John Desmarais

Re: Campaign Advice: How to Enforce Style? Dang... I wanna play! OK, first off - are your players all familiar with the genre? If not, educate them (several folks have suggested good info sources already in this thread). Next, do they like the genre? If not, why not? Sometimes this is merely a by product of not knowing the genre, sometimes it's a true dislike. If a player truely doesn't like the genre then you are going to have difficulty getting him to stay "in genre" - even if he actually tries. Help the players build their characters. Heck - have a big "party building party" as your first session. This will help you stear them in the right direction, and help avoid the possibility of everyone making the basically the same character (this happens more often than you would think at the lower point levels). One of my favorite things to do with low point-level pulp games is eliminate the normal char max (or use the Legendary NCM someone else mentioned). This encourages the building of non-balanced characters - characters who have a very definite schtick by encourage them to dump an innordinate number of points into one stat. This helps give you "the strong guy", "the smart guy", "the fast guy", "the tough guy", etc, etc... Very genre. Train your players. Use point rewards to encourage appropriate in-genre role-play. Now, this can be dangerous as it can cause points to escalate faster than you might want. Are you familiar with the Brownie Point system from Super Agents? If so, give these out instead. (Brownie Points could be used for buying equiment, perks, rank, and other indirect character benefits. If someone has a copy handy they could probably summarize it better). John D.

Re: Do all Gm's use the Skill roll for magic? My current FH campaign uses the spells from the Fantasy Hero Grimoire - the master version of the spells only (the ones that don't have RSR). So far things are working well. John D

Re: Culture HERO http://www.rpgarchive.com/index.php?page=adv1&advid=550 John D.

Re: Foundation and Empire Whoa... It's been so long since I've read anything by Asimov that I wouldn't even want to offer up ideas. I would, however, be interested in seeing whatever you do come up with. John D.

Re: Reincarnation Summon? John D.

You say this like it's a bad thing. Hero Games is unlikely to go after these types of licenses, so you'll probably never see Hero versions. These types of things done for ANY game system end up producing quantified descriptions of the key elements of the setting and lots of source material - all of which can usually be easily converted to use with our game system of choice. John D

Saying that there was never much Hero Systme support is understating it a bit. I liked Shadow World as a setting, but it was very much geared towards RoleMaster. The first several books included FH stats for many (but not all) of what appeared in them, but it was obviously an after-thought. Kulthea as a FH world had a very different feel than Kulthea as an RM world - mostly due to the vast differences in magic. I'm not really sure what tack I would take to handle magic now - whether I would try to build a Hero magic system similar to what the setting expects, of just say the heck with and use the Grimoire as is. I bought most of what was published during the first two years, then lost interest when I stopped running FH. I would love an excuse to use thet stuff again, but my current campaign (based on Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books) is already underway - and I've written far to much material to jsut chuck in dumpster now... John D

Re: Teen Heroes & Static Shock Because the producers of the cartoon wanted to do a Static / JLA crossover. (Not that it was really a long stretch as the original Static comic had been published by DC as part of the Icon(sp?) imprint). John D

Re: Horror campaign Here are the archetypes I have used (ie. actually created packages for at one time or another) in horror and similar modern games: Archeological Explorer Bodyguard Cat Burgler Con-man Ex-Military Museum Curator Mystic Occult Investigator Police Priest Private Investigator Professor Scientist Showgirl Soldier of Fortune Student Reporter Socialite Writer John D.

Doc Smith's attitude towards women (in his books at least) was never abusive - but they were definitely considered to be the "weaker sex" and couldn't utilize the lens (except for one special case, which was was strongly painted as special that you wouldn't want to use it as an excuse to ignore teh gender limitation). John D.

Re: Kulthea - the Shadow World Wow - someone else who remembers that Shadow World was supposed to support FH as well as RM (sort of). Actually, I haven't used SW in years. What I stared up my current FH campaign I strongly considered using SW, but instead opted to build one based on M. Lackey's Valdemar novels. If you decide to bite the bullet and build Kulthea material for FH5, I'd love to see it (who knows, I may decide to use SW again someday - I always liked it, even though it was really much more of a RoleMaster world than FH). John Desmarais

Re: Group size? Me (GM) plus 4 players. John D

Re: Better Monster Book? Kind of depends on what you're looking for. Beastiary has lots of "real world" creatures in addition to a nice sampling of creatures of legend. MMM is all fantasy creatures. I have both. I would probably consider Beastiary to be more generically useful, while MMM is more on target genre-wise. John D.

Sort of. I wrote them up for use in demo games. For the Justice League all of the names have been changed - and some non-critical background items - to reduce the chances of having a "but Superman should be able to do this" discussion with players, but they are all 200 base plus disads. For the Titans I stayed close to the source material as they are for use with young gamers who generally relate better to "you're playing Robin" than "you're playing a character who's like Robin but different". John Desmarais

Re: Lensman Hero I thought about for a while, and finialy determined that my wife (who games with us) would not be amused by the way females are handled in the setting. If you can find it, GURPS Lensman has a lot of good info and fairly easily converts to Hero. John D.

Re: Mansion Plans Wanted How about this: http://www.marveldirectory.com/misc/avengermansion.htm John D

Wow! Nicely done web store - and a discount. John D

Re: Stacking Problems? Hasn't been a big problem for yet, but I've been enforcing the encumbrance rules - Spell flingers typically having low STR, the weight of that chain mail added up real fast. John D

Re: Need Help With German (the Language) How complicated to you want? "kriegerische kunst" (literal translation "martial art") John D

Re: Why do you GM??? It insures that gaming happens... John Desmarais

Re: Star Wars HERO pdf / Compilation it's 4th Edition Hero (but things haven't changed that much). http://www.sysabend.org/champions/campaigns/StarHeroWars/index.html John D.

Re: how to create a sleep effect Sleep: Mind Control, Telepathic Communication, Only to put target to sleep. (Plus, if you're feeling squirrely, Based on CON). Warming up a small area: use Change Environment. John D.

Re: How the...? Here is a system I cobbled together many years ago. I haven't updated it for 5th edition (because it's not the system I'm using in my current game) but things haven't changed so much from 4th to 5th that it doesn't still work as an example of using VPPs for magic. http://www.sysabend.org/champions/rules/Art_of_Magic.html John Desmarais

Re: Re: Re: Fantastic Four, Champions-Style What characters can do in the comics tends to vary (sometimes wildly) from writer to writer. This is why I prefer to look at the niche they fill in their world rather than a specific feat that they were able to accomplish under a given writer (but not under a different one). ymmv John D.

Re: Fantastic Four, Champions-Style Eh? They're as expensive, or cheap, as you want to make them. Personally, I tend to look at charcters in terms of how they compare relative to other characters in their setting, then build them to compare similarly in my setting. Mr. Fantastic: Silly powers, smartest guy in the campaign setting - a couple of overall levels, INT is cheap, so are science skills (and really, you don't even need that many of them - give him the basic core sciences and let him take the minuses for the speciliaties). Human Torch: Pretty standard flying energy projector (with an extra, very high-power, very high END use, blast). Thing: Not quite the strongest character in the campaign setting, with slightly better combat (and non-combat) skills than the typical brick. Invisible Woman: An EC full of "force field stuff" - and not much else. I see no reason why they should be any more or less points than is typical for your campaign. John D.