DShomshak

Local update: Unfortunately, it looks like Washington Rep Jaime Herrerra-Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, is going to lose her seat after all. Because of Washington's all-vote-by-mail system, ballots trickle in over several days. As they've come in and been count4ed, Herrerra-Beutler's lead over Total Trumpist challenger Joe Kent has steadily shrunk -- and there are thousands of ballots left to be counted. If Kent overtakes her, he moves on to the finals in the Top Two main election. Herrerra-Beutler and Kent are both behind the Democrat, but only because the Republican vote was split at least three ways. This district is deep red: Any Dem who runs is a sacrificial lamb. So it looks like Washington is going to send at least one hard-core Trumpist to the next Congress, and Trump will get his revenge on Herrerra-Beutler. Dean Shomshak

"The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. * * * "The biological invention then tends to begin as a perversion and end as a ritual supporte3d by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices." -- J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus: or, Science and the Future. Today, spider zombies and revivified pig tissue seems bizarre and oogy In a few centuries, scientific necromancy will seem as normal as milking a cow and consuming the rotted product as cheese. Dean Shomshak

Yes, I remember hearing that song on Dr. Demento decades ago. Nice to see someone else remembers it! Dean Shomshak

I've told my family that I'm okay with the cheapest possible cremation, then send my ashes out with the garbage. I won't be caring. Dean Shomshak

Of course I'm serious. I would not post it if I were not serious. However, I brought up the Bolsheviks only as an example of how a committed, disciplined group of radicals can achieve power without truly representing the popular will. I agree that compared to the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, American conservatives are a bad joke. But then, many modern Americans are a lot softer and sillier than were the Russians of the time. American conservatives have also been working at this for a lot longer than the Bolsheviks did. And I am also entirely serious in expecting that post-Trumpian conservatives, should they achieve the House-Senate-White House trifecta again, would become democidally dangerous. I'm sure at first they would follow Viktor Orban's model of "illiberal democracy," in which elections still happen but are so rigged that the opposition can't win. But much of what the base wants isn't politically possible. LGBT+ people are not going back in the closet. Black people will not touch their foreheads and say, "Yassuh," nor accept being addressed as "Boy." The mills will not re-open with plentiful jobs for semi-skilled labor. And many in the base will still feel the scalding sense that the educated, credentialed elites sneer at them. The Republicans will have to turn to repression, then violence, then terror. I would rather avoid this. Since I don't think the country can be put back together again, I think there's value in exploring methods for an amicable separation. Dean Shomshak

I haven't found a really good news article to link, but if anyone's interested... Two of the Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump come from Washington state. Both were targeted by Trump-backed, full-on wackadoodle Big Lie supporters. Those challengers have failed to advance through Washington's "Top Two" primary system. In November, Reps Jaime Herrerra-Beutler and Dan Newhouse will both face Democratic challengers, as the Trumpians came third. So there's that, at least. Dean Shomshak

Oops! I didn't realize that. Reading comprehension fail for me. Never mind. Dean Shomshak

The Economist reports that the young conservatives of a new crop of post-Trumpian think-tanks policy shops are ebullient. And with reason. They are correct, at least, that the current liberal elites are utterly ineffectual. They don't care if the majority is against them, because the majority, provably, is passive. The Bolsheviks didn't take over Russia because they represented the will of most Russians. They took over because they wanted it more, and their opposition was fragmented and inept. They kept power for 70 years, in large part by murdering all the opposition once they attained the power to do so. The raw hatred and contempt openly expressed by many modern conservatives suggests they will do the same. Ultimately, such tactics must break the US as a world power. But the United States of Real America would start out from a much stronger position than the Soviet Union did, and can cause a lot more damage before it self-destructs or is taken down. It's why I'm trying to promote my "Sell the Cities to Canada" plan. I can only hope that conservatives would rather quickly and easily foist the people they no longer consider Real Americans onto another country, than punish the rest of us for our wickedness. Dean Shomshak

This. Brushing up on her background, the key element is that the Shadow Queen is a fairy tale creature and her Shadow Realm is part of the wider Land of Legends. So she's not going to do something sensible and rationally planned out such as steal money to endow a nicer orphanage. She'll abduct the children into the Shadow Realm and try fitting them into a fairy tale -- or she didn't think that far ahead and lets the narrative nature of the Land of Legends shape what happens. One option: the Shadow Queen shapes an island as the orphans' playset new home, imagining it'll be Neverland, with the orphans as the Lost Boys. Perhaps she even deputizes one of her minions to act as their version of Peter Pan. Except, 1) this is the Shadow Realm, so this "Neverland" might be gloomier, creepier, and more dangerous than the original; and 2), real children are not as sweet and innocent as J. M. Barrie's Edwardian versions. The result might be less Peter Pan, more Lord of the Flies. Another option: The Shadow Queen is not a woman who can summon or turn into a dragon, she's a dragon who can take human form. As we all know, fairy-tale dragons are hoarders. In this version, the Shadow Queen takes the children to live with her in her castle. She provides all the material things they could want. However, she doesn't really "get" human emotions and social needs. After the novelty of toys and cake wears off, the kids might get really bored. Or frightened, especially once they realize their hyper-protective/possessive new "mother" won't let them go outside. You can combine these elements. Maybe the Shadow Queen releases the children into her "Neverland" and apparently forgets about them. But when the heroes from Earth come to rescue them, she reacts with the possessive fury of a dragon whose hoard is being robbed. Another factor: Faerie is timeless. The abducted children will never grow up. Whatever situation they are in, they will be in forever if the heroes do not rescue them. And no, the heroes probably cannot convince the Shadow Queen to ordain a region in which time can pass normally and the children can grow up normally. She isn't that patient, or that human. Dean Shomshak This too. One more reason the heroes need to rescue the children. Dean Shomshak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immanentize the Eschaton. Dean Shomshak

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

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

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