Yamo

While Steve Long is one of the few, (hopefully) proud RPG writers that I would lay down cash for sight-unseen, I am curious exactly what Mr. S. John Ross contributed to Pulp Hero. Ever since I bought Uresia: Grave of Heaven for the BESM system, my admiration for his work has only grown. Anyone know?

Re: Robert E Howard or J.R.R. Tolkien? Howard. Most definitely Howard. Tolkien was the forerunner of a particularly damaging conceit that has since infected fantasy fiction to a saddening degree. That conceit would be that the "world" has value independent of the characters and their stories. Tolkien created fantasy mythologies, languages and histories first and then wrote novels about them as a secondary pursuit. Howard was all about the story. Using Howard's method, no extraneous detail has any rightful place in a story if it doesn't bear directly on what the characters are dealing with at a given moment. Tolkien viewed story as secondary to "world-building". Howard recognized that in exciting fantasy, "world-building" is, at best, a neccessary evil committed in pursuit of a thrilling story.

Re: Monsters, Minions, and Marauders: Opinions? It's a great resource for HERO stats, but I wish that it had more Turakian Age lore and sample NPCs, not to mention more offbeat races and monsters. A lot of it is just statting D&D staples in HERO and changing the names ("Okay, here's the kuo-toa, except call them uthosa.") I was expecting more. It's a very thin tome. Great for stats, though.

Re: More Turakian Age - modelling nationalities The Vornakkians seem like pure fantasy to me. Like the corner of the map where Steve stuck everything that didn't fit into an easy real world mold. The Kumasians are a classic "crossroads" race. Look at Turkey during a lot of its history, for example. Or parts of North Africa during other times.

Looking through the Turakian Age magic system, I get the impression that clerical magic may be a tad bit too flexible. Wizards are limited to specific specialities like necromancy, sorcery, elemental magic, etc. There's an individual skill that governs each. Clerics can get by with the just the Faith skill for spellcasting, and, given the fact that the portfolios of the various gods cover almost every imaginable subject, just about any type of spell effect can be easily justified as "divine." Which is to say, if a wizard wants to turn somebody to stone, shoot fire and levitate, he needs three skills to do it. A cleric can call on Korthund, Ophel and Sirella (respectively) and make his skill rolls for all three spells using the same skill. Is this balanced? If not, is it unbalanced enough to cause a problem? Granted, clerics are obviously obligated not to offend the gods with their magic use, but as long as you don't have anti-social players who enjoy bedeviling the townspeople, the clerics and wizards are both likely to use their magic in the same way (thrashing the baddies), so this limitation often isn't a limitation at all for most players in most campaigns. Thoughts? BONUS QUESTION: Since the High Faith has so many gods covering so many concepts, it seems like its clerics have a big advantage in terms of justifiable spell effects over clerics of more "limited" religions, like that of Ulinoor the cat goddess. After all, it's a lot easier to exaust the possibilities of the whole cat schtick when buying spells that it is the collective portfolios of all the High Faith gods. Can this be a problem, as well?

Re: The 'Elminster' of Hero: Harbringer of Justice? I've never liked Harbinger, either. It's no so much that there's anything wrong with a Punisher clone. It's just that the whole charm of Punisher types, in game terms, is that they're NOT built on more points than Silver Age Superman. He's just all wrong for the subgenre.

This site is described as "the only isolated temple willing to train priestesses" in the Hergeshite lands. To this, I say: Huh!? The book goes into great detail about how the Hergeshite religion is heavily misogynistic. I can't imagine that the Heirakte and Lataro would allow Hergeshite priestesses to exist, no matter how far out in the countryside they were. And what would a female Hergeshite priestess even do? I find it very hard to believe that she could ever practice her chosen trade successfully. So...was this just a typo or was the Hergeshite priesthood's attitude toward women overstated or what?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? The notion of an evil race is racist in the real world because, despite what some superstitious types maintain, good and evil are not fundamental forces that bind the universe together like gravity and magnetism. They're abstract labels that humans invented and that can be abused by humans in any number of destructive ways. In a fantasy world where evil (Evil, really) is an outside force as real as electricty, pointing out that orcs are Evil is not a matter of subjective human morality applied to destructive ends, but rather one of pointing out an objective physical truth. There's a HUGE difference conceptually.

1. Please clean up the rule for adding damage to Advantaged attacks. Dear Lord, that section in FREd makes my poor brain bleed. Sidekick did it much better. 2. Please relax the restrictions on the automaton Powers. A stop sign is fine, but arbitrarily restricting them to non-PCs makes it really, really hard to build certain characters (like intelligent robots, golems, etc). Thanks.

Re: THE TURAKIAN AGE Reviewed On RPG.Net Oh, I understand the rationale, Steve. I also agree with it. I would have just preferred a sidebar or something similar in the text explaining it to people expecting such stats.

Re: THE TURAKIAN AGE Reviewed On RPG.Net Sorry, guys. My spell-checker did a real number on a couple sentences there. Also, I had a brain fart and stated that Turakian gnomes were the get of elves and halflings instead of dwarves and halflings. D'oh!

I love TA (watch for my review coming in the next few days at RPG.Net), but I have a problem. According to Steve Long, Ambrethel has no "common tongue" that makes it so that anybody can talk to anybody with relative ease. On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. The real world doesn't have one, either. On the other hand, high fantasy is known for world-spanning megacampaigns. Without the unrealistic shortcut of a common tongue, how do you deal with the problem fo most characters not being able to communicate outside their homelands? There are so many dozens of languages that it's just silly to expect a character to know them all, or even most of them (nevermind a hard to justify character concept). Thoughts?

On my second read through TA and I just now took notice of the character named "Hentai." Haw! Good one.

Re: Ambrethel Map in Free Stuff Ambrethel IS Earth. The various fantasy eras in the HERO Universe are set in Earth's primeval past. TA takes place about 73,000 years before the present day, if I recall correctly.

Re: What the heck is a Migdalar? Neato. Thanks.

Re: What the heck is a Migdalar? So what do they look like exactly?

Re: What the heck is a Migdalar? Hey, you're right. It does mean "headless." Man, that sure brings back some warm, fuzzy Ultima Underworld memories. Wonder how they eat.

There are several references to these things in Turakian Age, but they don't say anything other than that they live underground and are "acephalic", which, as far as I can tell, more-or-less means "clam or oyster-like." Not very helpful. Can anybody summarize what these things are in general terms?

Having some trouble on my first read through Turakian Age. A lot of the "Arms/Symbol" entries for the various nations make no sense to me. The one for Keldravia reads, in full: "Pean, a red chevron cotised." Huh? What's a "pean" and how does one go about "cotising" it? I can't even begin to picture what this sentence is describing. I've flipped through the rest of the book and I don't see a primer for what this sort of lingo actually means anywhere. Is it just there and I missed it? Very confusing.

Re: Need Turakian Age info... The percentage above would suffice.

Greetings. I've kind of dropped out of the habit of using HERO System for my fantasy campaigns, but I love a good setting. So my question for those in the know is this: How much of TA could be considered "crunch?" 10%? 20% What? I like how the book sounds, but more HERO rules bits I don't need. Thanks.

Personally, as a GM, as long as the character can be deprived of his Focus by enemies, circumstances, etc, it's still a valid Limitation whether or not that focus has to be carried around on his person or not. An enemy snatching a magic sword out of your hand and an enemy sneaking into your lair and destroying your magic soul crystal have the same net effect in my opinion: Bye bye, Focus, bye bye, Power(s). If you really don't want to use Focus that way, though, you probably don't have to. Resurrection requires that you specify a means by which it can be prevented. You can always just set "destroying the soul item" as the condition, effectively making the item itself a special effect of sorts instead of an actual Focus.

I would do Regeneration with Ressurrection and a Focus. Net effect is a character that just will not die until you get rid of that pesky Focus.

Thanks. You're all right, of course. It's just that I've noticed that HERO gamers tend to stick together develop a strong loyalty to the game in thw long haul. The idea of something else becoming my "default system" is just so unexpected that I'm a little surprised by it. It's not like I'm going to stop buying HERO books or never, ever play the game again, or anything. I'm probably just overreacting.

I need some feedback on this. Now, I love HERO as much as anybody, but lately, I've been a tad conflicted. Recently, I've discovered a free game system called Tri-Stat dX . It was previously featured in games like Big Eyes, Small Mouth and Silver Age Sentinels, but I had ignored the system up until now because of its close association with anime and superheroes, two subjects I despise. Looking through it, though, I've started to have some doubts over whether HERO is really all I thought it was cracked-up to be. Gasp! Sacrelidge, I know. Certainly, I never dreamed I'd hear myself saying it. Tri-Stat really drove home to be the fact that I was playing a game system that hadn't be completely thought-through in over twenty years. Here's a generic point-based system with effects-based power creation rules and tons of options like HERO, but that also has: a) Three main stats and one to four figured stats instead of eight main stats and six plus figured ones. That's half as many stats! No multipliation, division or fractions. I could do character creation with no calculator. c) No breakpoints. d) No hefting, chucking or tallying bulging fistfulls of dice. In fact, no need to ever roll more than two at once. e) No tactical movement. Not only do I not need minatures or a battlemat, the game seems to actually run better without them. f) A more freeform style that still allowed for a strong rules framework. More stuff is handled outside the written rules, allowing me to play things more "fast and loose." I don't need to consult a chart to see exactly how far someone with Strength X an throw a park bench from a prone position. g) No speed chart. Increasingly, I'm starting to see Tri-Stat as a system with all of HERO's strengths and none of its weaknesses and an example of what the 5th Edition should have been (had only more sacred cows been slaughtered). It seems to do everything that HERO does, except with half the difficulty and twice the speed. So, really, I'm in a bind. I've seen myself as a HERO gamer for so long, that I almost feel bad about being drawn in by another game. The fact that my extensive knowledge of HERO leads me to compare it to Tri-Stat constantly and that the comparisons almost always turn out unfavorable for HERO just compounds the problem. Silly as it sounds, I have this odd guilty feeling about the whole situation, as though it were wrong of me to see another game as being better than HERO. It's not like I'm going to hurt the game's feelings, right? Anyway, I'm just ranting now, so I'll wrap it up. Has anything like this ever happened to you guys? What did you do?