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DShomshak

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Everything posted by DShomshak

  1. Well, yes, OP's question is unintelligible if you don't know about the mystical and extradimensional aspects of the Champions Universe. But if you don't care about those aspects of the setting, you can ignore it. This is pretty much what happens when some of my gaming buddies start discussing football. They might as well be speaking in tongues. But fortunately, I don't care. Dean Shomshak
  2. Given the number of worlds and peoples Istvatha V;han rules, it is virtually certain that some of those worlds generated Umaginal Reals. I haven't read Book of the Empress, so I can't say if anything like this is described there. Regardless, this field seems wide open for GMs to invent their own. My little e-book, Spells of the Devachan: Thaumaturgy from the Sorcerer's Galaxy (available from the HERO Store) includes brief descriptions of some alien Imaginal Worlds you could easily drop into the CU. IIRC, though, Istvatha V'han has conquered several alternate Earths. This brings up a question I never considered in The Mystic World: Do those alternate Earths also have alternate Parterres? (I didn't consider it because it's just a whole big can of worms, for a book that was already running long.) My first thought, though, is that the alternate Earths each have their own alternate Parterres... including some Earths where one Parterre or another became so dominant it merged with that Earth. But the Multiverse imposes very strong barriers between alternate Imaginal Realms -- even stronger than between material worlds -- so there's not much possibility of, say, multiple Netherworlds teaming up for a cross-dimensional attempt at conquest. I'd be interested to know if Book of the Empress says anything about how Istvatha V'han deals with the Parterres of the Earths she's conquered. If she leaves them alone, the various godly entities might not object to her conquest. After all, she doesn't generally try to impose or suppress native religions. They also might be reluctant to intervene because it's a setting rule that Earth's spirits are very weak against creatures from the Outer Planes. (A rule created so humanity must rely on its own heroes to stop dimensional conquerors, rather than relying on gods.) So it seems quite possible that on some alternate Earths, V'hanian forces conquered the Parterres as well. Heh, imagine a world where the Mythic Resistance Front is led by Tezcatlipoca, Marduk, Mephistopheles and the Archangel Michael. Yeah, these guys are not going to have an easy time working together. Dean Shomshak
  3. If you want to sound very angry, albeit Hispanic, rapidly shout "Escala Tipographica Oftalmometrica!" And hope that no one nearby speaks Spanish, because they'll think you're completely insane for using "Eye Test Chart" as swear words. And that's what I remember from High School Spanish Class. Something found while looking up something else in the English/Spanish lexicon. Dean Shomshak
  4. Oh, Bagehot sort of winks at the racial aspect in the first paragraph by noting that he's the grandson of Indian immigrants... then says the "prejudice" that might keep him from the top job is against the school he attended: Winchester has produced just one PM, to Eton's 20. Like I said, very snarky. (There's also a bit of more serious analysis elsewhere in the issue, though still with a bit of snark about how each tries to present as the Heir of Thatcher.) Dean Shomshak
  5. The latest issue of The Economist (July 23, 2022) is very snarky, even for theThe op-ed suggests that's not qum. High point likely the "Bagehot" column on British affairs, discussing the contest for leadership of the Conservative Party and the PM spot. Notably, the editor sums up the contest this way: "John Stuart Mill once labelled the Conservatives 'the stupid party.' That is unfair. But it is tryue that Tories are suspicious of cleverness. They prize a different characteristic: soundness. This trait is difficult to define. But, like pornography, Conservatives know it when they see it. Roger Scruton, a right-wing tinker, wrote that conservatism's 'essence is inarticulate'. To put it another way: Anything that can be greeted with the guttural baying Conservative MPs use to show approbal ('Yeeeyeeeyeeeyeee') is sound. The choice that party members must now make as they weight up whom to pick as their leader is between cleverness and soundness. Mr Sunak is clever. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary and his opponent, is sound." Guttural baying? Clearly, American conservatives are behind the ball compared to the Mother Country. Considering how often they act like brutes, they should learn to sound like brutes as well. Dean Shomshak
  6. I know of the Blood only from the early Champions supplement The Blood and Dr. McQuark and from Mr Allston's Strike Force. I assume he never meant it for anything but Champions. That said, super-powered lineages have a place in Fantasy. The Amber series has already been mentioned. Let me add the game Exalted. One of the types of Exalted characters are the Dragon-Blooded, whose elemental powers are heritable. (With some complications that don't matter here.) The largest group of Dragon-Blooded are the Scarlet Dynasty, the aristocracy of the Scarlet Empire, a.k.a. the Realm. Over the 700+ years of her reign, the Scarlet Empress married leading members of all the Realm's Dragon-Blooded lineages, so all the Realm's Dragon-Blooded are her kin either by true descent or as a legal fiction. Much smaller lineages exist in other parts of the game setting. Dean Shomshak
  7. If so, peak capitalism looks just like 18th-19th century mercantilist factory work, or an awful lot of the rest of economic history. If there is a vulnerable source of labor, someone will exploit it. Feel disgust at this incident, but don't feel surprise, or imagine that it's a symptom of some special evil of modern capitalism in the USA. As UncleVlad pointed out, the story here is the Alabama authorities' curious blindness and disinterest. Or maybe not so curious. Dean Shomshak
  8. Mass transformation of people into a different species. Example: In an issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA years ago, Marvel villain The Viper transformed the population of Washington, D. C. into berserk snake-people. I don't remember why she though this was a good idea, but as best I recall she's kind of nuts. Marvel villain Stegron the Dinosaur Man wanted to turn people into dino-humanoids like himself. He expected he'd rule the altered humanity. In a recent adventure, the PCs in my campaign fought a mad villain from a doomed future in which humanity was almost extinct after a massive nuclear war against the and between megavillains. A group of survivor scientists mutated themselves into grotesque but nigh-unkillable and radiation-resistant creatures (sort of like D&D Umber Hulks). They realized, however, that they were too few to form a viable breeding population. They sent the villain back in time to get a heaqd start by mutating a bunch of people before the war starts, whether the people want it or not. Reconstructing the process with available tools required experimentation, though, resulting in ferocious mutant creatures in the city sewers and subways -- including victims of not-quite-successful human experiments. CHAMPIONS dungeon crawl! Dean Shomshak
  9. So, people have said good things about Stranger Things. I checked my local library, but the system only has Season 2 on DVD. Is it worth my while to watch Season 2 without having seen Season 1? (No, I'm not subscribing to any streaming services. It's the library or nothing.) Dean Shomshak
  10. As CV3 mentions, the villain Alchemica really isn't veryt bright (or possibly sane) in using her transmutative powers to rob commit crimes when there are so many ways she could make lots of money legally. Waste disposal is one of them: Transmute radioactive or chemical waste into something harmless, or even useful. No matter what she was paid, it would probably be cheaper for the company or government than mundane disposal costs. One of my friends ran an adventure where the enemy was super-powered raccoons. A supervillain had hired a waste disposal company to dispose of the chemical waste from the experiments by which he gave himself super-powers. The trucker was crooked and just dumped the barrels of chemical waste instead of taking them to a licensed disposal facility. A few years later the barrels broke open... Dean Shomshak
  11. Browsing through the dictionary, "Franklin" appears to be another English term for a free but not noble person. The dictionary definition sounds like it could be equal to either yeoman or gentry. Since I am not going to go haring off on historical research, I suppose you could declare it equal to yeoman. "Freeholder" still sounds best to me, though. My dictionary actually lists that as a synonym or definition of "yeoman." Dean Shomshak
  12. From one of the articles linked by Cygnia: The leaked images also show the rules state "Races in SFNG [Star Frontiers: New Genesis] are not unlike races in the real world. Some are better at certain things than others, and some races are superior than others. We get into this later on in the manual." More eugenics from the white writer who can't form coherent sentences. The leaked manual also describes the Black Lives Matter and Anti-Fascist movements as radical - because being opposed to racism and not liking fascists is apparently extreme. It seems pretty clear the writer is avowedly racist, not merely clueless. Dean Shomshak
  13. Immanentize the Eschaton. Dean Shomshak
  14. Let's try that one more time, with the front page text blocks no longer overlapping... Forum updates, and what I've done to update my laptop to accommodate, are making everything much more difficult that they used to be. Maybe wait until tomorrow before downloading, to make sure no further corrections are needed. This is getting annoying. Dean Shomshak
  15. Okay, I uploaded a new version with the MegaScale added. (And I hope nothing else got screwed up in the process.) I apologize for the inconvenience. Dean Shomshak
  16. Aaand... I see I forgot to type in that Advantage. Good catch, Mr. R. Corrected version posted soon. (As my eyes get worse, writing on screen has become painful. Sometimes it's distracting.) EDIT: Maybe not so soon. After I made the correction, re-saved the Word file and transferred the file to my laptop for conversion to a pdf, Microsoft Office no longer picks up the illustration and associated page formatting. Weird. I will continue working on the problem. Dean Shomshak De
  17. And the Aussie is two ahead of me. Living in Washington, not that far from Seattle, I have been to the Seattle Center many times and been up the Space Needle a time or two. (I was always more interested in the Science Center.) I have traveled very little in my life, and I doubt I will ever have the money to do so. I would like to see Carlsbad Caverns, though, and maybe the Grand Canyon. Not much interested in any of the others, and some I'd only visit at gunpoint. Dean Shomshak
  18. Not so much a story about space as about human loopiness, with a triumph of the space program as the latest target. I like the tinfoil hatwith a Saturn-swtyle ring around it, though. Meet the Conspiracy Theory Kooks Who Think NASA’s James Webb Telescope Is a Giant Space Cannon (thedailybeast.com) Dean Shomshak
  19. An axis mundi connecting the mortal world to the Sky Realm of the spirits. Or the spot where the Old Ones can re-enter the worlds when an eclipse happens directly over the spire. Rocky shell over an ancient superweapon/defense system, like in the ST: TOS episode "This Side of Paradise." Phallic symbol, site of rituals the mods probably wouldn't let us describe. The hill where the giant Dobre-Kaleha shouted defiance at the gods and was turned to stone for his blasphemy. I could go on. Dean Shomshak
  20. Nightfall is calibrated as a foe for the PCs in my current campaign. For Galactic Champions, yeah, you'd boost the power level across the board. I never heard of Diabolon before now, but I'm not surprised. It's rare to come up with a really new idea. We3'll just say that great minds think alike, eh? Dean Shomshak
  21. I wanted a major new villain for my latest Champions adventure, who for reasons of plot had to be an alien. Here's what I came up with. I liked him enough to make an illustration and then format it as a pdf, just to see if I could remember how to do it. Having gone that far, I might as well share the result. I hope you can find a use for Nightfall in your games. He's written for 5th edition because that's what my gaming group still uses. Dean Shomshak EDIT: This link deactivated. See below for the new link. Nightfall-Corrected 5e.pdf
  22. Like others, I would have to wonder at the sanity and intelligence of anyone who would fake up my existence, by whatever method. I've failed ad darn near everything, and not even in an interesting way. If it's an entire simulated world, my existence is substantially unchanged. Whatever the mode of my putative unreality, I would continue taking care of my mother, to the extent I can do so. I take my obligations seriously, even if it turned out that I didn't have a mother because I wasn't real. Once that obligation was lifted, I think I would go mad from the revelation that the world was nothing like I thought it was, and devote the rest of my fraudulent existence to finding the Simulator and making them suffer for it. Dean Shomshak
  23. Flaws in the simulation? The programmers never expected us to get this far and spot the shortcuts they used. Or maybe they did, and it's part of the experiment. Dun dun dunnn! Dean Shomshak
  24. The latest issue of The Economist had a story about the Large Hadron Collider getting ready for its next run. Its last period of operation found the Higgs boson. Physicists hope that with greater power and improved instrumentation it can bring equally significant discoveries that perhaps resolve difficulties with the Standard Model of particle physics. Inconsistencies are piling up, especially with regards to the muon, and theoreticians don't know where to go from here. (Well, actually they have lots of theories with very pretty math, but no clue which are true.) The Standard Model also relies on mathematical hacks that seem arbitrary, but they make the numbers come out right. (Thinking of the famous cartoon where the theory on the blackboard includes the step, "And then a miracle happens.") Physicists hope that new data will suggest the reason behind the math jiggery-pokery. Some hint as to what dark matter is made of might be possible, too. The prediction of the Higgs boson was the high point for theoretical physics. Now the experimenters are firmly in charge again. The Universe will not give up its secrets to the exercise of pure reason. Dean Shomshak
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