#21: quite possibly the most beautiful cover of any of the AC books. It appears to have been done by the same artist that did the 4e Fantasy HERO, but I don't want to take the time to look it up right now. Lots of FH material on this issue, and a Steve Long pulp-style adventure for Justice Inc. Seems even in 4e, they knew JI was still a winner. Going to try to get 22 done; I don't know if I will get that far or not. I am really, really tired (probably the fluid loss), and I just want to sleep. Problematically, the illness has put me behind schedule. I should have been scanning the last three today and enjoyed the rest of the day to myself.Oh well!

Well, I promised Brian a surprise twist in the next update, and here it is!When I went to pull the next batch from the bookshelf, I noticed something askew. Number 24 is _missing_! The one with suggestions on how to build a Swarm: character or obstacle. It is _gone_!No doubt one of my players has it, but I don't know who, and I'm certainly not going to get it back in time for the deadline.Don't worry: I've already shot a message to Jason (who has most of the issues already, but not all) letting him know he'll need to scan that one himself (or have his pro do it) from his stockpile.But then there was another twist!I knew the bulk of my day was going to be spent installing air conditioning for a coworker of the wife (and it was, in fact, the bulk of my day).I came home sick. _Horribly_ sick. Fever, aches, stuffy head-- no; not Corona: there are some distinctly un-corona symptoms that I won't bother you with, but _sick_. Bad sick.So I have managed to get _one_ book scanned this evening, and I just can't stay awake any more.Tomorrow is going to be _tough_: Six books left to scan, and most of them the final "magazine size" format right before the magazine was cancelled.Oh well. Challenge makes life worth living, I suppose.

Duke asked me to pass along information about the scanning project. 👍

Current update:I'd wanted to get all six of the "that size" books done today, but I had yet-another company-oriented road trip today (you know: on my _vacation_! ) that hasn't left me with a whole lot of scanning time. Still, I'm plugging way, and I _will_ get this to Jason before his deadline. After tonight, there aren't all that many left anyway.#13 was a bit awkward. The book I was working from had been collated and folded more than a little off-center (pages only; cover was about right), resulting in pretty much every page after the centerfold being cut with _zero_ right hand margin. Still, everything remains intact, at least as far as what was printed.#14 is the first of the "comic format" books. No; they're not laid out like comics, but the editor refers to the new size as "comic format." I think comics are a little larger than this, but I'm not really sure. Fortunately, the uptick in real estate per page and a step down in font size dramatically dropped the page count. It's not quite enough to balance out the time invested in the scanning, though, as each individual page has to be hand-aligned (with the smaller size, I could do the whole leaf at once, really helping speed things up).On that-- page alignment. I am as meticulous as I can be, within reason. I have been informed that the deadline is closer than I thought (not that I'd been shirking, mind you), so I have allowed a bit more tolerance in page alignment. I still work to get it as close as possible, but I have stopped fighting the diminishing returns of micro adjustments. I'd like to explain what that means in this context.I am not lining up the pages square with the scanning bed. Given that these books are machine printed, machine collated and bound, and machine cut, that would be ludicrous. In almost every case, the final leafs and pages (and covers, too, actually) aren't actually square anymore. This is due to tolerances and variables during all the mechanized processes. Were you to actually sit and measure the borders in books and magazines (particularly "Saddle Stitched," or staple-bound magazines), you will see that the print is almost never square with the page. It's so much the dominant normal that we don't even notice it anymore when we are reading-- the page is curled or rolled anyway, blah-blah-blah-- the brain says "Oh, why bother noticing anymore?" That doesn't work on a screen, as we are used to everything being places with electronic precision. We can square the text perfectly, but when the "page" it's on is crooked, we think "well this is a terrible scan!" without actually noticing why the decision was made.I am not the guy doing the final clean-up and "restoration" of these scans; I don't know who is. Worse, I don't know what he or she has as a methodology. Without this information, I have decided to do the scans as if I were doing them for my own projects (and if the final product ends up like the 4e POD, I will probably end up doing my own project. ). Anyway, I have defaulted to doing these as if I was going to be the finishing guy, which means getting the text and headers as squared up as possible. Why? Well frankly, it's the most important part of the content. Yes; it's nice to get drawn lines squared up, as they are the first things to show digital manipulation. However, they can also be redrawn from scratch in your image software, so....Header graphics are nigh as important (that is, "almost equally" Ha!). The trouble is that most of these old magazines were laid out with the techniques at hand. Often that meant literally hand-laying various items to create a master from which copies would be made. What does that mean here? It means that it's entirely possible that the two columns of text aren't square with each other. It means that sometimes the art is off-kilter with relation to the text, of the text is "listing" to the right and the header is listing to the left. This is the sort of thing that necessitates digital manipulation.Yes; it could _all_ be done through digital manipulation, but we are all by now familiar with the hallmark of that: pixelation, odd "jogs" in the outlines and graphics, etc. The closer you can manually position the image you want to scan, the less manipulation you will have to do digitally, meaning the less signs of such manipulation will be in your final product. In instances where more than one important thing is askew, I try to position the originals manually so that they are... well, for lack of a better term, "equally askew, both as close as possible without making the other worse."The thing given the _least_ priority is the footer line and page number. Both of these are too easy to redraw from scratch, and I won't let them stand in the way of having the best-looking content I can create.14 has a great example of why you _plan from the start_ when you do _anything_. There is an add for Mystic Masters, featuring a _beautiful_ greyscale of that book, and after all these years, it _still_ looks fantastic. Two pages later is an add for the then-current version of Traveller, which looks like nothing so much as my father's tattoo. When I was a kid, it looked clean and crisp and was easy to recognize; even the tiny areas of color popped. Today, it's just a black blob, just like that Traveller add. There wasn't any decent composition planning, and the bleeds were deep to get that "this is so black and space-like" look. And over the last umpteen years, that ink has run and blurred and there's really nothing I can do about it. Most of the Cyber Space adds are like this, too. Just wanted that up there: sometimes, there are things you just can't save, but it's not because you didn't try: it's because you have nothing to _start_ with. I own some (a really, _really_ small portion) of the products in some of these "beyond repair" adds. If I ever find time to do a version of these scans for myself, I will probably try to scan in the actual products, and insert them into the add. It won't look the same (real always jars against drawn), but at least it will be recognizable. I've considered doing the same for the various HERO books displayed throughout the magazine's run: just slap in some colored covers! HA!#15: A surprisingly good long-game adventure. Too long for a scenario, but a nice bit of background for a campaign. If you don't have it, be sure to check it out: No More Mr. Nice Guy#16. I won't lie to you; this one was _hard_ to tear apart. Not physically-- it's just paper and a couple of rotten staples, after all. But that _cover_.... Fortunately, I had two copies. Unfortunately, I opted to scan the nicest one in the hopes of making less work for whoever is restoring these. (I wish I had a better copy of #1, but that's the hardest issue there is to find, I'm afraid ). But when it came time to fold the cover backwards to scan the inside.... Oh, there should have been a service of some kind... There is only one issue that's going to be ever more difficult. Any of you folks out there with a complete set care to make a guess? At any rate, this issue contains three pages of errata for the BBB, so if you missed it twenty years ago and absolutely cannot use a search engine, here's your chance to find out what went wrong. #17: The Western HERO Special! Sort of... When you guys look on page 2, I want you to know that what you're seeing is _not_ the fault of either myself or whoever the pro that Jason has lined up for cleaning these scans. That image really is that washed out in the original (same with the NOTICE! poster on p 44). It could be solved by someone who really wanted to take the time to maybe insert a greyscaled copy of the original product, so I am going to try to find the time to include one. Keep in mind, folks, that this doesn't mean the pro has time to actually _do_ it, okay? Remember that the goal here is the preservation of the game material; the vintage adds are just a nice tag-along. I do wish I had done this AC project before Western HERO, though. There are a couple of pieces of art that I believe are repeated from there, and they are in much, _much_ better condition than the pieces I was working with. I could have done a simple swap-out and saved _days_ of work....

Now that you mention it... I have no idea off the top of my head whether that's true. A trip through 6e volume 1 reveals... 6e1 p. 381: 6e1 p. 381-382: I hadn't bothered to check that before, but it looks like with Gestures or Incantations, an attack can disrupt the Power. "[T]akes damage from or is adversely affected by" probably means something like, at least 1 STUN or BODY through defenses, or at least 1m of Knockback, or greater than EGO on a Mental Power. I suppose technically at least 1 segment of Flash would trigger that as well, but that seems a little much. I can see a case for it either way. Enough to change the character's position, status, or any of their game values.

I honestly didn't mean to come across in any negative way. The premise was given in the initial post. We can expand it to a general discussion of magic, but let's keep in mind that we're not doing the original poster any favors by ignoring the givens. You are right in that there's nothing in the rules that says magic requires Gestures and Incantations, but that was one of the givens in the initial post. More generally, we are in the Fantasy Hero forum, and we're discussing magic, which frequently does have ways for an attacker to shut down a caster that don't involve an active Dispel or similar, which can include hacking off the caster's arms with a honking great sword, because they can't perform Gestures without them.

From the original post... (Boldface mine.) For a spell with Gestures and/or Incantations, a successful hit in combat against the caster doesn't necessarily disrupt the spell. If an attacker wanted to disrupt the spell, I've already mentioned in the thread how they might do so, with various targeted attacks. There are other Limitations that do allow a successful hit to disrupt a spell; specifically, Concentration lists how, and provides a way a caster might avoid it. There's an optional-but-recommended Limitation noted in a couple of Fantasy Hero books, without a lot of supporting documentation... the Limitation is called Spell (-1/2) and it basically rolls a number of Limitations into it, the specifics usually being up to the GM. This Limitation could include the condition that a spell being cast can be disrupted by an incoming attack that does some threshold of STUN and/or BODY to the caster. Gestures and Incantations were specified as given in the original post in the thread. Regardless of whatever other hypothetical or potential conditions a given magic system or spell might include or require, we are in fact starting from Gestures and Incantations as a requirement, per the OP. I'd like to suggest any discusssion of whether or not a given magic system might or might not require them be tabled, for that reason.

Glad to hear of the giant's new shoes! 👍

Security guard. Maintenance worker. Tradesman. Bartender. The blue collar and service workers never get enough love!

The 6th ed vehicle rules apply an OCV bonus to attackers to hit rather than a DCV penalty to the vehicle based on its size.

It's in the Champions III supplement, which I would argue is perfectly acceptable for 3rd edition!

If that's me then I'm the one who helped figure out that working across the Internet was probably not going to be workable. I still need to grab the files; I've had other things going on.

I just heard that Jim Holloway has passed away. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1650679758547413/

I don't believe this is factually correct. In FH 1, for first-gen Hero, the base condition for all spells were a full Phase to cast, half DCV, a Magic Skill at -1 per 10 Active Points, and END cost of 1 per 5 Active. Gestures and Incantations are Limitations that can be taken, but there's no requirement built into the system that they must be. In FH for 4th edition, the base condition is the requirement of a total of -1 from a list of Limitations; it's assumed that a list will be provided by the GM, but the book provides a list which includes Gestures and Incantations. I'll note here that no particular Limitations from the list are required, so a character could easily have spells without either Limitation. The genre books for FH for 5th and 6th editions specify that the GM will create the magic system, and will specify any required Limitations. These can include Gestures and Incantations, and those are listed as very common for magic, but there's nothing requiring them. The sample magic system provided in Fantasy Hero Complete does include Gestures and Incantations as requirements. Finally, the original poster in this thread, Gandalf970, specified Gestures and Incantations in the original post. There are a number of ways an attacker could disrupt a caster's spell using Gestures and Incantations: Via an Entangle or Grab that affects the hands, unless another body part is specified for the Gestures By an Entangle that affects the mouth or the voice, whether this is provided by a Modifier built into the Entangle (such as Stops Sense and specifies Voice as the "sense" stopped via the "voice as sense" rules in 6e2) or by special effect and GM permission By a Grab that affects the mouth (possibly via an OCV penalty) With GM permission, by a Darkness that affects the Hearing Group, possibly requiring the "voice as sense" rules in 6e2 With GM permission, negotiation, and discussion, an attack against the Hit Locations covering the hands, mouth, or throat might do it. Slitting a caster's throat before they can incant, slicing off a hand or arm, smashing the fingers or throat with a club, fist, or other weapon, choking or strangling the caster... any of these probably will do it. Pretty much all of this includes discussion with the GM as a prerequisite. Tl;dr: To fully answer the OP's question: if a spell has Gestures and Incantations, there are a number of ways provided by the rules to disrupt the casting, and a number of others that can be had with GM negotiation. The majority if not all of these can be performed with a Held Action.