DShomshak

She did her job without whingeing, which is more than can be said for a lot of people. RIP, and condolences for her family and friends. Many years ago, when my sister was in the Society for Creative Anachronism, she was part of the delegation from the Kingdom of An Tir that welcomed Queen Elizabeth II to the Pacific Northwest. As my sister describes it, the Queen was apparently well briefed enough (and a good enough sport) not to ask in public, "Who are these raving nutters, and why am I meeting them?" Dean Shomshak

If we're talking about the broader contours of American culture, and how they become pathological, I once again refer to this episode of Freakonomics Radio describing a social research program that attempts to objectively measure aspects of culture, and how the US measures up. And it finds that in some important ways, we Americans are freaks compared to the rest of the world. The Pros and Cons of America’s (Extreme) Individualism (Replay) - Freakonomics Dean Shomshak

As an aging wimp, I am not able to deal with an attacker by manly strength and hand weapons. As a person with very bad eyesight, I would never be able to defend myself with a gun, either. I suppose I could carry Mace, though I don't. On a personal scale, I stay out of areas where violence is most likely to occut. (30 years ago, I felt perfectly safe waiting around downtown Seattle after midnight to catch the last bus. From what I read in the news... nope, not doing that again.) In the long term and larger scale, LL has described the only means possible to protect people like me. As he says, Canada has managed this a lot better than the US. I'd move there if it weren't for family obligations, and that all my gaming group is here. Dean Shomshak

Just popped up on my Edge frontpage: Arizona judge invokes 14th Amendment to remove a public official who participated in Jan. 6: Judge Unseats Official Who Trespassed at Capitol on Jan. 6 (msn.com) It's a very brief story, and I'm not sure I entirely trust msn.com reporting, but it claims this is the first time the 14th has been used this way in about 100 years. Dean Shomshak

Through its many iterations, D&D has become quite good at being what it is. Its treatment of clerics and druids, however, is tightly limited to what they can do as adventurers. They have few spells (or other abilities) for the express purpose of representing gods to mortals and mortals to gods, or dealing with lesser spirits. Since I am me, I wrote up spells for such purposes to use in my campaign. One I called Aureole, and I eventually gave it to all clerics as a bonus cantrip. It simply lets a cleric flash an aura that other people can perceive, which identifies the cleric as the chosen servant of a god. Each god has its own unique aura, making it a nearly infallible identifier. (No other magic can genuinely duplicate an aureole, but sufficiently powerful illusions can make people think they saw the real thing.) For FH this could just be Images with No Range and Fixed Effect. The basic Sense Group would be Sight, but with something more the spiritual aspect by which other people know they are seeing a divine manifestation. It's a Special Sense that has been implicit in Hero, at least in 4th and 5th edition, but not specifically named. See, characters who are targeted by Mental Powers know they were targeted by Mental Powers (at least after the fact), and know more or less who did it. (I assume this is still the case with 6e; not sure about CC.) It's like a limited form of Mental Awareness, so I guess this is as good a name as any: Aureole gives this implicit sense the Transmit quality, so other people perceive the Image mentally as well as visually. It's kind of a stretch for the rules, but keeps the spell" in the 0-15 Active Points range for the most basic clerical spells. (Area Effect Mental Illusions might superficially seem more "legal," and a person with sufficiently high EGO might not perceive the aureole which seems backwards.) Dean Shomshak

I see you might be changing clerics completely, but I'll still post a few remaining thoughts on clerics as interlocutors between mortals and the divine. First, expanding on the notion of a Detect Soul or Detect Spiritual Forces power: This is an important feature throughout Lois McMaster Bujo;ld's "World of the Five Gods" stories, and I recommend that series for the examples it provides. For instance, all saints -- people who channel the power of the gods into the mortal world, though they do *not* cast spells as gamers think of them -- all perceive the immanent divinity of other sains as a glow in the god's characteristic color, while the brightness of the glow indicates the power of the miracle that the saint hosts. A petty saint of the Mother, whose miracle is simply that she's a very good midwife, has a clow like a candle seen through green glass. A saint of the Bastard, hosting a miracle that preserves a king's life against a curse, shines white like a torch. And he describes another character as lit up like a burning city. The aforementioned curse, OTOH, is perceived as a black mist clinging to the people it affects. Ghosts begin their existence as images of the people they were, but gradually fade into featureless white blobs. Demons and other spiritual entites are likewise perceived in characteristic ways. However, although mortals interpret these perceptions as sight, closing your eyes won't block the perception. Demons, and the Great Beasts possessed by shamans, are lesser spiritual entities but grant similar perceptions. Though when a sorcerer's indwelling demon perceives divine forces, its usual response is to curl in on itself and hide within the sorcerer's soul, denying its powers and perceptions to the sorcerer until it dares to come out again. There are further details, but I hope you get the idea. In these stories, spiritual perception isn't just a convenient power for characters to call upon. It grants them access to a whole other aspect of reality to which most mortals are blind. Dean Shomshak

For an example of divine domains that *isn't* D&D, there's the Scion game from White Wolf. The gods of myth are often (though not always) portrayed as having distinctive areas of interest and influence, so I won't say that giving their priests distinctive areas of influence is an automatic D&D-ism. "D&D does it that way" is a lousy reason to design features for a Fantasy Hero game, but it isn't an automatic reason to reject a design choice, either. If you also want a set of universal magical powers that are available to all channelers of divine power, these should be based on the fundamental priestly role of representing the god or gods to a community of worshipers, and the worshipers to the god. There... No, I don't see healing as universally clerical. Curing disease, maybe, if you've decided that disease is caused by evil spirits the cleric casts out of curses that the cleric lifts. But curing wounds? It's useful for anyone, but that doesn't make it suitable for every god. If you feel you *must* give all clerics healing, define SFX to fit it within a domain. Like, the Artisan God's priest intones "From clay were you made; now to clay return, that the Great Maker's hand may repair you!" And the wounded area briefly becomes clay, which flows back together before reverting to flesh. You've got a better case for Spiritual Weapon, as a basic low-power "Manifest Wrath of God" with which to smite enemies of the community. But again, it whould be skinned to fit the god's themes. I find Detect Magic dubious as written, since I tend to think of magic as a fairly broad category. If there's enough variation to make Discriminatory meaningful (let alone Analyze), that should be at least a 5-point category. To make it more clerical, I would adjust it to Detect Souls, or Detect Spiritual Forces, whatever those might be in your setting. This enables clerics to detect whether a creature has a soul; if it is being affected by a god or spirit (incidentally revealing whether a person is a cleric); or if an object is a holy/unholy relic and, if so, to which god it is consecrated. But if there are forms of non-divine magic, there's no intrinsc reason that all clerics should be able to detect them. (Or if there is, that's something you've defined about magic in your setting, as well as about clerics.) More later. Dean Shomshak

Flattering, but I think one of the other GMs in my gaming group topped me with the adventure that had our PCs fighting in, and against, a lake of sentient petroleum buried deep beneath the North Sea. "Special Environments" became sort of a theme for that campaign. We also fought the alien Star Gods on/in their homeworld within the Gray Nebula, a planetoid made of the corpses of the miles-long corpses of the real Star Gods, who had passed echoes of their appearances, power and personalities to the space maggots that had fed on them. (Sort of a Jack Kirby homage, but much weirder.) Dean Shomshak

In my two "Supermage" playtest campaigns, I created many of the supernatural/extradimensional realms of the CU such as the Congeries, mad patchwork realm of the dimesnional conqueror Skarn, and Babylon, the City of Man. IIRC the PC Artifex had CK: Babylon because he grew up and still spent much of his time there. Some PCs also went to Manoa, a Muvia/Atlantean "lost city" in the jungle-clad mountains of Brazil. Except... In my campaign world there was no Mu or Atlantis. Something else was going on. In my latest campaign, PCs raided the Hot Zone, a deadly subterranean "zoo" and "garden" created by the mad biologist villain Helix. I hope to send the PCs there again, as there's a lot more for them to discover. Dean Shomshak

Unless Doctor Monolith is intended for a very low-power supers campaign, he is not combat-capable. Even in a low-power (10 DC) Champions campaign, 15 PD and 15 CON means that mot attacks will stun him. Conversely, 8 DC from his punch will not make him a credible threat to most heroes. As it stands, the only way I see for him to function in a campaign is as a slippery mastermind, in which the challenge for PCs is to find him and corner him so he can't get away. Perhaps that is your intent, what with all the points in agent Followers and a large number of Bases. In that case, though, he needs more than basic Teleportation to get away -- at the very least, a Fixed Point enabling a safe blind teleport to the long-range Teleport Gate in a secure part of each Base. (Which is a good justification for each Base being absolutely identical: One fixed point will do for all the Bases!) Doctor Monolith's motivation for villainy seems feeble to me, but whatever. The DC character Rainbow Raider became a supervillain out of bitterness at being color-blind. (He wanted to be an artist. It is apparently lost on him that many great artists worked in black and white. Silver Age villains, <shrug>.) Building scads of Bases and maintaining lots of agent Followers usually requires a lot of resources. How does Doctor Monolith obtain them? You say he constructs his Monolith Domes with sensors to gather data about heroes, which he then sells to other villains and organizations. That is interesting. Does he have any regular backers, who helped him build all those Bases in the first place and supplied the agents? If so, he should probably have them as Contacts, or -- if the power relationship is less amicable -- he's Watched by them. Summing up, it seems the core idea here is that whatever criminal activities Doctor Monolith and his agents perform, these are just lures to draw heroes to one of his Bases. The heroes assault the Bases, possibly destroy it and capture the agents, and think they have thwarted a supervillain's nefarious plan. The villain got away but still, a decent bit of heroing. Only if they search the Base in detail do they find all the sensors and realize they've been played. That is a good premise for a villain, but I think you need to do more work on fleshing out the details of how Doctor Monolith operates. Dean Shomshak

In my old Champions campaign, one of the international NPC heroes I never got to use was Captain Armenia. Dean Shomshak

Gotta admit, before I scrolled down I saw it as "Heal Thy Burgers" and thought, "Whaaat?" Dean Shomshak

Something like...? MC Escher Planetoid Fine Art Print 60x60cm Giclee Gallery - Etsy Dean Shomshak

In the CU, the Gadroon lost most of tyheir population along with their home planet. Champions Beyond says some Gadroon still practice various religions, though 70% now disdain the old religions -- any hypothetical gods couldn't have been worth much since they didn't prevent the homeworld's destruction. So... Since the Gadroon had supernatural beliefs, they probably had Imaginal Realms as homes for their gods and spirits. A GM might pull some stories from this question: What happened to the Gadroon gods and Parterres after the planet blew up? Quite possibly, the event was a catastrophic for the Parterres as for the planet. Spirit realms imploding, the death of gods mixing with the death of billions of mortal Gadroon. A supernatural supernova sending mystical shockwaves throughout the Galaxy, disturbing things meant to be sealed and sleeping until the end of Time. And as a supernova can leave a neutron star or black hole as a remnant, what remnant was left by the Gadroon implosion? And what use might someone like Tyrannon or Xarriel find for such a remnant? Or maybe the Gadroon Parterres were cut loose and sent drifting through the dimensions. The Parterres themselves are crumbling and the gods and spirits face death without a without a sufficient population of Gadroon to sustain them. The gods might attempt ploys as desperate as the Gadroon's attempts to conquer Earth as they try to reconnect to their people -- or to any people. Or they might be vulnerable to exploitation. Or maybe the Imaginal Realms are drifting but the gods retain a tenuous link to the remaining Gadroon worshipers. The Gadroon managed to secure a beachhead in Canada and hold it against human counterattack. Are the Gadroon Gods making their own invasion attempt against Earth's spirit realms? Or since humans and their gods are sometimes not very nice, are any attacks going the other way? Tezcatlipoca, for one, might see pantheons of weakened gods as sacrificial victims to fuel his own campaigns. Takofanes could see similar potential. The Devil's Advocates would likely be sneakier, possibly investigating ways to use the Gadroon gods against the technological mortal Gadroon. And whatever the Dragon thinks of these spiritual immigrants, its goals are undoubtedly evil. OTOH the Gadroon and their spirits have no connection to the Dragon: It cannot see their dreams, nor whisper in their unconscious thoughts. A farsighted mystic might see possibilities here, if some peace can be worked out between humans and Gadroon. As for the nature of the /Gadroon Parterres, well, Champions Beyond lists four main surviving religions, and basic mystic reasonuing would correlate them to the Four Zoas. So postulate four Gadroon Parterres, representing the ways Order, Chaos, Art and Nature express themselves in Gadroon thought. But that's an arbitrary tidiness. I wouldn't insist on it. It might be more interesting for the Gadroon to be, as it were, mystically unbalanced, adding a cosmic conceptual dimension to the conflicts. Dean Shomshak

We had an escaped wallaby here in Pierce Couny, Washinghton many years back. The Tacoma News Tribune had fun with it. Big headline: "Wallaby Watch: Day 2!" IIRC the wallaby was recaptured less than a week later, though. Dean Shomshak

Mr Collins learns that Holy Dogma results in real harm to real people, and he decides real people matter more? His political career is over. Dean Shomshak

Yeah, it would be very difficult for a Perseid mystic to find the dimensional 'path' to any of Earth's Imaginal Realms, and it would be very difficult for Witchcraft to find the way to any Imaginal Realms that Perseids might have. Not impossible, though -- especially for Witchcraft, because she's (effectively) a PC. PCs manage to do things that NPCs don't -- or at least the NPCs don't want it enough. In the CU, mystics of most species probably didn't even know of each other's existence until their respective species attain FTL and meet each other. So why would Earth mystics even think to look for Perseid or Hzeel Parterres? They don't even know those species exist. (Until now.) For Spells of the Devachan, though, I deliberately reversed this. Long ago, mystics from different species in the Milky Way Galaxy met each other in the Outer Planes and so learned of each others' species. That includes humans. Earth mystics have been using astral travel to visit other worlds, and their Parterres, for centuries. There isn't just a Mystic World, there's a Sorcerer's Galaxy. But the gods and spirits generally need mortal help if they want to act beyond their native worlds and Imaginal Realms. Dean Shomshak

The way I wrote it, the Kings are bound in "hidden, empty prison dimensions and barren worlds" (Arcane Adversaries, p. 41). These can be Qliphothic, but don't have to be. Keeping in mind that these labels are human attempts to classify things that humans do not entirely understand. Is the prison dimension of D?eizzhorath the Dissolver qliphothic? It extends through all space and time, and other dimensions as well, outside any system of classification. That's an important aspect of how I wrote the Kings as a class. One of their chief defining characteristics is that they don't fit in standard categories. They aren't aliens, although some aliens (such as the Elder Worm) serve them. They aren't mystic entities or dimension lords, though some mystics call upon their power. Even calling them "qliphothic" is to try forcing them into a box in which not all of them fit. Even a label such as "Kings of Edom" is an attempt to put them in a box. Dean Shomshak

If any version of Luther Black succeeds in his ascension, perhaps he absorbs all the other versions of Luther Black. That may indeed be part of the promise and plan he derived from the Liber Terribilis. Becoming a singular entity could indeed be part of his motivation. After all, thinking too much about alternate worlds can drive one mad... (review Niven's "All the Myriad Ways.") The Kings of Edom themselves are definitely singular. There are no alternate Vulshoths or Dizzhoraths. They are too, well, "Outside the System" to exist in multiples. Dean Shomshak

All Things Considered reported that one of Trump's lawyers was present at all times during the Mar-a-Lago "raid," which would seem to make it difficult for the FBI agents to plant evidence or otherwise engage in hinky behavior. If I understood the report correctly, they also said Trump himself could unseal the warrant at will. He (or at least his lawyers) had to receive a copy. It seems plausible that if anything in the warrant was the least bit unreasonable or irregular, his lawyers would have him prove it by publishing it right away. He didn't. I see that in public, Trump urges the unsealing of the warrant -- but we shall see what he has his lawyers do in private. Dean Shomshak

Go right ahead! The books are written as starting points, not final words. And it's quite interesting so far. Dean Shomshak

So, who's even scarier than Trump's grievance-ridden, lumpen cultists? The people who are already thinking far beyond him, to radical restructuring of American society. Say hello to the New Right, who intend to be your future masters. https://www.stitcher.com/show/today-explained/episode/meet-the-new-right-205670888 (Endure the ads. It's worth it.) Dean Shomshak

Well, he sort of knew something was coming. When he emailed me telling what Artifex was doing, I emailed back something along the lines of, "Please tell me this is indeed what Artifex is doing." He took the plunge, and played along when the reveal came. I've been lucky in my players. They were quite good at making their own troubles, which is why the campaign became called "Keystone Konjurors." Dean Shomshak

Okay, I don't remember anything about the Shadow Queen from The Great Supervillain Contest, though I think I read that module some de cades ago. Anyway, OP is changing her somewhat. Still, I'll try again. Where does she take the orphans? Someplace fairly isolated, so the authorities don't immediately find them again. Also, it's less likely that any kids run away (because they're freaked at being abducted/rescued by a supervillain) and call in the authorities as a result. How does she take them? That depends on her capabilities, which I don't know. It also doesn't much matter for now. Work it out later. It's most important for when the heroes try to figure out who took the orphans, how, and where. The big one: What does she do with the children once she has them? Taking care of them will indeed require minions. Also a place to house the kids and the minions. And some way to support all this. Does the Shadow Queen have the necessary resources, or a straightforward way to get them? My suggestion: She decides she needs help from other villains, who perhaps have resources and expertise she lacks. Her new orphanage is a cooperative venture with some other villains, who have their own ideas about how to raise a bunch of orphans. Result: The heroes somehow track the orphans to their new home. Private island, remote mansion or reconditioned hotel, subterranean Lost World, whatever. And they find the facilities are... nice. The kids are well housed and fed. They have recreational facilities. Exercise machines. Wait -- a marksmanship range? Yes, the villains see this new joint-venture orphanage as a way to turn impressionable children into agents to back them in their criminal schemes. Presumably, heeroes will find this objectionable. Dean Shomshak

Speaking of contagious plagues... I ran one in my second Keystone Konjurors campaign (playtest for the Ultimate Mystic trilogy). Only in mine, the plague was Barbie. The player of one of the PCs, Artifex, said the Master of Cosmic Craft had made a 0-point Follower for his stylish loft apartment in Babylon: a human-size, living Barbie doll. Live-in housekeeper. I think: Okay. And, well, bed partner. I think: Ew. Then think: MUAH HA HA HA! Because Barbie is a powerful archetype, one of the best known toys in the world, and a focus of bizarre obsessions. Plus there's that manically/creepily cheerful song by Aqua. "I'm a Barbie girl, In a Barbie World. Life in plastic -- it's fantastic!" It started as apparently a different adventure, I think there was a fire demon. Anyway, some bystanders get hit in the fighting, and one of them partly melts instead of getting burned. He's a living plastic mannikin. He also has no soul. The PCs find other soulless plastic people... and they're turning humans into more plastic people. The PCs eventually traced it back to Artifex's Barbie simulacrum, who is absorbing all the reality from the transformed people and growing into a nascent cosmic entity; also turning Artifex's apartment into a colorful molded plastic Barbie World. Called on this, Barbie tells Artifex to defend her, which he finds he must do: He was Barbie's first victim and working for her all along. Artifex tries to convince the others that this is a good thing. There is no old age, sickness or death in Barbie World. The Dragon would be destroyed. The others did manage to get through to him and convince him to turn against Barbie and destroy her. So, um, yay? Good times. Dean Shomshak