DShomshak
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Posts posted by DShomshak
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At this moment I'm also working on revising Brother Bone. He'll still be a bugnuts-insane skeleton with a book of magic. His spells are powerful, but it's an important part of the character that he has only a limited set of them.
OTOH one of those spells can be one to Summon demon minions (not just the succubus that helped corrupt him). The variety of demon minions can be arbitrarily large.
Dean Shomshak
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Vampires have accumulated so much lore (if you like it) or baggage (if you don't) that it would take at least a small supplement to do them justice -- even if you stick to pop culture "gothic" vampires. There are many others!
It's tempting, given the amount of freelance work I did for White Wolf's Vampire: the Masquerade and Vampire: the Requiem, but I don't know that I will ever get a chance, for personal reasons that would take a while to explain.
My own favorite choice for First Vampire master villain is Kastchai (or Kostchei, Koshchei, etc) the Deathless, from Russian fairy tales. Intermediate shadowy mastermind of worldwide, behind-the-scenes power, Agrippina (look her up). But like I say... not yet, maybe not ever. CotN Resurrected will have just one general-purpose supervillain vampire.
ADDENDUM: I just finished my final revision of The Sylvestri Family Reunion (and it needed it). IIRC from what Jason Vester has said, it might be possible to publish it through Hall of Champions without needing an okay from Cryptic Studios. I will be looking into that possibility. That book will include a powerful specter and a vampire with a wide (probably too wide) array of powers.
Dean Shomshak
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Given the Pubs' slender majority, Dems might have been able top preserve McCarthy as Speaker so long as a fgew Pubs loathed the Freedom Caucus more than they loathe Dems. Not impossible, IMO, given how personally abrasive (as well as politically deranged) Gaetz et al are. At least minimal legislative functions might have been done.
While it's rather horrible to say so, I also think McCarthy protected Biden and Harris from assassination. The same sort of lunatics who are not willing to accept that Biden was legitimately elected also, I hear, loathe McCarthy. While some of them might try putting an R in the White House by murder, they wouldn't do it to put *him* in the White House.
As much as Dems dislike McCarthy -- the ATC report said none of them trust him -- removing him does open the possibility of someone even worse taking the job. And whatever is gained politically by letting the Pubs flail in chaos, there could also be gains from voters seeing an R Speaker dependent on D representatives for his office. I suspect some Dem voters would be heartened by seeing the party exercise raw political power more often.
Dean Shomshak
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4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:
What the recent Congressional vote on interim government funding really says about Trump's influence with the GOP (short video):
One of Beau's lines is meme-worthy: "The Republican Party, they're the party of family values. Sure, if you're talking about the Sopranos."
In the same vein, yesterday Beau pointed out that whaddaya know, not only can Democrats stand firm, a majority of Republicans were willing to vote alongside them. Gosh, maybe that majority is getting as tired of the Berserker Caucus (as The Economist calls them) as everyone else is. As a result, Gaetz and his fellow maniacs are weaker, and McCarthy is stronger by comparison.
I can only hope that at least some Republicans continue down this path to basic sanity in government.
Deanb Shomshak
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The Today Explained podcast just finished its 4-part series, "Blame Capitalism," on its history as an economic system and ideology, and current disappointments and challenges. Here they are from Google podcasts. Possibly of interest, though the whole series is nearly 2 hours long.
"Souring on the System": Capitalism has entered its villain era. In a new series running Fridays this month, we look at how Americans came to blame it for just about everything.
"Profit Over Everything": Economist Milton Friedman published an essay in 1970 arguing that the job of a corporation was solely to make money for its shareholders. General Electric CEO Jack Welch pushed that idea about as far as it would go — and broke capitalism.
"The 99%": Two wildly different political movements — Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party — emerged from the Great Recession. They forever changed the way Americans think about capitalism and democracy.
"Degrowing Pains": Capitalism isn’t natural, was never inevitable, and endless growth is killing Earth. The final episode of “Blame Capitalism” examines the degrowth movement, whose proponents call to end capitalism as we know it.
Dean Shomshak
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All Things Considered said the Senate passed the stopgap a little while ago.
ATC mentioned that more Democrats than Republicans voted for the stopgap, so I guess McCarthy has broken the "Hastert Rule" of trying to pass bills with Republican votes alone.
Dean Shomshak
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All Things Considered had tributes for Sen. Feinstein, including this:
Best moment, I think, is the clip of her during the debates leading up to the assault weapons ban of 1994. A senator from Idaho apparently thought the li'l woman from California couldn't really understand guns the way a big strong man from Idaho could, and...
Quote(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I am quite familiar with firearms. I became mayor as a product of assassination.
LARRY CRAIG: I'm aware of that.
FEINSTEIN: I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole.
CRAIG: Yeah.
FEINSTEIN: I proposed gun control legislation in San Francisco. I went through a recall on the basis of it. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks with a bomb at my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.
...She proceeds to rip him a new one without raising her voice. A moment when the Senate truly was a great debating body.
Dean Shomshak
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For classic sorcerer villains, you might take inspiration from Lin Carter's "Thongor of Lemuria" series. Yellow Druids of a flame cult, Red Druids of a blood cult, both practicing human sacrifice and holding cities in terrified submission... and then the Black Druids of the sinister city of Zaar, each one of them a unique and gaudy villain. For them, see Thongor in the City of Magicians. Short reads, second-rate Howard pastiche, but the series is pretty fun.
Or, yeah, necromancers. You just can't go wrong with necromancers.
Dean Shomshak
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Incidentally, here are the characters I already finished, including the <Character> Facts and Story Seeds sections:
* Caiman
* Great Beast, including his pets (and one new extra-oogy creature) -- and each pet gets a story seed of its own
* Ooze
* Haunt
* Four Eyes
I've done the edition conversion for a few more -- that's the easy part.
As a sample, here's the Story Seed for Flying Dogs, that I hope will take players straight from "Aww" to "Aw, S***":
Quote• Can I Keep Him? The Great Beast uses actual dog brains in building his flying dogs, as well as pseudoplasm patterned from his own neurons: Authentic doggy instincts make them better at tracking and pack tactics. But this has other consequences, too…
A super-battle leaves one flying dog gravely wounded and unconscious, and (for whatever reason) the Great Best cannot recover the body. The dog, however, isn’t quite dead. It regenerates. It tries to go home, but — perhaps because of brain damage — no longer remembers where home is. So it doggishly adopts a human family.
The children are delighted by their big new flying pet. The parents are more dubious. They call Animal Control (“Not touching it, nope!”), which calls the PCs as better qualified. The Great Beast also sees news reports about his errant pet and wants it back. Wackiness ensues… but leaving the dog with the family is dangerous. However loving and loyal the flying dog may be to its new owners, these dogs are trained to kill.
Dean Shomshak
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22 hours ago, steriaca said:
And remember my tribute to Crongberg in the Create a Villain thread ("The New Flesh").
I do indeed. Most of these characters were beyond the capabilities of basic pseudoplasm, but if the Great Beast was trying to patter it from mutants in attempts to port mutant powers into his "research sjubjects," why, anything becomes possible. I won't crib anyone else's characters, but a new character of such ilk is possible, And I will view the New Flesh as the bar I must meet.
Dean Shomshak
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I'm not settled on the form this will take: whether a complete book, or broken into smaller units about the same size as my old "Shared Origins" pdfs. For now, I'm grouping characters in tentative chapters:
Body Horror: Caiman, Doctor Black, the Great Beast (and his pets), Ooze, Reverent Gil Purdue
All In Your Head: Fearmonger (with Killer Appliances ported over from Supermage Enemies -- they were originally supposed to go with him), Four-Eyes, the Think Tank (renamed Mind-Master Complex, with its possessed proxies), Whisper
Undead: Brother Bone (with Skeleton Monks), Dead Heat (from SMB), Decay, Haunt, Lady Twilight or vampire to be chosen later
Diabolical: Apollyon (massively rewritten per an earlier discussion, to be a Satanist cult leader/con man), Brujo (from Ultimate Supermage), Gamygin, Razor Girl. The other demons from the Appendix don't get revised because In odd moments I'm also working on a Descending Hierarchy guidebook. It's doable because I don't need to buy illos or make them myself: The 19th century Dictionnaire Infernal supplies public-domain illos of dozens of demons, which the author of that book solemnly claimed were drawn "from life." But that's a discussion for another time and place.
Which leaves Granny Hex, Shadowfire, and some miscellaneous solo characters.
Apollyon, Granny Hex and Shadowfire are decoupled from the Devil's Advocates (though you could fit them back in if you wanted). Maze is now redundant after Tesseract (of the Paradigm Pirates) and Gyre. Plus he's a bit dated.
I'm not revising the Totems. They were a late addition because I thought CotN needed another team, and they're a rather horribly superficial treatment of Native American themes. While I like the idea of some Native American force attempting ghastly genocidal revenge on the theory that turnabout is fair play, this isn't it. Possibly Tezcatlipoca (CV1) covers this well enough already.
I am not sure about revising the Monad. Thus far I haven't felt the need to buy and read Book of the Machine, but it's possible that this explanded treatment of Mechanon makes the Monad redundant.
Archimago has been made redundant by Takofanes. While there are aspects of Takky I dislike, I actually *do* rather like the idea of Archimago as the master villain whose plots keep running decades after his death. A supplement about Archimago's plot and catspaws could be interesting, but this is not it. Though Homonculus should be updated because Killer Dolls are such a classic trope.
Kobold is probably the most straightforward supervillain of the old characters, but by that token I'm not sure he has much to interest GMs.
It's possible other characters from USM and SMB could be ported in, if they fit the horror thime. Since writing CotN I've also written several villains for my games that turned out rather horrific. They're available if they're needed. We'll see.
Dean Shomshak
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8 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:
On the one hand, I did like the original, but in general I don't use published characters: it's enough work to tweak them so they dit my game that I find it easier just to make new characters.
That's fair. I never used published characters either, and regarded the Enemies books just as sources of ideas to field-strip and recombine.
Dean Shomshak
- Beast and Duke Bushido
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So my front page newsfeed had a Newsweek article claiming "The Republican War on Taylor Swift Could Backfire." Not reading it because life is short but... Republicans hate Taylor Swift? Okay, that makes as much sense as deSantis' war on Disney. I guess? Because she hasn't pledged fealty to Trump or said anything wackadoodle enough to make the front page?
If anyone cqan explain this in 100 words or less, I think that's about what the topic is worth.
Dean Shomshak
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Oh, hey. As a convenience for people who don't want to read through the whole article, here are the relevant paragraphs:
QuoteThe anxiety of the mission's critical moments often gives him strange, vivid dreams. In one dream, for example, he found himself in a gift shop on the rocky asteroid.
"I was like, 'How did I get this job? I'm not supposed to be selling Bennu memorabilia,'" Lauretta recalls, saying that his dream-self then thought, "If we can build a gift shop, why am I stressing so much about getting all this sample? I could just pick some up right now."
In a more recent dream, with the day of the sample's return drawing ever closer, his dream-self opened up the capsule and saw, sitting on top of the black asteroid dirt, a shining green gem. "And I grabbed it and popped it in my mouth," he says, laughing.In real life, no one will be tasting the asteroid rocks, although Lauretta says they might get a whiff at some point. He expects a smell like rotten eggs or ammonia.
"I would never want to touch it or eat it," says Lauretta, "because we worked so hard to get it."
Dean Shomshak
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Several of the 4e characters I created in Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies were revised for later editions of Champions, ultimately making it to the Champions Villains trilogy. Most of them, however, did not. Tiger has expressed interest in updating selected characters for his Forgotten Enemies series (and used Lady Twilight with my blessing), but -- since I am still here -- I might like to do this myself. I've noodled around with Creatures of the Night Resurrected for the last several months, writing up 5e/CC versions of several characters. Before I go further, though, I have some important questions:
Does anybody want this? Did you ever use them, back in the day? Would you use them if they were revised?
Subsequent posts will discuss ways I plan to revise characters, but if they were never that useful in the first place I probably won't bother.
Dean Shomshak
- Beast, Dr. MID-Nite, Duke Bushido and 2 others
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NPR, quite rightly, no longer reports every deranged thing Trump says, but this got mentioned in passing: Trump recently claimed he could design a better fighter jet than the Pentagon.
Okay, given that the Pentagon is an extremely large office building and, as such, would not function well as a fighter jet, for once Trump is probably correct.
But I'm also amused by the thought of a Trum-designed fighter jet. Literally gold-plated, for sure. Instrument panel of Carrera marble. Real leather or crushed velvet bucket seat for the pilot! Wet bar stocked with the most expensive single malt whiskeys! And most important of all, a big "TRUMP" sign on it! A great fighter jet! The best fighter jet ever! Ability to fly optional.
Sorry, but the cheap shots are just so easy I couldn't resist.
Dean Shomshak
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News stories say the Osiris-Rex capsule landed safely and has been transported to the Jpohnson Space Center for study. No word yet of either origins or space plagues. (Though I suppose we could have both, a la Wild Cards.)
Dean Shomshak
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Asteroid material soon to be delivered to Earth... if all goes well. Also (as noted in Champions forum) an excellent "origin event."
Dean Shomshak
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The RL news story: On Sunday, the OSIRIS-REx space probe swings past Earth to drop off a capsure holding material collected from the asteroid Bennu. Pretty good origin material right there, but one of the scientists mentions a few odd dreams about the mission. One sounds straight out of a comic book, lacking only the super-powers one would inevitably gain as a result of the described object and action.
(The text of the linked story gives more information, but the "listen" draws more attention to the dream.)
Enjoy. And if you end up creating a character based on this for your game, you're welcome!
Dean Shomshak
Dean Shomshak
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Today's "The Daily" gives some background on the dispute between Canada and India:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/podcasts/the-daily/canada-india-assassination.html
Dean Shomshak
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well, this is at least mildly hopeful: More Trump Cult Republicans losing to Democrats.
Trumpism costs the GOP in a crucial election, again (msn.com)
Dean Shomshak
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Yesterday on the BBC, the host interviewed an Indian pundit and former member of Modi's government. He blustered: not only rejecting any possibility of Trudeau's accusation being correct, but treating every question from the interviewer as a neo-colonialist insult directed at India. He also suggested that Trudeau was just hustling for popularity with Canada's Sikh community because of his administration's political problems.
(Not a great ingterview overall. The subject was not really in a position to know anything; but stock outrage atroutine questions doesn't make a case either.)
Okay... Without evidence, we can't trust Trudeau's claim that much. After all, Colin Powell solemnly assured the UN that the Bush administration had ironclad evidence of Saddam Hussein's WMD program -- evidence that turned out to be circumstantial at best, filtered by motivated reasoning. On a matter this serious, "Trust us" doesn't fly from *any* government. Not anymore.
But contrary to Mister Bluster, I find it entirely plausible that Modi's government would send a death squad after a leading Sikh separatist. The BJP is explicitly sectarian, and in a Hindu state non-Hindus become second-class citizens by definition. Modi himself first came to political prominence backing Hindu zealots that rioted and murdered Muslims in his home state. There's been heavy (and internationally condemned) repression of the Hindu majority in Jammu and Kashmire. Journalists are threatened; movies are censored to ensure they promote a Hindu nationalist view. "The World's Largest Democracy" looks less democratic every year.
What's the truth in this case? I can't know. But if I'm not ready to trust Trudeau unconditionally, I am even less ready to trust Modi's government unconditionally.
Dean Shomshak
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I just heard a story on this on BBC World Service, so I went looking for more. Here's what I found: A deeply depressing report on xenophobic violence in South Africa. It seems we Americans are not unique in this idiocy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66808346
Dean Shomshak
Funny Pics II: The Revenge
in Non-Gaming Discussion
Posted
Still my preferred word processing system...
Dean Shomshak