DShomshak

I didn't watch the State of the Union. But I was sent this lovely synopsis. 
 
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2023/02/08/state-union-biden-deflects-republican-heckling-sarah-huckabee-sanders/11202538002/ 

I watched it. Okay speech, I thought.
 
Before I turned off the post-speech commentary and analysis, I heard one pundit note that Biden mostly talked about small, practical, "kitchen table" issues rather than big "culture war" issues. But isn't that the real cultural divide in politrics? Is government about administration to achieve practical goals, or is it an ideological struggle to enforce granscendent visions of culture?
 
Dean Shomshak

It was well within the upper limits of what is internationally recognized as a country's airspace...and well below what anyone has ever considered to be outer space.
 
You're not allowed to violate other country's airspace without express permission (barring a declared emergency of a manned craft). The choice on whether to shoot down the offending craft or not is at the discretion of the country whose airspace is being violated. From the Chicago Convention of 1944 that forms the treaty forming the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It's Article 1 states “The contracting States recognize that every State has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory.” Both China and the US, along with almost all other nations, are part of that treaty.
 
The balloon was bopping along between 60,000 to 90,000 feet, which is well inside the ICAO agreement.
 
To be an illegal target, the balloon would have had to be in outer space and be qualified for coverage under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which allows for free passage there for any country.
 
Outer space is generally considered to start at 100 kilometers, which is 328,000 feet.
 
No matter how generous anyone would want to be to the Chinese side in the matter, the balloon wasn't traveling anywhere close to outer space.
 

The Champions product I first think of here is Aaron Allston's Strike Force. The extended family called "the Blood" are exactly this: Super-powers run in the family. Some members are heroes, some are villains, some just living their lives. (They also appeared in the very early supplement The Blood and Dr. McQuark, IIRC.) Not part of the CU, but it would be easy to splice them in.
 
Strike Force is worth reading in any case. IMO it's the best Champions supplement ever written, and darn useful for any game as an example of what a successful campaign looks like.
 
Dean Shomshak

Nature about the seismic context in Turkey and Syria

I already have more ideas than there will ever be drafts.  I could do a worldbuilding draft every month.
 
Caveat: I didn't say they were good ideas.

This brief video is worth a chuckle and a tear:
 
 

One of the favorite books in my collection is From the Jaws of Victory, by Charles Fair.  The subject of the book is how militaries tend to attract and promote idiots who are then perfectly placed to inflict catastrophic amount of damage on their own side when the fighting starts.  Crassus, the French in the Middle Ages, both Charles XII and his opponent Peter the Great, anyone in the Napoleonic Wars except the Duke of Wellington, almost any Union general during the Civil War, the French again in the Franco-Prussian war, everyone in WWI, and the U.S. command in Vietnam.  Putin and his toadies would absolutely merit their own chapter if this book were to be updated.

A while back, I posted links to Perun Gaming's essays on how corruption and lies destroy armies. He's now dropped the third volume of this trilogy, on how militaries are sabotaged by personalist politics. As he says, the way politics works in autocracies, where personal ambition and CYA inhibits collective competence, is not unique to Russia. Some people might even see familiar elements in Trumpworld.
 
Dean Shomshak

Not that anyone here needs help writing up PCs or NPCs, but here's the latest hero I wrote up. I hope to use him as a PC someday. In the meantime, I like the personality (no angst please, we're well rid of the 1990s) and I think the illo turned out well. I hope he may be of use to someone else, too.
 
While my group plays 5e, Rep is written up in both 5e and 6e versions. It was somewhat interesting just seeing where the points shifted around.
(And please let me know if I flubbed anything. No man is wise by himself, especially at HERO System accounting and editing.)
 
ADDENDUM: Not quite pure 5th edition. I give the 5e version 75 points of Complications, 6th-ed style, as that's one alteration to the rules of which I thoroughly approve.
 
Rep 6e.pdf
 
Dean Shomshak

I'm inclined to go with the pseudo-archaic/Fantasy myself. Several ancient Earth cultures built stepped pyramids: The one in the image could be a Mesopotamian ziggurat, a Mesoamerican pyramid-temple, or a Buddhist stupa. (Only the stupa would have chambers cut in the sides; but the stairs look more Mesoamerican. The stupa for which I have plans has a more complicated shape than a simple square, and the stairs are on the inside.) Could be Atlantean/Muvian, as the prototype culture that gave rise to all those designs.
 
But for my Millennium Universe, it's one of the bases for one of Earth's most powerful villains, the chaos-goddess Tiamat. She's into stepped pyramids, per her Mesopotamian origin. (Or vice-versa.) With her magic, she can create a base anywhere she wants: The site could be any rugged mountain range on Earth, including the Trans-Antarctic Mountains (for a Savage Land vibe). Or since Marvel's Blue Area on the Moon was mentioned, she could build her base in a lunar range and have a Gate back to Earth.
 
Recruits to Tiamat's cult are brought to bases like this for advanced indoctrination. Those that are especially diligent and lucky to have the right qualities of soul are transformed into snake-dragons, lion-demons and other creatures of myth, the better to serve the Queen of Chaos. Only a very few possess the right qualities to be transformed into new Dragon Warriors, Tiamat's cadre of supervillain demigods.
 
Heroes who try to whittle down Tiamat's cult resources could find their way to this valley. They'll be in for quite a fight just from the cultists (some of them armed with magic weapons) and monsters. They'll have to act quickly, though, before someone sends an alarm message to Tiamat and the Queen of Chaos comes to join the battle.
 
Dean Shomshak
Dean Shomshak

Ooh, perfect for Fearmonger from Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies!
 
<scribble, scribble>
 
Dean Shomshak

Doctor Sebastian Poe, discoverer of the Psi-Serum and founder of the Parapsychological Studies Institute, spent 20 years in Stronghold for his crimes. The U. S. government (and a few others that infiltrated agents) offered to reduce his sentence if he shared the secret of the Ps-Serum. He refused. Then the government tried threats. D. Poe stood firm. Then government telepaths tried to wrest the secret from his mind; but Dr. Poe's mind was stronger. Dr. Poe also spent years becoming a pretty good jailhouse lawyer -- good enough to balk attempts to extend his sentence. Right on schedule, he walked out of Stronghold a free man.
 
A few weeks later, Dr. Poe slipped the agents surveilling him and escaped to a small country that didn't extradite well-heeled criminals. He sold Psi-Serum empowerment to anyone who could pay.
 
A year after that, Poe activated the psychic and genetic conditioning he'd implanted with the new, improved Psi-Serum. More than a dozen loyal, super-powered psychics began hunting Poe's treacherous former disciples in PSI. Not all of PSI's members died, but the organization was effectively destroyed. The New PSI took its place, with Dr. Poe firmly in charge.
 
While in Stronghold, Dr. Poe learned a lot about power and control from other imprisoned villains. The New PSI soon went beyond ordinary crime to subverting governments. When Dr. Poe died, 17 years after leaving Stronghold, he covertly dominated 11 countries, with significant influence in dozens more.
 
The civil war within PSI over who would succeed Dr. Poe split the organization three ways, but each faction had the Psi-Serum and unslaked ambition. Gheir leaders kept conquering. They also became more aggressive in murdering other superbeings who interfered with their plans.
 
In another 50 years, the spin-offs of PSI ruled the world. From then on, wars consisted of turf battles between ruling cabals. The psionic aristocracies warred quite a lot, interspersed with occasional marriage treaties to secure temporary truces. They mostly reserved the Psi-Serum for their own progeny.
 
Selective breeding and research into technological enhancement increased their powers further. By the 25th century, all the major dynasties possessed psionic weapons of mass destruction. Decades passed in a tense stalemate.
 
Maybe someone miscalculated and a bluff was called. Maybe a covert scheme went awry. Maybe one of the living weapons went mad under the strain of their own power. Or maybe one of the people who had illegally obtained Psi-Serum empowerment went too far. (Freedom fighter? Freelancce criminal? Crazed terrorist? These all existed.) However the war started, it escalated beyond Mutually Assured Destruction into complete spasm. Hardly anyone survived. Captain Chronos saw that humanity would go extinct within a few hundred more years.
 
But there had been people who fought their tyrannical psychic overlords. Captain Chronos rescued one of the strongest of them, who was also one of the most principled in wanting freedom for everyone and not just power for himself. The Freethinker readily joined Avant Guard to forestall the rise of Dr. Poe and the New PSI. His telepathic powers are invaluable in locating villains and their minions, and extracting the details of their evil schemes.
 
Next up: Whatever anyone wants.
 
Dean Shomshak

And the thread's stalled again. OK, I'll fill out the last two and then someone else can begin a new team. If people want to develop DT's suggerstion, go ahead.
 
Plenty of people knew that Necrull was dangerous, as well as utterly icky. People only realized how dangerous when the villain Borealis sought to cleanse the world of him... but wasn't under an aurora when they met... and Necrull won, and "harvested" one of Borealis' arms. Then a hero team caught up with Necrull at his  ellesmere Island hideout, or he let himself be found by them, and there was an aurora in the sky. He slew them all, his own powers -- all of them -- boosted as Borealis' had been.
 
And the war began. Heroes first; but more than a few villains, too, sought to destroy Necrull... in self-defense, if for no other reason, as the madman stalked superbeings of greater power to harvest them. Pretty soon, governments got involved, too.
 
Three months into it, after the People's Republic of China tried to stop Necrull with a nuclear device, he retaliated with bioweapons. His message to the world as he released the plagues was, "Now look what you made me do."
 
As humanity died by the hundreds of millions, Necrull sought the only person who could equal or surpsass his mastery of biology: the supervillain Teleios, self-proclaimed "Perfect Man." He especially wanted Teleios' cloning technology. Teleios fought back, and figured out how to destroy Necrull -- but it was too late, for him and for the world. Necrull killed Teleios before he could deploy his living weapons, and seized the Perfect Man's technology for his own.
 
The world Captain Chronos fpound consisted of Necrull, a few dozen of his surviving Necrullticians, and several concrete bunkers full of cloning tanks where Necrull and his acolytes grew batches of humans who awoke only to be immediately slain for their flesh. And thus would the world remain until the Sun itself died.
 
But Captain Chronos rescued one of Teleios' living weapons: a woman -- a... daughter? -- engineered with incredible powers of regeneration and overflowing life-force that enabled her to heal the wounds of others. She was, of course, as physicially perfect as her "father." As Immortal, she fights villainy with the rest of Avant Guard. She also makes sure that the others survive their vattles, and heals innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. If she has time, she visits hospitals to heal other people, too. And when she does so, her hands glow green and leave smears of a green liquid on her patients.
 
That last is pure special effects trickery. A final lure to draw Necrull to her. If she and Avant Guard cannot find any other way to destroy him, Immortal will sacrifice part of her own body in hopes that Necrull -- thinking her powers come from the same source as his own, but perfected -- will graft her flesh to his own. And will burn as her true life-force purges his corpus of the ersatz life force that has sustained him for so long.
 
Immortal also hopes to confront her "father" Teleios. She knows he is a menace as great as Necrull; but in worthier hands, his biotechnology could achieve great good instead of great harm. If Immortal gets her way and shares the secrets of Teleios with the world, she will surely change the world beyond recognition. But will humanity use such power wisely, or will she doom the world in turn?
 
Dean Shomshak

For a few days now, I'd thought of posting a new team concept since it had been so long since anyone posted, but was too busy with other things. I won't object if anyone has additional members for Second Chance, but I'd ;like to propose the next team. It's the same concept as the PCs in my current campaign, but I'd like to see what other people could make of it in the Champions Universe.
 
In the Superheroic Age, the future faces deadly peril. Forget the official CU timeline with the Alien Wars, Terran Empire, and all that. That's only one possibility. Many of the possibilities are dreadful. Several current supervillains have the potential to end the human race and the world... or inflict horrors without end.
 
Even in those doomed futures, there are heroes -- likewise doomed, because it's too late. But what if someone could go back in time to make sure that future never happened? Enter Captain Chronos! He has rescued six doomed heroes and brought them back to the early 21st century to defeat the villains before they can destroy the world. They are the Avant Guard.
 
Pick the villain who dooms the world. The likes of Doctor Destroyer, Takofanes or Mechanon are easy choices, but hey, if you can think of a way to make Bulldozer a Destroyer of Worlds, great! Give a brief description of the dark future, and then that last hero who's going down fighting before Captain Chronos finds him, her, or it.
 
Dean Shpomshak

Jana's closest friend in Second Chance is Fiona Stewart. She too suffered from an arranged marriage; in her case, as the trophy wife of a wealthy widower financier, Hezechiah Stewart. She tried to be a dutiful wife for the sake of her family. She did not encourage young men who paid her attention; she was faithful in her May-to-November marriage. It didn't matter. Her husband still was insanely jealous. Fortunately, he suffered a stroke in one of his jealous rages and died. Unfortunately, Fiona still wasn't free: Hezechiah's possessive obsession led to him becoming a ghost. (You'll find him in Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies, as The Haunt.) He murdered his wife and made her a ghost, too -- his wife for eternity.
 
That was almost a century ago.
 
Devious circumstances led to Second Chance entering Hezechiah Stewart's long-vacant house. They fought the Haunt, and gave Fiona new hope. She turned on her husband and helped the heroes destroy him. The old house burned. She expected to go to her own eternal reward then, but didn't. She was free for the first time in her... existence. Terrified yet exhilarated, she joined as their latest member (so far,), Ghost Girl. (Fiona is new at this hero name thing.)
 
Dean Shomshak

Here's the situation:
 
One of my players has a fun idea for a character, but it involves genres I'm really not up on. Specifically, the character's backstory is that when she was a lonely 13-year-old, she imagined a fairly elaborate fantasy world in which she was Princess Moonray, heroine of the magical Moon Kingdom -- sort of an unholy mash-up of Masters of the Universe and Sailor Moon. When she was grown up, she somehow managed to help a supernatural creature that rewarded her by granting the deepest wish of her heart. Not what she wanted right now, but what she had wanted most strongly in all her life: to be Princess Moonray. And so that's her Hero ID.
 
The thing is, this wish also seems to have created the entire Magical Moon Kingdom, too! Princess Moonray's friends/allies live there, like the magical hummingbird MoonBlossom and the hunky Dorian Silversword. And her arch-enemy Queen Nocturna, ruler of the Dark Side of the Moon.
 
There's no way I'm leaving this undeveloped. There *must* be visits to the Magical Moon Kingdom, and her friends and enemies must visit Earth to make her life interesting.
 
Only... I never watched Sailor Moon or any iteration of He-Man and She-Ra. So far, all I know is that Queen Nocturna needs to have a cadre of lieutenants who can implement her evil schemes to conquer the Moon Kingdom. (Or Earth, as they follow Princess Moonray.) Maybe her son, Prince Balthazar Blackheart, who looks suspiciously like Leader Desslok from StarBlazers (but more "bishi'?), and a daughter Princess Shadira, who is totally an Azula expy from Avatar: the Last Airbender. But that's all I got.
 
I appeal to the wisdom of the Forum. What are the tropes? What powers are standard for someone like Queen Nocturna, and what minions should she have? Are there any must-have locations? Standard story elements?
 
(At least I already have the character sheet for Princess Moonray. So I know that the way magical attacks work is that she points at her target and shouts, say, "Staggering Moon Strike!" for a Mental Blast or ""Moon Mind Invasion!" for Telepathy. This is, hm, a new magical tradition for me to learn, but I'm not sure I'll ever want to write a new chapter for Ultimate Mystic.)
 
Dean Shomshak

I have indeed, but I never saw any other Magical Girl TV to make the connection! So thank you (and for reminding me of TVTropes -- it's been years since I used it, I
d completely forgotten about it.)
 
The player tells me that MoonBlossom indeed tries to turn everything into a "lesson." Whether it is or not.
 
Dean Shomshak

The player does intend Princess Moonray to be a temporary character for this particular campaign, so final victory coming from giving up the Magical Girl powers and identity is not out of the question. We'll see how the campaign goes.
 
I Dream of Jeanie and Bewitched in the family tree of Magical Girls? O-kay! Yes, I do know them; watched them growing up.
 
I don't intend to do a great deal of research for this, but I might look for a Sailor Moon movie or two, or one DVD's worth of episodes at the library. I might look for She-Ra to watch a few eps (probably not a full season, uff da) because IIRC J. Michael Straczinski was the executive producer. That probably makes it better than He-Man, and She-Ra is a girl who's magic (don't know if she's really a Magical Girl, though).
 
Dean Shomshak

This reminds me of electronic composer Charles Dodge's Earth's Magnetic Field, though Dodge's data sonification is for purely musical purposes. Here's a link: the radio emissions from Earth's magnetic field are first sonified as simple beeps; then Dodge gets more elaborate. It almost sounds like it's about to become a melody, but never quite does.
 
Dean Shomshak

The Sounds of Science!

And the thread's stalled again. OK, I'll fill out the last two and then someone else can begin a new team. If people want to develop DT's suggerstion, go ahead.
 
Plenty of people knew that Necrull was dangerous, as well as utterly icky. People only realized how dangerous when the villain Borealis sought to cleanse the world of him... but wasn't under an aurora when they met... and Necrull won, and "harvested" one of Borealis' arms. Then a hero team caught up with Necrull at his  ellesmere Island hideout, or he let himself be found by them, and there was an aurora in the sky. He slew them all, his own powers -- all of them -- boosted as Borealis' had been.
 
And the war began. Heroes first; but more than a few villains, too, sought to destroy Necrull... in self-defense, if for no other reason, as the madman stalked superbeings of greater power to harvest them. Pretty soon, governments got involved, too.
 
Three months into it, after the People's Republic of China tried to stop Necrull with a nuclear device, he retaliated with bioweapons. His message to the world as he released the plagues was, "Now look what you made me do."
 
As humanity died by the hundreds of millions, Necrull sought the only person who could equal or surpsass his mastery of biology: the supervillain Teleios, self-proclaimed "Perfect Man." He especially wanted Teleios' cloning technology. Teleios fought back, and figured out how to destroy Necrull -- but it was too late, for him and for the world. Necrull killed Teleios before he could deploy his living weapons, and seized the Perfect Man's technology for his own.
 
The world Captain Chronos fpound consisted of Necrull, a few dozen of his surviving Necrullticians, and several concrete bunkers full of cloning tanks where Necrull and his acolytes grew batches of humans who awoke only to be immediately slain for their flesh. And thus would the world remain until the Sun itself died.
 
But Captain Chronos rescued one of Teleios' living weapons: a woman -- a... daughter? -- engineered with incredible powers of regeneration and overflowing life-force that enabled her to heal the wounds of others. She was, of course, as physicially perfect as her "father." As Immortal, she fights villainy with the rest of Avant Guard. She also makes sure that the others survive their vattles, and heals innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. If she has time, she visits hospitals to heal other people, too. And when she does so, her hands glow green and leave smears of a green liquid on her patients.
 
That last is pure special effects trickery. A final lure to draw Necrull to her. If she and Avant Guard cannot find any other way to destroy him, Immortal will sacrifice part of her own body in hopes that Necrull -- thinking her powers come from the same source as his own, but perfected -- will graft her flesh to his own. And will burn as her true life-force purges his corpus of the ersatz life force that has sustained him for so long.
 
Immortal also hopes to confront her "father" Teleios. She knows he is a menace as great as Necrull; but in worthier hands, his biotechnology could achieve great good instead of great harm. If Immortal gets her way and shares the secrets of Teleios with the world, she will surely change the world beyond recognition. But will humanity use such power wisely, or will she doom the world in turn?
 
Dean Shomshak

Doctor Sebastian Poe, discoverer of the Psi-Serum and founder of the Parapsychological Studies Institute, spent 20 years in Stronghold for his crimes. The U. S. government (and a few others that infiltrated agents) offered to reduce his sentence if he shared the secret of the Ps-Serum. He refused. Then the government tried threats. D. Poe stood firm. Then government telepaths tried to wrest the secret from his mind; but Dr. Poe's mind was stronger. Dr. Poe also spent years becoming a pretty good jailhouse lawyer -- good enough to balk attempts to extend his sentence. Right on schedule, he walked out of Stronghold a free man.
 
A few weeks later, Dr. Poe slipped the agents surveilling him and escaped to a small country that didn't extradite well-heeled criminals. He sold Psi-Serum empowerment to anyone who could pay.
 
A year after that, Poe activated the psychic and genetic conditioning he'd implanted with the new, improved Psi-Serum. More than a dozen loyal, super-powered psychics began hunting Poe's treacherous former disciples in PSI. Not all of PSI's members died, but the organization was effectively destroyed. The New PSI took its place, with Dr. Poe firmly in charge.
 
While in Stronghold, Dr. Poe learned a lot about power and control from other imprisoned villains. The New PSI soon went beyond ordinary crime to subverting governments. When Dr. Poe died, 17 years after leaving Stronghold, he covertly dominated 11 countries, with significant influence in dozens more.
 
The civil war within PSI over who would succeed Dr. Poe split the organization three ways, but each faction had the Psi-Serum and unslaked ambition. Gheir leaders kept conquering. They also became more aggressive in murdering other superbeings who interfered with their plans.
 
In another 50 years, the spin-offs of PSI ruled the world. From then on, wars consisted of turf battles between ruling cabals. The psionic aristocracies warred quite a lot, interspersed with occasional marriage treaties to secure temporary truces. They mostly reserved the Psi-Serum for their own progeny.
 
Selective breeding and research into technological enhancement increased their powers further. By the 25th century, all the major dynasties possessed psionic weapons of mass destruction. Decades passed in a tense stalemate.
 
Maybe someone miscalculated and a bluff was called. Maybe a covert scheme went awry. Maybe one of the living weapons went mad under the strain of their own power. Or maybe one of the people who had illegally obtained Psi-Serum empowerment went too far. (Freedom fighter? Freelancce criminal? Crazed terrorist? These all existed.) However the war started, it escalated beyond Mutually Assured Destruction into complete spasm. Hardly anyone survived. Captain Chronos saw that humanity would go extinct within a few hundred more years.
 
But there had been people who fought their tyrannical psychic overlords. Captain Chronos rescued one of the strongest of them, who was also one of the most principled in wanting freedom for everyone and not just power for himself. The Freethinker readily joined Avant Guard to forestall the rise of Dr. Poe and the New PSI. His telepathic powers are invaluable in locating villains and their minions, and extracting the details of their evil schemes.
 
Next up: Whatever anyone wants.
 
Dean Shomshak

According to one of the NPR stories I heard a year or so ago, this is at least sometimes the case. Supposedly, some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, in jail pending trial, were given basic civics courses -- and were surprised (and sometimes embarrassed) to learn that American history, government and the Constitution were not what they'd believed. They realized they'd been living in political Fantasy Land. Either nobody told them the truth, or they hadn't listened before.
 
Dean Shomshak

According to one of the NPR stories I heard a year or so ago, this is at least sometimes the case. Supposedly, some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, in jail pending trial, were given basic civics courses -- and were surprised (and sometimes embarrassed) to learn that American history, government and the Constitution were not what they'd believed. They realized they'd been living in political Fantasy Land. Either nobody told them the truth, or they hadn't listened before.
 
Dean Shomshak