Ranxerox
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Posts posted by Ranxerox
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Re: Does the CU have a Franklin Richards?
Well, a person doesn't have to be a great match for being a mommy to become one. Heck it seems to happen more often that way. Still your objection is duly noted.
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Re: Lucha Libre artwork!
Very nice stuff.
No offense to LLH, but it looks like Brett is moving up in the world.
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Re: Does the CU have a Franklin Richards?
Gloriana' date=' from [i']Teen Champions,[/i] comes to mind. Not exactly cosmically powerful yet, she still has a Transform (anything to anything) that might work for some things, and adding some sort of summon or EDM to her Multipower would be in character. Eventually she's going to have a giant cosmic Variable Power Pool instead of a Multipower (according to her description text) so having her start in with some other powers first would be fine, I think.Gloriana was a senior at Raven's Wood when her "accident" happened, though, and she'd be about 25 years old now, if you use their time line exactly.
So IOW, she right about the right age to be the mother of a cosmic child.
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Re: The Boys
From what little I have seen of The Boys, I would probably give most of them some Dirty Fighter martial arts moves. Also, they seem to be a faster than most of the other supes that share their universe. So, you might consider some extra DEX with the only to attack first limitation - you could title that power Likes to throw the first punch.
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Re: Does the CU have a Franklin Richards?
Hmmm, I did not know that about the CU. I like the cosmic kid idea, but this idea has stuff to recommend about it too. Thanks.
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Re: Zombie Event advice need
Who is your main villain and what is his general shtick? Is he magic based or science based? There are many ways for bring back dead characters. I am just trying to narrow down the possibilities a bit.
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Re: Does the CU have a Franklin Richards?
He or she would have to be young enough to be engrossed by the story of Peter Pan, and powerful enough to pull the characters of Pan and Hook from wherever they exit to his world with out being aware of doing so. I'm not sure how big of role he or she would play in any adventures. I wouldn't imagine a central role for the character, but very possibly a reoccurring one.
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I need a cosmically powerful child for the origin of a character that I am working on (Peter Pan moved to the Champions Universe), and I wondered if the CU already had one of if I would have to make my own. Thanks in advance for all responses.
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Re: The Doctor is Back !
Yeah, my bad for not being more explicit.
I have some hope. The trailer seems to portray him as a tortured hero, risking his soul for the sake of innocents, and the stories did have that feel (at least the ones I read).
Besides, there's the tagline at the end. ("There are many roads to redemption. Not all of them are peaceful.") I've created many a character with that motivation.
Yeah, I've got my fingers crossed. The average viewer rating of it among non-US viewers is 8.4 out of 10, and that is pretty good. The reason I'm singling out non-US viewers is because the only place that the movie has shown is a film festival in Spain, so I'm thinking that the US voters haven't actually seen it.
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Re: The Doctor is Back !
Sorry. I'm just not a Dracula fan, so the Van Helsing title didn't get a click.
I'm just hoping that the film makers remember that Solomon Kane is a dour puritan and not a standard action hero. The movie trailer is very action centric, but you can't always judge a movie by its trailer.
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Re: The Doctor is Back !
Sorry you had to experience that. My number one rule-- developed when I first encountered youTube:Never, ever, _ever_ read the comments. Never. They just make you fairly certain that there is no intelligent life _anywhere_ in the universe.
If you read too many, you can actually start to feel your own brain cells dying off in wave after wave of mass suicide.
Actually, I'm kinda of glad that I did read the comments, because by doing so I found out that there is Solomon Kane movie coming out and it is far enough along to have it's own trailer.
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Re: Firestorm (Ronnie Raymond/Prof. Stien)
Opps, my bad. I saw the numbering scheme next to powers, and my head went straight to multipower. I totally missed that it was a VPP.
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Re: Firestorm (Ronnie Raymond/Prof. Stien)
What specific power does his dispel work against? What specifically can he transform things into?
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Re: The Brick is now a dinosaur
The game has changed to the detriment of characters like Last Hero. If that is what you want, because you always thought they were terribly over-powered before, you may be happy. That does not mean that characters like these have not been nerfed.Except the rules. Straightforward, "good citizen" bricks like Last Hero were never built with their stats bought through Elemental Controls.
Giving more points to everybody does nothing to remedy the harm done to characters like Last Hero.
If Last Hero can do everything under 6th Ed that he could do under 5th, he has not been nerfed. Giving a boost to EBs and mentalist (I don't own 6E and don't know if this has occurred) is not the same as nerfing bricks. A character type is nerfed when at the end of the day they have less power than they use to have. Sorry, if EBs and mentalist got some nice presents and bricks and MAs missed out, but that is not the same as being nerfed.
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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...
Recently, I read the The Caryatidsby Bruce Sterling. Set in the mid-2060s it's outside of what I consider to be Bruce's sweet spot of 20 to 30 years into the future.
I was worried a bit use of a three world power system with each power representing different world view. There is a long history of opposing sides in science fiction representing opposing ideas. Generally, in these scenarios the author "proves" his favorite idea is best by having its side come out victorious. Fortunately, Mr. Sterling does not give into this impulse and at the end of the book all the sides remain balanced.
The title characters of The Caryatids are 4 "sisters" cloned from the DNA of there war-criminal mother, and all of the sisters loath each other. Going into the book, I found this notion too artsy by half. However, over the years Bruce Sterling has matured from I guy who is good at coming up with ubercool future gadgets into an accomplished storyteller, and for the the most part I think he managed to pull off the clone thing.
On the whole I would give it 3 out 5 stars.
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
And for the sake of gratuitous linkage, another discussion on this topic:Nothing gratuitous here. This link has plenty of good examples of alternate ideas concerning the whole superhero thing.
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
Alternate current day with schizotech. And the real good guys were a group of reform-minded sorts who wanted to compromise' date=' gradually working toward a representative parliamentary system, and passing reform laws.[/quote']Unfortunately, reform-minded sorts who want to compromise are a hard sell as either a comic book or a Champions campaign. Still, it does sound like an interesting setting.
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "The Boys" by Derrick Robertson and Tony Avina. In the series' date=' the stereotyped spandex wearing supers are all shown as hedonistic pricks with more power than sense, while "The Boys" are the CIA team intended to keep them under control. "The Boys" wear black jackets and pants when they're going to rumble, but otherwise street clothes.[/quote']I've thumbed through some issues of The Boys at my FNCS and I felt that the writer made a legitimate point about how people might very well behave if they had powers which made them superior to there fellow mortals. But good point or not, it wasn't enough to make me want to shell out money to read about such unlikable "heroes".
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
Was this a "current day" setting or a fantasy past setting? Also, who if anyone was the good guys in this struggle, the oligarchs or the rebels?
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
My last charecter fits into this perfectly. The thing that always struck me about superheros was how they only became superheroes after getting their powers. Before they didn't want to fight crime' date=' then boom they dedicate their lives to it.Now I'm not talking about Batman or Ironman and how they got their abilities soley for the ability to fight crime. So I made Scardey Cat who got his powers at a young age, and hid them. He had no interest in crime fighting, so he never did. Then after he grew up he decided to flex his superpowers. The costume was never meant to hide from or strike terror into criminals. It was to keep the cops from arresting him, and his friends from bugginh him to use his superstrength to move things for them. After all the whole you can't go ten blocks in a costume without running into some minor crime only happens in comic books. An hour later his superhearing had picked up a crime, and for the first time muttering his mighty battle cry of "Crap" leapt reluctantly into the fray.[/quote']The classic vision of garish costumed flying superhumans clashing over the city is iconic. But due to its popularity, has a great deal of crappy writing ( even if the % of crap remains the same ). But pretty much anything that is well written with compelling characters, setting and plot, I'll read.For playing, again, I can enjoy any game with a decent set of players and GM. One of my favorite characters which I am currently playing is decidedly non-traditional for a superhero in a superheroic setting. He is black-clad with a duster, a wide-brimmed hat, and a blindfold. His only powers originate from a curse which allow him to communicate with and command corvids of all types. Combat with him looks like a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds and to maintain versimilitude, he can't do significant amounts of real damage with a flock of birds. His real use is information gathering, as while blind, he can see through the eyes of every raven and crow within 50 km ( for the first range increment ) (almost) simultaneously (x1000 rapid, +22 telescopic, N-Ray, 360 deg, Transdimensional (land of the dead), Targeting, Sense).
But he has a compelling story, has unique and powerful imagery, and contributes strongly to the plots as they develop.
These both sound like very interesting, non-traditional superheros existing in a superhero settings, but that wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'm looking for interesting ways to change the whole setting, not just individual characters.
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
One that's well written? Something that doesn't cycle through the same four plots over and over and over, and that has characters that behave like human beings?Forgive my cranky old man routine, but every time I look in on the output of DC and Marvel I'm amazed at how bad it is. I'm afraid to reread the comic books I liked when I was a kid. I expect it'll turn out that they were crap too.
On a more positive note, I can think of some books that successfully "reimagined" the superhero. Grant Morrison's runs on Animal Man and Doom Patrol were kind of brilliant. (How weird is it that he now writes the latest reality reboot for DC?) Planetary was great. What I've seen of Powers and Ex Machina were promising. Ex Machina is particularly interesting - it's about a guy who uses his fame as a superhero to launch a career in politics. It's sort of like a downscaled West Wing, except that there's some weird stuff going on in the background. The Boys has potential. The first few Wild Cards books were good.
I'd love to hear more recommendations.
For me, the urban fantasy genre has picked up where superheroes left off. I get fantastical tales in a contemporary setting, but better plots and more compelling characters. Sure, I have plenty of nostalgia for the X-Men and Teen Titans and so on...but I'm much more likely to pick up the latest Dresden Files novel, or rewatch an episode of Buffy, than seek out a comic book nowadays.
But superheroes clearly still have a hold on my imagination, or I wouldn't be here.
I'm even in a superhero game. But the fun of it for me is in exploring my character's psychology and trying to artfully chronicle his moral decay, not beating up Captain Destructo. I would love to play in a Planetary-style game. Or something more in the horror/occult department, or Warehouse 13 with superpowers.You make a really good point about urbane fantasy, it kind of is superheroes but different. It has characters with power beyond that of normals living in a modern setting and usually battling foes as powerful as themselves. So it just like superheros but with different tropes.
Do you know of any good urbane fantasy comic books? I've seen Anita Blake at the comic book store, but so far I have not picked it up.
Of course, I'm kinda of cheating since you asked for recommendations and here I'm asking you what is good. So allow me to recommend Air and DMZ. Neither has superheros (though Blythe from Air has some interesting abilities) but they are both IMO good reads.
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Re: Reimagining the Superhero
There are OTHER ways to diverge from the superhero archetype than to not dress the part.Yes, there certainly are. I just mentioned it because I've noticed that an aversion to spandex is pretty common, and I wanted to know what other ways people were interested in breaking the classical superhero mold.
Oz Incorporated are a security company whose super-powered reaction force swing into action when one of the advanced alarms they sell goes off (with the occasional diversion into private investigation and bodyguarding)The Misfits are an underground community of the more freakish superhumans who constantly fight to hunt down the Others, a society of monsters who indulge their taste for human flesh, blood and souls.
The Jannissaries are a team of super-powered humans abducted as babies by aliens to act as the enforcers for their empire, until they rebel and set off to find their home world.
These are all good examples of campaigns with supers that don't fellow norm. A comic based Oz Incorporated doesn't really grab me, though if I heard enough good things about it I might give it a try. Both The Misfits and Jannissaries sound interesting either to read about or play in.
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The standard superhero in spandex who saves the world while working to hide his secret identity is what really sells in comic book stores, but I've noticed that many players shy away from spandex and other superhero tropes when building their characters. Certainly, even once you stipulate that a character will have super powers and spend their time saving the world you aren't limited the standard comic book superhero. You could have super spies, soldiers, police, entrepreneurs, performance artist, rescue workers, politicians and so who knows what else.
So my question is what alternate visions of the superhero would you be interested in playing or plopping down three bucks at the comic book store to read about?
Does the CU have a Franklin Richards?
in Champions
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Re: Does the CU have a Franklin Richards?
Yes, and it might be a virgin birth and who doesn't like good old fashion hit them over the head with a hammer religious symbolism. Also, it allows her current instability to be explained pregnancy mood swings on a grand scale. However, using her absorption of Redshift as the point of conception shouldn't she have already had the child at the start of the Teen Champions timeline?