DShomshak

Same here. A couple Champions PC groups had bases that I wrote up, but that was just for reference. The players wanted the team to have a base; I saw ways to use the base in stories; so they got a base and defined what was in it. Everyone was happy. A while back I posted the maps and writeup of Wetchley House, the base used by my Ultimate Supermage playtest campaigns. More recently, the heroes of Avant Guard made their base in a reconditioned ship (the RV Liaden --a nod to our colleague Lord Liaden, for suggesting that a derelict ship could make a good "ready-made" hero or villain base.) And all that goes double for villain bases, especially Master Villains. The primal chaos-goddess Tiamat can reshape reality for kilometers around her. She don't need to scrimp on point accounting. Neither does Doctor Thame, who can program his robots to build anything he can imagine, or the mad biologist Helix who can grow a base, or... You get the idea. Dean Shomshak

Eh, D&D 5th ed is quite good at being what it is. As opposed to, say, Exalted 2nd ed which was quite bad at being what it was. As in, the Rules As Written supported a style of play that was not what was advertised or intended, with rules full of land mines just waiting to blow up a campaign. The Exalted campaign my friend ran was great fun, but wrestling with the rules broke him as a GM. It took a spell of Barbarians of Lemuria to recover, then running a D&D 5 campaign. D&D5 is now our go-to-game because it's easy to make characters, it's easy enough to run that even a novice GM can handle packaged adventures, and plenty fun if you accept what it is and what it isn't. I would like to get back to Hero, though. As far as Hero editions go, I think the system started down a wrong path through the Dreams of Perfect System that others mentioned, and 6th plunged completely off the deep end in this respect. Champions Complete at least pruned things back to one volume of manageable size. 4th edition will always be "mine" for sentimental reasons: I ran most of my Champions campaigns with it, and wrote Creatures of the Night and Ultimate Supermage for it. My ideal edition would be more like 4th than any other, though I would like some of the specific mechanics introduced in later editions. And keep one very useful feature from 5th: Sample Powers using each mechanic. Useful not just to see how the Powers and Modifiers worked, but to show the sheer *range* of what a Power, Advantage, Disadvantage or Limitation could represent! As for attracting new players, I suspect Hero will always be caviar to the general. Character creation can be a lot of work, especially for new players. But as others have said, a rulebook that didn't read like a textbook would help; and well-designed, well-supported settings would help a *lot.* Returning to Exalted, the game's many flaws did not prevent it from being popular; as was the case for Vampire: the Masquerade and White Wolf's other games, all of which had less than stellar rulesets. (And I say this as someone who liked those games quite a lot.) Dean Shomshak

Speaking of sermons... I looked up one of the most famous phrases about human interdependence and found it came from a sermon. I thought it was a poem, but it was a sermon by one of England's greatest poets. The subject was Christian faith, not public health, but it still fits as a rebuke to narcissism. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” -- John Donne

Actually, I think traffic accidents can have some useful comparisons to Covid. Consider: We are told to do various things to make driving safer. Speed limits, traffic lights, seat belts, etc. They do not guarantee you will never have a traffic accident, but make them less likely to happen, and less likely to kill you when they occur. Traffic accidents are also "contagious" in that one person's bad luck or bad judgement can harm other people, too. Suppose 20%, or whatever, of drivers refused to go along with these safety measures. They think accidents can't happen to them. Nobody they know died in a traffic accident, it must be all a hoax. Traffic laws are intolerable, tyrannical assaults on their FREEDOM!!! Or other narcissistic fantasies. They don't wear seat belts, they drive 100 mph, don't signal, etc. Accidents will go up. A lot. And they won't be the only ones who die. Because that's the nub: In traffic and in public health, there's a limit to what you can do to protect yourself. You can never say, "Ha, I'm safe, screw the rest of you." What people around you do matters at least as much as what you, personally, do. It's a social contract: You follow the rules to protect everyone else, and they follow the rules to protect you. It's no guarantee, but everyone's odds get better. So get your jab. Wear your mask. Avoid crowds when possible. Encourage the people around you to do the same. The life they save may be yours. Thus endeth the sermon. Dean Shomshak

Hey, just repeating what the news story said...😇 The JWST project manager said he's amazed it's gone so smoothly so far, but there are still plenty of things that could go wrong. Dean Shomshak

Read in the news this morning: James Webb Space Telescope reached its Lagrange Point destination and successfully entered its intended orbit. So far, the mission has gone so well, with so few problems require course adjustments, that the Webb has enough fuel left over to extend its mission another 10 years. Assuming nothing goes wrong with the next step: adjusting the focus. Dean Shomshak

I wouldn't know. IIRC I got the DVD from a local library after hearing the soundtrack on a radio program. Sorry! What can I say, I'm technologically backward. Even the laptop I'm using now runs on steam.😉 Dean Shomshak

Speaking of horse nomads, I must recommend a movie called Nomad: the Warrior. It's from Kazakhstan, and Borat jokes would not be appropriate because it's an excellent movie set in central Asia of long ago. Is it historical fiction, or Fantasy? There is no magic, but there is a force of Destiny that one character can perceive. It has battles, love, courage, villainy, friends turned deadly rivals, and cinematic horse-worship like you've probably never seen before. Also an excellent music score of epic romance, worth acquiring for its own sake. Dean Shomshak

My "Plenary Empire" setting has barbarians as appropriate to the quasi-Byzantine setting. First are the barbarians within the Empire. I remember reading about "Hill Tribes" in India, maintaining their separate cultures and sometimes acting as "professional barbarians" -- outsiders the settled lowland princes sometimes hired as mercenaries. Orcs are the mst notable such professional barbarians: the orcs of the Bone Desert, the Togrian Hills, etc. still live as semi-nomads or in rough little villages, allowed to govern themselves by their traditional folkways, as long as they don'tbother their neighbors. The orc tribes supply a steady stream of recruits for the Imperial Legions: See the world, get paid to fight and kill people, maybe come home with a bit of swag, what's not to love? And the chow is good! (Good compared to orcish cooking, anyway.) The orc drill sergeant is a trope of popular culture in the Plenary Empire; the orcs' chief god, Gruumsh, now has extensive worship among non-orc legionnaires. Outside the Plenary Empire, the human Savaxi are the former horse nomads who conquered a swath of Imperial territory and still press for more. A century after the Savaxi swept down from the highland steppe to conquer the fertile Macrine plain, Savaxi live off tribute from their subjects rather than herding and stealing cattle, but they maintain skills of roping, riding and war, and a culture of extreme aggression. The uniter of the tribes, Harix the Great, served the Plenary Empire as a mercenary in his youth -- which is where he learned Imperial military doctrines, and how the highly mobile Savaxi could break them. Harix also pushed the natural arrogance of the horse nomad, confident in his ability to rob and kill settled folk and get away, into a code of Master Race megalomania as a tool to unite the feuding Savaxi tribes. So the Savaxi aren't just pseudo-Mongols: They are pseudo-Mongol Nazis. Yeah, they are one of the villain groups. Since this is a D&D campaign, there is also the barbarian class. Only within the Plenary Empire, most members of this character class don't come from barbarian cultures. They are just people who practice channeling rage into combat prowess. Could be a Bone Desert orc, but more likely a streetfighter or a really badass farmer. Dean Shomshak

As an addendum to my earlier posts: Prof. Walters suggested two things that could avert a Second American Civil War. One was regulating social media, whose current business model involves radicalizing its users. The other is voting. The Republican party wouldn't be working so hard to nullify voting if they really thought they had a lock and didn't have to care anymore. Though I admit, at this point I don't see what can get nonvoting citizens off their asses and out to the polls. Dean Shomshak

Oh, and one of the "On the Media" guests cited research that peaceful protest has a better success rate than violence. I also recall Scientific American ran an article claiming this, a year or two ago. Of course, peaceful protest only works if the government actually cares how it's seen. As Syria and Belarus have shown, peaceful protest doesn't work in states whose rulers consider their population expendable, and don't give a rat's ass who sees their crimes. Dean Shomshak

The Jan. 14, 2022 episode of "On the Media" was devoted to the question of whether the US is heading toward civil war, from a few different viewpoints -- including the accusation that even suggesting the possibility makes it more likely. Or, conversely, that such dire possibilities must be raised in order to forestall them, and the greater danger lies in saying, "No, it can't happen here." https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media Prof. Barbara F. Walters added information on militias as a harbinger of civil war: She clarified that it's specifically militias based on identity -- tribal, ethnic, sectarian -- rather than ideology. Examples include the Catholic and Protestant militias that grew in Northern Ireland before the Troubles: There was a political division, yes, but it was bound to which group would dominate the other. Walters also ascribed equal weight to political parties based on identity... and noted that the current Republican Party is 90% white, and hardly even pretends to try reaching out to other groups. (The final segment, of two historians who've written a book, "The Bright Age," challenging narratives about Europe's Dark Age, was also interesting.) Dean Shomshak Dean Shomshak

Well, Seattle has Kshama Sawant, a City Council member who is (Wikipedia tells me) the only member of the Trotskyite group Socialist Alternative ever to be elected to anything in the US. She advocates nationalizing large companies such as Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, and confiscate the "Millionaire's Row" of fancy old houses in the neighborhood she represents. However, the Capitol Hill neighborhood she represents is *the* most liberal neighborhood in a quite liberal city. In 2020, her neighborhood also saw the CHOP -- Capitol Hill Organized/Occupied Protest -- which the cops and city government briefly abandoned to its own devices. What I heard on local public radio sounded more laughable than menacing -- watch out, the neo-Marxist/anarchist radicals are painting murals and holding drum circles, that racist, patriarchal capitalist tyranny is gonna FALL! At least until a third-string rapper showed up with a few guys with guns and declared himself the "warlord" of the CHOP, and somebody got shot. Then the police swept back in and broke up the whole thing. So much for the revolution. Really, the far right is better off keeping its left-wing bogeymen imaginary. If the CHOP was any evidence, America's real Radical Left can't find its ass with both hands. (And from what I hear, the violence at 2020's BLM/George Floyd protests was deeply suspect. An expert on All Things Considered talked about the FBI's belief in a long-standing "Black Block" of serial rioters who show up at political protests, the way European soccer hooligans show up at games. They aren't political; they just use the protest as cover for their property destruction and general violence.) Dean Shomshak

Also, when I revised Tyrannon I gave his home dimension a toroidal theme. When he broke his homeworld's star into 8 parts and shaped them into spheres, it was to show off how powerful he was, that he could force matter into this crazy, unnatural shape! Dean Shomshak

I am bemused by the apparent assumption some people make that altruism is not praiseworthy unless it is maximal. If someone had a super-power to heal people, using it to help people is a good thing. If they want to do that 16 hours a day, tht is a very good thing. But no one has the right to complain if they don't do it 16 hours a day. While I'm not ready to go full-on Ayn Rand, I am not ready to endorse compulsory altruism. Autonomy matters, too. And moral absolutes are s;lippery slopes to very bad places. Indeed, I think you could design some interesting supervillains around maximal and/or compulsory altruism. Like, somebody who tries enslaving supers to use their powers to help othersw... as he sees fit. Or someone who is willing to go to criminal extremes to magnify their powers, in order to help still more people. "What does [fill in the cost] matter, compared to the thousands more I can save?" Dean Shomshak

This weekend, the New Yorker Radio Hour interviewed political scientist Barbara F. Walters about the prospects for civil war in the US, based on her recent book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/a-new-civil-war-in-america Walters was part of a CIA group that studies civil wars in other countries and the factors that precede them. She was unnerved to find those factors emerging in the US. One important note: Robust democracies don't have civil wars. Robust autocracies don't have civil wars. It's the countries in between thaqt tend to have civil wars. So the de-democratizing of the US is especially worrying. One possibly hopeful note: A major sign of imminent civil war is the appearance of militias, on more than one side. The US has its right-wing militias, but so far we don't see corresponding left-wing militias. (Well, there's Antifa, but it seems very much smaller.) People on the left seem generally not to have lost faith in the regular military and legitimate government. If the far right rebels, we've got insurrection, but the machinery of government has shown how quickly it can bring the hammer down (as, say, after the Oklahoma City bombing). If left-wing militias emerge, or the military and security forces themselves fracture, we've got a much worse civil war. Dean Shomshak

Just heard on All Things Considered: Ukraine expert Alexander Vindman (whom you might remember from Trump's first impeachment) ponders what Russia might attempt in Ukraine, what Putin's goals might be, and what the US and its allies might do to deter this. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/10/1071896624/vindman-discusses-u-s-options-on-russia-ukraine-tensions Dean Shomshak

*Some* Fantasy games follow D&D's lead with a "Zero to Hero" arc. Not all. I will once again cite Exalted, in which Solar Exalted (the default PC type, though the game supports several others each with their own sourcebook) start out quite powerful, and rapidly escalate to world-shaking titanhood. For instance, sorcery operates in three levels. First level has spells like, "Conjure an elemental." Third level has spells like, "Nuke a city." Not that sorcerers get all the goodies. By the time your Twilight Caste sorcerer can nuke cities, your Zenith Caste prophet can sway the entire population to his will through his eloquence, your Night Caste ninja-spy can have murdered the city leadership and be impersonating all of them, your Dawn Caste warrior can cleave through walls or entire armies with equal ease or forge the populace into a super-army, or your Eclipse Caste diplomat has bound the city's patron god to go along with whatever else your group decides to do. In Exalted, PCs can say, "I am no mere god," and it's not boasting. Some of my friends played Fantasy HERO games they described as "Fantasy Champions," which approached this level. One of my players, though, prefers D&D to HERO precisely because D&D has the Zero to Hero power curve. And sure, you could rig a HERO game so characters gained power fairly quickly, but it doesn't seem to be the default assumption. Dean Shomshak

For the "older woman" type of witch, just a proper name preceded by Mother, Granny, etc. is traditional. Allegedly RL Mother Shipton, folklorfe Mother Gothel, fictional Granny Weatherwax, etc. The name of Baba Yaga, from Russian fairy tales, simply means "Little Grandmother." Scottish legend has Allison Gross, which suggests another style: just an ordinary name with a hint of Dickensian grotesquery. ("Allison Gross/She must be/The ugliest witch/In the North Country...") Dean Shomshak

You get the dry understatement award. ("Like," "Thanks," and "Sad" being all not-quite-right as responses.) Dean Shomshak

White Wolf game company's house organ, White Wolf Magazine, once ran a spoof ad for "Gilligangrel's Island," identifying the cast with the seven original vampire clans from Vampire: the Masquerade. The Skipper was Brujah (a clan whose members have anger management issues), Mr. Howell as Ventrue (the old money, aristocratic vampires), Ginger as the Toreador (the "beautiful" vampires), etc. Also on the spoof TV schedule: Arkham 90210, a teen soap version of the Cthulhu Mythos. Dean Shomshak

All Things Considered reports that the JWST's sunshield finished unfolding today. A project spokesperson praised the completion of this vital step in deploying the JWST, which he described as "The coolest thing in space." The sunshield is, of course, there to keep the spaceship at the necessarty low temperature to see in infrared. Is this NASA's version of a dad joke? Dean Shomshak

The Professor! (orange juice) Dean Shomshak

Think the unthinkable before your enemies do. It's your only hope to forestall them. I don't see how, in this case, but other people are smarter than me. I just hope some of those smarter people are in the Biden administration and in Congress. Dean ShomshK

The Constitution guarantees the right to vote. It does not guaranteed that votes matter. I actually find a rather charming naivete in Republican attempts to "fix" the 2024 election. They don't realize how easy it is. With their atempts to block voters (other than their own), rig the counting, and overturn results "in case of fraud," they are still trying to preserve an illusion of democracy. And they don't need to! Article II says that state legislatures choose the manner of appointing electors; and it and Amendment XII go into some detail about the rigmarole of the electors' voting. Nowhere is the voting public mentioned. There would thus seem to be no Constitutional impediment to a state legislature arrogating to itself the power to appoint electors directly, without need for any votes cast by the public. (The public already voted, in a sense, by electing the legislature, right?) Or even just say, "The electoral votes go to the Republican candidate." Any sane court would overturn such laws in a heartbeat, saying that the right to vote implies that the votes matter. But a strict constructionist could argue that unless the Constitution specifically enjoins or forbids something, government can do whatever it wants. And a sufficiently partisan court can say the Constitution means anything at all. Dean Shomshak