DShomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of all (well, most of) the stuff I wrote for USM and SMB, and I'm glad you found it fun and useful. Just about all the big ideas and major characters made it through to 5e, though -- the framework for the mystical side of the CU, that had to be there for other material to make sense.

It's too bad there couldn't have been a revised Mystic Bestiary to update the other critters and characters, but such is life. Now that Cryptic/DOJ allows people to write their own licensed supplements, I'm working on entirely new material that I hope people will find just as appealing.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Now, about Lucifer.

I did not think that nailing down many details about the Descending Hierarchy was a good idea; I wanted to leave a lot of freedom for GMs, without saying that any particular accoun of devildom was true. For instance, that's why MYW and UMY say that devils lie about their rank. Hey, even if the Abrahamic tradition there are multiple stories about the origin of devils. I want them all available for GMs to use.

So, is there truly a supreme Devil or Satan in the Descending Hierarchy? There can be, if you want -- or not. There might be an archdevil named Lucifer -- or that might be a pseudonym of another archdevil, or even a title for whoever is most powerful at the moment.

Vibora Bay uses the fall of Lucifer as part of Therakiel's background. I did not coordinate UMY and MYW with the Vibora Bay authors. Well, except for Steve Long, who as line developer could have asked me to include Lucifer, Therekiel and the Fall in MYW. He didn't, and I don't think that was absent-mindedness on his part. You'd have to ask him, but I suspect his motive was the same as mine: To keep these matters loose, with lots of room for GMs to tweak the setting.

All the gods and spirits have their own memories of their mythic pasts. It would be normal for Therakiel to remember the Fall: That's his mythology. What matters is not whether it's true. I'd say it's that holy crap, there's a god-level entity on Earth who *somehow* escaped the Ban. (How? Why? More story possibilities here.)

Dean Shomshak

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

At the start of my second Supermage campaign, the player of Artifex asked if the Master of the Cosmic Craft could now have a live-in girlfriend: Barbie. As in, a life-size Barbie that he animated. Artifex wasn't much for human connections that could be used against him. Well, how could I pass this up?

A couple of adventures into the campaign, the PCs discovered that one of the people injured in the crossfire was a highly realistic, living plastic mannikin. In fact, there were thousands of them in the city and one on a plane flying away. They had all been human, but were victims of a sort of contagious Reality Vampirism. The US government's super-team was already transformed, which added to the problem.

Eventually they traced the plague back to Barbie and Artifex. At which point, Artifex remembered that he was Barbie's slave and turned on the team. Barbie was absorbing all the stolen reality and becoming a nascent dimension lord; the PCs saw the Barbie World she was creating to replace the Earth. She claimed she was doing it for the good of humanity: No more sickness, old age, starvation or war. Just life in plastic, dolls playing out roles.

The other PCs got through to Artifex, though, and he destroyed Barbie before the transformation of humanity was complete. With her destruction, all the transformed people became flesh and blood again.

Yeah, it took Artifex a while to live down that particular oopsie.

As for other creepy things that happened in the campaign? Later.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Another question from a CO player.

 

"Regarding The Ban. I've been reading The Mystic World and I wanted to know, does it affect Gods and Goddesses made AFTER it or not? I can't find anything saying it does or doesn't."

 

Thanks for answering these, Dean.

Before or after makes no difference. It's not a curse on specific individuals, it's a metaphysical brick wall with a teeny tiny hole in it. Above a certain power level, you can't squeeze through.

DS

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

I just wonder where in the Multiverse Yahweh would think he could seek refuge from super-heavyweights like those.

Mortality. Yahweh was born as Jezeray Illyescu's daughter Jordan. Cosmics only possiss gods, not mortals.

Also begs the question of who might try to fill the power vacuum.

Not much of a power vacuum, with Mephistopheles sitting on the throne of Heaven, using all his skill and power to make sure nobody realizes the substitution. Because that could be bad for him.

Lucifer needs a more complicated answer. I may get to that later.

Dean Shomshak

Re: It was a dark and stormy thread

Hm. There are so many possibilities...

Was it the mob of partly melted mannikins from Trinity (you know, the mock-up town that got blown up in the first nuke test) shuffling and lurching forward Night of the Living Dead style, strying to grapple the heroes in their deadly radioactive grip?

Nah. That wasn't even my creepiest scene with mannikins. That was... for tomorrow.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Or maybe Thaumiel, the Two-Faced Lord of Good and Evil. In my own campaign, lots of cosmic entities made Yahweh their sock puppet, pulling him this way and that like dogs fighting over a juicy bone because he was such a *useful* sock puppet. He had like five minutes a day of free will. The final story arc in my second Supermage playtes campaign dealt with Yahweh's jailbreak from Elysium.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

How "canonical" is USM? At this point, not very. Everything genuinely important got ported over to Ultimate Mystic and Mystic World.

Also, don't be too sure that Yahweh had anything to do with creating the Ban. He may have been as surprised (and annoyed) by it as any other deity. The description of the Ban's rise is deliberately somewhat vague and the matter of causality and intentionality.

If anyone is the prime mover for the Ban, I'd nominate Urizen as the cosmic entity with the strongest interest in promoting religious belief centered on doctrine rather than direct experience. At crucial moments, though, Urizen could have possessed Yahweh and made him say and do things to support the plan.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Mr. Shomshak' date=' what would you propose as an alternative to the Ban? I am curious what other solutions might work.[/quote']

As I said above, designing gods on the same point range as most superbeings removes a lot of the problems. Though this can be tricky if you think gods need lots of Life Support, Universal Translator and other miscellaneous powers and such.

 

Though this can lead to other story problems. How do you enable Loki to fight all the Avengers, if he isn't written on significantly more points than the individual Avengers? You may need to come up with "dodges" the other way, to give villain gods a power-up.

 

White Wolf's game Scion takes an interesting approach. In Scion, worship is irrelevant to gods: What matters are that mortals know their stories. However, a god who uses his powers too freely around mortals can become bound by the mortals' expectations. It becomes harder and harder to do anything but play out the roles the mortals expect, repeating the same stories over and over again. So, gods use mortal disguises when they act on Earth, try not to use their full power where mortals can see them... and produce half-human children to do things for them as a new generation of heroes who will be less bound by mortal expectations.

 

(Yeah, it's Percy Jackson: The RPG in all but name. And as usual for WW, it has brilliant setting and suck mechanics. Some excellent supplements, though, including material written or developed by, , me.)

 

An exact translation of Scion's "fatebinding" mechanic into Hero terms would likely be unwieldy, but you could probably design something along the same idea. Gods would need strong motives to act on Earth; but they could exploit the new tropes of costumed heroes and villains to insulate themselves somewhat from being trapped in old myths.

 

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

But people should be aware that Dean himself came up with the concept of the Ban and published it in The Ultimate Super Mage, long before Steve Long was calling the shots for the CU.

Wow. It's been so many years (and campaigns, and writing projects) I'd forgotten about that earlier version of the Ban. Yeah, in USM the Ban was to explain (or explain away) how Christianity and Islam could ever replace the old polytheisms if the gods could appear at will and remind people they were real, and powerful. In the superheroic Age, this version of the Ban fell almost completely and gods were merely faced with the problem of being in another dimension.

But then, USM also suggested writing up gods in the normal power range for superbeings, with only a few being significantly more powerful. (Which can be done. As an exercise, I wrote up a "starting PC" Thor on 400 points -- though it had to be early Marvel's version, with OIAID on damn near everything.) In this case, pantheons are no more a problem for the setting than any other small, super-powered race such as the Eternals and Inhumans for Marvel. Long's decision to make every god comparable to Doctor Destroyer made the problem sharper, and required the Ban to continue in some form.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Evil

Fanaticism is more complex than it may seem at first.

Consider the young man who becomes a Jihadist suicide bomber. He's likely unemployed, seething with sexual frustration, and has been brainwashed for weeks using harangues and sleep deprivation (standard cult indoctination techniques). He is a tool in another's hand and, I think, deserves a measure of pity.

The one who brainwashed him does not. This man is a fanatic, but also a hypocrite: You don't see *him* strapping on explosives, eager to become a martyr. But fanaticism and hypocrisy go together like the two sides of a coin. For the sake of The Cause, any lie, crime or blasphemy becomes acceptable and maybe even noble. The fanatic is above the laws and morals that govern lesser, less committed men. A law unto himself.

The egotism is incredible, and incredibly evil.

Dean Shomshak

Re: Evil

The latest issue of Scientific American has an article that might be relevant to this discussion. It's called "The Wisdom of Psychopaths." Sometimes there is a fine line between hero and villain -- like the world-class brain surgeon who says that over the years, he has deliberately extirpated any trace of compassion for his patients. To keep a steady hand and perform surgery at that level of difficulty, he cannot afford any trace of emotion.

Psychopaths are, provably, also better detectives than other people. They sense vulnerabilities -- such as having something to hide.

But there's a spectrum. The traits of a psychopath (inflated self-esteem, empathy that can be turned off at will, superficial charm, etc.) can be useful at moderate degrees, but criminal and dangerous if they're turned up too high, or paired with other traits (such as a need for instant gratification).

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Lord Liaden: The Congeries is definitely a Netzach plane. There is no law but Skarn's will.

Thulkos superficially seems to maintain some natural laws, such as the tendency of matter to collect in Hula Hoop shapes. That is only an appearance, though. The central spheres of world-loops and star-loops could not exist under Thulkos' old system of natural law. So, modern Thulkos is a Netzach dimension as well.

Keep in mind that the distinction between Netzach dimensions and Hod dimensions is partly political: Whether there is a dimension lord actively controlling the dimension. So, what if Skarn or Tyrannon die? The GM must decide what happens to their dimensions.

If the Congeries and Thulkos continue operating by whatever rules, in whatever condition their masters last imposed, they become Hod dimensions.

On the other hand, maybe the dimensions fall apart without their masters as keystones... which means Skarn and Tyrannon both have a whole lot of hostages to protect their lives.

For a third option, maybe the system is so strong that if you kill the dimension's master, the plane sucks a new entity into the role of dimension lord. (Think of how Dormammu's flames of regency switched to Umar and Clea.) Plausibly, this would be the nearest and most powerful mystic to the slain lord. Like, the PC who just struck the death-blow, who is now the *new* dimension lord and bound by the same restrictions as Skarn or Tyrannon.

Oops.

(As GM, I would give the PC a brief window in which to use the vast Cosmic Pool "inherited" from the dead dimension lord to restructure Thulkos or the Congeries so the dimension could survive on its own, as a Hod plane. But it would be interesting to see the player's reaction.)

Dean Shomshak

Re: Question for Dean Shomshak

Scott: No, the entities from the Outer Planes can invade Earth at will. The Ban applies only to humanity's gods.

As a setting element, the Ban exists because of the way Steve Long wanted gods to be written -- on thousands of points. See Tezcatlipoca for an example. If dozens (hundreds?) of such entities can be active on Champions-Earth any time they want, it dilutes the impact of human heroes and villains. It also raises the question of how Skarn, Tyrannon or other dimensional conquerors can pose a serious threat to Earth if dozens (hundreds?) of Tezcatlipocas can defend it and have an interest in doing so.

(Which also explains why Mystic World says the supernatural powers of gods don't work against entities from the Outer Planes. The defense of Earth is humanity's responsibility. I forgot to mention it in the book, but all the "dodges" by which gods reduce their power to operate on Earth as PCs also remove that limitation. So, if Tyrannon invades Faerie, the god Ogoun can't fight him in any way but fisticuffs, but the god's mortal avatar, the hero Ogoun, can use all his powers effectively. So can the PC-level demigod Chrysaor because he's not a full god. Etc.)

The Ban is sort of a brute-force solution, I admit, and I'm not entirely happy with it. I wouldn't criticize a GM who adopted some other solution to keep gods from dominating the setting.

Dean Shomshak

Re: [Retro] COTN 5th edition proposal

This might tie into the origins of Saguenay, the extra-dimensional pocket realm ruled by Baron Nihil. Thanks, Dean!

Saguenay? Oh. OH.

See, the west coast of North America is even more of a patchwork than the East. Over hundreds of millions of years, North America has collected dozens of old volcanic islands, shreds of oceanic crust and scraps torn off other continents. In fact, everything from the coast inland to the Rockies consists of such "exotic terranes" (the geological term) that have been swept up and smooshed together.

Until now it didn't occur to me to have the same thing happen metaphysically. Bits get torn off Earth or one of the Parterres, drift through the Astral Plan and merge with another dimension. Astral cysts accrete. Maybe even little Outer Planes stick to bigger dimensions and slowly merge -- a slow, natural version of what Skarn and Tyrannon do by force.

Saguenay could be a North European culture that got erased from Earth by powerful magic or time paradox, but continued to exist as a pocket dimension. Maybe it's all Nihil's dream. Maybe it's a little Outer Plane that Greater Earth swept up. It's only begun to assimilate to Earth. By traveling back and forth, Nihil is speeding the process. At some point, the whole pocket world splices itself into Canada, BLOOP. The event is likely preceded by earthquakes, auroras, rains of toads and other natural and supernatural prodigies. The metaphysical shock might also crack open other prisons and portals. Preventing or easilng the merger could be a suitably epic challenge for heroes.

Dean Shomshak

Re: [Retro] COTN 5th edition proposal

Ah, thank you for the corrections. The program was from 20 years ago, and my memory is imperfect. I guess I conflated "encouraging immigration" with "finally allowing immigrants who aren't white." (Still a significant cultural shift that could be worth exploring. Really, every place is globalizing and a modern setting should robably reflect that.)

I've been mistaken for British too. I assume it was for diction.

Dean Shomshak

Re: [Retro] COTN 5th edition proposal

Thinking of Australia from the distant US...

Layer 1: Geography. Australia's population concentrates around the coast, with a truly vast, sparsely settled interior. I heard an urban legend that government satellates and/or seismographs picked up evidence that parties unknown tested a *nuke* in the Australian desert, with no witnesses. At least none who've come forward. In a super-world, this could be true. The Outback would be a great place for Master Villains to build their Secret Hideouts and build Doomsday Weapons to conquer the world. The Australian military probably has a special department tasked with watching all the supervillain bases that heroes have found and trashed over the years. Good places for origins, too.

Layer Two: Aboriginal. The Dreamtime and all that.

Layer Three: Early British settlement. Tall tale characters, who might have been real and established legacies for heroes and villains.

Layer Four: Mature nation. I am interested in how Australia's foundation myths affect current attitudes to law and order, as it can shape the conduct of heroes and villains.

I remember a documentary program noting Aussies' changing attitudes to accents. Used to be, anyone with social ambitions tried to talk like they went to Eton. Politicians don't do that anymore -- they want to seem authentically Aussie, not some pretender who's ashamed of where he was born.

Mature Australia is as technologically advanced as anyplace in the world, and the superbeings should reflect that.

Level Five: New Immigration. The same program said that after WW2, Australian leaders made a conscious push to encourage immigration from damn near anywhere, never mind about preserving Britishness, because the low population was seen as a military weakness. So Australia gained a lot of immigrants from Asia (and other places, I assume, but SE Asia is closest). Immigrants mean assimilation issues, and you can hardly expect all the cultural influence to be one way. So the idea of a blonde Australian ninja might not be that incongruous. A Shaolin branch temple in the mountains back of Sydney or Brisbane, why not? Maybe one of the monks is developing 'Roo Style Kung Fu. (Or Crocodile Style -- I hear those huge salties in the northern swamps are pretty amazing.)

Dean Shomshak

Re: Things That Exist in a Superhero Universe

Something that makes Earth worth invading by aliens

Or to put it another way, aliens who are enough like humans that Earth, and humanity, are worth conquering. (Given that assumption, it's easy to justify any invasion. For humans, "Because it's there" was historically an adequate justification for attempts at conquest.)

'Course, this assumption isn't unique to superhero settings.

Dean Shomshak

Re: [illo Test] What Tartarus Really Looks Like

Good idea. Until I get the image insertion codes right, you can find Tartarus at http://s1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee439/DShomshak/

Dean Shomshak

Arcane Adversaries and CV2 both illustrated Tartarus, one of the Devil's Advocates characters I created. Neither illo came very close to how I imagined the character (though CV2 was worse). So now I'll try posting my own illo of what he looks like. Let's hope I have the format codes right. (The preview shows a little icon for an illo, but not the illo itself.)

Edit: And the picture isn't appearing. Will re-read instructions and try again.

Edit Edit: Ah-ha! When I copied the URL, I didn't get all of it. This should fix it.

Dean Shomshak

Re: You Don't Have to be Crazy to be a Superhero, but it Helps!

As others have mentioned, though, one big problem with the "Anti-Mutant Hysteria" trope has always been, "How do they know?" It's one thing if a mutant goes around saying, "Look, I'm a mutant!" or has otherwise become widely known as one, but lazy writers effectively gave every Tom, Dick and Harriet a Magic Mutant Detector.

At least one writer -- I forget who -- once had a character (Spider-Man?) meet a fellow who was being chased by a mutant-hating mob despite him yelling, "I'm not a mutant! I was in a lab accident!"

By the 1990s, though, it seemed to me that anti-mutant hysteria was no longer used as a parable for racism and other bigotries. Given that the X-Men and New Mutants were young, mostly good-looking, athletic, lived in a mansion and had super-powers on top of it all, I didn't think they had much to complain about compared to, say, just about anyone. It seemed to me the trope was now a metaphor for adolescent self-absorption -- a world full of stupid meanies who don't realize how *special* you are, when you understand everything so clearly and they don't, you care so much more, yadda yadda yadda...

It's one of the reasons I stopped following the X-titles, and, not long thereafter, all of Marvel. (That, and the inability ever to resolve a subplot. And other crappiness of writing that would e tedius to revisit.)

Dean Shomshak

Re: [Retro] COTN 5th edition proposal

Perhaps apropos of the importance of the Land, Canadian geologists were central in proving there have been multiple cycles of the continents merging and splitting apart, and that a large block of land (dubbed Avalonia -- hmm) split off from proto-Europe, crossed a previous version of the Atlantic, and smacked into North America to become eastern Canada and New England. Also, in the last few decades Canadian geologists made a concerted effort to map the strata of the Laurentian Shield in depth, reconstructing the geological history of North America back through billions of years. Who knows what eon-buried secrets they have found? Or what special inquiries may have used this project as a cover?

Dean Shomshak

Re: Character: Azrael

Yep, that's Azrael all right. Thank you!

Dean Shomshak

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

Oh, and don't believe too much of what you think you know about witch-hunting. It was a complex social phenomenon, with great variation in time and place.

For instance, most people probably don't know that the Spanish Inquisition had, overall, nothing to do with hunting witches. (It hunted heretics, especially backsliding former Jews and Muslims, or jews or Muslims who only pretended to convert.) The professional theologians of the SI had doubts whether witches even existed. There *was* one episode of witch-hunting, driven by popular demand. Once the inquisitors started, the accusations and confessions multiplied.

However, one of the inquisitors thought the whole thing smelled fishy. Alonso Salazar de Frias did something no one before him thought to do: He checked the stories and found that the details didn't add up. As in, he had people hiding at the places and times that the witch's sabbaths supposedly took place, and nobody showed up. Or, he knew the witch wasn't whisked out of his/her cell by magic to go to the sabbath because he had people watching them.

In his final report to Inquisition Central, he laid out in detail how the interrogation process generated false confessions and false accusations against other people. It was probably the world's first sociological study. The SI promptly freed the accused witches still in jail. From then on, Spanish canon law held accusations of witchcraft to pretty stiff standards of proof -- and leveling a false accusation was a crime.

In England, OTOH, witch-hunting seems to have been connected to changes in class and social structure. Modern studies of the old witch trial records show that in many cases, the person accused of witchcraft was a poor relation of the accuser. It appears the witch accusation was often used by the emerging middle class to rid itself of poor relations who tried to invoke traditional economic obligations among family. (You also had such entrepreneurs as Matthew Hopkins, self-styled Witchfinder-General, who had their own financial interests.)

In Germany, yeah, a lot of witch-hunts seem to have been coopted by the local bishop or burgomaster as a way to acquire land and money. But there was also unquestioning popular belief and fear of witches for centuries. One of the broad patterns that emerges is that witch hunts were usually pushed by local authorities, in places where wider church and state authority were weak.

The end of European witch-hunting was as complex as its other aspects. In England, for instance, witch accusations ended abruptly. A woman was accused of being a witch; as evidence, her accuser claimed to have seen her flying on a broomstick. The judge, Lord Mansfield, ruled that he knew of no English statute that specifically forbade flying on broomsticks, and the woman was welcome to do so if this was within her power. It was England's last witch trial.

lesson>

Dean Shomshak

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

In my long-running Seattle Sentinels/Keystone Konjurors series of campaigns, I began with the standard "Golden Age/Silver Age Reboot/More from there" setup, in part because one of my first players wanted his character to be a legacy hero.

If I start up a brand-new campaign, I think I'll have the first costumed heroes and villains appearing in the 1980s. That still leaves time for legacy characters and for some heroes and villains to have built up reps, some super-technologies to have matured, etc. But nothing before that. Well, maybe. It might be that there was an earlier Age of Heroes -- early Bronze Age, in fact a whole cycle of civilization that mostly erased itself from history through time paradox. (My current campaign thoughts have time travel being an important element.)

But things are still up in the air.

Dean Shomshak