John Desmarais

Re: PA Hero: Kamandi's World If anyone is really interested: http://www.amazon.com/Kamandi-Archives-DC-Archive-Editions/dp/1401204147/ http://www.amazon.com/Kamandi-Archives-Vol-Jack-Kirby/dp/1401212085

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate? If you die, you die - but it hardly ever happens in my games.

Re: The Brat Pack Well, see, that's the thing with this book. It's not really crap. It's bad, but not bad in a "poorly crafted" way, but bad in a "you now feel unclean for having read it" way. For what it is, it's well done; but what it is isn't very pleasant. Rick Veitch very definitely has talent, and he choose to direct it in very odd (and sometimes unpleasant) ways.

Re: Why do you like to play Super Hero Games? I like the (typically) clearly defined "right" and "wrong" that the genre offers and the very wide open nature of plausible character concepts.

Re: Anyone try 'Black' Hero Action Points?

Re: Best HERO system product Justice, Inc. is great, although for pure usefulness the 5th Edition (revised) rulebook is hard to beat. My personal favorite Hero System book though has to be the old Justice, Inc. supplement Lands of Mystery. (Also in the running, the 5th edition Fantasy Hero and Star Hero books - both of which provide a nearly exhaustive break down of their respective genres; and the 3rd edition Champions supplement Strike Force - which taught me more about how to run a Champions campaign than any other book I've ever read.)

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations Heck, after my wife's gotten hold of one, you'd be hard pressed to do any additional noticeable damage - but I must admit, it is nicer to have one's own copies for later perusal.

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations How did I forget this? Books of Magic (comic) -- by John Ney Rieber, Jane Yolen, & Neil Gaiman Books of Magic (novelizations) -- by Carla Jablonski. Although the comic is decidedly better, the novels - aimed at the teen market - offered a slightly different take on the basic premise that made them worth reading as well. there were two spin-off or equal series as well. I'd skip Books of Magick: Life During Wartime by Si Spencer unless your a fan of "odd purely for the sake of being odd" - but The Names of Magic by Dylan Horrocks wasn't bad and provided a lot of addition background info on the main character and the magical world.

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations I'm not sure I can ever read these. I morally object to them on the grounds that Kurtz should write more Deryni novels, dammit, not this other stuff. Here I've been thinking just the opposite - I want more Adept novels.

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations (trying to avoid most of the current crop if nearly identical trashy vampire novels...) Novels The Smoke Trilogy and The Keeper's Chronicles -- by Tanya Huff. Fables (comic) -- by Bill Willingham The Southern Vampire Mysteries series - by Charlaine Harris The Weather Warden -- books by Rachel Caine The Sorcerer's Academy -- by Denise Little (Editor) The Adept books -- by Katherine Kurtz and Deborah Turner Harris Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions -- by Melanie Rawn Magic Street -- by Orson Scott Card The Diana Tregarde Investigation books -- by Mercedes Lackey Juvies: The Sisters Grimm -- by Michael Buckley and Peter Ferguson Percy Jackson and the Olympians -- by Rick Riordan The Young Wizards Series -- by Diane Duane Movies: The Cat Returns -- by Hiroyuki Morita Kiki's Delivery Service - by Hayao Miyazaki (actually, most of the Studio Ghibli is quite good and falls into the "modern fantasy" genre, but most of it also lacks a definite sense of "modern" in that many of them could jsut as easily be set 50, 100, 300, or more years ago; so you lose some of the "fantasy interacting with modern society" thing) The 10th Kingdom (yeah, I know, cheesy, but it hits a lot of the genre tropes). The Librarian movies with Noah Wylie (see comment above)

Re: Another human civilization may live inside Earth's hollows It is quite good. I've used it myself multiple times (through at three different versions of the Hero rules). And I'll probably use it again if anyone ever lets me run a Pulp game.

Re: What cities do you use in your game? Cool! I'd not seen that one before.

Re: Hero Alliance Sourcebook?

Re: Star Hero:? Most of what is thought of as the "Pulp Era" is actually contained primarily in the years leading up to WWII (although WWII is also lumped in there). Pulp Hero is (IMO) the best genre book Hero has produced - and one of the best genre books ANY game publisher has produced. It is chock full of pulpy goodness.

Re: Star Hero:? It's a nice idea, in theory, but not one that the market really supports. Science Fiction games are a hard sell. Actually, anything outside of D&Dish Fantasy is hard to sell (Vampire having been a noteworthy exception, due in no small part to being in the right place at the right time). The Superhero genre (Champions) does the best for Hero Games, which is understandable as it's very much the "core" genre for the system (and customer base) - and, as such, has become the best supported genre. Traveler is one of the few SF games to attract a substantial following, and I'm really hoping that TH does well as it could turn some of that Trav fan-base in Hero players and increase the desire for more SF Hero stuff (but my fear is that the audience for TH is going to be limited primarily to the intersection of the existing Hero and Trav audience).

Re: Appearance Shifting For Items Shape Shift (on the car's ch. Instant Change (purchased as a type of Transform) Instant Change (purchased as a type of Transform)

Re: Rant? Speed in Hero But the end result of this was that you applied a limitation to make your powers slow and then bought more spd to offset this limitation. Why not just build the powers not using the Extra Time limitations?

Re: Wonder Woman: the best stories Infinite Donna Troy: He mangled her origin (as if it wasn't already bad enough by this point) such that she was originally created by the Amazon sorceress Magala as a magical duplicate of the young Princess Diana of Themyscira (a nod to the original Wonder Girl) to be a playmate for Diana, who was previously the only child on the island. However, Donna was soon kidnapped by the Dark Angel (a World War II villainess and sworn enemy of Queen Hippolyta, Diana's mother), who thought the girl was Diana. Dark Angel cursed Donna to live endless variants of a life characterized by suffering, with her life being restarted and erased from the world's memory when Donna was at her lowest. Even Donna would forget her past lives until the moment at which Dark Angel would arrive to restart her life, at which point she would immediately recall all of her past suffering. Wonder Mom: John Byrne's run included a period in which Diana's mother Hippolyta served as Wonder Woman,while Diana ascended to Mount Olympus as the Goddess of Truth. Byrne posited that Hippolyta, having traveled back in time to the 1940s, had been the Golden Age Wonder Woman.

Re: Wonder Woman: the best stories I enjoyed the Perez stories for their own sake, but always felt that the changes he made to her history were unnecessary and caused problems for DCU as a whole. (Of course, post-InfiniteCrisis, most of his changes went away). Avoid the John Byrne stories at all costs. Not so much because of his (IMO much over stated) ability to write or draw comics - but the man should never be allowed to play in someone else's sandbox. He leaves in his wake continuity time bombs that cause problems for years.

Re: Question on Pulp book Just to reinforce. I've bought about half of these and have been happy with all of them. There are some cool ideas hidden in these PDFs. (My favorite so far has been HPA02 Solar Smith and the Sky-Pirates of Arcturus)

Re: Pathfinder Hero I had a chance to look through the first one this weekend. Very nice, but (IMO) overpriced. I'd prefer it with the same material, but with non-glossy paper (and possibly b&w interior illos), $5 to $8 cheaper. After all, selling 6 "tied together" adventures for $20 each adds up to a pretty heft price tag. It was, however, a pretty nice answer to "adventures don't sell" problem in that the book, while mostly take up with the adventure, also contained some setting information and monster write-ups - potentially making them appealing to people who don't but "just adventures".

Re: 4th to fifth edition I think your friend is looking for something to complain about. 5th Edition took the approach of rebuilding all of the talents using the existing powers/limitations a means of adjusting the point costs relative to the rest of the game. The only real difference is that a few of them had their point costs altered a bit.

Re: Okay, what do I need here ... Multiple exchange rates throughout the lands is cool, but can frequently be more cumbersome than it's worth (yes, I'm lazy). I've pretty much just stuck with the "major coinage denominations have values based on the value/weight of precious/semiprecious metal involved". If Kingdom 'A' has a coin containing 1/10 of an ounce of gold, it will have the same basic purchasing power as a 1/10 of an ounce gold content coin in Kingdom 'B' - but don't try to spend coins from an unfriendly nation around here.

Re: Okay, what do I need here ... Not just help ground (or perhaps grind) them into the genre, but the common monsters can really help enforcing with a particular feel/flavor within the genre. With the FH campaign I'm running right now I am deliberately aiming for a bit of the old xD&D feel and having all of those traditional D&D-type monsters is an important part of that - and the write-ups in the published material are similar enough to the classics to feed that need. Conversely, if I were to get a chance to do a Tuala Morn game, I wouldn't touch any of those monsters with a 10 foot Lithuanian.