DShomshak

Also speaking of super-Earths, this month's Discover magazine has a pretty neat article about planetologists trying to figure out whether they could be habitable. The questions are complex, because their geology could be quite different from anything we see in the Solar System. Example: A planet won't stay habitable for long if it lacks a magnetic field. The interior of a super-Earth could easily be hotter than Earth's interior -- but the greater pressure could still prevent iron from liquefying. So, no liquid iron core to make a magnetic field. Except... the greater heat *could* liquefy magnesium oxide despite the greater pressure, possibly resulting in a magnesium oxide layer that churns to make a magnetic field. The upshot, the scientists interviewed for the article say, is that whatever we try to imagine for super-Earths, the reality will probably turn out to be weirder and more widely varied. Because that's how it's been for, like EVERYTHING astronomers have found for the last several decades. Dean Shomshak

The last FH campaign I played in worked that way, or at least it started out that way. The PCs were the neighborhood watch for a district in the city... but an unexpectedly tough and competent neighborhood watch that had a knack for stepping into the escalating conflict between the city's nobles and merchants, and interfering with both sides. (My character, Jervon Cutler, was a knife-maker who'd become an expert fencer -- and an uppity streak that led to him challenging arrogant young nobles to duels.) The campaign didn't last that long, though, due to GM life-&-work scheduling problems, and he hasn't evinced interest in re-starting it. Too bad; I liked it a lot. But it shows such a campaign can be done. Dean Shomshak

This month's Scientific American has an article about rival teams working to image exo-jovians directly. Specifically, they want to view very young jovians in IR. There are two theories about how jovians form: runaway accretion, or the direct collapse of a large portion of the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust, like star formation in miniature. The latter process would leave the new jovian much hotter than accretion would -- at least at first. After 100 million years or so, the jovian has cooled enough that it's impossible to tell how they formed. Imaging super-Earths will be a bit more challenging, but the field is advancing so quickly that I'd expect smaller planets to be imaged within 10-15 years after imaging relatively near-to-star jovians. (And I know that a couple very remote exo-jovians have already been imaged directly.) Dean Shomshak

I’ll work out some details that never turn up in play, such as a country’s population and how people feed themselves, just to help create verisimilitude and have answers ready if players ask questions. Like, for the lost city (well, fragment of town) of the medusas and their slaves hidden in a rift in the mountains, I took care to mention the terraced gardens built up against the cliffs. I also knew what they used for money and many other social quirks. Although such details played no part in the adventure as such, they were meant to subliminally tell the players that this a community of people – if rather unpleasant people – rather than a “lair of monsters.” Which was very important for the adventure. I’ve also had bits of world background that I thought were pure self-indulgence on my part turn out to be useful. In my second Super-Mage playtest campaign, I had a story arc set on the sword-and-sorcery/Dying Earth homage world of Loezen. (See The Mystic World, p. 41.) Since one of the PCs could do time travel, I decided the story arc would include traveling back into the past to steal a magic artifact needed to save the world from its current doom. So I wrote a page about Loezen’s past ages: the Age of the Road Builder before the current epoch, the Age of the Cloud Lords before that, the dark and terrible Age of Red Shadows before that, and the Age of the Six Sovereign – when the PCs would go – before that. And because I never know when to quit, I tossed off a series of Ages so far in the past that their very existence was conjectural based on slight evidence: the Age of Towers; the Arcuate Age when people wrote using glyphs of short curved lines; the Trefoil Age dominated by a religion that used a three-loop symbol whose significance is no longer known; the Anaglyphic Age, inferred from some very ancient buildings with pictures carved on their walls, including the indestructible tomb-city of Necropolis; and the Trilunar Age, when Loezen apparently had three moons instead of the current two. Pure world-building wankery! Only… when the time came for the PCs to travel back to the Age of Six Sovereigns, the guy with the time travel spell blew his control roll. A lot. Our Heroes were in an Age a few million years before when they wanted. On the spot, I improvised a bizarre society for Loezen before the sun faded – pretty much throwing out whatever cultural or magical non sequiturs popped into my head. (How the Ancients made the "wizard spar" crystals that later Loezenian mages incorporated into magic items? Martial arts, of course!) The PCs managed to obtain help, though: The magicians(?) of the city of Stelladan-5, that would later become Necropolis, proposed to put the PCs in suspended animation and launch them into orbit in an indestructible capsule, timed so the orbit would decay and deliver them back to the ground at the time they wanted. (They weren’t willing to try time travel magic again.) The PCs agreed, and it was done. At which point, one of my players smote his forehead and said, “We caused the Trilunar Age!” It was one of my best Gming moments, and I swear I never planned any of it. When I dashed off my list of Ages, it was just details to suggest a very long, obscure, bizarre, and partly misunderstood history for Loezen. I had no way of knowing the player would blow the control roll. I stole the orbital capsule/suspended animation idea from a story by Cordwainer Smith as an expedient to get the adventure back on track. I wasn’t even thinking of my list of Ages, since I was just pulling stuff out of my ass as quickly as I could. By pure good fortune it all came together. All I can say is that chance favors the prepared mind and, sometimes, the over-prepared GM. So while I focus my world-building more than I used to – provinces rather than continents – I make sure to design bits of random evocative detail, in hopes I may find a use for it later. Dean Shomshak

Apropos of nothing, the last two fantasy worlds I built actually were Earth with magic. My Fantasy Hero campaign was set in a magical alternate history Europe, while my "Magozoic" D&D campaign was set in a fantasy future 250 million years from now, on the supercontinent of Pangea Ultima. Dean Shomshak

Well, the game Exalted uses a flat world anchored by five Elemental Poles (Fire, Water, Air and Wood, with Earth at the center). The Sun is not a ball of fusion-powered plasma. The Moon is not a satellite. The stars are gods, and the Five Maidens who walk among them really do reveal clues to the future in their perambulations. The world runs by the whims of gods, somewhat constrained by a Loom of Fate. The otherworldly regions of Exalted, such as the Demon Realm of Malfeas and Autochthonia, the mechanical Realm of Brass and Shadow, are even stranger. I rather like it all. Dean Shomshak

Okay, I haven't had time to read all the Ravenna file in detail, but I've read enough to say this: I'd read the novels. Dean Shomshak

In one of his Suppressed Transmissions columns, Ken Hite pointed out that a Fantasy/SF world could still have legends that are not true, but still widely believed. (He was specifically talking about Mandeville's Travels and how to adapt the concept in various ways to various settings.) Even people who live in urban legends can have urban legends. The Greys might be one of them. Dean Shomshak

Remember: Steal from one, it's plagiarism. Steal from a dozen, and it's research! Thank you for sharing the campaign guide. I'm noodling around with an Urban Fantasy campaign; I hope you can help me avoid reinventing the wheel a few times. Dean Shomshak

BoloOfEarth has a good point about special effects and character background. The glamours of a faerie prince won't feel like the brain-hacking of a super-cyborg with a head full of psychotronic circuitry, even if both are using (say) plain ol' Mental Illusions. What's your mentalist's background? Dean Shomshak

With my compliments! Dean Shomshak

People have been posting ideas for grimoires and mystic texts, and it happens I have a few. I invented these tomes for my Supermage campaign, but they might be adapted or supply inspiration for an Urban Fantasy campaign. Note: While the descriptions include mentions of characters that have become part of the Champions Universe, they were part of my campaigns first and should be treated accordingly. Please do not take them as in any way "official." SEPHER GILGALIM The "Book of Whirling Motion" teaches thaumaturgy from a foundation of Hebrew Kabbalism. Mages have kept it secret for centuries. Understanding the Sepher Gilgalim requires an expert knowledge of kabbalism. The book is specially meant to carry on from the Sepher Yetzirah or "Book of Formation," which tells how cosmic forces link the realm of archetypes to the worlds of physical manifestation, but a student also ought to read other kabbalistic texts such as the Sepher Raziel, Sepher Sephiroth and of course the great Zohar. Sepher Gilgalim tells how to put this theory into practice. LIBER ASCLETARIONIS The "Book of Ascletarion" is the grimoire of a Roman mage. It has become one of the most popular handbooks for thaumaturgy in the western world, thanks to the copious annotations added by later mages. Ascletarion was an early Neo-Platonist and describes his magic in those terms. The later commentators added comparisons to Hermetic and kabbalist magic theory. Ascletarion's grimoire is also a good source of information about magical doings in 1st century Rome, because the magus tossed in anecdotes about supernatural people and events around him. Ascletarion was also a prophet: He correctly predicted that the emperor Domitian would be eaten by dogs after his death. Liber Ascletarionis incidentally includes twenty prophecies about the future, all of which have been fulfilled. The last one to be fulfilled concerned the establishment of a lineage of Guardians of Light to oppose a lineage of Sons of Darkness (now identified as the Sylvestri clan). PATTERNS OF GEOMETRICAL SYMBOLISM This eight-volume monograph by folklorist I. O. Morlinger (Oxford University Press, 1922) is one of the last examples of a particular academic genre: the exhaustive, cross-cultural study that attempts to Explain It All. (Frazer’s The Golden Bough is one of the best-known examples.) Modern anthropologists and ethnologists reject this universalist approach, and charge that the 19th and early 20th century savants who used it relied on their imaginations more than on hard data. Nevertheless, Morlinger's book is the most definitive study of its kind. Morlinger studied the meanings that different cultures ascribe to shapes and patterns such as circles, triangles, stars, crossed lines, and so on. He drew his examples from dozens of archaic and modern cultures, including their occult traditions. Morlinger claimed to find universal patterns of such symbolism. Some he decided were the result of common experiences: For instance, the horizon is circular, so every culture uses the circle as a symbol of totality and completion. He thought that other patterns of symbolism, however, indicated a "primitive and intuitive awareness of forces and motions in the æther," with some rather strained comparisons to physics. A thaumaturge realize that Morlinger almost figured out some of the basic principles of thaumaturgy. His book is useful for magicians who investigate the fundamentals of their craft. DU PLESSIS CANON The premier thaumaturgical textbook of Tetragrammaton was written in 1638 under the patronage of Cardinal Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu. The famous Cardinal Richelieu was not himself a sorcerer but his librarian Jacques Gafferel was. Even master thaumaturges find political connections and royal funding useful: Tetragrammaton and Richelieu allied to curb the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs and the Hermetic ritual magicians they supported. When Gafferel and other Tetragrammaton members wrote a new textbook of thaumaturgy and mystical cosmology, they dedicated it to their patron. The Du Plessis Canon consists of six thick volumes, organized according to Zoa cosmology and the six days of creation. The first volume, associated with the 1st day's creation of light, deals with magic that does not call upon extradimensional beings. The succeeding four volumes introduce the Four Zoas and magic that calls upon dimension lords aligned to each Zoa. Volume Two associates Urthona (Art) with the 2nd day (separation of waters). Volume Three associates Tharmas (Nature) with the creation of dry land and plants. Volume Four (creation of sun, moon and stars) is linked to Urizen (Order). Volume Five (birds and fish) is linked to Luvah (Chaos). Volume Six (beasts and man) discusses various unaligned dimension lords and magic that calls upon them. Much of the symbolism in the Canon is Christian Kabbalist; for instance, the Four Zoas are described as the four Holy Living Creatures from Ezekiel's vision, while dimension lords are called Sons of God. Authentic copies of the Du Plessis Canon are written in Latin. They bear the Richelieu arms on the cover, and are enchanted so that they reveal their true contents only to someone who touches the heraldic device and says the four Guiding Words of the Magus: Scire (To Know), Velle (To Will), Audere (To Dare), Tacere (To Keep Silent). Otherwise, each volume appears to be a copy of Richelieu's autobiography. SELEUCID SCROLLS During the Hellenistic period, the School of Antioch was the largest alliance of thaumaturges in the Western world (just as the School of Alexandria was the largest alliance of proto-Hermetic ritual magicians). The School of Antioch preserved thaumaturgical texts dating back all the way to Shamballah and Agharti, including texts from empires erased from history. The thaumaturges also wrote extensive commentaries on the elder texts, and accounts of all sorts of supernatural events in the eastern Mediterranean. Some of these books are noteworthy enough to receive titles of their own. Later magicians call the books collected and written by the School of Antioch the Seleucid Scrolls because the School flourished most during the 4th-3rd centuries BCE when Antioch was the largest city of the Seleucid Empire. Tetragrammaton estimates that it owns about 1/3 of the Seleucid texts. The others are lost and most probably destroyed. Tetragrammaton goes to considerable lengths to recover lost Seleucid Scrolls, if any should turn up. BLOOD ANNALS This ancient book is a first-hand account of vampiric activity in the eastern Mediterranean region. The author, a vampire called Enceladus, dwelled in Antioch during the 3rd century BCE. In his diary, Enceladus records the activities of himself and other vampires. Since Antioch was one of the largest and most important cities of the Hellenistic world, nearly every Western vampire passed through the city at least once in that century. They gave Enceladus reports of their activities from Persia to Spain. Even better for later scholars, Enceladus compared accounts and pointed out where they contradicted each other or information he gained from mortal travelers. In passing, Enceladus gave much information about the origin and history of vampires, their relationship to the Dragon, and all manner of other supernatural events in the Hellenistic world -- including the School of Antioch, which was a continual threat to the city's undead. According to the Blood Annals, the 3rd century BCE. saw a struggle between vampires who remained loyal to the Dragon and undead who sought power for themselves alone; Enceladus himself was an independent vampire of little ambition, who preferred to keep a low profile. According to the introduction to the Blood Annals, the School of Antioch eventually destroyed Enceladus and added his diaries to the Seleucid Scrolls. The Blood Annals remain the single best source of information about vampires in the Classical world. TESTAMENT OF IALDABAOTH Occult scholars believe that the mage Menander, a pupil of Simon Magus, wrote this Gnostic gospel and grimoire. The Testament calls the Four Zoas and other cosmic conceptual entities the Pleroma -- the sum of the truly transcendent powers -- and refers to the gods of Greater Earth as the Aeons. The Testament describes the Aeons as "reflections" of the Pleroma within the "mirror" of human thought and the Astral Plane. Yahweh is another name for Ialdabaoth, the most powerful of the Aeons. Although Ialdabaoth and the Aeons try to limit humanity and bind souls to themselves, powers from the Pleroma sometimes possess Aeons to reveal higher truths to saints and prophets. The Testament presents itself as one such revelation, granted by the Christ (not the same personage a Jesus -- it’s Gnostic, so it’s complicated) through the medium of Ialdabaoth. Both thaumaturges and ritual magicians find the Testament useful -- if they can make sense of its opaque writing, which combines allusions to Jewish, Christian, Greco-Roman and Egyptian myths and gospels with the obscure jargon of Gnosticism itself. The Testament tells how magical power flows from the Upper Planes through the Outer planes to the Inner Planes and ultimately to Earth. It also describes the state of the spirit world in the Classical era. Many grimoires tell how to call upon spirits, but the Testament is almost unique among Classical texts in explaining precisely how ritual shapes the Astral Plane and compels spirits to serve. AVERNUS CHRONICLES This book tells about demonic and Satanic activity in 17th century Italy. The author was a Florentine apothecary whose brother channeled the Shamballan mage Zontar Bok in a partnership that lasted almost 30 years. The Avernus Chronicles tell about the rise of the Sylvestri clan. They also give an account of Caibarien of Agharti, who possessed a Florentine woman and deceived Zontar Bok into becoming her lover for a short time. PROPHECIES OF HYDATIUS In the late 10th and early 11th centuries, the Byzantine monk Hydatius wrote this book of prophecies about events a millennium in the future. Hydatius describes airplanes, automobiles, genocides, skyscrapers and superbeings, though he focuses on supernatural events such as the greater plots of the Devil's Advocates. He included a prophecy about the end of the Guardians of Light lineage and the concomittant Second Coming of Christ -- or the birth of the Antichrist, he's not sure which. Hydatius did not understand much of what he saw, and so his poetic imagery is hard to interpret. Hydatius was burned as a heretic. His manuscript has remained little-known since then, chiefly because sorcerers who knew of it also knew that it would not become relevant for centuries to come. RECORD OF THE BIAFRAN WORKINGS From 1969-70, Archimago dwelled in Nigeria, where the Biafran Civil War caused massive death from war and starvation. Archimagi used the concentrated misery to power many potent rituals, including rituals of prophecy. He wrote accounts of 12 times in the next 100 years when the world could end. Naturally, he wrote his prophecies in deliberately obscure fashion, using a code of symbolism keyed to Satanic, Edomite and Qliphothic cults and magic. Archimago meant the Biafran Workings to be an instruction book for people who shared his interests, not a warning. In the ensuing decades, however, copies of the Biafran Workings fell into the hands of sorcerers who did not want an apocalypse. As usual with these things, the prophecies only make sense to sane people once it is almost too late. --------- Dean Shomshak

You can make some interesting mental Powers by taking other Powers and adding ACV and AVAD. Like, a "Psychic Blinding" attack: a Sight Group Flash with ACV (OMCV vs. DMCV) and AVAD (acts versus Mental Defense instead of Flash Defense). Dean Shomshak

In campaigns I've run or played in, the PCs usually had a base. They varied in importance, from "barely mentioned as a necessary place for them to get together," to "significant location developed in detail." They were usually donated or obtained in play, and points were usually hand-waved. The most detailed base I gave the PCs came in my two "Keystone Konjuror" super-mage playtest campaigns. The PCs acquired a small but ornate Victorian house that existed simultaneously in Earth and Babylon. Convenient for them, since one PC preferred Babylon to Earth. In my on-hiatus Avant Guard campaign, the PCs used the fabulous super-tech base of their mentor Doctor Future. No writeup or point concerns, since he's an NPC. That base is now apparently destroyed, though, or at least lost in the Mesozoic for now. And I write up bases for villains who use superweapons. Dean Shomshak

Dean Shomshak here, writer and publisher of Spells of the Devachan, Shared Origins: Sky-Q and Shared Origins: The Dynaton under license from HERO and on sale through the HERO Store. I also hope to sell them through DriveThruRPG, but after reading their site I feel I should ask if anyone's had any problems with the illustrations or other aspects of my PDFs. Like, DriveThruRPG recommends 150 dpi resolution on illustrations; I use 300. Also, I don't know how to embed fonts in a PDF (me big tech dummy) so I use little illustrations for the headers. (If you save the file as text you can see the original text headers and codes.) Do these show up okay? I'm particularly concerned with how my PDFs work on tablets and phones, since DriveThruRPG says sometimes there are issues here. They also recommend going through processes called "Preflight" and "Optimize" though I don't know what these are supposed to do. If anyone has had problems with the PDFs, I will find out how to fix them. If not, I will upload the PDFs to DriveThruRPG as is. (Whatever licensed products I write for HERO in the future, though, still go on sale here first!) Dean Shomshak

I'll "ditto" the Prydain series. An excellent YA series whose story grows up with its protagonist. I'll also recommend the Kingkiller "series" by Patrick Rothfuss. I put "series" in quotes because so far it's just two books and a separately published novella and short story. The third book isn't out yet (and God knows when it'll come out, because Rothfuss takes his time.) The series might be subtitled "The Making and Unmaking of a Hero." Nothing in this story is exactly what it first seems, so I don't know what else I can tell about the series without giving a false impression. The series consists of the novels The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear. The novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things is about a supporting character in the series and should not be read until you've read at least the first book. There's a short story about another supporting character in the anthology Rogues edited by George R. R. Martin. EDIT: Okay, I can think of one other thing to say: These books have superlative magic. There's a well-developed logical, quasi-scientific magic called Sympathy, with subsidiary/affiliated arts of Sygaldry, Alchemy and Artificing, taught at a University. And there's a deeper, primordial magic of Naming that is the University's true reason for existence. Series protagonist Kvothe is learning both, with varying degrees of success. Dean Shomshak

I wish I could take credit for "Darwinnowing," but I learned it from a friend and Google says it's been around a while. Governments drafting supers: Easier said than done if the supers don't want to be drafted. If the force that lets people become superhuman only links to people of strong and individualistic motivations (or the transition somehow drives people to develop such motivations), governments will have difficulty assembling armies of obedient super-soldiers. Even patriotic super-soldiers who serve willingly will do so from personal passions, rather than mere deference to authority. Dean Shomshak

Hm. From the first post, I thought the desire was for quasi-"real world" excuses for how Silver/Bronze Age tropes could arise. But it seems to be more assuming those tropes by fiat, and speculating what effects they would then have. I, however, will stick by my original reading. Colorful Costumes: Dazzle camouflage. Decades back, an experiment was made to paint battleships with bright geometrical op-art designs. The usual goal of camouflage is to blend into the background -- but the paint broke up the ship's outline and made it hard to tell their speed and direction. One admiral declared it the best camouflage he'd ever seen. Bright, multicolored costumes have the same effect. Fluttery capes further distract the eye. Even if they don't make a hero or villain harder to hit, they distract people from details of appearance that could reveal a true identity. Who pays attention to the shape of someone's jawline when they're looking a the big logo on the chest? Why don't villains go on mad murderous rampages when they realize the heroes are out of town? Well as Massey points out, the Iron Age of maximum depravity is as artificial as any Silver Age worldview. People who exploit their super-powers through crime do not *have* to revel in pointless bloodshed. They may indeed be shocked by people who do. I've heard that IRL, sex offenders who prey on children tend to die in prison. Even hardened killers can have things they just won't allow. So when some super-powered psycho goes on a rampage, or gets his jollies killing kids and eating their hearts, he'd better pray the heroes find him first. As in Fritz Lang's classic thriller M, the city's professionals might hunt him too -- if only because they don't like the extra heat the manhunt brings on the entire criminal community. The mad schemer is tasked to prove he's smarter than the cops and the heroes by finding the monster first; the petty street criminals feed reports through the gang leaders; and if they find the rampaging pervo killer, the hit men converge on him to take him down... permanently. The corollary is that if the cops realize what's going on, they might not try too hard to capture the villains involved. The long-term result might be a kind of Darwinnowing in which the criminals who stick to a code and don't harm civilians too much live longer than those who are truly vile. In an age that has seen mere mortals commit crazed massacres and fanatical terrorism, a villain who merely robs art museums and society parties might seem rather endearing. It's only crime, after all. Dean Shomshak

I remember consulting Pegolotti when I did a quick bit of research for my "Fantasy Europa" campaign, though I only looked at his list of "spices" -- which back then meant any relatively high-value commodity that wasn't cloth. In addition to what we would call spices, Pegolotti included dyestuffs, alum, perfumes, sugar, medicinal herbs -- even paper. I thought it was a pretty interesting look into the world, and world-view, of late Medieval commerce. Dean Shomshak

This month's Scientific American has an article about an attempt to assay the Extragalactic Background Light. And what is Extragalactic Background Light? The abstract at the beginning of the article explains: "The night sky may look dark, but it is actually filled with the accumulated light of all the galaxies that have shone in the universe's history. "This extragalactic background light is difficult to detect because it has spread out throughout the expanding cosmos and because it is outshone by brighter nearby sources of light. "Astronomers have finally been able to measure this light by observing how gamma rays from distant bright galaxies called blazars are dimmed when they collide with photons of the extragalactic background light. "Studying the background in this way allows scientists to examine the record of cosmic history that the light preserves." To show the difficulty, the article notes that the EBL is much fainter than the Cosmic Microwave Background. Preliminary results are not particularly surprising: The EBL seems strongest in higher frequencies suggestive of bright, hot, newly formed stars and another peak in the infrared, suggestive of dust. Lots and lots of dust, to the extent that there might be lots of "dust-obscured galaxies" (DOGs) that our telescopes can't see at all. The astronomers involved in this project hope they can detect how the spectrum of the EBL has changed over time, as another line of evidence in reconstructing the history of the universe. Dean Shomshak

Incidentally, Victorian/Edwardian London was surely the Earthly city with the greatest affinity to Babylon: It's Earthly avatar, if you will. Capital of the most far-flung empire the world had ever seen, with a population drawn from every corner of that Empire and beyond. If ever there was a World-City, a City of Man, London was it. New York City now takes that role. It isn't as absolute a financial hub as London was, but it's still in the top five. It isn't the American capital, but has a possibly greater claim to be Capital of the World as host of the United Nations. Its ethnic diversity is unsurpassed as well. It's well stocked with iconic landmarks, some rather explicitly mythic (the Statue of Liberty's crown is a direct copy of ancient statues of Apollo). Even the name of Central Park reinforces its role as the World-Axis, the Omphalos. (And this huge patch of green in the center of a vast city -- which has, I am told, become the hub of bird migrations throughout eastern North America -- would make an excellent embassy or neutral ground between Faerie and Babylon.) Some people say China is overtaking the US, but there's no chance of any Chinese city supplanting NYC anytime soon. Shanghai seems to be trying to channel the Futuropolis district, at least in its architecture, but I haven't heard of any Chinese city attracting large and diverse immigrant populations. (Has anyone heard differently?) Dean Shomshak

The Way Outback, to go with the Even Wilder West? Dean Shomshak

I start with the 1:1 million ratio, then divide it by 1 to 10 based on prevalence of high tech, powerful and interesting mystical traditions, general wealth, dramatic social conflicts, and a bit of whim. Australia, as a First World society with every possible origin-inducing factor, gets a divisor of 1, same as the US. China and India receive a divisor of about 4, so their supers populations are comparable to the US anyway -- and I just accept that, by having a lot of expat Chinese and Indian supers running around. But then, I have high mobility of heroes and villains anyway. It's a globalized world now, and heroes and villains get around same as everyone else. Dean Shomshak

in a couple Fantasy worlds I ran, the core reward was an afterlife. Souls dissipate or become undead horrors without a god to collect them. Plus there were the various "mundane" benefits of belonging to a faith community that others have mentioned. Dean Shomshak

I spent a few months as an intern at my local newspaper's library. Good times. As of 20 years ago, therefore, there would be a company librarian who maintains the files of back issues, reference sources for the reporters to consult, etc. Nowadays it's probably all done by the IT guy as part of managing the paper's website. Dean Shomshak