DShomshak

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

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

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

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

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

Count yourself lucky. Dean Shomshak

Cover story for the July ' 22 Scientific American is about the Voyager spacecraft, still operating after more than 40 years. NASA is shutting down more of the instruments to conserve power, but they might keep operating until 2030. The current focus of interest is the magnetometer: Increased plasma and cosmic ray density suggests the Voyagers have passed the "bow shock" of the Solar wind and so hav entered interstellar space, but the magnetic field lines still seem to be radiating from the Sun instead of changing direction as the galactic magnetic field takes over. Also an article about two cosmological puzzles. There are at least two ways each for calculating the Hubble constant and the matter density of the universe. They give different results, and the error bars don't overlap. Such inconsistencies suggest that something important has been missed, or misunderstood. Dean Shomshak

Area Effect rebuild was the first thing I thought of, too. Giving AoE fixed ranges of area for particular Advantage values is just so much more convenient than calculating areas based on Active Points, except don't include the AoE Advantage in the calculation... Dean Shomshak

Heh, or Apollo: Sun/Light, Archery and Athletics, Medicine, Music? A bit of a grab bag. But then, if the gods are people with personalities and life stories of their own, why would they be tightly consistent any more than mortals are tightly consistent? Over time, my interests have included paleontology, Star Trek, librarianship, vampires, superheroes, and writing. Among others. I'm sure anyone here could list similarly scattershot interests. Dean Shomshak

Whatever you pick is probably fine. Speaking from my 40+ years of experience as a GM and worldbuilder, I can say your players probably will probably neither notice nor care about your choices for such details... unless they get in the way of a PC getting what the player wants, in which no amount of internal logic will prevent complaining. So don't stress about it. In fact... it might be more interesting to try this exercise: Write down the domains you want available on slips of paper, Put the slips in a bag and shake them up. Pull out three domains at random. See if you can make up a god for that set of domains, no matter how deranged the combination may seem. With a little work, you can probably come up with a myth to justify why the same god deals with, I don't know, Death, Light, and Travel. I also recommend the World Creation Superdrafts threads in the Non-Gaming Discussion forum. A game of competitive shared world construction, in which each participant takes the role of one of the gods making that world. There've been six so far, I think, in which people came up with amazingly creative gods In the last one, I went rather conventional with a God of Love; but other people produced gods of Metal, Colors, Moons, Doors, and a truly terrifying God of Tyranny -- among others. I guarantee these will broaden your horizons when it comes to designing gods. EDIT: Here's the link to the last one. Enjoy. World Creation Superdraft 6: May 2022 - Non-Gaming Discussion - HERO Games Dean Shomshak

Barbarians of Lemuria does the same thing. It works well for what the game is. / Not sure what you mean by "post it here," but in case it needs to be said... Don't post blocks of rules from games. Ever. Respect the copyright and the effort for which writers and developers were paid. If they wanted it given away for free, it'd be Open Games License. Sorry, sore spot. I've been in the biz. Dean Shomshak

I finally noticed Shang-Chi and Eternals on the shelf at my local library, so I finally saw them. Shang-Chi was okay but seemed very checklisty. Threat to the world. check. Cameo advertising another part of the MCU, check. Funny sidekick, check. Daddy issue, double check with underlining. I found Eternals rougher but a bit more interesting due to the conflict among the characters, and because it gave a significant expansion to the MCU. Huh, so the Celestials have sort of been merged with Galactus. OK I guess that Eternals and Deviants have been made something completely different from the comic book originals. One point of "Boy, they're stupid": After Sersi gets her infodump from Arishem about how Celestials are born but they're necessary to preserve life in the Universe, nobody says, "And of course we believe the guy who just told you our whole lives are a lie?" Dean Shomshak

When my group plays Champions we play 5th Revised, and will never switch to 6th/Complete. Those of us who GM have no interest in rewriting villains *again.* I, ah, acquired 6e in pdf, and then bought Champions Complete, because I wanted to write for them, but I have never looked at any sections except character creation rules (inc. writing up Bases and Vehicles). The changes I saw in 6th are for me, well, whatever. I suspect some of the more dramatic changes to Powers (such as Barrier replacing Force Wall) were done to facilitate a computer game. Since we stick to tabletop, these are fixes to problems we don't have. Looking at 6e writeups in the Champions Villains books, though, I actually think they are too backwards-compatible, and this adversely affects the standards for creating new characters. For instance, Duke mentioned the game's chabging END economy: So why are most sample characters still built with an END that's about twice their CON? It perhaps makes more sense to give characters high END, and use Reduced END a lot less on Powers. But that may be mere esthetics. More seriously, perhaps, most characters still have OCV/DCV at or close to the old DEX/3 standard, when there is no longer any reason to couple those values -- especially given that CV is now a grseat additional expense, and only the difference in CVs matters. Due to such changing costs, I find that a 350 point 5e character often cannot be rewritten as a 400 point 6e character. It takes more points. But that problem could likely be resolved if the usual range for character CVs was 5-7 (still well above human standard) rather than 8-10. I have a soft spot in my heart for 4th, because it's the edition we played most and for which I wrote Creatures of the Night, Ultimate Super-Mage and Supermage Bestiary. But I find 5th hit a personal sweet spot in building PCs, because 350 point is enough you don't have to scramble and shave points to get the character you want. OTOH we now adopt 6e-style Complications, because trying to find 150 points of Disadvantages often resulted in Disadvantages that didn't really disadvantage, or that the GM didn't have time to use (frex, multiple Hunteds). Like other people here, I think 4th gave better presentation that 5th, 6th or CC. But I credit 5th and 6th for one important addition: the copious sidebars of sample Power writeups. CC would have benefited from their retention. Dean Shomshak

My mother likes watching reruns of the old TV show, Diagnosis Murder. Dick Van Dyke as a brilliant doctor who helps his homicide detective son (played by Van Dyke's RL son) solve murders. I just realized you could transcribe the setup into Lois McMaster Bujold's World of the Five Gods. Doctor Mark Sloan as a petty saint of the Mother, blessed with a supernatural sense for when a dead person was murdered, and his son Steve Sloan an acolyte of the Father, as seen in Penric's Shaman and Penric's Fox. Amanda the pathologist could mmmaayybe be a sorcerer, since a demon can give its host supernatural perception into the body. No character obviously fits as a shaman. The good-looking junior doctor sidekick (Jack in early seasoms, Jesse later) is just a junior acolyte. Dean Shomshak Dean Shomshak

But sane Americans are outnumbered by simple folk who only care about their pocketbooks, exemplified by the woman interviewed on ATC who said Democrats were wasting time with the Jan. 6 commission hearings instead of doing something to lower food and gas prices. So, the midterms will be a landslide for Republicans. At which point, expect a blizzard of highly publicized "investigations" of the Biden administration, and likely a few impeachments. And an interview with a co-founder of the Lincoln Project offered an even more horrific possibility: House Speaker Donald Trump. Because nothing in the Constitution says the Speaker must be a member of the House. Dean Shomshak

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61708452 The Congo basin holds an enormous area of peatland that stores an enormous amount of carbon. Government ministers say that sure, they know developing the region would be disastrous for the planet but their people are so very poor and what else can they do? They don't quite say, "Give us lots of money, and stop complaining about corruption, or we destroy the world," but I suspect the implication. I grant you, making poor people not be poor is a Good Thing, and in Africa is likely vital to preventing further environmental degradation. But as Acemoglu and Robinson argue (convincingly, I think) in Why Nations Fail, the chief cause of extreme poverty is bad government. So I am not entirely convinced by African government ministers saying that rich countries should just fork over the money and trust them to spend it well. Dean Shomshak

Off hand, I can't think of a single instance of conservatism where maintaining the status quo *didn't* involve different rules for different people... though the intent might be disguised Fiscal conservatism is a prime example. Fiscal conservatives present themselves as merely concerned with governments digging themselves into financial holes they can't get out of. But what expenditures must be avoided or cut for this prudence? Why, the welfare state. I don't remember ever hearing a self-described fiscal conservative ever saying, "We shall simply have to slash our military budget and hope for the best." Much less, "Corporations will simply have to pay more for the benefits they gain from government," or "We can still afford pensions and health care if we raise taxes on rich people." No, the pain of austerity must be borne by the less affluent. So in practice, different rules for rich and poor. The current Republican obsession with "election security" similarly tries to present itself as a hard-headed, prudent concern for accuracy and reliability (against those wild-eyed liberals who'd hand a ballot to anyone willy-nilly), but is rather unsubtly code for "Keep Black people from voting." I will grant that some conservatives have become fairly slick at presenting liberal innovations as creating new privileged groups or new oppressions -- opponents of affirmative action were quite brilliant at selling this -- but it's usually not hard to spot the defense of an old unfairness hiding behind the accusation of a new unfairness. So I think my formulation stands. Dean Shomshak

Well... While they are plans for a ship, they are not ship plans. I found a ship online called the RV Barens that seemed perfect, just the right size, but the deck plan image was so small it printed out as a blur from shich I could extract little information. The loading/unloading crane and shaft are taken from the Barens, but much of the plan for the Liaden is my own imagination. Which is why the description says the Landlady gutted and rebuilt the ship. Dean Shomshak, ever punctilious

Oh, and credit where it's due: Some of the Trophy Room items were lifted from another old thread in which people proposed, yes, odd items that might be in a hero team's trophy room. Deepest thanks to everyone from that thread, along with all the people who contributed to the "Ready-Made Villain Base" thread! I hope this sample base can "pay it forward" to other players. Dean Shomshak

Part Five: Upper Deck: About two-thirds of this deck is also open as a sun deck. There’s enough room to park the flitter if the main deck helipad is needed for guests. A large hatch leads to a shaft down to the lower decks. The rest holds a forecastle that used to hold the ship’s bridge. That room is now the communications center and main security office with monitors for all the hidden cameras about the ship. Another stair leads up to the roof of the forecastle. This holds a satellite dish and communications antennae. There is also a meter-wide polished steel ball on a gimballed pedestal. Controls in the comm center activate this device: The sphere splits and unfolds into petals framing a mechanism with a large plasma ball in the center and a barrel wrapped in a spiralling fluorescent tube. The tube pulses on and off while what is very obviously a powerful energy weapon makes a loud wom wom wom hum. The pedestal extends and swivels as the comm center controller directs. As the representative from the Landlady explains, their service usually builds villain bases, and villains usually want at least one location wired for a superweapon. The Liaden is similarly equipped. The “weapon,” however, is merely an impressive-looking fraud.

Part Four: 2nd Lower Deck: The bottom deck is divided into a series of rooms. The narrow triangular room at the fore holds miscellaneous stores. Furthest aft is the generator room with diesel fuel tanks and banks of batteries. A corridor leads from the gymnasium to a narrow triangular storerrom at the fore of the ship. On one side is a small sickbay (at this point little more than a couple beds and some first aid gear). On the other is a lab. Well, it has a workbench, plumbing and power connections for a lab; the team hasn't decided what to do with it yet. Aft of the gymnasium, a trophy room bends around a vault. Avant Guard didn't keep trophies and mementoes from its adventures. No problem: The Landlady pre-equipped the trophy room with odds and ends cleaned out from the bases of villain clients who were captured or killed, and which could not be sold to other villains. Only a few are identifiable. Here's what Avant Guard received: • A giant credit card (non-functioning). • The scepter and lion-man costume of the deceased animal-controlling villain called the King of Beasts. The scepter is just a club with a flashlight and some flashbulbs in the head. The costume has ballistic cloth lining, but no special powers. • Costumes of Rhinestone Cowboy and his minions. The laser jewels were removed, but they still look ridiculously gaudy. • Several hooded cultist robes, dark blue, blazoned with the I Ching hexagram #23 ("Breaking Apart"). • The Coach of Crime's whiteboard showing the "game plan" for his gang's last robbery. • A fake marble bust of Marcus Aurelius with a hidden compartment for a canister of knockout gas (now removed), formerly owned by the Rome-obsessed criminal who called himself Caesar. • A bell jar full of swirling green smoke. • A metal canister labeled "Q-Matter Containment Unit — Do not let power reserves drop below 10%." The indicator is at 9%. There is no obvious way to recharge the unit. • A mini-fridge holding a can of Diet Sprite and a half-eaten hot dog (mustard only). If you remove them and shut the door, a new can and half hot dog appear five minutes later. • The infamous Gay Ray Gun of Alternative Person, allegedly a variation on the Professor Pain/Doctor Bliss technology. • A large black slab, framed like a work of art but apparently featureless. • Arm of a battlesuit with fried circuitry. • A fire extinguisher stenciled with a silver cross and Bible verses. • An oversize blue ring octopus in ajar of formaldehyde. [UPDATES: The security system recorded Helix taking the blue ring octopus, apparently an early creation to which he feels sentimental attachment. "Who's a genetic abomination? You're a genetic abomination, yes you are!" Also, the King of Beasts' son recently contacted Avant Guard and asked them to destroy his father's costume and scepter: He saw it in the YouTube tour the team posted of their new base, and he found the sight of his father's criminal gear upsetting. Avant Guard did as he asked.] Aft of the trophy room, two stairs descend to a well-equipped machine shop with tools for both electronics and mechanical engineering. Finally, the rearmost room holds a diesel generator, drums offbel and racks of batteries.

Part Three: 1st Lower Deck: This deck consists of rooms fore and aft, a corridor between them, and matching rooms to either side. Two pairs of stairs come down from the main deck, and continue down to the second lower deck. A wider central area holds the foundation for the crane and a small guest bathroom. Steel pillars connecting the decks help strengthen the ship’s structure. A shaft in the ceiling leads to the upper deck, while a steel hatch in the floor below leads to the lower deck. The forward triangular room holds the base’s water pump and heater; the underside of the hot tub sticks down through the ceiling. The curved rear of the deck is a home theater with a projector in one corner. A wet bar in the other corner lets this double as a party room. In between, the larger rooms are bedrooms for Anunit, Csongor, Huntsman, Night Train, Thing Fantastic and (if he returns to active duty) Nomad. Each bedroom has its own closet and a compact bathroom with toilet, sink and shower. Interspersed among them are six smaller guest rooms, each with a small closet. One small room wedged between a stairway and the hull is actually a getaway capsule (another villain base-inspired feature). A small console lets the people inside seal the door, blow the hull and eject the capsule, which can speed away underwater for several minutes. The capsule can also tap into the security cameras. The other small room is left for the team to develop for themselves. (ADDENDUM: New teammate Huntsman turned it into a "panic room" against demonic attack by painting warding pentacles on the floor, walls and ceiling. Not represented as a Power; it takes advantage of demons' Physical Complication that they can't enter or leave a correctly drawn pentacle.)

Part Two: Main Deck: The rear third of the deck is a helipad where the team can park its flitter, a repaired MONAD transbot. A small helicopter could also park on the pad, though it would be a tight fit. The fore quarter holds deck chairs and a hot tub for outdoor relaxation. Narrow aisles connect the fore and aft areas, flanking the main cabin. A crane dominates the rear of the cabin, flanked by two stairs to the upper deck. Inside, the fore of the cabin consists of a wide briefing room. Windows fill most of the curving fore wall. There’s a table, chairs, podium, large television screen for videoconferencing, and side-table with coffee maker. Stairs behind the briefing room lead to the upper deck and first lower deck. Next come a small dining hall and rec room with sofa, comfy chairs and wide-screen TV with entertainment center and video game controllers. The rear is divided into a library and office. In between are a compact galley and pantry, a head (just a toilet and washbasin), a laundry room, and a sealed shaft running between decks. Stairs from the library and office lead down to the first lower deck. Dean Shomshak

The thread about buildings that could make cool hero bases reminded me of an earlier thread in which I offered and solicited ideas for buildings and other places that villains could easily convert into secret bases. That in turn led to the HQ the PCs acquired in my Champions campaign, Avant Guard: a refurbished derelict ship. Our forum colleague Lord Liaden suggested the idea, so I named the ship the RV Liaden. The Champions forum has been a bit slow lately, so I thought some people might be amused by seeing what I eventually devised -- with maps. (Hex mapped, because we still play 5e.) Here's the first section: AVANT GUARD BASE: THE RV LIADEN Background: The Liaden was an oceanography research vessel about 30 feet wide and 160 feet long. The Landlady bought it and reconditioned it as Avant Guard’s headquarters. It no longer has engines; it’s permanently docked among other semi-derelict ships so that attacks on the base will not endanger many other people. Concrete props under the ship mean that hull breaches won’t sink the ship. Much of the base’s cost came from reinforcing the hull with advanced composite materials, making it much stronger but not much thicker. The Landlady also gutted and replaced much of the interior: The Liaden still has four decks, but bulkheads were moved to create completely different rooms. The stairs are still steep and narrow, though. The hull is painted white with “Avant Guard” painted on both sides of the bow. There are rows of portholes on the main deck and first lower deck, and wider windows in the forecastle. Security: Dozens of tiny cameras are hidden throughout the ship, inside and out. It is flat-out impossible to approach the ship or go anywhere on it or in it without being on camera. (It is up for the team to decide how assiduously they watch the monitors. The team’s bedrooms also have hidden switches to turn off the cameras within them. The cameras are represented as Area Effect Clairsentience.) Exterior doors have keypad locks and alarms in case they are forced open; fine wires in the windows and portholes similarly guard against breakage; and motion sensors turn on lights inside and out, showing the general location of any intruder. (These off-the-shelf security systems are represented simply as a Security Systems rating for the entire base.) Dean Shomshak

It's not hypocritical when you accept that the fundamental premise of conservatism is different rules for different people. Dean Shomshak