Zane_Marlowe

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy Hey everyone, just a quick update for those who don't know. One of our contributors is industry veteran John Ostrander. I can tell you first hand the guy's a gem to work with, a real gentleman, and someone who's got a great publication history and is still knocking out great work. John has, however, been battling glaucoma, and as the late great epic poet John Milton will confirm, blindness does put a crimp in one's writing career. John's been undergoing expensive surgeries to correct this, but they're expensive, and to help offset that cost, a number of industry people have setup a charity called Comix4Sight.com. At the site you can learn more about John's situation and how you might help out. At the very least, there is a bunch of original art donated for auction by some of today's hottest industry names, and you could come away with a cool print and help a good cause as well. Give it a look and trust me when I say that it couldn't be for a nicer guy. Bonus tease: for you who want to know more about John's contribution to the Supervillains and Philosophy volume, I'll say that it's the only contribution I've seen in any volume I'm aware of that deals directly with Just War theory!

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy @Balabanto: there is more interesting work on Dr. Doom in this book than you can shake a stick at, so you should find that rewarding. @SimComm: There's an essay on the Watchmen in the book, and specifically on the ethical perspectives of the Watchmen, and whether or not these really would permit or imply as permissible Ozy's actions. Also, there are two essays dealing with Magneto in one way or another. @WCW: Yes and no. All the villains featured in the book are comic book supervillains. However, there's a whole section entitled, "So You Want to Be a Supervillain" that takes on popular villain tropes, such as the paradox of being good at being bad, the problems with finding good Henchmen (and why that's so), and what I hope will be the most entertaining and insightful discussion of mad science you'll have ever encountered. My essay is in that section as well, and discusses Mark Millar's book, Wanted, in the context of a real life historical supervillain whom I'll not name because that reveal is part of the fun of the essay. I thought Wanted was an especially appropriate subject for the book because it's the one in which the bad guys win. In all, there are 19 essays in the book (the same as Tom Morris's prior Superheroes and Philosophy book, interestingly) about a range of supervillains and supervillain tropes, not including the brief introduction that frames the examination of supervillains in the book. In this book we were fortunate to have industry contributions from John Ostrander and Dennis O'Neil, and if I hadn't mentioned it already, those two guys are each a real class act and very nice to work with. For you guys who keep track of such things, we were fortunate to get the same cover artist that did Morris's prior Superheroes book, so there's a really neat visual continuity that connects the two. Of course, I have to say that I like the Supervillains cover better! I still wonder what that hooded guy's name is, and what nefarious plan he's contemplating? I'm sure I wouldn't find out until he'd captured me and was about to feed me to the sharks with the lasers on their heads, because at that point it would be appropriate to explain the master stroke of his plan. Of course, I'd also like to think that the superhero leaping into the sky on the cover of the first book would avert disaster before things went too far awry.

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy Greetings would-be Supervillains! A bump and a quick update. The final cover art is now appearing in the publisher's listings, and the book's street date is September 1st. I hope my friends here especially enjoy this, and I can report that everyone you'll read in the book turned out some really entertaining and insightful work. I'll be fascinated to see how people respond!

Re: Make a Green Lantern Oath May I suggest a slight amendment for meter. In blackest void, by cosmic string Let no evil pass unseen Let those who would bring suffering Beware the Lantern's Light and Ring!

Re: Superpowers and the Law I'm actually surprised no one yet has mentioned the entire chapter Steve wrote on this in the Stronghold book. It's quite well done, obviously draws on Steve's background as an attorney. Definitely worth a look!

Re: Microtransaction (Cryptic Bucks) Info Up For those worried about non-cosmetic microtransactions, remember that they said the items would be something you could earn in-game too. So it's not that the guy with deeper pockets gets something you won't, it's just that he'll get it sooner.

Re: 10000 Closed Beta Keys Registered for mine! Keys go out August 1-5.

Hi Steve, I'm hoping there's not an obvious answer to this somewhere, but I've consulted this thread and the faq in addition to 5ER and the Combat Handbook. Also, this may not be covered except as a kind of judgment call by the GM, but I wanted to see what you thought or if I'd just missed something. Our game uses the hit location chart, and I've permitted the sniper character to buy a 2pt PSL that applies only to sniper rifles, and only to offset hit location penalties. Now most everything I can find in the rules seems to assume that the PSL is used exclusively to offset penalties to specific areas, but I was wondering if the existing 5ER rules permit players to apply the PSL in similar fashion to the Adjustible Hit Locations rule in the Combat Handbook (p. 119) so that the PSLs allow the player to adjust the location roll by 1 point for each level bought. The player has 2 PSLs vs. hit location, so a roll of 7 would permit him to hit locations 5 through 9. I have one player who argues that this is a permissible reading of the rules as written, but I can't find clear support for that view in the text. There's a related question. If I do permit this as a house rule (whatever its status in the 5ER rules), I'm thinking that the cost should be perhaps doubled because the PSLs can adjust the result number up or down, and that seems to double the PSL's utility relative to the cost if it was applied against the called shot penalty alone. Again, hope this isn't a no-brainer, thanks again for the response!

Re: The Marvels That Men Do! (Marvel Comics Conversion to Pulp) Actually, when Mark Waid started his run on FF back around ish 500, he wanted to get Reed back into a Doc Savage kind of mode.

Re: The Marvels That Men Do! (Marvel Comics Conversion to Pulp) let's not forget a certain Captain America, whose valor in the Great War helped lead allied forces to victory. Alas, for his disappearance in a strange billowing cloud of weaponized vapors whilst battling his nemesis (The Scarlett Skull) on a great precipice overlooking an alpine lake. He was the first to gain the full benefit of the special formula discovered by an old patent medicine salesman whose patriotism burned as brightly as the deeds of his first and only patient. (Sadly, he was the victim of his own success when would be customers rushed forward on seeing Mr. Rogers's remarkable transformation before their very eyes; Dr. E.R. Skine's formula for Vita-Juice died with him when he accidentally backed into the road and was run down by one of those newfangled horseless carriages Henry Ford built.)

Re: Byronic Hero Has no one yet seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy I'll warn that because the publisher wants to reach the largest possible audience, we're probably not going to have any of the more obscure villains. That said, we do have some interesting coverage of some of the more general concepts not attached to a particular character. For instance, there's an essay on what makes mad science mad, and a whole section on taking over the world.

Re: Which is better for a beginner: Champions or Dark Champions? You know, because no one's said it yet, I'll mention that I cut my teeth on Pulp Hero, and it's got some neat advantages. First, heroic games give the starting GM an easier time than the full catalog of superpowers you'll have to manage in a Champions game. That means you can concentrate on the basics of the system applied to guns, fists, knives, etc. Second, and sort of in counterpoint to that, there are a number of heroic talents that resemble low-level powers that you can use to figure out the way that powers work before being confronted with a dozen dice of damage/effect. Pulp games can be either high-flying superheroic affairs or grim and gritty detective novels, and both are in-genre. The source material's easily obtainable. You'd need the main Hero rule book, Pulp Hero, and then (optionally, but recommended) Masterminds and Madmen and Thrilling Places. The last two are optional because you've got history books and the pulps themselves to take advantage of for any adventures or locations. With Pulp Hero you can also run Victorian-era games, and those are quite fun if you like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, the or anything out of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You could probably do a Western too, but I haven't tried it. Oh yeah, and Pulp Hero won an Ennie, it's one of the best in Hero's catalog.

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy How would you compare Lex to the Red Skull then? Both are ordinary men with extraordinary ideals and visions of what humanity could be.

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy

Re: *puts Hermit on The List* Doh! Sorry, I was distracted by Hermit's fluttering cape. Have rep.

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy One of my favorite essays is on "Marvel's Recent Unpleasantness," though I worry that that euphamism may be lost on most of us Yankees. You know, most everyone thinks about Stark, and yeah, he was the mover and shaker, but Reed gave the whole thing a heck of a push too.

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy Hermit, thanks for amending the header, this is perfect. Yes, we've got something on Luthor and the Red Skull, and a lot more on Doom and Magneto relatively speaking. Joker, Watchmen, and some industry contributors: John Ostrander on the Suicide Squad and Denny O'Neil on Two-Face. I'm currently trying to pull off something amazing on the cover with a legendary artist, but I can't say more about that yet. My gamer streak actually arranged a section of the book addressed to the readers themselves: "So You Want to be a Supervillain." Those essays are largely written in second-person, and they offer advice on the dos and don'ts. Galactus, not so much. Two reasons. First, there's a whole essay on him in the 2005 book on Superheroes and Philosophy, and second, the point of that essay applies here perhaps as well, he's not a supervillain so much as a force of nature. He's no more a villain than a landslide, even if he's as inexorable and as cataclysmic. Oh yeah, and nobody submitted an essay on him either. As far as Wanted is concerned, I'm writing that essay now.

Re: Supervillains and Philosophy Subtitle Suggestions Okay, now I've got to come clean on the thread title. I'm still working on the subtitle for the book, but my wife wisely pointed out that if I open a thread for suggestions, I might similarly open myself or the publisher to legal risk in case we used one of the suggestions. So I edited the text, but I don't think I can change the thread title or "Question" label. That said, I'm still happy to let you know the book is forthcoming, and I'm still interested to know who you think the paradigm cases are.

Hi Friends, It's time I come clean: I'm editing the forthcoming volume in the Pop Culture and Philosophy series, Supervillains and Philosophy. I'm really excited about the stuff in the book, and I can't wait to see what you guys--my fellow Herophiles--think of it. I can tell you at present that it's going to include stuff on several of our favorite bad guys, and, like Tom Morris's 2005 volume on Superheroes, we're going to have a pair of industry contributors involved as well. So, not that it'll impact what goes into the book in any way, but who are your favorite supervillains, without which no book of this kind would be complete?

Re: Ultimate Champions Oh no! Hard to follow is not what I intended, but I've been trying to capture the gist of the story in the threads and clearly I've lost something. Can you say more about what seemed out of place? The game is a 250 base + 100 disad game, and the only reason that player could do what he did at the end is that he used his power skill to run his own powers through the much more powerful displacement device. The rest of that player's time and space effects are things like increased SPD, a kind of desolidification (because he can warp the physical dimensions of his body), and a few blasting powers. So far quite manageable. Only Millennium City prohibited metahuman intervention in law enforcement because after the Battle of Detroit (in 2001, it was this setting's 9/11), city officials decided they such intervention was too unpredictable given the potential for harm. No other city had reason to take a stance like that. MC had just been rebuilt from the ground up over top of old Detroit, and the national image was bound up with this America's commemorative municipal jewel. It may have been a little pride that motivated the prohibition in addition to a nominal prudence, but definition one cannot rule out unpredictability. That decision left them open to VIPER's activating the absent Dr. Destroyer's dimensional displacer. In general, the setting contains far fewer metahumans, though they've been around for roughly the same amount of time. New York should have not more than one or two dozen genuinely super-powered individuals, and that would be one of the highest concentrations of which people were aware. I'll be adding to that number as I go, but I want the players to feel remarkable as metahumans, not just noobs on their way up a new metahuman ladder in this city. Partly because Dr. Destroyer made a lot more sense as an ex-Nazi when the game was published in the early 80's. I've got the Book of the Destroyer, and while I respect that they've done what they can to avoid making him practically decrepit, I took advantage of the fact that I was starting fresh with players who didn't know the character. Dr. Destroyer thus became a communist wunderkind born (UNTIL estimates) some time in the early 50's. It's thought that he may have contributed to their space project in the 60's, become involved with the KGB in ths 70's, before (perspicuously) finding a way to leave the Motherland some time in the 80's to start a relatively short-lived career as an arms dealer where he gained the name people have come to fear internationally. What everybody knows about him is that in 1992, Dr. Destroyer revealed himself to the world when he landed a massive force of heavily armed robots and mercenaries in Oceanside, CA, a little north of Camp Pendleton. Advance units disabled the available Navy assets stationed in San Diego, and for a while things looked quite grim as the US Military rushed to develop a front. Metahumans joined battle with the Destroyer in the days following, and though it took a toll, he was beaten back to his island base Destruga. More fighting followed, and while the base was destroyed, several metahuman heroes (including the most powerful known meta, Vanguard) never returned from that battle, and Destruga itself sank in six thousand feet of water. I've said that Dr. Destroyer was involved in other activities in the mid-90's, but these paled in comparison to the destruction of Detroit in 2001 as metahumans engaged him in a conflict that laid waste to the city (I haven't rendered this in detail either) and apparently resulted in Dr. Destroyer's death. VIPER is relatively unchanged in its structural details, but they are more politically sophisticated. Their goal is to undermine western liberal democracies and install governments friendly to their own philosophy (a kind of dictatorial rationalism). When they discovered Dr. Destroyer's displacer technology in a hidden vault in the underground ruins of old Detroit, they saw an opportunity to make an object lesson of MC by showing everyone how weak democratic regimes are in moments of crisis. Their overthrow of city government during the crisis was mounted on popular support, but in fairness to the MC's citizens, they had also received potable water supplies tainted with oxytocin, a hormone that elicits trust behavior. VIPER is currently inclined to view the MC displacement as a fiasco that started well, but spun out of control because of the PCs intervention. They will almost certainly appear again with a very special score to settle with Millennium City's new Champions. Finally, there's the fact that literally the first twenty vertical feet of old Detroit is buried about two hundred feet below Millennium City, and it's accessible through two sets of ventilation tunnels near the new city's outer perimeter. MC is essentially built on "stilts" composed of the old city's foundations supplemented by hundreds of supporting structures. Why did I do this? Because I thought it would make a cool location (a kind of modern Moria), and because there are other underground cities below modern cities, but none (to my knowledge) that pay off the coolness that the idea suggested to me. I'm still massaging the in-game rationale for this though. Okay, so that's the major stuff, and maybe that helps connect some things.

Almost two years ago, I decided to start a play-by-email game to stay in better touch with distant friends in a way that wouldn't require large and synchronized commitments of time. Being an old fan of Rifts, but never being quite satisfied with its underlying game mechanics, I decided to try my hand at a similar idea in Hero System and see what I might do. Now I realized right away that I didn't want to just model Rifts in Hero because I knew I'd find myself constantly agonizing over whether I'd gotten it right according to my own idiosyncratic tastes. Besides, Hero Games had all these great genre sourcebooks for Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, and (it had just been released) Post-Apocalyptic Hero. What would happen if I just ran that stuff together? My answer was The Terran Restoration, and two years later it's been a big success, though not without some intervening work and first-time PBEM GM's learning curve. The campaign log is rather long at this point (as you might expect), but the action is only now wrapping its second day. I've come to believe that we have a "relaxed" pace, but that the game is also relatively densely described given the volume of text we've produced. The campaign log is essentially a lightly-edited version of the original message sent to the list, sans most references to game mechanics. Since the action is taking place via email, I've also added an online player reference for players to keep track of maps, turn order, a log of recent actions by players and NPCs, overall experience, and my most current version of their character sheet. I hope you enjoy perusing the wiki, and I welcome any comments or questions you might have.

Last Fall my players and I were deciding on a game we'd all play, and they stipulated that whatever we played, it should be long-term so we could strive for the "epic campaign" while we were all here in grad school. I offered to run a Champions game since I'm a Hero System fan, a superheroes fan, and hadn't yet tried it. The result was Ultimate Champions, so named because most of my players are not comic book fans as such, and so I knew I couldn't ask them in good conscience to take on the tropes we veterans all wink at nostalgically. The link above will take you to the wiki hosted by the fine folks at wikidot.com. Have a look at the campaign log for our first major storyline, Grand Theft Millennium City. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as you enjoy playing it. The night we did "Eye of the Needle" was everything I ever wanted out of a role-playing game. I'll look forward to whatever comments people have, and would be glad to answer any questions about the setting. The next major story arc is currently underway.

Re: New Book: Superheroes and Philosophy *bump* Forthcoming