DShomshak
-
Posts
3,255 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
27
Content Type
Profiles
News
Store
Forums
Downloads
Events
Posts posted by DShomshak
-
-
4 hours ago, tkdguy said:
"Have a Snickers bar, Rep. Foxx."
Dean Shomshak
-
10 hours ago, Rich McGee said:
I thought the Visitors were here to eat us, not steal our water. We were supposed to be livestock, weren't we?
It's been quite a while, so I checked Wikipedia.
QuoteA resistance movement is formed, determined to expose and oppose the Visitors. The Los Angeles cell leader is Julie Parrish, a biologist. Donovan later joins the group, and again sneaking aboard a mothership in search of Tony, who was captured, he learns from a Visitor named Martin that the story about the Visitors needing waste chemicals is a cover for a darker mission. The true purpose of the Visitors' arrival on Earth was to conquer and subdue the planet, steal all of the Earth's water, and harvest the human race as food, leaving only a few as slaves and cannon fodder for the Visitors' wars with other alien races.
Steal water, eat us, and use us as slave soldiers -- a trifecta of idiocy! And all on Arthur's list. Well, maybe he thought it was so bad that nobody would remember it... or he suppressed the memory as too traumatic. Hey, I hadn't thought of this excrementitious piece of sci-fi in decades.
Dean Shomshak
-
Isaac Arther devotes an episode to "Dumbest Alien Invasions," on why the standard excuses for heroic Earthlings battling nasty conquering aliens don't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. (I'm surprised that in the "Steal Our Water" segment he doesn't mention V. Ye gods, more than one writer thought this made sense?)
I enjoyed the running joke of how the rules of warfare are numbered.
(Incidentally, some earlier episodes explain Mr Arthur's voice. It's a speech impediment, not an accent. As he says once in onscreen text, if you've never heard of rhotacism -- difficulty pronouncing the letter R -- it's because people who have it can't say it.)
Dean Shomshak
-
IIRC somebody said they'd like to see one of the Great Beast's experimental victims. Yesterday I wrote one up. I think it's best treated as a monster rather than a character, since it's so badly damaged in mind and body. Here's the physical description:
QuoteThe Grue’s form remains humanoid, in that it has two legs, a torso, and a head; but it has a spare left arm, and stout tentacles sometimes erupt from its body or withdraw with a slurp. The Grue has no skin, only muscles and tendons sliding under glistening slime. Sometimes its limbs stretch four times longer as flailing lengths of sinew and bone. Massive claws adorn its hands and feet, while its misshapen head stretches into a maw full of fangs as well as the oversized ears and nostrils of a bat. If only it had eyes.
Just an update to show that work continues.
Dean Shomshak
-
https://www.npr.org/programs/all-things-considered/
Analysis rather than news, but I had not heard before that Trump's legal team wants his D. C. trial televised. As observed, Trump is a creature of Reality TV and no doubt expects this would be a great way to play to his base; the legal outcome would be irrelevant.
But oops, Federal codes prohibit televising Federal trials. That isn't stopping major media outlets from pleading to televise the trial. It's so important! To, um, the voters, yeah, the voters need to see this. Perhaps I am cynical for thinking their real interest is more interest in viewership and ad revenues than civic service.
Dean Shomshak
-
As I've posted before: At least according to one scholar I've read, Fundamentalists/Evangelicals have a somewhat peculiar way of reading the Bible. Fundamentalism was born from reaction against the social and intellectual changes of the 19th century. Part of that reaction was to insist that the Bible was self-evidently true -- that you didn't need to spend years studying a complex text, comparing passages, parsing out meanings and considering historical contexts. Just zip through and the Truth would be irresistibly revealed... if you had the Holy Spirit in your heart. Which meant that if two people read the Bible and derived different messages and meanings, at least one did not have the Holy Spirit and was instead deceived by the Devil. One result being that deriving doctrine from the Bible became an exercise in political skill and charisma in which the text itself is no longer that important.
So this person claimed, anyway. I'm afraid I don't remember the author's name as this was a case of Things Found While Looking Up Other Things, and not my primary interest at the time. (IIRC I was researching Gnosticism and, yeah, this approach to the Bible is rather Gnostic -- a mystical revelation that cannot be captured and explained by reason.)
Dean Shomshak
-
4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:
The magnitude of bare-faced hypocrisy and condescension toward the intelligence of the American public in that statement leaves me absolutely sickened.
As I have said before, there can be no hypocrisy if one's only principle is power.
Okay, that's not fair. As a report on today's All Things Considered discusses, Mr. Johnson does have principles, in that he is a group with explicitly totalitarian goals that can only be achieved through the acquisition of absolute power. Say hello (again) to Dominion Theology:
Dean Shomshak
-
And allege insults to your country's "dignity" to distract people from your government's brutality, corruption and incompetence at providing basic services. All the years of crisis and shortage the presenter mentions? All the result of Maduro's own policies.
Dean Shomshak
-
21 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:
The trick is to remember that area effect applies the same effect to the entire area, so you don't have to move all of the water, just however much 2 cubic meters of water weighs (2000 kg, I believe). That's a pretty hefty telekinesis still (around 32 STR) and you just apply it to an area effect line of the chosen size. Each and every 2m area in that line has 32 STR applied to it to push it to the side and hold it there.
Every cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kg, so a 2m x 2m x 2m cube (the base volume for AoE (Any Area) is 8000 kg, which requires 42 STR.
However, the 6e text of Telekinesis seems to forbid applying that STR per unit volume of a larger AoE. Page 296:
QuoteArea Of Effect: If a character has Area Of Effect Telekinesis, generally you should calculate the amount he can lift over the overall area. For example, if a character with Telekinesis (60 STR), Area Of Effect (18m Radius) tries to telekinetically scoop up some sand, the weight of sand he picks up depends on his telekinetic STR -- he picks up 100 tons of sand, not 100 tons per 100 tons per 1m radius or what have you -- and the sand comes more or less equally from all the affected are.
CC leaves out that text, but once again I am hesitant to consider that a "rule change" that tacitly endorses mass per area rather than mass distributed over an area.
It may be moot. 42 STR per 2m cube doesn't allow a very large Area Of Effect Advantage. I actually get a larger volume of water just using 67 STR TK.
EDIT: If the calculation is per cubic meter instead of per 2m cube (27 STR TK, or 40 base points) I get +1 1/2 Advantage. Uisng Any Area but Fixed Shape, I can have a passage through the water that's 2m wide, 4m tall (give some head room) and 64 m long. 208 feet is a little more impressive, though it's still not enough to let Brother Bone open a passage across, say, the Hudson River.
Dean Shomshak
-
22 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:
For the red sea style thing, I might be inclined to use tunnelling where the "tunnel" remains intact. If the radius of the tunnel is enough, you get to the surface, or you might give the headroom for free.
Depends on what additional use you think the character might make of having a u-pipe rather than a pipe.
Hm. 5th and 6th editions explicitly say that Tunneling does not work through air or liquids.: it "only works on solid substances, such as soil." CC, with its abbreviated descriptions, does not include that specification. But I'm leery of taking that as a "rules change."
Sigh. A disadvantage of knowing multiple iterations of the system. (Or a Complication, if you prefer.
)
Dean Shomshak
-
Checking the nvironmental Conditions Table (p. 379 od 5e, which is what I have handy at the moment), being in water results in -2 DC and, if underwater, -2 DC to all attacks unless you wear SCUBA gear or make a suitable (undefined here) Skill Roll. You're also holding your breath or drowning. Change Environment is sufficiently broad to cover that, I think -- though Doc persuades me Barrier could work in 6th/CC.
Currently I'm puzzling over the reverse of this: opening a gap in a body of water, a la Moses parting the Red Sea. Telekinesis to force the water apart is the simplest, but water is so heavy that even spending 100 points (the limit here -- the Power is a Multipower slot) only moves a fairly unimpressive volume of water. Say, 67 STR TK moves 270 tons of water, which could correspond to a passage 2 meters wide, 3 meters high, and 45 meters long, which is only twice the length of my house. Not very impressive, considering what else one can do with 100 Active Points.
I've thought of Change Environment, which can sometimes be allowed to *remove* the same penalties it creates. In this case, a CE to counter the -2 DCV penalty, the -2 DC penalty (stretching things here, guessing that a 5-point CE effect such as TK STR or points of damage will work for countering 5-point DCs), and the damage of drowning (same, and perhaps stretching things even more). CE can also be MegaScaled. But a nitpicker might say that such a CE wouldn't force one to walk instead of swim. I am not a nitpicker for my own games, but this is to update Brother Bone (from Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies) for new publication. I would prefer not to handwave such details.
But Doc D makes me wonder if Barrier could do the job: create a Barrier that *only blocks passage of water* and is fully permeable to everything else. Reading through Barrier, I'm... not sure this can work. The best I might be able to do is a Barrier that expands outward in the shape of a rectangular tube to push aside the water, leaving an air gap in which people may walk but cannot swim. Even this feels kind of handwavy, though.
Does anyone have any better ideas?
Dean Shomshak
-
Noted, Duke. I'm sure we'll all miss the good sense you occasionally slip into your long, wandering anecdotes!
(Actually, I do find them interesting.)
Dean Shomshak
-
10 hours ago, unclevlad said:
b) 112 voted no...as did 2 Democrats. Yeah, OK, the Freedom Caucus folks looked to be in there, but that's a lot more than just them.
The ATC story said two representatives voted "Present," rather than yea or nay, but didn't specify whether than yea or nay, but I didn't catch if the report specified they were Democrats. I could look it up, I suppose, but I'm busy with other things. I'm not sure how to interpret "Present."
Dean Shomshak
3 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:H his empire of houses of cards is bleeding money to death,
Ow, ow, mixed metaphors!
Dean Shomshak
-
A remarkable system of exoplanets:
‘Shocked and delighted': Astronomers find six planets orbiting in resonance (msn.com)
(The BBC story was cringe-inducing. The presenter interviewing the scientist kept calling it a "universe" instead of a "solar system." Aargh!)
Dean Shomshak
I was reading about making pharmaceuticals in space back in the 1980s, in books like Stine's The Space Enterprise. Now it's happening for real.
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/11/29/low-earth-orbit-open-for-business-varda-space-industries/
Dean Shopmshak
- tkdguy, Scott Ruggels and L. Marcus
-
2
-
1
-
One of the last story arcs in Kurt Busiek's Astro City was the saga of G-Dog, a hero who was a man mystically merged with his pet corgi. In one of those one-panel toss-offs Busiek does so well, at one point G-Dog led a team of super-powered animals... one of which, a cat with Desolidification IIRC, had appeared in an earlier story as the pet of two superheroines -- who didn't know their kitty had powers and was assisting them.
Dean Shomshak
-
Oh, hey, and how could we forget Zelazny's Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness? In the former, another case of humans posing as gods using advanced technology and possibly artificial psionics. (It's been a while since I read it, but I remember one of the quasi-Hindu god-men saying that the new Agni [fire god] still has to use a flamethrower.) Plus demons who are actually the conquered energy-being indigenous inhabitants of the planet in question. Lord of Light was a big inspiration to me in designing the rival psionic aristocracies of planet Sard, mentioned upthread.
Creatures of Light and Darkness is harder to gauge. Some of the characters might be god-men enhanced/ascended through indistinguishable-from-magic technology. The Steel General is called out as once having been mortal. (And likewise his steed, which was once a horse.) But others...? They may, indeed, be gods.
Dean Shomshak
-
For instance, the psionic aristocracy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" series objectively has power that other Darkovans lack, which they maintain and strengthen through selective breeding. (With, in the planet's past, catastrophic results when the powers became too strong.) Though the distinction is not as clear-cut as the aristocrats like to believe: The lords and ladies of the Seven Domains are still all too human, which means there are by-blows and their further descendants -- an important plot point in at least one of the novels.
The psionic technology of Darkover also resulted in at least one relic from that catastrophic past that could evoke the psionic construct of a god that was worshiped by one of the planet's subcultures. An extremely dangerous divine/psionic construct, especially when being evoked by a group of people with, IIRC, pretty serious hang-ups of their own.
Dean Shomshak
-
To the roster of god-emperors I'll ad Ptath, god-emperor of a far-future Earth(?) in A. E. Van Vogt's Book of Ptath.
We've discussed before the tendency of alleged future SF settings to emulate past forms such as empires with feudal nobility. I don't find this implausible. Humans had monarchies and empires, including god-emperors, a lot longer than we've had liberal democratic republics. If one does *not* assume an irreversible force of social progress, it seems plausible that the social forms that were most common in the past would be more likely in the future, too. Just regression to the mean.
(Though by that argument, the overwhelming majority of future societies should be hunter-gatherer bands. OK, I'll grant a compelling force of technology that might limit high-tech future societies to forms that developed post-agriculture, with larger and denser populations.)
God-emperors especially. Humans invented god-emperors at the dawn of recorded history, and they never went out of style. See Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and other recent despots to whom people ascribed more-than-human status. Something in humans wants to grovel in awe before an incarnate god. We will continue to see god-emperors as long as humans stay human.
Dean Shomshak
-
I would be very surprised if any comics creator follows fora for obscure roleplaying games. We may amuse ourselves, but I estimate the chance of affecting any existing title is approximately zero.
As for PCs having pets, in my Avant Guard campaign the hero Huntsman can summon a demon horse named Brimstone that carries him through the air. Written up as a Power, Huntsman is sure it's just a construct of magical energy... but wow, Brimstone, sure manages to look smug when women coo over him, pet him and try to feed him. Maybe Huntsman is projecting.
Dean Shomshak
- Rich McGee and Lord Liaden
-
2
-
2 hours ago, unclevlad said:
You are. Not for staying at home; only a masochist bucks those early Black Friday crowds nowadays. Or those wanting to save money on Christmas lights, wrapping, etc. Last time I went out, those were all on big markdown.
We stopped buying wrapping paper decades ago. We still have at least a half-dozen rolls. Maybe we'll start on them when we run out of wrapping paper re-used from past years. I figure our stock should last up to my neices' grandchildren.
We have all the lights we need, too. I still put up the string of lights around the door that my parents bought for their fist Christmas, at least 70 years ago. Most of the sockets still work.
Ornaments? HAHAHAHAHA. In addition to glass balls, strings of beads, little plastic musical instruments, and other ornaments that are older than I am, we have Christmas balls I made decades ago with Styrofoam balls covered in colorful fabric or silky thread, ribbon, beads and jewelry findings, and all the ornaments my mother received as presents when she taught preschool. We have enough for at least 3 trees.
We suck as consumers. But tradition? We've got tradition in spades.
Dean Shomshak
-
-
23 minutes in, Arthur mentions filled-in mineshafts as giveaways of pre-human civilizations. Others too, which would require fairly baroque scenarios to remove from geological evidence.
I too thought of banded iron deposits; also fossil fuels, which we are ripping through at a tremendous rate and which are not replenished at all quickly -- or at all, since Earth is unlikely to see another Carboniferous Period. A pre-human civilization that maintained comparable-to-current technology for very long should have used them up. Except... Earth's surface has seen an awful lot of erosion and deposition. It might be interesting to ask a geologist how accessible the Minnesota banded iron deposits were 50 or 100 million years ago. Or conversely, an estimate of banded iron deposits that could have been accessible long ago but were eroded away and lost. Or on the third hand, there might be deposits that are now deeply buried, but that might be easier to mine in another 50 million years (thought this total reserve must inevitably go down over time).
IIRC the recent NOVA series "Ancient Earth" mentioned that eroded coal deposits put a lot of carbon into sea ooze, which eventually got cooked into petroleum. The coal fields under the Soberian Traps also got cooked away by thoat series of massive eruptions, helping to bring about the Great Dying. So there might be major coal deposits that were accessible once and whose fate is now impossible to guess. Again, I think one would need to ask a geologist.
As Arthur says, it's still all a bit contrived. But a clever writer might be able to manage an illusion of plausibility.
(When I ran my Planetary Romance campaign, I went the other direction and made the extinct aliens of 40 Eridani impossible to miss. Not only did their towering cities of age-defying crystal still standing, needing only new plumbing and wiring for humans to inhabit, they knew they were doomed by a companion star's transition from red giant to white dwarf and left records of their culture in vaults filled with neon for preservation, surrounded by huge bullseyes of concrete salted with long-lived radioisotopes as "Dig Here" signs that could last a billion years, in case their attempts at submarine and subterranean cities failed. They were people who knew how to rage against the dying of the light. But humans also found a planet so mined-out that heavy industry could not flourish, which is why so many people still ride around on domesticated animals, use sailing ships, and fight with glass swords instead of heavy artillery...)
Dean Shomshak
-
The only case where I ported a character directly from other media into my Champions game was in my early "Seattle Sentinels" campaigns, in which the heroes' police xcontact was a captain named Dietrich. He was Lieutenant Dietrich from Barney Miller, promoted and moved to the other side of the country. At least, that's how I played him.
While I've read lots of comic books (mostly Bronze Age; the Iron Age '90s eventually bored me into quitting everything but Astro City), I have never ported characters directly from a comic book into my game, or copied a plot from anywhere. Types and tropes, yes, but I have tried to learn from rather than copy.
Like, my dimensional conqueror Skarn the Shaper happened because I knew my Dr. Strange-inspired "Keystone Konjurors" campaign needed a Big Bad filling the same role as the Dread Dormammu -- but I gave Skarn quite a different origin and personality. His home, the Congeries, is very much a "Dark Dimension" homage, though.
Also, I pulled various demons and other creatures from mythology and occult lore, but translating them into something gameable usually takes a fair bit of, shall we say, creative re-interpretation or extending of source material.
My vampires show a fair bit of resemblance to those in Vampire: the Masquerade, but that's fair because VtM draws a wide net through vampire pop culture. No background mythology about Caine (the Bible guy but spelled with a final E to be more pretentious), Antediluvians, the Great Jyhad, blah blah blah. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and found it didn't fit.
Dean Shomshak
- Hermit and Rich McGee
-
2
-
Another library turned up in my newsfeed: Oxford's Bodleian Library. The slide show even notes it as a "Dark Academia" setting, and that its shelves have appeared in various Fantasy and superhero movies.
Inside Europe’s oldest library with 13 million books and bizarre membership rules (msn.com)
Dean Shomshak
)
Create a Villain Theme Team!
in Champions
Posted
Kudos for postulating a Mastermind Villain who might be Chinese (though not necessarily), and not having "Dragon" referred to anywhere.
Dean Shomshak