Bismark

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Emerald Isle" - Leaves Eyes

Re: Rolemaster Magic Conversions? Here is the last of the characters I did for the SW game; a knight cursed into being a kind of Centaur (as a Centaur, a little small and weak, but with all his knightly abilities). Used to use his abilities at Shield Blocking a lot to protect more 'squishy' members of the party. I thought I had the stats for one of the lovely 'Soulslayers of Murlis' demons, but they appear to have gone 'walkies'

Re: Rolemaster Magic Conversions? I didn't actually reference the RM level equivalent when designing those Shadow World characters. I just used Killer Shrike's D&D 3e equivalency chart to find out the points values for characters that would be about 6-7th level in D&D 3e. This is because the players I was most likely to get were originally D&D 3e players and giving them a point of reference was helpful in 'recruitment'. I would have had difficulty guessing the RM levels anyway because I have not played RM for 23 years… [i did buy the [i]RM Classic[/i] rulebooks a couple of years back, though - and may even get to run RM in the next year or so].

Re: Rolemaster Magic Conversions? A couple more characters from my old campaign for you. Also included is a nasty RM beastie from Shadow World called a Janak (aka Hue-eater/Life-eater) - highly intelligent ogre-sized nasties from the Outer Void with a nasty habit of putting holes in people and then sucking out their bodily fluids and life-force via the wound. I will try to hunt down their full description but they would make very nice 'Elder Brood' types for Dark Space. They often ride into combat on/in giant bio-engineered flying turtles .

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Chasing the Dragon" - Epica (from The Divine Conspiracy)

Re: A Calendar Fantasy World Seconded!

Re: DragonQuest Magic Conversion Unfortunately, both copies I had of DQ 2nd edition (1 hardback, 1 softback) have disappeared, otherwise I would have a stab at this (I hope one of my friends has my hardback copy - I will ask around). The good news is that doing this in HERO allows us to eliminate the major problem with DQ magic - the insanely high XP cost of learning spells and the horribly large chance of losing all magical abilities forever because of a nasty fumble roll.

Re: Turakian Age Map At the moment, the nearest you will get is some decent resolution JPGs of Ambrethel (the TA world) either with or without place names (there are 2 versions) in the "Free Stuff" section of this Web site (found under the "HERO System Resources" heading).

Partially inspired by the previous posts on 6th Edition settings for Fantasy HERO and also by watching Troy recently, I had an odd thought (brought about by too little sleep, no doubt ): Why not convert Valdorian Age to a Bronze Age setting? Some of the groundwork has already been done - the city-states of Graecoria, for example, would fit very nicely (rewind them to a Minoan/Mycenaean Greek-style cultures with palace economies), as would Abyzinia (use something like the Kushite Egyptians as a template) and the Drindrish make opponents suitable for characters of truly heroic stature. There would be a nice overlap with the Wiki's "Realm of Classica" as well, as a bonus. The history would need a bit of doctoring - most of the human cultures in the 'official' setting appear to have gone from Stone Age to early Iron Age almost immediately under the influence of the Drindrish, for example - but the setting is painted in broad enough brush-strokes that it this conversion could work. I would be tempted to do something about the pantheon of deities, which seems a bit limited and uninspiring and the fact that this is not an 'age of diminishment' means that my pet hate of Normal Skill Maxima can be dumped . Sorcerors would have more power in that their spells would be easier to cast and the overall magic level would be higher. Non-casters would have the classic mythological hero attributes of 'heroic abilities' to even the odds (things like Regeneration, Damage Reduction vs. magic attacks etc. have been used by me in the past for some Ancient Greek epic characters and worked quite well). Thoughts?

Re: Rolemaster Magic Conversions? Hi Tywyll Attached are some HD files that are from my old Shadow World campaign - if you want me to attach the actual characters sheets (PDFs) I can do that for you as well. House rule used when building those characters was reducing the cost of Skills that had originally been Everyman Skills by 1 pt (a habit I carried over from my 4th edition games). These days I would probably fine-tune the magic a bit more, but this was reasonably successful (although the old 'issue' of the mages getting a bit scary compared to the non-mages reared its ugly head and was partially compensated for by giving the fighters magic items). I included the female half-troll character for amusement value - "Grendellyne" was a scary, scary female. The nature priest is a bit... edgy (think Ancient Egypytian for the kind of fertility rituals we are talking about here); he has a nice 'reaper' though BTW, you may want to 'outsource' some of the DarkSpace monster conversions to get further ideas and see what people come up with - I am willing to have a stab at designing some of the Elder Worm servant races . Cheers!

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? A blast from the past (late 1980s): Season 1 of Sledge Hammer "Trust me - I know what I'm doing" One of my work colleagues bought both seasons for me on DVD - Season 2 will be all-new to me because I do not believe that it was ever shown over here in the UK (and Season 1 was aired at the "viewer-friendly" time of 03.20, so I managed to catch some but not all of them)

Re: A Question of Balance & Lethality Just a little ramble to give another example of stuff from an ongoing campaign - in this case a "215pt characters in the 1st edition Forgotten Realms setting" game: I gave one of my players (an Earth Genasi with the appropriate name of Geb) a mace with 3D6 HKA and +2 STUN Mod bought with Affects Desolid (non-corporeal Undead only), affectionately named 'Krusher' The rest of the party have serious offensive capability as well, but the real killer in this current game of mine is the fact that the party have actually gelled into a scarily efficient fighting unit. They are about to ambush a caravan of bad guys (40 Hobgoblin soldiers, plus 2 human mages and 2 leader-types), and they are going to slaughter most of them, unless lots of bad dice rolls get in the way, as the bad guys' mages will be throwing big fireball attacks at the party and the party have all been 'buffed' by the cleric to the tune of an additional +14ED. The fact that one of the front row fighters is a Fire Genasi with 25% fully resistant damage reduction vs. fire and the other is an Earth genasi wearing enough armour to make Conan strain under the weight means that the standard magic is going to be of limited value - and by the time the mages realise that they need to use more devious methods to hurt the PC they may well already be toast themselves. The Hobgoblins using Teamwork and sensible stuff like active Shield Blocks will actually be far more dangerous - but there may not be that many standing after the party's own casters have 'let rip'. FYI, the average melee attack of one of these guys (who are all 'semi-spell users' - my favourite kind of pre-6e FH character) is 2D6+1 to 3D6HKA, usually with one or other of Additional STUN Mod or AP; there is a 'machine gun' Elf archer who can do a limited number of 5xAutofire on a 2D6 bow attack and who then reverts to a 2.5D6 RKA bow attack, both of them using his Longbow of Far Shooting (No Range Modifiers). Only the Elf and the cleric have non-magical melee weapons, the Elf has a Dacian Falx-type weapon doing 3D6HKA and the Cleric has a (cold iron with silver banding on it) all-metal mace which he does 2D6+1HKA, +1 STUN Mod. The feral Gnome Shaman () in the party rides a giant badger into combat and is particularly dangerous against Goblinoids and Kobolds because he has a magic Bohemian Ear-Spoon (the one I designed for the D&D 3.5 Magic Item thread - originally started by SKJAM!) - he should be able to one-hit kill most of them with that thing. If this is a bit incoherent I must apologise - it's 6.38am here in the UK and it is time for bed.

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Hey Bunneh! Very nice… I believe I have one of those old Ral Partha Sea Dragon models waiting for me amongst the huge pile (many thousands - eek!) of figures that are in my possession and need painting. Shame that I have not painted a thing since 1995 - and would need a rather stronger daylight bulb to see by as the old eyesight is not what it was (as well as a LOT of practice to even get close to what I used to be quality-wise). This was my attempt in the 1992 UK Golden Demon awards (as featured in White Dwarf 151) http://demonwinner.free.fr/uk/1992/golden_demon_winner.php?categorie=2 (mine is the second place entry - the gloopy diseased guys in the livery of bile green, pus yellow and #### brown) The camera operator was apparently not used to his gear so the colour balance is a bit off, but there you are.

Re: Love for Non-Casters? Hence my earlier mention of fighter-mages and fighter-priests being scary - especially as I DO let them buff their 'free' gear with spells - like RuneQuest's Bladesharp family of spells (though, needless to say, I am very careful with magical force fields and the like ). The "2x Base weapon damage" cap makes sense if you think about the fact that weapons tend to object to having too much force put through them (they bend, break, etc.). Also, don't forget that, even with the "2x Base weapon damage" cap active, in a High Fantasy game in particular, you can have weapons made of materials which may not have been enchanted by a mage but which are insanely strong/tough, which gives a legitimate reason within the rules of the game universe to allow that damage cap to be exceeded by really strong characters using Martial Arts, etc. Example - normal shortsword doing 1D6+1 base damage could be made of some kind of "unobtainium" (ICE's Shadow World was full of different variants of this stuff) which allows up to 3 or even 4D6 of damage to be put through it without it suffering any ill effects. I had to raise the non-casters' allowed damage even higher for my last campaign, as all the mages were throwing 16D6 EBs around with gay abandon.

Re: Love for Non-Casters? I think part of the problem with the 'Divide by 3' thing is that it simulates D&D-type High Fantasy (pre-4th edition D&D anyway) TOO well; Fighters (and also Monks, to some extent) always suck in those games. I have used both Turakian Age style spellcasting and also Multipower-based (which was used for a Rolemaster-style game), and in both games pure fighters were decidedly second-best. In the first case, magicians could happily cast spells while in armour - I researched historical armour types designed for archers that would not impede Gestures (even complex ones) - and you can wear some seriously heavy kit (see Sassanian Persian Clibanarii for an example). In the second case, I was able to create (admittedly 200pt) characters who could throw seriously excessive spells around and, although they had strict armour restrictions - that's what equipment is for (Robe of Protection - Armour 6pts without the Real Armour Limitation anyone?). In both cases my usual 200pt mage design (soon to change for 6e, because of the lack of Figureds) of STR 20, DEX 15 or 20, INT 23 and expertise with one class of weapon (usually his/her all-purpose magical Focus) was capable of giving serious grief to fighters. [For the record, my fighters usually have expertise in many more weapon types than the non-fighters - that is one of the things that distinguishes them from the non-fighters, Martial Arts being another.] Some people would say that these were more like old-school RuneQuest-style fighter-mages - just higher-powered than the usual (frankly insipid) RQ-style characters, but that's the way it is. Most games that do not put artificial limitations on spell use will end up with Fighter/Mage or Fighter/Cleric combos being more dangerous than pure fighters in most situations because they can 'buff' themselves with spells (Hands of the Bloody God {+4 to OCV} anyone?) Every iteration of Fantasy HERO I have played in or run that did not use "Low Fantasy" or low-powered "Swords & Sorcery" genre tropes had the same issue with casters (usually caster/fighter hybrids) being better than non-casters; unless you let the non-casters have Wuxia-standard "chi powers", "Warp Spasm" or similar (like allowing Deadly Blow and associated abilities, plus PSLs vs. Ht Location and the like), you can really expect nothing else. Oddly enough, all the PCs in my current Forgotten Realms campaign are 'semi-spell users' apart from one who is a pure caster (with a nasty weapon Focus and magical robes that protect as reinforced mail on all locations); I found out in last Wednesday's game just how lethal this party is, even with some truly abysmal die-rolling when it came to their spell-casting. If this is a bit garbled - I was up all night working , but the above is my experience in the last 23 years of Fantasy HERO through the various editions.

Re: I have players! Now I need a Gnome and badger... "Verily, Grasshopper, the former student doth come to the aid of the former master" This will do very nicely for the basis of the gnome shaman; now to design the badger...

Just managed to recruit players for my Forgotten Realms 1st ed. campaign (with a few extra races from 3e) using HERO 5ER ("Frankensteined" with some 6e for good measure). I now have 6 characters (I am designing the players' characters for them) and a Follower to get finished before next Wednesday's game. We have a very odd party (I always seem to get players who like oddball characters): 1 token Human (the 'blasty Mage') 1 Aasimar (part Celestial) Fighting Cleric 1 Fire Genasi (part Fire Elemental) Fighter-mage 1 Earth Genasi (part Earth Elemental) Earth mage/party 'Tank' 1 Elf archer (semi-spell user - will use Druidic magic) 1 Gnome beastmaster with a Dire Badger as his combat mount (bought as a Follower as it has other uses) - he will use Shamanic magic All characters will be 200pts (150 base + 50 Disads/Complications) - they will be facing seriously nasty opposition, so they need the points. I am using the Turakian Age-style magic with the serial numbers filed off and names changed to make them 'Realms-y' (hence the lack of pure Fighters, as they can be somewhat disadvantaged by this setup). Some of Killer Shrike's spell conversions will also appear in a modified form, as will some of my Rolemaster spell/ability conversions I looked through all my HERO stuff and noticed I had no Gnome write-ups or any Badger write-ups to shorten the design process. Anyone have some 5e write-ups I could 'borrow' from? The other stuff is pretty straightforward - I can copy/paste some abilities in from my old TA party and raid Killer Shrike's site for feat conversions etc. I want to get this done properly, as 4 of the 6 players are complete newbies to HERO and another guy has only played HERO as part of my Nationals 2008 Valdorian Age party (he seems to be 'hooked' already, though ).

Re: Next 2 campaign projects decided upon I work in academic publishing and one of my clients is based at the university, but basically I am just "sad old git with no real life" () who lives right near the university I graduated from 24 years ago. I still have a lifetime membership of the Students Union - which runs the Roleplaying society, among many others.

Soon the new academic year starts, and it will be time to set up a new FH campaign for it. Owing to the timing of 6e and the launch dates of the support books, this year's project will be a 5e campaign with a few 6e features grafted on (I will delete COM and measure ranges in metres). This year's campaign will be set in the 1st edition Forgotten Realms (yes, the 1987 'grey boxed set' version) - when it was a 'sandbox' setting rather than being crushed under the weight of its own canon. I have one player so far - who will be playing an Earth Genasi (appropriately enough, he will be the party 'Brick'). The real test of the idea will be in 3 weeks' time when the first RPG session of the term starts; I need to get players. Some years that has been decidedly difficult - last year things started off well but 'real life' whittled our players down to one (), which made a campaign unsustainable - and from 2000-2003 there were too many aspiring GMs and not enough players to go around. The inaccurate perception of HERO as difficult does not help either (although I like to think that I have done a lot to squash that perception here over the last 5 years ). If I cannot get enough players for a HERO campaign, I will probably not bother running anything this year and probably end up playing instead (the first time since 2002 that I have only played) - and it will probably end up being D&D 4e for some "old skool" monster-bashing goodness. I already have an idea for the 2010-2011 academic year - and that is a 6e campaign set in the 4e Forgotten Realms. This will take a lot of preparation, which is why I will be doing it in the hope that 'if you build it they will come'.

Re: Real Locations that should be fantasy …and now it is my new desktop wallpaper

Re: Breaking News! 6e exposes 5e min-maxing! The item in question was a supplementary END Reserve which doubled as his weapon - it was a Kopis/Falcata-type sword, which also had enhanced damage and armour-penetrating capability so the guy would have a decent weapon. The character's main END reserve was not Independent - in fact it was not even in a Focus, it was just a bog-standard 'built-in' END Reserve to power his Essence magic Multipower. [There was a bit of cheese in there though - but it wasn't HERO System cheese so much as Rolemaster conversion cheese - normally Rolemaster Essence Magic requires the caster to have both hands free for the Gestures, but this is waived if the character has a magic-boosting item in his/her hand - and if that item happens to be a handy weapon, well, that comes in very handy in combat situations ]

This is of course stating the blindingly obvious, but here we go Just started converting one of my old 5e Fantasy HERO characters to 6e - specifically, a Rolemaster-style sorcerer from my Shadow World game a couple of years back. Having just finished the characteristics and the CVs I noticed that 'grandfathering' this character is going to take a lot of points - rather more than the suggested point increase from 5e to 6e characters. It is 54 points more(!) and counting - and I have not even factored in the increased cost of the guy's magical Focus + supplementary Mana/END Reserve (which has got 7 points more expensive with the removal of the Independent Limitation). It appears that I min-maxed every single characteristic (STR 20, DEX 18 etc...) on this character (and even bought down some STUN I did not consider essential to add the proverbial 'cherry on top'). I shudder to think what the assassin dude will cost now. He was SPD 4 and - of course - DEX 23 (with the plethora of DEX-based Skills he had, plus the high SPD, it was simply not cost-effective to have less DEX). This has been a wake-up call; I can no longer optimise characters 'in my sleep'; I'm feeling quite inadequate now

Re: What sorta rig are you running? That's good news - I have not got the game yet as my new rig is still being set up for (horror!) WORK! - but it's basically the same spec as your rig. It's running Vista64 (which so far has been fairly smooth sailing - but I did buy a humongous book with all I needed to know about Vista in it) and the CPU is running OC'd at 3.8GHz nice and stable thanks to the fancy Noctua cooler () and good airflow from the Silverstone Fortress case. There is also a discrete sound card in it to take some more load of the CPU when gaming. Good to know that I should be able to crank everything up to max without a hitch - now I just have to get it fully set up and ready for some serious work/gaming

Re: Omcv 1? You could go even further and do something like in the original Psionics rules for AD&D1 (and I recall, Eldritch Wizardry supplement to OD&D as well): Those rules had psionically 'dead' people who were so psionically 'dead' that they were really hard to target with psionic attacks (an easy way to do that now would be to simply transfer all the OMCV to DMCV; you could put Limitations on the DMCV to make it only apply to psionic attacks, of course). I would be happy to let my players (and 'name' NPCs) do that in my upcoming SF campaign, for instance - everyone else is out of luck unless they are psionically-capable aliens. [The campaign assumes that psionic abilities are pretty much unheard-of among humans, but they are used by at least one alien race as standard communications.] For the record, when designing my first 6e character, I sold back all but 1 OMCV before even assigning basic characteristics

Re: The unofficial: I Have 6th edition thread Had them within a couple of hours of the Books + PDFs "Megabundle" appearing on the Online Store listings Printed the PDFs out yesterday on my monochrome laser printer (as my colour laser does not do double-sided printing). They should come with an ink/toner "health warning" - out of a (nominally) 5000-page capacity toner cartridge, the two PDFs combined used up 44% (= 2200 so-called 'normal' pages ). Comb-binding that lot was somewhat tedious - 824 pages punched (8 pages at a time... ) and 2x16mm and 2x12mm combs filled. Adds up to a nice pile of reading matter for me to wade through . [i just had to have a hard copy and it will be a good few weeks before I get the printed books in my grubby mitts as there will be the"printing + shipping + customs + shipping + customs + shipping" factor involved with getting the books off the ship from China and to my good self in the UK.] I am now porting the updated 6e HD .jar file to all 6 of my machines (though the most important 2 - the main desktop and the netbook - have already been 'done').