DShomshak

Star Trek: Lower Decks, Season Two. Still funny, still managing more story and character in 22 minutes than most ST series manage in 45, Still remembering bits from TOS, TNG and other series that were well worth seeing again, and still poking fun at Star Trek tropes that were done just a few times too often. Also, this show managed to tell more about Billips' home planet in one episode than TNG told about Betazed in seven seasons. That's writing. And I really, really want to see more of that planet and the skills Billips has because of that past. Best scene, IMO, was Boimler and Rutherford defeating the Ferengi poachers through... the Power of Math! Boimler pwning the megalomaniac computer came a close second, though. He may be naive and inexperienced in some ways, but behind the humor he's growing into a pretty darn good officer. In fact, all the recurring characters are people I would like and respect IRL, which is quite an achievement for any show. Dean Shomshak

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/29/1222539335/banned-books-high-school A secret collection of banned books for students. In Texas, no surprise, though I expect it could be needed in at least a dozen other states. At least it shows that books still matter. Dean Shomshak

Well, no surprise that in 240 years a litigious people should have already considered the constitutionality of secession... The problems of state-by-state dissolution of the Union are well described, but I think there's something to be said for limited forms of 'soft secession.' My favorite scheme would let individual counties declare themselves quasi-states on the South African "homeland" model -- nominal sovereignty while having no control over their defense or economy. These "Albistans" could be legally Straight White Christian only, since so much of MAGA grievance seems to be loss of acknowledged racial, sectarian and cultural hegemony. They can also do without those nanny-state features that offend their peoples' sense of heroic self-reliance, and the rest of us don't have to feel guilty if this results in starvation or plague. Corporations can also exploit them for non-union labor, if that's how the albistanis roll. (But be careful to draw up the charters of quasi-secession so companies can't use them as tax havens.) Most importantly, Albistanis lose any right to vote in national elections, leaving the rest of the US to chart a more progressive path. Failing that, the easiest way to unzip the USA is through sale of territory to other countries. The US grew by buying tracts from other countries; it can shrink the same way. If Trump wins the Presidency again, it might be a good idea for urban governments to petition to be bought by, say, Canada. Trump might love to be the broker of "THE GREATEST REAL ESTATE DEAL IN HISTORY!!!!!" while bidding farewell to most of the people who voted against him. The rural, rump Unites States of Real America can then hold a constitutional convention to make him President for Life, or Emperor, or whatever. The USRA would lose maybe half its population and more than half its economy, but at least the righteous Real Americans would be rid of people like me. We'd be Canadian, and I for one would be glad of it. As for blather of civil war: It doesn't seem impossible to me, but what's so mind-blowing is the lack of substantive issues on the MAGA side. Slavery gave the Confederate States abundant grounds for secession: It wasn't just a "peculiar institution," like, I don't know, Austtralians and Vegemite. It was integral to their economy and the wealth of its ruling class. Rational, in a deeply unpleasant way. But studies show MAGA isn't suffering economically (though many of them think they should be wealthier). They aren't being robbed to support the elites; rather, the liberal and urbanized states are subsidizing conservative and rural. Nobody is forcing MAGA to worship in particular ways; merely that they can't force their faith on others. The Constitution's setup means they are in no danger of being steamrollered politically. The grievances seem to be all cultural: the rest of us no longer accept their dominance. If it happens, it'll be a Seinfeld civil war, fought about nothing. Dean Shomshak

That sounds hella cool. Dean Shomshak

Well, the PCs in my urban D&D campaign encountered a magic sword with a will of its own, though it did not talk. Thousands of years old, forged by Elves for one of their ancient wars against Orcs, still devoted to the cause. Only, oops, Elves and Orcs are now equal citizens of the Plenary Empire (as are all sapient beings who are capable of obeying its laws). When the sword woke from centuries of sleep to find itself in a city with an orc minority, it overpowered the will of its owner and began a campaign of assassination intended to spark a race war. The PCs dealt with the situation and freed the wielder from the sword's control. They have been assured by the Powers That Be that the powerful sword has been destroyed. Dean Shomshak

Speaking of which, may I recommend the movie Nomad: the Warrior? Made in Kazakhstan, and skip the "Borat" jokes, it's a crackerjack Fantasy epic. With no magic as such, but there's prophecy, destiny, and battles both glorious and terrible. And never since the glory days of Hollywood westers, and maybe not even then, has a camera so loved horses.

I believe it's The Gate of Worlds by Robert Silverberg. (I also read it years back.) But the Wikipedia article lists several other novels using similar conceits. The Gate of Worlds - Wikipedia Dean Shomshak

I can only guess at the reasoning behind such design, but I'll try. One thing you sometimes see in comics is the giga-villain who fights multiple teams of heroes at once. They come at him in waves, he bats them back, the next wave piles on and gets scattered in turn, etc. This is tricky to do in Champions, because a single team of, say, 5 heroes can dish out an awful lot of STUN in a Turn. Even giving the giga-villain high defenses and lots of Damage Reduction might not be enough -- and yet you still want it to mean something if a hero manages a Pushed, Haymakered, Called Shot to the head. So it's not a good idea to push the villain's defenses too impossibly high. Ditto DCV. It's a boring adventure if the fight consists of whiff after whiff because nobody can hit Big Bad with any roll over a 5. Okay, so players might be able to devise a clever use of Powers to reduce Big Bad's DCV, but when you publish Big Bad you don't know who the PCs will be. Or you use the STUN rules. Give Big Bad such overpowered attacks that any hero he hits is Knocked Out, or at least Stunned. That way, you don't have a dozen or more heroes launching 5+ attacks per Turn. You have the few who are conscious at any given moment, not all of whom will hit, while the others regain consciousness and take Recoveries. So that's my guess. I still think it sucks. I think it's based on a comic-book trope that just doesn't translate to the gaming table. Don't have a fight with large numbers of NPC heroes. (Or if you do, have them engage in a separate fight off in the distance, which you as GM merely allude to now and then. No dice rolls, good God.) Though as LL recounts -- some campaigns have run so long the PCs *can* fight even the most apparently overpowered published villains and win handily. That's why 6e versions include notes on adjusting character power up and down... one of few 6e innovations of which I approve. Dean Shomshak

I have two volumes of Hite's columns, called Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast and Suppressed Transmission: The Second Broadcast. I suppose I should see if further collections were published. Well, yes, the key to a good investigative scenario is that the players can be rewarded for thinking, but don't actually need to do so. It's a good idea to have something ready if the player *does* make a great Deduction roll. It lets you skip the step where the NPC posts the snarky comment that, "I don't see Jesus. I see a road map to Eveleth, Minnesota. And I should know because I live nearby in Hibbing." Then add another Fortean event or two. As GM, you have also primed the pump by describing how Fortean events, both loud and subtle, followed Dr. Macabre -- and that the heroes he fought used this to track him. It's still possible that the players won't trust you to supply clues to the Janus Key even though they said they wanted an adventure built around searching for the Janus Key. Or, yeah, that they won't realize you are trying to give them what they asked for. Then you'd probably go to your Plan B. Maybe go big and have Eveleth suddenly be replaced by a swath of long-devastated land patrolled by Martian war tripods. See, the new owner's latest experiment replaced the town with a section from an alternate history where the Martians won the War of the Worlds. (In the CU, it was the Orson Wells version that really happened, and the "Martians" were actually Sirians, but whatever.) As always, know your players. But at least try to give them a chance to feel smart. Dean Shomshak

Someone in my family checked out the first P. D. Q. Bach record from the library when I was young, and I was hooked. Seeing Schickele/P. D. Q. Bach in concert in Seattle was a high point for my 1980s. It featured the 'Unbegun' symphony and a fall of sheet music onto the stage. I hadn't known Schickele was still alive. Dean Shomshak

Mystic "echoes" of the Janus Key being used? How about Fortean events? As the Key's wielder warps reality, unintended alterations also happen. Back in the day, PCs would have needed to read the Weekly World News for sightings of Elvis (or Batboy), rains of toads, images of Jesus appearing in tortillas, and the like. Nowadays I assume there are websites for this stuff. Oh, hey. Let's work more with Tortilla Jesus. There are lots of lines going hither and thither in the taco, and okay, a person with a vivid imagination could imagine some of them as forming a vaguely human outline. But someone who makes a really good Deduction roll (or applies computer analysis) finds the lines form a map. The tortilla isn't showing Jesus, it's showing the roads and rivers around Eveleth, Minnesota. What's significant about Eveleth, Minnesota? Well, the PCs don't know until they go there. But it's a breadcrumb along the trail to the Janus Key. Or at least on the trail to something the Janus Key wants done. Maybe the PCs encounter other people who are follow their own similarly obscure investigative trails. Maybe they're just nuts, engaging in a more abstract form of pareidolia; maybe it's connected to the Janus Key; or maybe the world genuinely is far stranger than the PCs imagined. Dean Shomshak

And try to establish a precedent for punishing the nonconforming. Or at least virtue-signal your eagerness to punish the nonconforming. Dean Shomshak

One of Kenneth Hite's excellent "Suppressed Transmissions" columns, "Justinian and Arthur: Historical High Fantasy," described a campaign based on bringing these two together, with Justinian as Evil Overlord. Dead tree publication in Suppressed Transmission: the First Broadcast. Dean Shomshak

For many years, my sister and her family celebrated "theme Christmas" -- Polish Christmas, Scandinavian Christmas, South African Christmas, etc. ONe year they did Saturnalia, then Roman precursor to Christmas and found that... a lot got ported over. Including one subtle cultural attitude: that it used to be better, especially before it got so commercial and people forgot the True Meaning of Saturnalia. Our long-established holidays such as Christmas, Tet, or Eid might continue far into the future and on other worlds, even after original contexts are gone and forgotten. I hear Thanksgiving has spread beyond the US. That seems like a good candidate for long-term survival. "Yearly fest to gather with family and be glad for what you have" seems pretty basic and easily ported to future circumstances and other cultures. Dean Shomshak

That's what I assumed in my Ultimate Supermage playtest campaigns, which began before there was any official word on things like Resistant Mental Defense. And since exotic-defense Killing damage can only exist by creating an NND/AVAD, the only reasons to postulate Resistant versions of those defenses are a) to create such an arms race, or b) an obsession with pattern that demands that because PD and ED exist in normal and resistant forms, *all* defenses must exist in normal and resistant forms. I do not consider maintaining a consistent pattern to be a crucial consideration for game design. (OK, Mental Illusions can deal Killing Damage, but the rules for this are idiosyncratic. You defend by having enough Mental Defense to keep the final effect below the +20 threshold. If you don't have that, whether your pitiful insufficient Mental Defense is Double Hardened Impenetrable Resistant or not doesn't matter.) Dean Shomshak

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season One came in at the library. Smarter and funnier than it has any right to be, and some of the best Trek I've seen since Next Gen and DS(. The people who make this aren't just Star Trek fans: They are perceptive Star Trek fans, who aren't afraid to poke fun at the tropes while still loving them. And occasionally calling out places where the franchise genuinely has fallen down, or at least where attitudes have, one hopes, evolved -- such as treating all members of a particular alien species as one-note stereotypes. I look forward to Season Two, on hold at my library. Dean Shomshak

Speaking of ring-shaped structures in space, yesterday's NPR science roundup included a story about Odd Radio Circles (ORCs) found around a few galaxies. There may be an explanation. (Topic begins about 6 minutes into story.) Hint: It involves GREAT BIG EXPLOSIONS. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/12/1198909135/radio-circles-coming-from-the-centers-of-galaxies?ft=nprml&f=1007 dEAN sHOMSHAK

Oh for sure, Seal Team 6 would never obey such an order. But Trump could find people who would. Trump has done and gotten away with (so far) enough things that we thought nobody could or would try that I don't think this hypothetical can be dismissed as pure hysteria. The core issue, I think, is that when presented with such an absurd extension of his argument, Trump's lawyer didn't immediately reply, "No that's ridiculous, it could never happen, the President would be in jail so fast it'd make your head spin." His response at the time seemed to be. "...Maybe?" It can happen here. Dean Shomshak

HERO is so good at representing everything and anything in mechanical terms that I think it's easy to slide into thinking that everything *must* have a mechanical representation, paid for with points on a character sheet. I can unfortunately imagine an exchange something like this: Rubber Band Man's Player: "The Sun Stone could be a source of limitless energy! I need to get it back to my lab to study." GM: "How do you plan on moving it? Like the name says, it's as hot as the surface of the Sun. It isn 't burning anything right now because it's magnetically levitated. If you take it out of the starship engine, it won't be." I'm On Fire Guy's Player: "My costume doesn't burn up when use my Damage Shield, so let's make a bag from my costume. We can carry it that way." GM: <fixes glittering eye on player> "Oh? And did you spend points on your costume being fireproof all the time? If it's not on the character sheet, it doesn't exist." Now, I think The GM is being a jerk. Players should be rewarded for clever use of resources and capabilities. Sketchpad found the phrase I was looking for before: Using the costume this way is a *power stunt,* which is a thing in HERO but mentioned so briefly that it's easy to forget about it. And even that's been "mechanic-ized" by adding the Power skill, with rules for your chance to fail depending on the Active Points of the stunt effect. (One way, and not the only one, in which I think earlier editions were better *because* they were looser.) Dean Shomshak

I'm sorry if I became snarky; I was rewriting my post while you responded. In most cases, yeah, being immune to a character's own Powers is just handwavium. The comics often seem to be fine with that; I am fine with that; many other people seem to be fine with that. One can say "Unstable Molecules," or "Magic," or just dramatic license. May I suggest your question about unstable molecules was perhaps unclear. Would a more precise question be, "How (if at all) do you write up a costume being immune to a character's own Powers? Assuming circumstances in which this goes beyond the mere fact that the costume isn't instantly destroyed by Powers that, in the real world, would destroy ordinary cloth." If I work at it, I'm sure I can think of situations where, say, the Human Torch's non-burning costume could be used for purposes other than not leaving Johnny Storm buck-naked when he turns off his flame aura. Under those circumstances, a GM might want to specify what can and can't be done with a costume when the character isn't wearing it -- even if one isn't charging Character Points for it. (Or it's a campaign where characters are not limited to arbitrary point totals.) Am I getting closer? Dean Shomshak

Re-read post. Emphasis added. If a costume has confers Resistant Defense and can change color or shape, those are additional Powers that can be written up normally. (Though I agree to the extent that I don't recall many, if any, costumes being literally indestructible. Just, hm, "minimally destructible.". Rips or bullet holes when dramatic, but not shredded when someone super-sneezes. Dean Shomshak

Reading the article, I'll say that Ashcroft almost has a point in saying that Democratic efforts to keep Trump off the ballot invite Republican attempts to do the same to Biden, and that a determined person can find (or invent) insurrection to justify the attempt. He is quite correct in that it can result in electoral chaos. He and the Texas lt. gov. are wrong in claiming migrants at the southern border as their grounds for attacking Biden, because the Biden administration seems to be following the law as best it can. It's just that the laws don't accommodate conservatives' cultural and racial paranoia very well. Which is why Ashcroft only almost has a point. But such legal nicety is irrelevant when one is motivated by white-hot cultural grievance. Dean Shomshak

Indeed. A costume is a Focus, even if it's only Power is the 0-point one that you avoid indecent exposure, and whether Foci are breakable or unbreakable does not affect the point cost. Dean Shomshak

A good, focused one from Isaac Arthur this week. He's mentioned statites in passing in several episodes. This time he describes them (and variations) in depth, and why they could be a foundational space technology. (I'm particularly reminded of the solar mirror that helps warm the planet Komarr in Bujold's "Vorkosigan" series. Turns out, it could be a considerably more sophisticated piece of technology... and not nearly as expensive as presented. Komarr alone could probably build as many of these mirrors as they wanted.) Dean Shomshak

Time for another small update. The Monad will receive additional robots, including humans it wired into obedient "hubots" because who doesn't love a cybermen/borg homage? And speaking of Doctor Who villains, dedicated fans of the series might recognize the source of the title for this Story Seed for servobots. Beware even the least of the Monad's robots! Dean Shomshak