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Kharis2000

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Posts posted by Kharis2000

  2. Thrilling Places In Warehouse

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: Thrilling Places In Warehouse

     

    In short, Thrilling Places is a book of locations for GM's to build adventures around in their pulp games, as opposed to a series of adventures. You get the location, complete with history, maps, sample residents, and adventure seeds, and the rest is up to you and your GM. Some of the locations are 'lost world' locations, some of them are the kind of places that you'd find in your campaign city, and others are the places that your character might go looking for to learn the answer to a question, or to stop someone else from exploiting.

     

    Steve listed the contents in an earlier thread:

     

    http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45933&highlight=Thrilling+Places

     

    Have fun with it, and let me know what you liked and didn't like!

  5. THE ULTIMATE MENTALIST -- What Do *You* Want To See?

    in HERO System Discussion

    Posted

    Re: THE ULTIMATE MENTALIST -- What Do *You* Want To See?

     

    What I'd really like to see is something touched on somewhere above: how characters who don't have mental powers can resist/fight the ones that do.

     

    Specifically, the sorts of things we see all the time in comics and novels where a character stops thinking about the fight consciously and just lets his body run on instinct to defeat a telepath or precognative, or where someone conjures up memories of being tortured in hell (or eating a salad in the case of an alien carnivore) to cause a telepath to flee their mind - things like that.

  6. Recent Lost World novels

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: Recent Lost World novels

     

    Oddly enough, that style of novel has slipped out of fashion in the last 20-odd years.

     

    'Congo,' by Michael Crichton fitds the bill in an odd way, as does 'The Lost World'

     

    Several of the Dirk Pitt and (whatever the new guy is, Kirk Something) novels by Clive Cussler also have lost world themes. Even the ones that don't are usually good examples of what a modern pulp adventure could be like.

     

    There are a few more on the shelf at home, but nothing that leaps to mind without looking there.

  7. Empire Club map.

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: Empire Club map.

     

    It was in the original Justice, Inc. boxed setway back in the day (The first iteration ofwhat would become Pulp Hero for those not old enough to remember), specifically in the adventures book.

  8. Map of Mongo!

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: Map of Mongo!

     

    Awesome.

     

    I have to wonder, though, how that desert managed to pop up between Arboria and that jungle. Bad soil, I guess....

     

     

    Best explaination I have comes from the movie:

     

    "We, the people of Ardentia have suffered since you blasted our Kingdom. I can offer you nothing this year except my loyalty."

  12. ENNIE nominations out

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: ENNIE nominations out

     

    I can honestly say that of all possible outcomes for M&M I floated around in my head while it was being written, being nominated for an Ennie was never one of them. (As I recall, it was mostly things like 'Oh God, please don't let everyone think this sucks' and the like.)

  14. Hindenberg Size Comparisons

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    (Cross-posted from the StarHero list)

     

    http://www.merzo.net/

     

    Is a website that's set up to show starships from TV, Fiction, and film in comparison to each other sizewise. While that's not a great deal of use to Pulp Hero GMs, it also features entries in the 10x to -2x range for the Hindenberg and several real-world skyscrapers that might well be useful.

  17. Pulp Movie Resources

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: Pulp Movie Resources

     

    They are indeed good resources. There's also a pack that specifically has classic serial films (advertised as 150 chapters all told, which makes it 10-12 films), which include some real gems for mining ideas.

  18. Serial Villany

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    To clarify matters, I don't mean 'serial' in the sense of the Republic serials. What I was looking for here was a discussion of serial (or 'legacy' if you prefer) string villains in your pulp games. That would be villains that continue in a 'string' or line built around a common set of equipment, powers, or theme but are not the literal same man, and may have different motivations.

     

    I wrote an example of this up for M&M where the villain was actually a series of different men wearing the same costume and using the powers it granted them at the behest of the suit's inventor, but it occurred to me that I'd never asked if anyone had done something like that. So....

     

    Have any of you used them? How did that work out? What problems did you encounter with them?

     

    By way of example, one of the most 'beloved' (and I use the term very loosely) serial villainy strings in my own Pulp Hero game has now made a total of three appearances.

     

    1st appearance was as a mad scientist type who discovered that he could take 'living electricity' (bio-electric power) from animals and humans and infuse in others, granting them superhuman abilities. The party copped to him after a few too many college athletes (the more athletic the 'doner' the more energy to transfer) vanished, and the resulting showdown with the professor (who revealed his own enhancement in the course of the fight) and his 'vitality-enhanced' pet gorilla left both bad guys dead and the lab destroyed in a fire. (I can't claim credit for this - it was lifted in altered form from an old FGU 'Daredevils' adventure.)

     

    2nd appearance was as the 'Bestiariius' (the animal handling master in the old Roman arenas according to my college Latin): a blackmailer who threatened the city with scores of vitality-enhanced stray dogs and cats under his control (he used ultrasonic cues to set the animals on a rampage). He was revealed to have been the lab assistant of the first man with the process, who'd added the sonic trigger programming to the mix and stolen energy from a stockyard by wiring the metal fences up as 'siphonic vitality extractors' to transfer energy to large pens of captured strays. He also perished.

     

    3rd appearance was on a smaller scale, where wealthy citizens were being blackmailed, and apparantly torn apart by wild animals if they didn't pay. The name 'Bestiariius' was used again here as well. This time, it turned out to be the veterinarian that had helped the lab assistant in the second appearance using the surviving equipment in conjunction with his female assistant. They would enhance the vitality of the wealthy's pets, and if no payment was recieved, use a sonic trigger fired from a device mounted on a small balloon to 'set off' the pet. (I just used the stats for cheetahs for treated housecats, wolves for dogs, and eagles/falcons for birds, and so on) These folks too, met a sad fate at the hands of their own creations, when the vet was torn apart by 'activated' house cats, and one of my players made a 'thrown objects' Missile Deflection Roll against an 'activated' cat the vet's assistant had tossed onto him as he stood in the sonic broadcaster's range and subsequently tossed it back at her (hitting her in the head).

  20. OK, so what makes an interesting villain?

    in Champions

    Posted

    Re: OK, so what makes an interesting villain?

     

    For me, it isn't so much about the powers, or the costume (or lack thereof), or any of that - it's all about the personality. There needs to be something in the character that 'clicks' on some level for me in order to elevate a villain from 'Yawn, it's another mutant' to 'Holy Crap! It's Magneto!'

     

    Whether it's a personal code of honor; a sincere love for another; a fondness for chess or abstract impressionism; a good cause being championed the wrong way; or something else, it's all about the way the villain acts, not what his powers are for me. Thinking villains, especially, are a bonus, because that means they can be talked to and possibly dealt with (at least occasionally) without resorting to violence.

  22. Snippits From My Pulp Hero Game

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    I ran over the Memorial Day weekend which lead to the following moments that stick out in my mind:

     

    The party's toughest character, a former Olympic boxer and big game hunter is bailed out of jail by his wife (amazingly, he was not guilty of the crime of beating the four men to death and stuffing them into a closet he was accused of). Once they get home the following conversation ensues:

     

    Wife: "Oh! I almost forgot! One of your friends came to see you today - a polite German man, very tall - he waited a little bit, and had some tea, but had to leave. He wanted me to tell you that he'd try and catch back up with you later."

     

    Player: "Did he leave a name?"

     

    Wife: "I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget... Oh, here we are. Krieger, Maximilian Krieger."

     

    Player: "We're moving."

     

    ******

     

    Another player, who has decide that his character thinks the prototype for Minnie Harper of the Frankenstein Mob is the girl he'd like to date is at a nice Italian restaurant - in a small booth in the corner - having dinner when a local mobster comes in and is gunned down by a NYU college athlete, leading to this gem:

     

    Player: "Guns? Shooting? I check to make certain that no one's coming this way!"

     

    GM: "No, everything seems to be happening near the front door. The mobster's bodyguards are currently reloading after they apparantly shot some young man in a Letterman's sweater about twenty-five times."

     

    Player: "Good - I was worried there for a second!"

     

    GM: "There is a sort of muffled sound from across the table, though."

     

    Player: "I look that way to make sure Minnie didn't get hit by a stray round."

     

    GM: "You don't see any blood, but you can clearly see that one of her eyes is physically larger than the other - and a differant color - and curls of wood are coming up off the table top under her nails. She's making a low growling sound."

     

    Player: "That's not good."

     

    *****

     

    Later in the game, while the same character is escorting a Chinese feng shui practitioner and geomancer to look at another player's room, the geomancer stumbles and drops to one knee while passing the character's room:

     

    Geomancer: Points to door. "I cannot fix that!"

     

    Player: (knowing that the room is his and that he recieved a dream from the demon his family is responsible for keeping bound up in a temple in French Indochina the night before that had physical side effects on the environment around him as he slept) "No, no, Lady Penelope's room is this way. That's just... another problem."

     

    ****

     

    Finally, the closing moment of the session fell out this way:

     

    Basic explaination: One of the players has a tong in China that is going to incredible lengths to kill him for some offense that he doesn't recall giving them. Their latest attempt is to send two of the guardian Foo Lions allied to the tong after him to kill him - the hook being that he hasn't actually *done* what they think he has (not yet anyway). This session, the character had a series of dreams where the character thought he was fox hunting back in England and had lost his dogs. He could hear them, and (all on his own - sometimes players are so accommodating!) started calling to get them to come back. After two or three dreams where they get closer and closer each time, the scenario ended when he was dreaming and finally got them to show up. As he turned to greet them (the dogs having run up out of the woods behind him) it started to rain and he woke up...

     

    ...to the drip-drip-drip of saliva as a pair of 3 meter long foo lions - one male, one female - stood over his bed, saliva dripping on his forhead from their open mouths.

     

    GM: "Christopher remembers seeing the statues everywhere when he was in China, but he'd always thought they were made larger than life, that the Chow-Chow dogs were what they really represented, and that the statues were inflated larger than life for artistic and mythological purposes. It never occurred to you that the Foo Lions were real, and actually looked like that... or that all those statues were, after all, life-sized."

  24. Algernon Files from Black Wyrm Games

    in Pulp Hero

    Posted

    Re: Algernon Files from Black Wyrm Games

     

    I found a good deal of interesting, useable material in there for my Pulp Hero game, although it was primarily information and ideas as opposed to actual characters. The supplement is well-written, and has a wide variety of characters,but they're geared for a WW2 superhero setting, which is a bit higher-powered and further advanced in time than my game.

     

    I'd reccommend it despite that, though.

  25. Have you used anything from the Asian Bestiaries?

    in Fantasy Hero

    Posted

    Re: Have you used anything from the Asian Bestiaries?

     

    Update to the update of my earlier reply. (Say that five times fast! )

     

    The Pulp Hero game went off well, although the subplot with the Foo Lions coming to call was slowed by several other subplots that folks locked onto. What finally wound up happening was a series of dreams where the character thought he was fox hunting back in England and had lost his dogs. He could hear them, and (all on his own - sometimes players are so accommodating!) started calling to get them to come back. After two or three dreams where they get closer and closer each time, the scenario ended when he was dreaming and finally got them to show up. as he turned to greet them (the dogs having run up out of the woods behind him) it started to rain and he woke up...

     

    ...to the drip-drip-drip of saliva as a pair of 3 meter long foo lions - one male, one female - stood over his bed, saliva dripping on his forhead from their open mouths.

     

    Descriptive Cliffhanger Quote That Ended the Game: "Christopher remembers seeing the statues everywhere when he was in China, but he'd always thought they were made larger than life, that the Chow-Chow dogs were what they really represented, and that the statues were inflated larger than life for artistic and mythological purposes. It never occurred to you that the Foo Lions were real, and actually looked like that... or that all those statues were, after all, life-sized."

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