Cancer

Re: Campaign Idea - Suggestions Gratefully Welcome If you really want to bring home a dark, corrupt world, have the PCs get befriended by a small group of NPC heroes who are comparable in origin/motives/etc. to the PCs. Maybe these NPCs save their butts once. (Heck, maybe one of them is a PC's parent, sibling, SO, or something.) Then let those friend NPCs step on some corporate toes, and then get framed for something nasty (and the PCs know beyond a doubt it was a frame), and then hunted down and wiped out by the corrupt governmental agencies in the pocket of the corps. And let Fox World News carry it live on TV, include infinite replays of a particularly nasty lethal head-shot of one of their pals (since that's what boosts the ratings most).

Re: The Last Word If MightyBec were to use Zornwil's avatar, there would be no end to cracks about the word "greenhorn".

Re: The Last Word There's an old Far Side strip where the frog in the honkytonk sings, "... I got the greens real bad..."

Re: There's No "REAL HORROR" in a Horror RPG setting...is there? I've played in a couple of horror-type quickie games (test runs for convention events). Although I don't enjoy horror as a genre (either reading or cinema), the games were OK. You just have to play characters you despise, let them do stupid things, and revel in their hideous deaths. The jerk jock from school? That weasel slimeball manager at work? Your ex's lawyer? Aren't all of those people you'd want to roleplay having their viscera torn out and devoured before their eyes? Last time, when I played the Weasel Slimeball Manager, the plotline involved characters being "converted" by Evil and doing homicidal things. The GM was shaken by how readily I joined in the carnage. I had no problem envisioning that character come in late, calling a late-working office goober into his office, and then beating him to death so he could suck the marrow from his bones...

Re: Drugs, man... Drugs... My Champions character (I know, that's not FH) has a Multiform which is based on "Power Pills". His name is Mr. Terrific, and if you're not old enough to remember that very-short-term TV series, well, that's just another advantage of youth. He hasn't yet bumped up against an anti-drug campaigner, though that could be an interesting plot twist.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings A minor fringe benefit of teaching physics -- specifically, the optics lab courses -- is that you can get your 8- and 10-year-old kids excited by offering to take them to the school and show them the lasers. They are at first disappointed that they aren't the giant death rays of infinite destruction that are all the lasers on the kidivd shows, but playing around with them is still cool, even to the kids.

Re: The cranky thread

Re: The Last Word All against the wall, suckahs!

Re: WWYCD: The Binder My character isn't this creative, but I would be tempted to find the supervillains' character sheets, erase the most significant digit in their stats and powers, and then rent a safe deposit box and lock the binder in it. If the character's major psychlim was triggered, he'd be tempted to take his own sheet out of the binder and drop the binder (and all the rest of its contents) into an incinerator. If his minor pyschlim was activated, he'd be tempted to take out all the sheets except his own, make up a new character sheet (to his own specifications, which includes a certain Psychlim: Slavish Infatuation) for Montana Wildhack and insert that into the binder. If neither psychlim activates, probably he just does the safe deposit box thing until something pushes him over the edge.

Re: The Last Word Is there a logically viable way to distinguish those?

Re: The Last Word Koyaaniskatsi.

Re: Real Life Forcefield Hmm. That's almost as good as electromagnetic tank armor (for deflecting/defocussing the plasma jets produced by shaped charges). If you google for that phrase you can find a number of links mentioning it, but I can't find the original site I read a couple of years ago. The power requirements are considerable.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Pick up the trash, weed the garden, wash the windows, do the dishes, clean the bathroom, paint the house, clean out the gutters, run to the store and get a loaf of bread. That should take about 45 seconds. Not sure how to fill out the rest of the time.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: At the Sink-o de Mayo, what was the hors d'ouerve on deck when the ship went down? [For the A, I collapse the thread back to my previous entry.]

Re: Answers & Questions Q: What's tomorrow's entree recipe on Roadkill Chef? A: No terrestrial animal species with an average adult body mass of 25 kg or more survived.

Re: A Thread For Random Links http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/Illusions.html Images stark enough to be grasped. The Impossible Fork has a nice little blueprint. There's also a nice Infernal Machine gif to be seen at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TrefoilKnot.html

Re: A Thread For Random Links The Torino scale http://128.102.32.13/impact/torino.cfm (despite the numeric address, that's an official NASA site. The parent is http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/ ) Down near the bottom of the page is a graphic mapping Torino Scale numbers to collision probabilities and kinetic energy of impact. I leave it as an exercise for the board participants to translate those into STR values and dice rolls (or Unluck values).

Re: Odd Mind Scan question Interesting. I haven't had this come up, but it sets me to thinking of a framework/world background for mental powers along the lines of an analogy to sonar. There's passive sonar (the use of which is flatly undetectable, but you get a much less comprehensive view of the environment if that's all you use) and active sonar (where you see lots of stuff, but anyone in range with any awareness at all knows at least that there's someone doing a scan, and has a good chance of locating you). Hmm. Lots of possibilities and implications there, but it probably starts getting too grainy unless mentalism really dominates your world and/or plot lines.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Sometime back in the 1960's on manuvers in Germany, a soldier got himself killed. He got run over by a tank, the tread smashed him right across the midsection. Word is it was nighttime, he was sleeping on the manuver grounds, and the tank driver didn't see him, though how you can sleep through a tank rolling up to you I can't understand; tanks are incredibly noisy. (We have speculated that the soldier was high on something at the time, but however it happened, it's not relevant to the story.) The person I heard this story from was an ambulance driver. He had to pick up the body and deliver it to the nearest US Army Hospital to be dealt with. So the body was put in a stretcher, belted down with a single strap across the thighs, stretcher put into the ambulance. Away he went with the corpse. It was late, after midnight, but as an Army ambulance driver, it wasn't the first time he had driven with a corpse in the back of his vehicle. Part of the job. However, when rigor mortis set in, the abdominal muscles that had been smashed exerted a much greater force than the back muscles. As a result of this and being belted down below the hips, the corpse slowly sat up. Since the road was empty, it was quite a while before the driver glanced into the mirror ... and when he did, the corpse was sitting up, staring directly into his eyes in that mirror. The driver carefully brought the ambulance to a stop, and ran a quarter-mile down the road. Eventually he talked himself into returning to the vehicle ("He's dead, I know he's dead."). Peering in from behind, sure enough, the corpse was still there, sitting bolt upright in the stretcher, not moving at all. The story has it that the driver went in there, first belted the corpse's legs down securely using all available ties, and then leaned on the torso to get the body into a regular supine position, which he belted down very securely. After which he drove like hell to the hospital, without looking in that mirror again.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "What do you mean I can't put hotels on Go?!? I own everything else!"

Re: Answers & Questions

Re: A Thread for Random Musings So ... would you want the job where your official title is "Testbed Manager"? And if so, what project would you want it to be for?

Re: Answers & Questions

Re: Help with Murphy's Curse character Here's a weird idea ... Depending on how you want to slant your universe, this could be almost an Aesop- or Brothers Grimm-like situation, sort of a cosmic justice poll by some outside entity. The curse is a sticky entity; it is transferable from one person to another, simply by the act of cursing. Someone who transfers the curse become subject to a much lesser but permanent curse, but cannot be struck again by the original curse. If someone can go 13 days without passing on the curse, then it's broken, and the breaker gets some serious bennies in addition to (unknowingly) saving the world. If, on the other hand, the curse never gets broken in some considerable but not insane amount of time (13 months? 13 years?) then whatever entity started it along declares the setting to be without any truly just people, and comes down and smites the place like Yahweh smote Sodom & Gomorrah. That "considerable amount of time" I'd have to think about ... if it works out that the curse becomes non-transferable because everyone has been struck by it, then the destruction might descend automatically, too.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat All that comes out of it is "it's a small world after all..." and it won't turn off.