DShomshak

We have spent two years trying to keep Covid out of the house to protect our frail and now bedridden mother. Vaccination, boosters, masking whenever we leave the house. Yesterday, my brother tested positive, with a second test for confirmation. We are now trying to keep my brother as far from our mother as possible, as much as possible, but we can't afford to, like, send him to a hotel for a week. I am terrified.
 
CORRECTION: I just thought of a way to get him out of the house for a week that's in our budget. I hope he agrees, and it's not too late to prevent contagion.
 
Dean Shomshak

We have spent two years trying to keep Covid out of the house to protect our frail and now bedridden mother. Vaccination, boosters, masking whenever we leave the house. Yesterday, my brother tested positive, with a second test for confirmation. We are now trying to keep my brother as far from our mother as possible, as much as possible, but we can't afford to, like, send him to a hotel for a week. I am terrified.
 
CORRECTION: I just thought of a way to get him out of the house for a week that's in our budget. I hope he agrees, and it's not too late to prevent contagion.
 
Dean Shomshak

Since we're discussing campaign creation, I'll be immodest enough to post a link to the thread I did about my own Champions campaign setting, the Millennium Universe. I am not sure how useful this is, since I create most of my own material, but it's an example of how someone else did it.
 
https://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94135-millennium-universe-overview/
 
Some things here you probably should *not* do, like the timeline. It amused me to create it, but I have never seen a setting timeline that was any use to players or GMs. As Duke Bushido says, most players *do not care.* I am not sure a timeline is even useful to GMs, as a way to keep the world internally consistent. Because players probably aren't paying attention closely enough to notice any inconsistencies.
 
A lot of this is just for my own amusement. I also hoe that a few of the dossiers helped players get a feel for the setting. I now think that illustrative anecdotes are more helpful than facts and figures about how many supers are in the world, or things like that. My players know there are other supers in the world, heroes and villains; but most of them will never need to be described. Much of the Millennium Universe remains very sketchy -- just brief notes about things that might be interesting to develop later, as needed.
 
Dean Shomshak

I am at something of a loss after reading the directions.
 
Are we to contribute text- names, elements of background or origin-?
 
Are we to contribute singular abilities aka "plus 25 STR" or "his DEX 18!" or "tracking scent!"- ?
 
Are we to contribute individual elements of his  origin:  "and the sledge hammer blow knocked him from the roof and into..... Your turn!" -?
 
Are we to contribute bits of his costume: full sleeves, but each ia a different color!- ?
 
Or literally build the villain?
 
Up front:  I will be abstaining because of the request to not drop a fully-formed character with details, etc.  Please don't misunderstand:  I respect that request, but my creative process doesn't work that way:  as soon as I have one piece of a character, I have the character in minutiae.  Therefore, I will be following along, but not participating.
 
It is simply that I am nit sure what you are looking for.  At the moment, all I can think is "Legs!  He should have at least two!"
 
(And Yes; just saying that gave me a complete character:  The Racer.  He is a brick / speedster with stretching  (no fine manipulation), physical limitations based on size and mass, lots of leaping, and specific skill levels for combat maneuvers (that's martial arts to the rest of you guys).  He has one leg: he is a centaur-sized snake man, resulting from a horrific experiment with genetics performed by a deranged scientist with the backing of a banana republic dictator, and currently I am thinking of the fictional nation in which Scott's DI campaigns occurred.  I could go on, because it is all there, just like that.
 
I won't because that is not why we are here, but it is a great example od why I am setting this one out.
 
Still, a little help on what it is you are looking for?
 
 
 
 
 

Since we're discussing campaign creation, I'll be immodest enough to post a link to the thread I did about my own Champions campaign setting, the Millennium Universe. I am not sure how useful this is, since I create most of my own material, but it's an example of how someone else did it.
 
https://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94135-millennium-universe-overview/
 
Some things here you probably should *not* do, like the timeline. It amused me to create it, but I have never seen a setting timeline that was any use to players or GMs. As Duke Bushido says, most players *do not care.* I am not sure a timeline is even useful to GMs, as a way to keep the world internally consistent. Because players probably aren't paying attention closely enough to notice any inconsistencies.
 
A lot of this is just for my own amusement. I also hoe that a few of the dossiers helped players get a feel for the setting. I now think that illustrative anecdotes are more helpful than facts and figures about how many supers are in the world, or things like that. My players know there are other supers in the world, heroes and villains; but most of them will never need to be described. Much of the Millennium Universe remains very sketchy -- just brief notes about things that might be interesting to develop later, as needed.
 
Dean Shomshak

Since we're discussing campaign creation, I'll be immodest enough to post a link to the thread I did about my own Champions campaign setting, the Millennium Universe. I am not sure how useful this is, since I create most of my own material, but it's an example of how someone else did it.
 
https://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94135-millennium-universe-overview/
 
Some things here you probably should *not* do, like the timeline. It amused me to create it, but I have never seen a setting timeline that was any use to players or GMs. As Duke Bushido says, most players *do not care.* I am not sure a timeline is even useful to GMs, as a way to keep the world internally consistent. Because players probably aren't paying attention closely enough to notice any inconsistencies.
 
A lot of this is just for my own amusement. I also hoe that a few of the dossiers helped players get a feel for the setting. I now think that illustrative anecdotes are more helpful than facts and figures about how many supers are in the world, or things like that. My players know there are other supers in the world, heroes and villains; but most of them will never need to be described. Much of the Millennium Universe remains very sketchy -- just brief notes about things that might be interesting to develop later, as needed.
 
Dean Shomshak

"The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion.
*     *     *
"The biological invention then tends to begin as a perversion and end as a ritual supporte3d by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices."
-- J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus: or, Science and the Future.
 
Today, spider zombies and revivified pig tissue seems bizarre and oogy In a few centuries, scientific necromancy will seem as normal as milking a cow and consuming the rotted product as cheese.
 
Dean Shomshak

It took many years of nagging and a few threats of legal action to get paid for the "Mystic" trilogy. (And since I wrote far more than contracted, DOJ effectively got a free book.) To be fair, it took DOJ so long because they weren't being paid by distributors.
 
At one point they offered me partial  payment in product or office furniture. My father, who ran several small businesses in his lifetime, was not impressed.
 
The bulk of payment came only when Cryptic bought out DOJ.
 
For my Digital Hero articles presenting the Dark Champions hero Repairman and villain Bloodmoney, I gave up and said I'd accept payment in kind -- a CD-ROM of the complete run of Digital Hero, to that point.
 
Dean Shomshak

We're one Hero short for 2023.
 
Darren Watts passed away on New Year's Eve

It took many years of nagging and a few threats of legal action to get paid for the "Mystic" trilogy. (And since I wrote far more than contracted, DOJ effectively got a free book.) To be fair, it took DOJ so long because they weren't being paid by distributors.
 
At one point they offered me partial  payment in product or office furniture. My father, who ran several small businesses in his lifetime, was not impressed.
 
The bulk of payment came only when Cryptic bought out DOJ.
 
For my Digital Hero articles presenting the Dark Champions hero Repairman and villain Bloodmoney, I gave up and said I'd accept payment in kind -- a CD-ROM of the complete run of Digital Hero, to that point.
 
Dean Shomshak

Well, yes, but I thought it unseemly to bring it up. 
 
If DOJ had been able to pay me in a timely manner for the UMY Trilogy, I might have rebalanced things by writing The Ultimate Gadgeteer with a new set of High Tech Enemies. 😇
 
Dean Shomshak

Well, yes, but I thought it unseemly to bring it up. 
 
If DOJ had been able to pay me in a timely manner for the UMY Trilogy, I might have rebalanced things by writing The Ultimate Gadgeteer with a new set of High Tech Enemies. 😇
 
Dean Shomshak

Fun idea, @dean day! I've played around a few times with making a campaign using other game books in the past. Back in the '90s, I had a few V&V villains show up in a Champions game, and have had both V&V and Champions characters show up in an M&M campaign. The big problem I had was conversion. In the end, I found that converting by concept over some magical mathematic formula works best. Mind you, it also helps that Freedom City's creator, Steve Kenson, had dropped some conversion on the boards almost a decade ago (see attached). 
 
IMHO, it might be best to start small. Take a single city, populate it with NPCs, villains, any heroes that you want players to interact with and prep for running. Say you decide to use Freedom City (using the attached file). Just mix in what you'd like and then start working on your first game. When you have some time, start on the next city that your player heroes may interact with. Rinse, repeat...
 
 
That would be one of the cities in Mutants & Masterminds, Dean. They had a 3rd edition sourcebook that came out with info on it. It's basically a stand in for Seattle. Fun book.
 
 
fchero-_1_.txt

I wondered which origin types are particularly popular for the Champions Universe, and what types of Powers go with them the most.
 
Why? Because
1) It might point to character concepts that are cool but have been neglected; and
2) I’m a deranged nerd.
 
So this has been my spare-time project for the last week.
 
The whole CU is very large, but not all of it is equally propmoted. So I’m restricting the domain of analysis to the three volumes of Champions Villains. 292 characters total, not counting “agent” types such as Doctor Destroyer’s robots or Necrull’s Necrullticians. Individual characters only!
 
Here are the categories I devised when I did this analysis for my own Champions settings:
 
* SUPERNATURAL BEINGS are innately magical creatures: demons, dimensional conquerors, undead, etc. Examples: Bloodrage, Takofanes, Tyrannon. Also people with supernatural ancestry, such as Frag.
 
* MUTANTS were born with super-powers in their genes. I also include MUTATES, whose origin stories specifically say that their powers are the result of genetic manipulation (such as anyone given powers by Teleios). Examples: Menton, Hurricane, King Cobra.
 
* ROBOTS AND CONSTRUCTS are artificial beings. They have powers because somebody else built them that way. Robots are of course the result of tech; but golems and similar magically-created artificial beings fit in this category as well. Examples: Mechanon (duh), Syzygy.
 
* ENCHANTED characters were given powers by magic: a curse, a spell cast upon them, a magic potion, or the like. Examples: The Basilisk, Black Fang, Harpy.
 
* WEIRD SCIENCE covers all those lab accidents, exposures to industrial waste or atomic radiation, and empowerment processes that are scientific but aren’t specifically called out as exclusively based on gene-splicing. (Though some origin stories are not clear on this point.) Examples: Durak, Bulldozer, everyone in Project Sunburst, Sunspot.
 
 
* CYBORGS started out as normal people but gained powers by having bits added to them. Usually techm but I extend the concept to magical additions (such as a magical gem permanently affixed to the character’s body) or other surgical modification. Examples: Interface, Fiacho, Cairngorm, Howler.
 
* SORCERER characters cast spells. Examples: Doctor Yin Wu, Demonologist, Talisman.
 
* INVENTOR characters build gdgets (including, but not limited to, powered armor) or otherwise do things using SCIENCE! It’s implied that they can build new tech, even if they don’t have VPPs — they aren’t limited to just one device or suite of gadgets. Examples: Doctor Destroyer, Teleios, Utility, Binder, Doctor Philippe Moreau.
 
* TRAINING: If a character’s powers come down to extraordinary skills that aren’t super-tech or sorcery, they go here. Mostly martial artists, but there might be others such as a super-thief with incredible skills but uses mundane tech, Examples: Scorpia, Green Dragon, the Cahokian.
 
* WEAPON: The character’s powers derive from a device that could be taken away, whether it’s tech, magic, or undefined. Moreover, the character lacks the skills to replace or alter the device easily. Examples: the Warlord (he didn’t build his own battlesuit), the Crowns of Krim, Lazer.
 
* MASTERMINDS would be powerful just from the people and resources they command, even if they didn’t have any other source of power. Example: Franklin Stone and Doctor Philippe Moreau are “pure” Masterminds; Doctor Destroyer, King Cobra, and the Warlord have extensive organizations in addition to their personal powers; Baron Nihil and Tyrannon rule entire populations; and the Demonologist can Summon whatever demons he wants, while the Engineer creates robots at will.
 
* ALIENS aren’t human, but aren’t specifically supernatural. Extraterrestrials such as Herculan and Firewing go here; but so does Leviathan (a Lemurian) and Ape-X (uplifted gorilla). This is often a “meta-origin,” worth noting even if not being human is not specifically the source of powers (as Herculan was artificially given powers that are not natural to his species, the Fassai).
 
* OTHER is anything so rare and weird that it doesn’t justify creating a new category, or the source of the character’s powers simply is not known. Example: Timelapse, Glacier.
 
* COMPLEX: Characters can fit within multiple categories, as the dimension lord Skarn is both a supernatural being and a sorcerer, or Cheshire Cat is both a highly trained martial artist and gained teleportation powers through weird science. But if a character fits in three or more categories, I just call it “Complex.” Example: Josiah Brimstone has one set of powers as a sorcerer, another set from the demon that’s fused to him, and a third set from magical devices. OTOH I make exceptions for Masterminds and Aliens, as these tend to be meta-origins — and I try to limit assigning categories based on what’s really important to a character. Just packing a gun or minor gadget, for instance, isn’t enough to place a character as using a Weapon.
 
Placing characters in origin categories can be iffy. Like, I don’t assign every character with martial arts on the character sheet to the Training category: Often its just an add-on and the character would function as a superbeing without it. And as the discussion of Weird Scienct and Mutate characters suggests, the line between them can be blurry. But the goal is to spot patterns, not to precisely classify every character.
 
Here’s the result:
 
Supernatural Beings: 30 characters; 10%
Mutants/Mutates: 65 characters; 22%
Robots/Constructs: 8 characters; 3%
Enchanted: 23 characters; 8%
Weird Science: 54 characters; 18%
Cyborgs: 9 characters; 3%
Sorcerers: 33 characters; 11%
Inventors: 26 characters; 9%
Training: 31 characters; 11%
Weapon: 44 characters; 15%
Mastermind: 25 characters; 9%
Alien: 17 characters; 6%
Other/Unknown: 9 characters; 3%
Complex: 3 characters; 1%
 
Further analysis available if anyone's interested.
 
Dean Shomshak

Kudos on wanting to spread supers around the world. Even if you choose one city as the "home turf" for the PCs ane set a lot of the action there, people move around the world a lot nowadays. This would seem especially reasonable for supervillains, who might want to stay a step ahead of the law or who seek richer spoils than are available in just one city or country.
 
Beyond that, the most important "super demographics" question is how "open" you want the campaign to be. Like, do you want intense, ongoing conflicts between a limited number of characters and factions? Or do you want the freedom to bring in new characters without worrying how they fit into some larger scheme?
 
If you want a wide-open setting with an indefinite number of supers running around, your campaign prep should focus on the major characters and factions. For instance, is there an international law enforcement force analogous to the CU's UNTIL or Marvel's SHIELD? (I make no judgment either way.)
 
Conversely, is there a world-spanning criminal group comparable to VIPER?
 
Who are the Master Villains at the apex of power? This is a particularly good place to show that supers aren't all Americans. (Like, in my own campaign Professor Proton comes from India, the chaos-goddess Tiamat comes from the Middle East, the ecoterrorist Baron Frost is European, the robotic Monad appeared first in China, the Warlock comes from South America, and so on.)
 
Are there any factions that cut through the supers community, such as Marvel mutant supremacists vs. mutant haters, with advocates of coexistince in between? Or for something not quite so done to death, the mystical villains in the CU who seek a Dark Renaissance of magic?
 
That's enough to start.
 
Dean Shomshak

Off in my campaign's background is a government hero who wears powered armor with cold-projection weapons. The government of Taiwan built the powered armor using salvaged Monad tech, and armed it with reconditioned weapons captured from the villain Baron Frost. his code name translates as "Ice Machine." Only after he was publicly announced did anyone notice that this is... not as impressive in English as it is in Chinese.
 
Still, the guy is better off than the Eritrean super-soldier with non-ranged powers of psychic disruption, whose name can be translated as "Bad Touch."
 
What? 
 
Dean Shomshak

I noticed that we don't have a guy with an ice gun. I thought we should have some guy with an ice weapon.  I mean, DC has The Icicle (one and two), Captain Cold, Mister Freeze, and at least one cold ajantant villain in the Golden Glider
 
My own answer to this is a yet written up villain named Winterblade. Basically he is the "ice gun" guy, except his "gun" is the shape of a sword hilt. Not only can he shoot cold/ice beams from it, but he can also cause ice to form as a sword. Hench the name.

Yes. Thought it was a Fantasy Hero Campaign, and I detailed how all the players objected when I killed a favorite NPC to demonstrate a villain’s trap in another thread. The players walked, and that was how a 20 year FH campaign ended. 

Well, Dean, probably not in the way you are asking for, but...  Sort of?
 
I think I may have told this story before, but my first Traveller GM, Lars: he took a summer off and went back to Austria to see his family.
 
When he came back, he had this pair of 4-inch binders just _packed_ with notes and maps and new NPCs and who-knows-what-else.  He had spent a lot of the summer brainstorming what was to be his Magnum Opus of a Traveller campaign- something that would have us see half the universe and ultimately looking upon the face of God....
 
At least, to hear him tell it (a couple of years later). 
 
We were all incredibly stoked!  We made up new characters- we even took some of his advice when selecring careers and skills charts upon which to roll.  That cant be stressed enough: we were so excited to sive into this massive new universe that we took GM advice _without balk or complaint_!
 
Two hours into the first session finds us in serious trouble and on the run- mistaken identity, I beleive it was, followed up by a solid frame while our reputations were low.  We had to get out of Dodge, and fast, if we were to have any hope of clearing our names!
 
Lars was quite excited- he already had four or five bookmarks in the first notebook (which he had been,dlipping through furiously, feeding us situations and flavor text), then he paused, grabbed the second book while we were warming up the engines for an illegal departure.  We lifted off as he oulled the book open near the center, just soread enough to get his fingers  in it.  "So!" He began, excited by the turn of events.  "Which way is it that you think will run to escape your circumstance?"
 
In unison, we all shouted happily "coreward!" Followed by various ckaims about just how fast we were goinf to go!
 
Lars's face fell completely off.  He sat there, stunned, dumbstruck, and just stared.
 
Finally he sobered up, made a big show out of xloaing both books, got up, walked to the kitchen, held them in outstretched hands, and dropped them both into the trash can.
 
"I think, my friends," he started, never actually looking at us, "that we are done for tonight, surely.  (As a anon-native- but excellent- English user, he had some rather odd structures and turns of phrase).  I think it is the best thing to be stopoing here at this point for tonight.  We should plan on not  grouping up again for I am thinking maybe three weeks."  He turned then to look at us.  "I should be enough sober again by three weeks from now.  Okay?"
 
Then he went into the living room, flopped down on the couch, and turned the TV on.
 
 

The latest adventure I ran in my "Avant Guard" campaign ended with the PCs blowing up the campaign. I'm not upset: They triggered a land mine I planted in the campaign practically from the beginning.
 
Time travel is a big thing in the campaign. All the PCs were recruited from various doomed futures in order to prevent those futures from happening. Two PCs had been in a previous iteration of the team, in a timeline that was erased. They have seen hints that recent history has been changed other times, too.
 
So, in the course of the adventure the PCs captured a villain called Ravager, who wears a plasma-tech battlesuit: plasma blasters, plasma jets for flight, plasma force field for protection. He's been around practically from the start of the Superheroic Age (in this campaign, 2000) and most plasma super-tech is based on Ravager's -- though everybody knows that he was just a grad student who stole the tech from his faculty advisor, a leading plasma researcher, then killed him and destroyed any records of the tech. Other people heard them arguing.
 
One of the PCs works at a scientific research company. Another scientist there, Dr. Marilyn Jones, specialized in plasma research, trying to reconstruct it all so it can be mass produced instead of held by a few rogue gadgeteers. She's also interested in time travel: A previous adventure had her kidnapped because of her research in sending information back in time through a standing plasma wave.
 
The fight happened at the research facility, and Dr. Jones helped out by shooting Ravager in the back with an experimental plasma blaster she kludged together... but that was very good at penetrating Ravager's force field. It comes out that she's studied him. No surprise there. She also *hates* him. But that doesn't stop the PCs from handing her Ravager's damaged blasty-suit until the Feds and the lawyers say otherwise. She is, after all, the person best qualified to study it.
 
At the end of the adventure, the PCs are tying up loose ends, trying to find why people did what they did. The PC who works at the research lab walks in on Dr. Jones, who is wearing the blasty-suit. She's stripped down the costume part and attached other bits that he recognizes from her temporal physics experiments. He persuades her to explain what she's doing.
 
Doctor Jones is Ravager's daughter, though she hasn't seen him since she was young and he went on the lam as a super-criminal. Her mother changed their names. She believes she can use the modified suit to go back in time to stop her father from killing the great scientist, stealing the tech and becoming Ravager. Everyone will be better off.
 
The PCs are dubious. Time travel is dangerous, you never know how else history will change, etc. They persuade her not to trigger the time-jump just yet.
 
And history changes.
 
Doctor Jones vanishes. There is no Doctor Jones. There never was. Ravager is gone from his jail cell. That villain never existed, either. I call for EGO rolls for each PC, as the life history they remember is overlain by a second set of memories of another timeline. Not everyone succeeds. This is not good for them.
 
Here's what the PCs can now never learn, because they didn't ask the right questions when they had the chance. Ravager didn't invent the tech. Neither did the scientist he supposedly stole it from and killed. One night a massive power surge blacked out half the city of Toronto, where he then lived and worked, as a badly burned woman wearing a fried high-tech suit appeared near him and collapsed. If he'd worked harder to call paramedics, she might have lived. As it was, she died of her burns. He hid the body and took the suit to study. His faculty advisor found him studying the advanced tech, and they quarreled...
 
I created Ravager very early in designing the Avant Guard setting. I introduced the character of Dr. Jones as soon as the PC began working at the lab. Slowly planted the seeds of the climactic scene, then let the PCs influence Dr. Jones' choice. I made no attempt to influence *their* choice.
 
So the setting's history has changed. The causality loop of Ravager's life has been broken. As a long-time villain, he interacted with many other villains and heroes, whose lives all changed now that he never existed. I now have quite a lot of work to do to reboot the campaign. I am an idiot.
 
Has anyone else blown up their campaign, or had the players do it?
 
Dean Shomshak