Bismark

Re: Converting adventures from other systems for fantasy hero A while back I did a quick conversion of D&D 4e damage types and defences that would work against them to HERO. In many ways, the damage 'keyword' system of 4e is much easier to convert to HERO than the earlier editions' level drain, etc. mechanics. The draft document is attached; you may find it useful.

Having run a STAR HERO campaign for most of this academic year, I am once again GMing at the UK Student Roleplaying and Wargaming Nationals competition. I was planning to run a different system (just for a change), but lots of Real Life work and time constraints (the tournament is on the 9th-10th April) have made me go back to the game system I have by far the most recent experience with. The good news is that I can use characters from my campaign with the serial numbers filed off for the majority of the party (5 of them - I need 2 more) and I will be running the game in the same homebrew universe I have been using all year. The bad news is the time constraint and the fact that I have a bit of writer's block regarding scenarios. I will therefore do the characters first and hope that the inspiration comes from there. Now I need to design some insectoid aliens which are a bit like the Star Fleet Battles Seltorians crossed with Starship Troopers (the original book - what else?) Bugs who will be the main villains for this adventure. They have cropped up in the campaign already but I want to stat them up properly this time - the leader-types (who are bigger and more intelligent than the drones) at least. To add a small amount of humour into what will be a dangerous universe, some of the character names might be familiar: the party medic is called Franklin McCoy, and the gun bunny is called Clint Bronson (I know… but I could not resist). Ideally the party should be finished and a skeleton of a scenario should be ready for a run-through next Sunday, with further tweaking at another run-through with a different set of players a week later. So far the party (finished characters, that is) consists of: 1. the aforementioned Medic (ex-Marine, lots of contacts and positive Rep) 2. a hot-shot pilot with lots of Complications relating to his inability to stop bedding women 3. an explorer/archaeology assistant with corporate connections and a serious skill at using sniper rifles, but with a weakness for fine booze - especially weird alien concoctions 4. a technician/all-around mad scientist (he's a Transhuman - genetically altered to be stronger, faster and more intelligent than humans, but sadly, he's also a mass of Mental Complications) - he has the classic Transhuman identifier of pointy ears. He spent most of last year obsessed with making ever-more-powerful back-pack-powered heavy weapons for him to carry around; having finally been convinced that a particle beam was just plain dangerous , he settled on a coilgun. 5. An ex-marine with a set of scrounging and grifting skills, plus a mortal fear of vacuum (having been accidentally 'spaced' once) In development is the gun bunny - tough ex-Marine with lots of weapon skills and some cyberwear (the internal stuff that would make some sense rather than stuff that would be better kept external for ease of upgrading). I may do one more to have a spare in case someone gets "croaked" early. Well, back to work - HERO Designer needs my attention…

Re: Shadow World setting Folenn is largely in the hands of Unlife minions (both Steel Rain and Soulslayer minions), from what I gather. One of those groups (the Soulslayer-following Vancu) have found a gate to another continent and are busy invading it (and given the fact that they have seriously unpleasant soul-eating gear, I would not want to face those guys).

Re: Shadow World setting Bladestorm it is - set on the continent of Folenn. I used that location and the maps for my HERO Shadow World campaign of 2007-2008. The current SW situation has modified conditions on that continent a lot (according to the game world author in the ICE forums). Bladestorm was not originally going to be in any previously-published campaign world, but it got dropped into Kulthea in the hope of boosting sales.

Re: Shadow World setting Oh, how I like compliments Just noticed this thread because recently I have been hooked again on an old 'time eater' known as Diablo2 and been playing in a lot of private (passworded) games on bnet (where lurks the all-powerful 'Lag Monster' - the greatest enemy any on-line toon will face). Shadow World is up to 4th edition now - the 4th ed book and the Masters of Light and Darkness supplement are pretty darn good; I might well pick up that Players' Guide PDF myself. It's a fun setting - especially the feeling that "the bad guys have won but they don't know it yet" - mainly because they all hate each other. BTW, in case you did not know, the 'murderous super-androids' alluded to in the previous post are the incredibly scary magical constructs known as Shards. The undead are very scary - in HERO terms they would all have an area effect STUN Drain (Power Defence as countermeasure)-even scummy low-end skellies and zombies. Really cruel GMs would crank that up with a bit of BODY Drain as well (probably with a much lower frequency of effect). I have some characters for 5th ed HERO in this setting (taken from my campaign, in fact) which I can make available if anyone wants to grab them for inspiration/ideas/brutal criticism ;)/whatever. Now I really must do an update to 6e of one of my favourite Shadow World monsters - the Hue Eater/Life Eater

Finally, the local University RPG society has a number of members with the excellent taste to volunteer to be guinea pigs - sorry - players in a Star HERO campaign run by yours truly. I am still doing the characters at the moment so will have to add details about the campaign later, but it is basically a Space Opera tending towards the 'hard rubber' end of the spectrum (there is FTL - to make the whole thing work) but the number of rubber sciences is kept to a minimum and there are no psionics (which I always think of as magic under a different name) to speak of. Overall feel is Babylon 5 meets BSG meets Aliens. The backdrop is a war that has ended recently (or more correctly, 'Round 1' has ended recently). So far we have a shady ex-merc who is into the darker side of trading, an ex-military doctor, a hotshot pilot who is also a talented computer jockey and a crazy engineer (a Transhuman I for those people who remember Space Master), who I have given the Inventor Skill to under the name of 'Mad Science', and who could probably rebuild the entire stardrive from a set of spares and some duct tape in a matter of hours. 1 of the players has the 6e rules and has done 90% of his character himself, another has the 5th ed rules, and the other 2 are complete newbies to HERO. The characters are built on a total of 275pts including 50pts of Complications; they need those points because in SF I tend to use fairly narrow skill categories and the costs soon mount up. Later today will be when they see their character sheets for the first time, we sort out equipment and introduce them to their ship (which is actually kind of paid for in full - for that read: 'they stole it off the base that produced it but the war trashed the ownership records and the computer jockey falsified some new ones'), before the first adventure starts. "…and so, it begins…"

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Just bought 'Babylon 5: The Ultimate Collection' (all 5 series, plus Crusade, plus all the movies and last year's 'Lost Tales' add-on). Watched 2 of my favourite episodes from series 3: Severed Dreams Shadow Dancing [cue the big space battles - trying to get into a Star HERO design mood…]

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Spot on I hated that film - but lusted after Dina Meyer (heck, she's even in my age range )

Re: Creature: Grandfather-of-all-the-Reptiles

Re: Creature: Grandfather-of-all-the-Reptiles ...and for those that do not use HERO Designer (thanks for the Rep, Lord Liaden!), here is Kar-mit in simple .txt format and in PDF; he is good for a laugh - until you see what I did with his blowgun damage... (the need for serious lung power did give me an excellent excuse to min-max the STR and CON, though )

Re: Creature: Grandfather-of-all-the-Reptiles

Re: Dragons Being used to Rolemaster dragons (which are terrifying) I tend to 'clone' their abilities in HERO. This can be a bit of a nasty shock for younger players - the older players (who have actually played Rolemaster) stay well clear of anything draconic unless they are in a position to talk to it - or they are terrifyingly powerful themselves. A combo of decent defences (suitably Hardened or Impenetrable) plus a huge dollop of Damage Reduction usually suffices to stop the dreaded 'Headshot specials', and there are usually massive levels of defences against the element that dragon is associated with (e.g. I would give a firedrake a very high ED against heat/Fire only allied to humongous levels of Damage Negation against non-magical fire and + Damage Reduction against magical fire).

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? Having tried both 'Divide by 3' (for 3 years) and Multipowers (for 1 year) in my High Fantasy games so far, I would tend towards the Multipower option, with common Limitations on the MultiPower to enforce the sort of mages you want. In THIS thread : http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/77763-Rolemaster-Magic-Conversions?p=1965786#post1965786 I posted some of my characters from a game where I was working off Rolemaster-style mages and priests - feel free to make use of them as examples. These were 5th edition characters rather than 6td edition characters, so the terminology is slightly different (fixed Multipower slots often used to be called 'ultra' slots, for instance) and were 200pts or thereabouts, so the actual power level may be a bit more than you want for starting PCs. The 'Divide by 3' option is the easiest for beignning FH GMs, but it does suffer from some 'side-effects' - for example, if you want inherent powers for Paladins, etc, they has better be bought as Spells of some kind or they will be overpriced by comparison to 'actual' spells since they do not benefit from the divisor. [i bought a cleric's Turn Undead ablity as a spell for precisely that reason]

Re: Forgotten Reallms in HERO Al Hazred: Regarding weapon damage, I was considering some Limited Power stuff for 'real weapons' - one example: 'Weapon does Minumum STUN' - x1 STUN maximum, regardless of location hit (useful for arrows and the like - it's the bleeding that gets you with these things) There are a few others I am working on which I will submit as a 'working document' when I have throught up a few more; one thing that strikes me is I am veering towards treating mace/hammers (and slingshot for that matter) as AP Normal attacks.

Re: Kulthea - the Shadow World As Shadowsould has noted, I did indeed run a Shadow World campaign about 3 years back. There was a thread on these forums relating to Rolemaster/HERO magic conversions, to which I contributed a few characters from that campaign. It was 5ER rather than 6e HERO of course, but conversions are not that dificult. Thread linky: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/77763-Rolemaster-Magic-Conversions