RPJesus

Re: Starting resources & Psions I know what your saying. In the earlier editions of fantasy hero and Star Hero they spoon feed you every bit of info that you needed to game, but as went on we are given less descript outlines from which to pull ideas in these supplements. I'm almost sure it's just the "don't sweat the little things" because you could come up with an approriate starting cash system or use the guidelines in the 5ER. I'm getting off of the point...I miss them continually spelling out every little thing too! RPJ

Re: Altered time perception Nice power idea, but have you ever thought about the power Change Environment: Make it Megascale and buy multiple combat effects get some personal immunity and stack up the characteristic, movement, and perception penalties for everyone other than your character remember to link it to a couple dice of spd Drain and your in business!!! RPJ

Re: Need help with Teen Heroes A period campaign, outstanding!! You of course will look up Stanfords web directory to get a layout of the campus. Some school have tags for the buildings to let you know when they were built and who and why the major benefactor are. That can be a great plot resource especially if it was from a rich ex-student or someone who died mysteriously and a building is named after them. Get a list of tenured professors and sometimes they list retired professors, it's kind of over the top but yet another possible twist. I would also look at the list of graduates maybe someone is doing something interesting that you had not considered a Harvard grad doing later on in there career. I do things like this because if your PC's happen to get interested in the people in the campaign and many of them are based on real people they can root around for possible hints as to how these people will turn out later in life or if you have a player with a typoe of future sight then you can give them clues that they can actually look up to figure out on there own time with the help of Al Gores lovely creation "The internet". There are a couple of movies that you could try to research the early 1960's. 1960 A modern movie made like two years ago. THE BIRDS Alfred Hitchcock classic but not very helpful The first 2 James Bond movies also not very helpful but it helps to picture the era Valley of the Dolls Bing this is a little messed up but:straight: THE GRADUATE Tells a lot about prevailing attitudes and some mild current events. The last of the beach movies were in the 60's It's a hard era to nail down from a strictly historical perspective due to the radical changes in the mid 60s the early 60s is all but untouched the late 60s are hippies and the early 60's the hippies were beatniks. Remember the bombs we were making and sending chimps into space. The Cuban Missile crisis. Tense times and many current world figures were college or high school students at this time. You could also check the year to year history in the online library at www.questia.com RPJ

Re: i call upon the heros of the forum to help me!! (plz) Good for you Nightbringer, the best clarification and expansion on an idea is inspired by actual roleplaying PCs have a way of totally killing or elevating the most simple plots. RPJ

Re: Hooray for Newbies! why are you suddenly here? Fiendish!!!! Honestly, your tale sent a chill down my spine. I have ran in the other direction upon sight of "He whose name must never be spoken" but now that I know he has his mother out there peddling his "tainted" wares I now fear that know one will ever be safe. AAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Re: i call upon the heros of the forum to help me!! (plz) Thanks, It good to be here. RPJ

Re: i call upon the heros of the forum to help me!! (plz) Woah!!!!! Nightbringer the last thing you want to do is totally map out what the heroes are doing in reaction to your plot(underground resistance??) people react violently to not having options and free-will. It sounds like you're fairly excited though and you have given it a lot of thought...good luck and have fun, but remember that roleplaying is an organic experience you can't tell a flower how to grow you can only water it and watch it grow as it will. Happy Holidays RPJ

Re: How good is "good"? Dr. Evil the simulated sword tricks that you search for are a game convention called "Targeting Skill Levels" These are used not for OCV and DCV but for countering in any negatives for called shots like the shoulder strap of a womans blouse or the belt of her dress or a person head." An OCV of 9 is awesome if you factor in 6 to 8 targeting skill levels making an attacked to an armored opponents unarmed hands effective and hard to defend. RPJ

Re: i call upon the heros of the forum to help me!! (plz) Nightbringer, First of all let me say that I am NOT ripping on year adventure idea, but unless you have some unseen elements to make it float I don't see it working. Why would your villain with the power to move an entire city to an alien planet capable of sustaining life want to control the city. Is there some muse being used here to incite the adventure that you haven't told us about like a woman...no not just a woman a beautiful woman or something special about or in the city that makes him want to seperate and control the people like ants in a colony. Here, I'll give you another example: In Marvel comics the interdimensional being Kulan Goth once transformed and encased and entire city into a Barbarian paradise like something straight out of the pages of the old Conan comics all in an effort to extract vengance on spiderman and many here went through the barrier encasing Denver Colorado in an effort to save him(Captain America the X-men the New Mutants) the point is that the motive wasn't just to control the city, controlling the city was just the end result because the magical barrier that didn't allow technology also changed the way people thought, spoke, dressed and to a limited extent the way they looked and people struggled to keep ahold of the memory of who they were and what they were there for. Many of the hero found themselves submersed in the world Kulan Goth created and had no recollection of their former selves. If you want more help then perhaps provide some of the villains motivation to give us or at least me a stronger idea of what type of person he is and what his resources or limits my be when dealing with the players characters. RPJ

Re: Hooray for Newbies! why are you suddenly here? Yeah!! "Brick killed a guy!!!??"

Re: Hooray for Newbies! why are you suddenly here? Gentlemen, Take it easy, I sadly enough was one of the 10 foolish long beards to purchase Synnibar at Gen Con in 92' and the only two game modules to come out for it(the wound is still to deep for the heart to forget) and before you slam Gary Gygax's "Cyborg Commandos" I roleplay tested that game and gave it to thumbs up. In my defense, I was young...and needed the money! RPJ

Re: Hooray for Newbies! why are you suddenly here? I've been playing hero since 2nd edition fantasy hero(roughly 15 years) and I did a little writing back in the Adventurers Club Mag days. I got ahold of Steve Long about a year ago pitched some ideas he found kind of groovy but got this huge promotion at work so I couldn't commit time to writing a book. My work load is finally settled down so I decided to at least join the community online that has kept me gaming for almost two decades. RPJesus Gents please note that RPJesus is a bold claim, but Jesus is actually my middle name, a sick joke played on me by my parents. It also happens to be an amusing association of words my friends in college had thrown together many years ago. It is not meant to sting or mock religion and my most humble apologies if it is percieved as such. RPJ

Re: Self-Exiled Angel -- Character Background Brainstorming I find the character kind of confusing. The fact that the Angel of war is a woman and that god would have anyting to do with Atomic weapons. When bombs get dropped there is nothing holy about that war. That's you angle life used to be white and black, heaven and hell and now there's a whole bunch of grey taking up space where clarity once reigned supreme. To some it would seem a lethargy or madness had overtaken her and to even more still a strange melancholy for the ages, but the truth be told she realizes now more than ever right and wrong are totally perspective based and that in war and conflict both sides are right, both sides are wrong and the only person that must ask for forgiveness is the person that knows that their wrong utherwise all is holy and just as long as we choose to believe it is. This sobriety that she must suffer through is true devinity.......the tragedies she has taken part in have granted her that final understanding and she recoils from her faith....shaken by what we all hope is true....we are all gods children and no one fight, or love, or life is worth more than the other. RPJesus

Re: Need help forming a scenario idea Okay.......I have a couple questions. What are the exact origins of Geists power if this is the first game you definetly want to shade it with tinklings of the future like a nemesis that he will not meet until two or three episodes later. Since he got loose Psychic abilities let's say it is a power derrived from some tupe of accident...... I don't know, he suffered a back from the grave experience and is now blessed with second sight or he was on vacation in New Orleans and his car hit an old woman she was psychic and dying and the power and a piece of her spirit transfered over to him while she died in his arms....WHATEVER! The guy needs true background, roleplay it or storytell it, set the mood with music, lighting and description(write it out if you have to). Now everybody has awesome ideas but I don't believe the auction is enough of an obstacle. The hero leads a life give him complications.....headaches or flashbacks maybe the old womans thoughts and memories blending with his own....sleep walking or if you went the old cajun witch route her psychic son searching minds all over the city looking for him. Give the guy a nice hook and it gold like......a whistle the touch of his mind causes mild psychic damage due to the harsh whistling in the targets mind call him whistler(these are just ramblings) if you wanted he could feel whistlers presence growing ever closer and speak with the old woman or a choir of creep children standing in a swamp chanting answer back at him about Mother Hicks the Witch that lives on the top of Knob Hill...or during a chorus he is confronted by the distant shadow of WHISTLER a large and mysterious man with a share croppers hat overalls and a penchant for laying low in shadows.......now about the auction it would be silly to sneak in on 60+ foes it would be better to go disguised as an invited guest and bid on it in front of the gathering of baddies. He locates the person he takes places with, brushes up on their mannerisms and then passes himself off in front of his "Coworkers" The good thing about this is the hero walks in and out but, who says he's going to make it out of the parking lot before Shamrock has his way with Geist or before he's exposed as a fake. This does of course offer up complications like how does he find the villain to subplant and who would put up the money to buy the info. That's up to you after all you would know how you've set up your world better than I do. It's all about focus, think about real life: Mission directive 1 secure entry into auction Mission directive 2 secure harmful documents Mission directive 3 Tracking devices on all the baddies so he can round them up at a later date(he could either attach bugs to everyone there or put tracers in something that every gets). I imagine supervillain auctions are much like celebrity events and they probably get a little something just for showing up. Lastly, PCs do like to be challenged and once they get used to it they do like having to think. The best campaigns don't have the baddest villains or treasure. They're the ones where people use that ability to think outside the box and can play Sherlock to your Moriarty and it tends to build a level of respect for the truly clever villain. If you're interested in different challenges for PCs drop me a line. RPJesus

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. Once again I find myself the fixed figure in the age of scorn. You have a spotlight on my inaccuracies....fair enough, but my inability to nail it down constitently with a bold and definite declaration is clearly tied to the hypothetical nature of the actual science. These statements started off in an effort to shed some light to the fact that the direction science is going right now is not necessarily the direction it'll be going 20 or 200 years from now. The conversation was limited in scope due to narrow perspective and over analyzation but the critical mind. Everyone was looking to have cold hard fact before they could suspend their disbelief and just go with an idea. Science fiction is attractive to lots of fans based off of the fact that we don't know everything and one day we as a society will know more and live at a higher level as a society. I don't care about the game conventions and making it as realistic as possible. I argued the point just to point out that there is so much more that we don't know than what we do know and as soon as something comes out we overanalyze it and murder the creative Id that inspired the work. I'm all for science and research, but not at the expense of the fantasy aspect of roleplaying. RPJ

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. I apoloqize for my absence Gents, I have work and a long standing campaign that required much of my attention. BASIL the great..... ZPower Corporation was founded to become a global leader in providing viable fuel-less and pollution-free energy alternatives that can deliver electrical, mechanical and thermal power. ZPower is developing several technologies which collect and convert energy from a previously untapped source, sometimes referred to as Zero Point Energy (ZPE). In essence, the key is the conversion of electromagnetic radiation energy to electrical energy, and more specifically the conversion of an extremely high frequency bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum (beyond Gamma Rays) known as the zero point spectrum. Zero Point Energy -- vibrational energy that molecules retain even at the absolute zero of temperature. Temperature in physics has been found to be a measure of the intensity of random molecular motion, and it might be expected that, as temperature is reduced to absolute zero, all motion ceases and molecules come to rest. In fact, however, the motion corresponding to Zero Point Energy never vanishes.Zero Point Energy results from principles of quantum mechanics, the physics of subatomic phenomena. Should the molecules ever come completely to rest, their component atoms would be precisely located and would simultaneously have precisely specified velocities, namely, of value zero. But it is an axiom of quantum mechanics that no object can ever have precise values of position and velocity simultaneously; thus molecules can never come completely to rest. Physicists recognize that we are immersed in an energetic field. The existence of the zero point electromagnetic energy was discovered in 1958 by the Dutch physicist M. J. Sparnaay. Mr Sparnaay continued the experiments carried out by Hendrick B. G. Casimir in 1948 which showed the existence of a force between two uncharged plates which arose from electromagnetic energy surrounding the plates in a vacuum. Mr Sparnaay discovered that the forces acting on the plates arose from not only thermal energy (heat) but also from another type of radiation now known as classical electromagnetic zero point energy. Mr Sparnaay determined that not only did the zero point electromagnetic energy exist in a vacuum but also that it persisted even at a temperature of absolute zero. This term Zero Point Energy (ZPE) has been based on the concept that even if matter were cooled down to absolute zero (minus 273oC), in terms of its temperature, this energy field still remains. Meaning Zero point energy is a relative term in reference to many types of energy and not just anti-matter. It also supplies ample hope that a horse can be more than a horse given a push in a direction that actually pans out. Once again I do apologize for the tardiness of my reply, but without adequate time to check my sources I would make myself an even big A** than I am. RPJ

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. Very true Basil, I need to check my sources before I ramble off the alternatives. I know that no person currently alive has the ability to consume this theory whole and spit out something palpable or more to the point functional. This person much like the "rubber science" we are speaking of doesn't exist....yet! I digress. RPJ

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. You're a bad man, I like you! All life energies work at some level off of a basis of attraction and or repulsion which is what sends it spiraling around. (Bold statement) We are not always attracted or repulsed by things but these properties if identified can be enhanced or we could synthsize something to simulate the effect and magnify a response through attraction. RPJ

Re: What now? I think Lord Liadon is right, in making that great campaign like the space opera it is important to find as much as you can and gorge yourself on tidbits from other campaigns. This all is not for the purpose of stealing other peoples intellectual property and claiming it as your own. The idea is to use good ideas to fuel new good ideas, get the juices flowing. I am a big fan of starting small in the space opera, mainly because the idea of space opera is big and you lose characterization and depth if you go for the gusto in the first couple adventures. Example: Your character is human in the 2600's and earth humans make contact with.....(I'll borrow the reference) the Phychi who enter into earth space and impress earths governments with their advanced technology and Utopian culture. The Phychi ships travel FTL 2000 X the speed of light and earth culture has barely mastered 8 X the speed of light in their fastest ships. Terrans being terrans can't stand the idea of being left behind and after years of light trade and technological endowments by the Phychi. The Phychi offer to give the Terrans a place in there Galactic Empire and a seat of there Inner council but the terran ships are still painfully slow compared to the Phychi so the Phychi arrange for transport vessels to move the humans with enough currency for passage to the holding planet of Garo where the humans will stay while their new world is being Terraformed. Now it seems pretty simple you make the character the child of someone who wanted to start their life over in the empire. The next key is your ability as a GM to do a pre-story for every character letting them know who there parents were on earth and why they left then you explain how they sold all their stuff to get passage and that the voyage was supposed to take 6 weeks but actually it took 10 months and the fact that terrans were deloused shaved and regularly sprayed with chemicals that supposedly killed the germs that terrans carried, how the terrans themselves had no immunties to the Phychi diseases and roughly 60% of the people died from common colds and metal allergies while locked like cattle in a cargo bay for 10 months. Then you set the PCs down on Garo a planet of an inhospitable nature with only to resources coal and oil, sparce vegetation and an overabundance of a dog faced fish used to make the planets only noted delicassy Gib Stew. Gib Stew is like throwing dry grass onto a bowl full of eels floating in fish oil. The Terrans are dumped on this planet along with the race that has evolved from primates here(The Kindred). The Kindred are under an odd state of home arest by the Phychi and take a serious offense to the presence of the Terrans and the tension mounts as more and more terrans arrive(Think GANGS OF NEW YORK) This all sets up tensions and it buys you time to see the way the characters develop and plot out the rest of your campaign. There are so many directions. Eventually one of the characters could become a spokesperson for the terrans and the Terrans could unite with the Kindred and over throw the Phychi Duchy on Garo set about to govern of this unofficial prison. This is only the pre, during this time you could sculpt the actual campaign. RPJ

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. YESS!! Besides, if authentic technology is so important then make a couple charts for tech level modifiers(price, availabiltiy, size, increments of increase and modifiers to put the ship together). If you're a tech level 7 but can get ahold of something tech level 8 then the price is modified to show how cutting edge and expensive it is to make the product. There should also be a tech level size modifier, because the higher in tech you go the smaller the items become. You would then be simulating the progression through the ages and the key at this point would be not cradling it in stone fact and documented theory, but relative thought and the ability to suspend disbelief as a GM. RPJ

Re: Creating the power H to H Reflection There is room for style and interpretation in every rule. If you grab someone by the hand they can still kick you. If you bearhug them they can headbutt you. The rules are not all inclusive, but I love a well stated case. RPJ