name_tamer

Re: Villains (solo) book 3 Kickstarter now up! Link HERE. Full color & hardcover - matches the rest of the series. $50 for just the book; $60 for book + PDF. $35 for just the book, if you previously bought the PDF from the HERO store. Could someone with power to do so please put up a sticky thread on this topic? I'm sure everyone would like to see this Kickstarter succeed, and it is unlikely to if people don't know about it.

Re: Champions Villains, Volume 3: Solo Villains Pledged. Why is there no ALLCAPS Sticky thread about this Kickstarter on the relevant boards (like, say, Champions)? There have been people clamoring for this book for months; why is HERO not giving it publicity?

Re: MYTHIC HERO Kickstarter I just upped my pledge too.

Re: 2012, end of the line Luther Black, from DEMON: Servants of Darkness.

Re: King of the Mountain Reviewed at RPG.net +1 Sale here.

Re: Balrog in a superhero world This on Surbrook's stuff is a straight LOTR Balrog. I don't see anything about it that makes it particularly incompatible with a supers setting, as opposed to fantasy. It's fourth edition, but should be easy to adapt. Alternately, if you have the fifth edition Evil Unleashed, or the sixth edition Champions Villains 3, you can use the stats for Josiah Brimstone's "Demonsoul Embodied" form.

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter

Re: Needing a Name for a Density Increase Super Heroine I like this one.

Re: 3rd edition Supplements I am not aware of any such, and I have looked. I think anything that you find would likely be a violation of someone's intellectual property rights.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? This news is probably relevant to the topic of this thread.

Re: Champions Villains VOL 3...My review Yes.

Re: USA 50 Discussion Sorry to hear that. I would have liked to buy another product in this line. I simply don't have time for that. I have a full-time, 50+ hour/week job, a wife, and three kids; gaming is a hobby for me, and a hobby that gets the short end of the stick a lot of the time. All that may be true for you as well, and I really don't mean to suggest with my comments that I would have been able to do better in creating characters, laying out a book, etc. I cannot and/or would not take the time and effort to do that. But others can and have, and their books are much more useful TO ME than the Book of the West is. I explained the reasons why above. I don't mean to pile on; I really liked parts of the book (and the issues identified by Balabanto were, for the most part, not issues for me). I don't intend to post further on this topic unless invited to do so.

Re: USA 50 Discussion A clarifying note: because I have a quote from OddHat in my sig, I assume that Balabanto mistakenly attributed my comments (above) to OddHat.

Re: USA 50 Discussion I bought the Book of the West, both in PDF and hardcopy (simultaneously, as I often do for HERO products). I was disappointed. I found the book very difficult to read, simply from a layout perspective. Some character description sections are missing for some characters. The writeups are formatted in a way that is very inconsistent. I found all this made the book very difficult to use. Here's an example: Estrella (pages 28-29) has powers written up in a wide variety of ways. Her Luck power is written up in a way similar to the way DOJ does it: "Fortune Favored: Luck 2d6" (i.e. "Flavor Name of Power: Game Mechanics"). But many of the powers are written up without the flavor name. And sometimes it's really necessary. She also has a power that is written up like this: "To 33' North, 44' West: Teleportation: Floating Fixed Location (1 Locations)." A little Google work reveals that 33 degrees north, 44 degrees west is the latitude/longitude of Roswell, NM, and it would probably be possible to guess that from the main text that follows the character sheet, but why should you have to? And the power seems to be written up wrong: if it is really always to 33 degrees north, 44 degrees west, then that is a fixed location (1 point), not a floating fixed location (5 points). And the teleportation power that this is written up as a fixed location for appears only in a sample VPP power. This may be legal under 6E, I honestly don't know, but it is certainly confusing. And this floating fixed location is her **first listed power.** Furthermore, the teleportation power in the VPP is written up as teleportation 17m, x17 Non-Combat, 32 Active Points; by my understanding there is no way to have a x17 non-combat multiple; this should be written up as teleportation 17m, x16 non-combat, 32 active points. That would mean that she would be able to teleport 272 meters non-combat, but the VPP limitation states that she can use her VPP within 666 miles of Roswell, and her teleportation only within 504 miles from Roswell; this suggests that she should be able to teleport the 504 miles to Roswell, which she obviously can't. It's a legal writeup that only allows her to teleport within 504 miles from Roswell, but why can she use other powers further away? In short, it seems like the author's intent was not met here, but I can't really tell for sure what the author's intent was. Other powers are also written up in a confusing way. For instance, her Flash Defense has no descriptive flavor text, and has the limitation "Only in Hero ID (-1/4)". Her Resistant Protection has the flavor text "Armor-Suit," grants her resistant Mental Defense and Power Defense, and has the limitation "Only in Costumed Identity (-1/4)." Is this the same limitation as her Only in Hero ID? The main text provides no explanation of either power; it would appear from this that she wears an armor-suit when in her hero/costumed identity (i.e. that it is something physical, more like a focus - but somehow grants her both mental defense and power defense), and that the suit also grants her flash defense. But I really have no idea; it could be that her "armor suit" is some kind of light energy that appears when she goes into hero ID (arguably more consistent with the resistant mental and power defense), and her flash defense is also a byproduct of that. I'm not quibbling with the mechanics - based on SFX "only in hero id" could be either a physical suit that is hard to remove, or something else that appears when she makes her change - but the writeup gives no clue of the SFX, and having "only in costumed ID" for some powers and "only in hero ID" for others adds to the confusion. Her "appearance" section gives nothing other than height/weight/hair/eyes. That's fine, I guess, but other writeups have more details, as well as information about costume, civilian clothes, etc. Some of that information is provided for Estrella in her "Origin-History" section ("She adopted a costume based on the loud yellow flag of her new home state") but not much. At least there's a picture. Some writeups have a "tactics" section; others don't, and Estrella is one of those that doesn't. In DOJ books the "tactics" section is usually a "powers and tactics" section that explain the basic nature of the powers; that would have been helpful in the case of Estrella to avoid the kind of confusion I mentioned with respect to the "only in hero ID" issue. The "powers" aspect would have been helpful for many of the writeups, in fact. And then on some of the writeups, the "tactics" section provides useful information about powers, but little about tactics. It appears most of the hero writeups have an associated quote, but the place where they appear is inconsistent from one to the next. In Estrella's case the quote is in Spanish. I appreciate that Spanish may be her first language, but it is not mine: a translation would have been useful. In addition, the text of the one text section that we have for Estrella really needs some editing. For example, the second paragraph, which is eight lines long, is one sentence with no punctuation and contains at least three typos. I don't mean to pick on Estrella; I just picked her at random. I found similar problems in other writeups. In addition, I just found the font of the book hard to read: it is very small. But on many pages there is a lot of blank white space. That doesn't compute for me. This is all very disappointing because while I did not follow the USA-50 thread on the hero boards, I really like the 50-state team concept, and I think there is probably a very interesting gaming universe (or a portion thereof) behind these characters. But while some of the character concepts jumped out at me (Captain California, Wild-Catter, Hanford FX (radioactive wasp swarm = awesome)), the layout of this book really interferes with my ability to enjoy the setting and the character concepts. It was simply too hard to figure out how a particular character might fit into a setting with homebrew characters, or even how it might relate to other USA-50 characters, because of the layout and formatting choices that were made. But I really think there are some interesting characters here: for example, as I was dissecting Estrella for this post, I really thought more and more about what an interesting character she is, how she could be used, etc. But to be brutally honest, there are a lot of character writeups out there to be had; if I'm going to think this hard about how a character is supposed to be used, I might as well write it up myself. My bottom line: I will not buy another book in the USA-50 series without having a chance to review the product at my FLGS to be sure that there are significant improvements to the layout and editing. Sorry to be harsh.

Re: USA 50 Discussion I bought the book and was disappointed. I can post here or I can contact you in some other way, whichever you prefer.

Re: Champions Villian Voulms Beyond 3: Is There Room For More? Based on statements Darren made in this thread about the sales of CV1 and CV2, I suspect DOJ will not be eager to do a CV4.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? Darren, thanks for the responses. You have provided useful information, and I have stopped waiting for the bundle to come out.

Re: Hero Games needs a new printer Darren, good to hear the company still working on it. I ordered the Star Hero and Champions Beyond book-PDF bundles a couple days ago - that is, as soon as they were available. Now Steve's front-page update today made it sound like Beyond has just been sent to the printer, rather than that you have copies on-hand. Who's right? I will be ordering the Champions Villains 3 bundle when it is available. It's hard waiting on the book when the PDF is already available, but on the bright side it keeps money in my pocket.

Re: Villains (solo) book 3 I'll just add my voice to the chorus of those looking forward to this being printed. I'm sure there are many.

Re: Printed books?

Re: The Edomite Or Classic Organizations, for 4th edition. Primus and Demon was, IIRC, for 3rd edition (or earlier).

Re: Glacier? Here is a character sheet.

Re: Was the Infinity Man ever given a re-do in the latest edition? Not really, no. There were several characters with very large power pools in the Galactic Champions supplement (for example, Arcane: 250-pt VPP; Examiner: 500-pt VPP), but of course not all characters with giant VPPs are the same, and none of them (or any other published 5E character, for that matter) really reminded me of the Infinite Man. (The Examiner, in particular, reminded me of the Collector of Marvel's Elders of the Universe fame). BTW, if you are interested in Infinite Man, you should check out Galactic Champions to see if you'd be interested in making the investment in that book. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Re: Fantasy art Really nice piece, Storn. If anyone is interested, this is the cover to a module by Open World Press, called World of Whitethorn - The Village of Oester. I have a copy but haven't read it - it was a free gift with a Hero store online order.