Storn

Re: Daily Art Findings Here is a mag cover I did with decidedly Pulp overtones. Been looking at a lot of pulp work, especially George Rozen's Shadow covers. I think you can see the influence on me.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. En, I did respond to your link/article. Folks, I'm sorry about the absence. I had two covers to put to bed, one of extremely tight deadline. The other I thought I had done, didn't like what I did and I'm in the process of repainting it because the deadline is a lot softer. Then, this last weekend, I was layed out for two days with a headcold. I just didn't feel like doing diddly. But I'm back in the studio, working away. Here are two commissions below the mag cover painting.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Yes. But my website is down. I drew her maybe three more times. In Millennium City, she is visiting a memorial to the falling heroes. It is a low angle shot of her pushing back her goggles. One of my favs.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread.

Re: Character Cover Sheet Sure. It has happened to me many times. Why I think this sheet is interesting and what works about it is that it is aimed at the player. Not the PC. So, it cuts down on being surprised. If you KNOW you don't like playing dishonorable characters... then your rogue might be rougish and mischievious, but the GM knows that your rogue has a strong streak of honor. Now, you've put on the sheet that YOU are interested in playing out scenarios that involve your Rogue's honor. Or more important, you are NOT interested in being a hardcore criminal. The GM is forewarned, and better yet, can craft scenes that gets you to play those kind of scenes out. And avoids the Resevoir Dogs kinda plotline of grim, gritty life in the shadows... as you want to play the Robin Hood end of the criminal spectrum. So... it cuts down on the "suprised" factor of behavior coming out of left field. But will never eliminate it. There are always going to be those situations that change or evolve a PC. Don't we want that? I do.

Re: Character Cover Sheet Bump because its good and it came up in a discussion elsewhere between myself and another forum.

Re: 60mm Mortars Here is how i would handle a mortar attack on player characters. This is an abstraction, so ranges and all that can be dispensed with. As they run through (or are in) an contested area: re: one that is being mortared... have each player roll for each Turn!!! (not every action or phase, Turn) that they are in or they passed through said contested area. If they roll a 17 or 18, they are close enough to take damage from shrapnel. The base attack is 4d6 RKA (off the top of my head). Explosion. Have them make a Concealment roll if they are hunkering down, a Dex roll if they are moving around. For every 2 they make it by, the damage is reduced by one die... but only to 3 dice maximum reduction... Target at bare minimum will take 1d6 RKA. Mortars are designed to be fired in unison, are not super accurate at typical squad level environs. But if your squad gets pinned down... and the enemy can start walking fire in... yup, then your squad is in trouble. If the Mortar(s) is sighted in, then a sucessful hit might be 15-18. I would rarely make the odds of getting hit more than that.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Something a little different. This was sketched from a bust at the Detroit Institute of Arts in probably 20 mins or so... not quite sure... I was having fun and babbling to another artist. This is Giovanni Bandini Coismo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. I had never seen this bust before, I go to the DIA probably 10x a year. But they have deep, deep basements and new stuff is always rotating up. I wish I could remember the painting's name that he was near.... for it is an amazing portrait of his wife and child and it is huge! It is always in their permanent collection... oh well.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Only if you think there is something pertinent in them. Visually pertinent that is. So. Up to you. Now. Something a little different. This was sketched from a bust at the Detroit Institute of Arts in probably 20 mins or so... not quite sure... I was having fun and babbling to another artist. This is Giovanni Bandini Coismo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. I had never seen this bust before, I go to the DIA probably 10x a year. But they have deep, deep basements and new stuff is always rotating up. I wish I could remember the painting's name that he was near.... for it is an amazing portrait of his wife and child and it is huge! It is always in their permanent collection... oh well.

Re: How things have changed! I haven't seen it yet. And I've done a ton of experimenting. Sure, skill roll... failure, auto Side Effect. I even tried to do a Side Effect table that had some positive, some totally odd but neutral and some negative effects. It just felt like a kludge and overcomplication. I've seen the many variants on the VPP... but the problem with the VPP is that it caps stuff. Some very cool spells, that are not combat effective or game unbalancing, cost SO much in Active Points and/or real points... it is just silly. Vpps have never really worked for me. I tried a multipower with the same effect, the cap of active pts really strikes out some great concepts.... if you build the MP to those active pts, then the mage is WAAAAY too much of a powerhouse. I've tried each spell is a seperate skill roll. Each spell costs 3 pts. +2 pts per every +1 in that spell. Active pts took away from the skill. This seemed to work the best. But still didn't get down to some really staid "my spell goes off and feels no different than a superpower with an activation.". This is something that in Mage or Ars Magica... I just don't get that feeling!!! I feel that the game base concept makes magic cool, interesting, unpredictable and fun and imaginative.

Re: How things have changed! I walked away for a bit, did some other stuff... and an add'l thought came to me. In the beginning, when I tackled Fantasy Hero for the first time (and by extension, Champions) in 1984... I thought Energy Defense and Physical Defense was brilliant. I thought the base idea of special effects was amazing. Now, many years later... I've moved away from thinking that was so brilliant. Oh, don't get me wrong, defining the sfx of EB is still brilliant... but I've moved away from the overabundance of stats and splitting of defenses and attacks into such narrow parameters. I also feel that sfx doesn't go far enough. And this is because of other games that have come down the pike since 1984. Lets take Defenses of super. There is PD, ED, rPD, rED. I think this can easily be condensed to Resiliancy (or pick your term), the inheritent toughness... and Defense (body armor, force field...what have you), the stuff that helps repel lethal force. Does it really matter if a punch is Physical and a EB is Energy? It used to. I thought it was neat. Not to me anymore. It is splitting hairs too fine for my tastes now. It is overcomplication, increased bookkeeping and not elegant. IF! You want the Hulk ripoff to be affected more by Energy attacks, build it into the Disadvantages. No one has taken away the ability to fine tune the character by collapsing the defenses into fewer stats. How many bricks have the Energy and Physical side of the equation pretty much identical anyways? Looking at the "stay in the fight" stats. WE have Stun, Body, REC and End. Do we really need that many stats to represent some one is either incapapble of pushing on or is capable of pushing on? While I still think the Stun/Body dichotomy is brilliant, i truly do, there are other games out there have found ways of simulating Stun/Body w/o 4 Stats, often just one. Yet those Heroes in those systems fall, get tired, push themselves to the breaking point...all the dramatic stuff that happens in movies, literature and comics. One can go too far. I think Hit Points without ramifications are an abomination. I will play Hero. I won't play d20. What I mean by ramifications is that it makes no difference if I have 5 hps or 125 hps... I"m still in the fight identical in ability in either case, just that i"m closer to "out". Lastly, Hero seems antiquated to me because of the lack of drama systems. I think the power of the Hero, Fate, Luck, Benny pt puts limited dramatic control in the hands of the player. I love that. Hero does not have it. We have it, we've house ruled it. But Hero doesn't... and I think that really shows its age. Burning Wheel, M&M 2nd ed and Weapons of the Gods have taken the idea of Disadvantages and created a much more nuanced and interesting (yet, much simpler at Chargen) mechanic. You pay points for flaws. no more trying to shoehorn yet another disad so you can top out at 150 pts worth. If you have a flaw, and you play it, you get a Luck, Fate, Hero, Benny etc. In other words, it creates a dynamic at the table where Players are eager to bone their own characters... to reach that understanding that setbacks can be fun... something that I admit I have a tough time with... but when I can author my own setback... it is much easier to swallow... after all, it was my idea. If 6th ed was in my hands, it would be a pretty radical rewrite. Probably a good thing it isn't.

Re: How things have changed! A bit overstated. I want these things in a combat. Not in any particular order. 1) Ease of use 2) Speedy resolution 3) Imagination creates fun and dramatic options. 4) Combat should be dangerous, but not overly lethal. Death at the hands of the dice SHOULD happen, but be rare. Unless we are playing a gritty version of something... Cyberpunk for example.... then ratchet up the lethality.... That is not the same as "let the GM just make the call." And to be fair to Hero, I don't hate it. It does some of my list pretty well. 1) Ease of use? Not so much, I want to keep track of Stun, Body, End... easy when I play, drives me bugnuts as a GM (pd, rpd, ed, red, Dmg reduction, Dmg Resistance, Penetrating, Armor Piercing, Stun multi, Hardened etc, NND).. a Champions fight can have a lot of modifiers stack in order to resolve a single blow. As far as skills and task resolutions, Hero is speedy. I have no problem with that. RDU Neil's house rules on Speed make SO much sense, that as written, Hero feels like a dinosaur on a tricycle in comparison to me now. There are faster combat systems out there and a bunch that are slower. 3) Combat dramatics. Hero is pretty good at this. d20, which I pretty much loathe, is terrible. M&M, a d20 system, is pretty good, but isn't quite as tight as that little list that prints out on your character sheet in Hero. Yeah, that Block, Dodge, Grab, Move Through, Brace list etc... is pretty damn wonderful and holds up from 1982 well. 4) Hero does this excellently. No complaints. Here are my two major beefs with Fantasy Hero (my first love is Fantasy and my yardstick). 1) Strength is too cheap. In 3rd Ed, when characters were being built on 75 pts, this was less of an issue. Since STR is the benchmark, it throws the whole system outta whack. 2) Magic is too constricted. VPPs are a pain in the ***. Magic doesn't "feel" right to me. YOu get the same effect, a 3d6 Drain is a 3d6 Drain. Yet Ars Magica does. It allows for the easier to cast preconstructed spells and yet a wonderful framework for "making spells on the fly". Ars Magica has a mechanic in place that isn't "let the GM make the call." NOw, can you build a world of magic around Hero? Absolutely, a world where spells have the same outcome over and over, is a reasonable way to go. Which leads to my major beef with Champions. There is no thought on how to "Stunt". Feng Shui and Mutants and Masterminds is built around the core idea of the Stunt. M&M does it better, IMO, than Feng Shui, because it is linked to a limited resource, Hero pts. Yet in what I feel is genre, Stunting happens almost every combat. Thing rips up the fire hydrant to douse Jonny, that is a stunt, Spidey weaves a parachute in desperation out of his webbing, that is a stunt. Cap'n America can't get into a combat w/o Stunting.... sure, all of these things can be built in Hero. But do they have to? Again, this is not "Let the GM make the call." There is a framework in place. Champion's Power Skill kludge is a joke. And there is precious little framework in the 3 or 4 paragraphs in the ruling. Sorry folks, every Super should have Power Skill.. and if every super has it... then there is no reason to spend points on it. If you demand pts spent, then my guy who has it is all of sudden doing all kinds of "cheap" uses of his powers... and just when you say "hey, its totally handwave to have Flame Guy use his 12d6 Fire blast to create a small bit of flame.", (which I agree with, it is totally in the concept of the character)... that small bit of flame becomes a major issue when he is trapped in a cave and needs some light. In the end, I just don't think Hero emulates my two favorite genres all that well. Fantasy and Superheroic Comics. It does do Supers... but they don't feel comic-booky to me, from Silver to Iron... doesn't matter... they don't feel like the genre is being emulated. So it is not "Logic" that I reject, it is some of the Hero Design Logic that I reject...and not all of it. Sword and gun fights, Hero rocks on toast. If the speed chart is tossed and our Speed House rules are incorporated.

Re: How things have changed! and Boy Neil.. I just simply disagree with you on the White Wolf thing. HIstorically, White Wolf got lucky. It wasn't any great big marketing plan beyond that of any other game company of the time. And the correlation between cheesy fantasy novels (which, back off, I like... no worse or better than comics) is only suposition. If anything, the explosion of license Forgotten Realms novels and the like had more to do with the d&d crowd through exposure to software titles, than to the White Wolf crowd. Besides, the first gaming novels I saw in like 1986? Battletech. Blame Fasa. WW just tapped into a zietgeist. That of modern horror. Really, the only horror game of any market share at the time was Call of Cthlhulu, set in the 20s.... the market was primed for modern horror. And vampires have a hook that is easy to get to. Did it evolve to a marketing plan? Sure. No doubt. But I did some checking. And as for rulebooks, my Vampire has pages 59- 230 out of 269 pages devoted to the rules. That is pretty hefty amount. I'm not sure where you get :'zero relevance to actually playing the game" Starting pg 231 is a section all about judgement calls of rules. A quick read, and it is a very GOOD section written about GM calls about rules... one of the best i"ve ever read. So the Concepts and Ideas that you speak of are very, very much in place in WW's products. Exalted has rules on pages 86-257 and 324-346 of equipment rules out of 350 pages. Exalted is a complicated world structure. Granted, much of the worldview is tied up in Castes and is taught along with the rules of making characters in various Castes. Now, you know I don't like pigeon holing of Castes or Clans... but it is a very simple and organized and effective way of teaching rules. It isn't badwrongfun. Just not for me. Now. I cannot speak for the supplements. I only own a couple and they are Trinity... and they are mostly equipment and colony books. But I think you are misplacing the fire of your ire.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Here is another Nighthawk concept. I think this is about the 4th I've done in the last two years... and that is not counting the actual Hero Games character. Hey. I don't mind.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. That's been done a lot, visually. I mean, c'mon, it is Robin Hood as a villain. Green Arrow is a Robin Hood knockoff when you get down to it. Here is my suggestion. An archer with NO arms. yup. No arms. He's got prosethetics. Have you seen some of the people who jog on these springy prosthetics? Which, btw, are made of the same materials these days as bows. Its amazing.... graphite composites and the like... titanium. Now. His arms are optimized for pulling a bow (maybe even spine, shoulder bracings, do the POV from behind). Some of the pulleys and what not can be built into the arm.... He literally is the bow. (not like the arm is a bow, it does attach, detach, he would have hand facsimiles). ...and how he lost his arms could be an interesting backstory motivator.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Oh thanks guys... not something simple like a longbow... nnooooooo, got to do all the damn pulleys and stufff (and now, do it in perspecitve!!!) Geez, the bow itself is so complicated it is almost its own commission! How about a invisible bowman? That would cut down on my time. Better yet, an invisible composite bow! {kidding} Actually, any leg work other folks do for me as far as reference goes is always appreciated. Yes, RT, got your e-mail, yes, changes are coming to both Snowfire and Battle Angel. Just had a bad day yesterday and was up to my eyeballs in a painting (which is coming out well, wasn't part of the bad day thang).

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. About the halo? I did and promptly forgot about it. Sorry, been juggling like 3 projects every day. I'll try and get to it soon.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Well, you know what they say; Better Laterly than Never. Seriously, thank you. I feel like I made some progress of late.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Here is another commission, RT's Snowfire.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. I gotta say that I'm pleasently surprised and that I was wrong in my assumption.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. ooh. spooky how just a little change can really shift the personality. Good job. Neat.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Yes! please! I'm curious to see what you saw in the pic that made you think in the direction that you went. That's always cool!!! Every artist problem solves visuals in their own unique way. Its fun to see something that I've done taken in a different direction!

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. that's why I post 'em.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. I have a feeling that these next two commissions will not generate as much feedback as the scantily dressed Glamour. Something about underclothed superheroines... just don't get it! (re: sarcasm). These two are for patron Death Tribble.