BigJackBrass

Re: Speaking of Pterodactyls

Now this is the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to 'net forums. Excellent stuff, thanks.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now?

A variety of albums from Pat MacDonald (formerly of Timbuk3... remember them?) He's the man I'd vote for as the most unfairly overlooked artist in America for the past decade or so.

Re: Greatest Super Battle Ever

Wolverine going claw-to-claw with Sabretooth in - if memory serves - Uncanny X-Men 218. Not only was it a beautiful, savage cover and terrific action art throughout, the fight also showed the personalities and nature of the combatants beautifully. They don't just fight to win, they fight because they love it. The battle rages throughout the mansion and ends up in the sea with Rogue shouting "Wolvie, you loon! Don't you know when to quit?"

And no, apparently he doesn't.

Re: Pulp Era Board Games

Fantasy Flight have a game called Quicksand! which is fairly pulpy, and of course there's Chaosium's old Arkham Horror game. I used to have a family boardgame put out by Palitoy in the 1970's called Treasure of the Pharaohs, which featured a race between archaeologists to acquire a golden deathmask from within a trapped pyramid. A fairly simple roll and move game, the best bits of which were the traps built into the 3-D pyramid, things like pivoting pitfalls and lowering stone blocks, and the amusing playing pieces of fat guys wearing shorts and pith helmets.

Other than those, I'm drawing a blank and it's interesting that although there are pulp era games there seem to be almost none with what we'd call a pulp theme.

Re: THRILLING PLACES -- What Do *You* Want To See?

Forgive the addition of a real location, but I can't resist mentioning my favourite, not least because it appears in Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories:

http://www.storyoflondon.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=454

The old Derry & Toms department store had a rather elaborate roof garden, with mock Spanish architecture and a pond full of flamingoes. These days the tea rooms have become a nightclub, but it's a location absolutely made for pulp. Treat your heroes to an unexpected oasis high above London next time they are in town; and given the current owner, it might make the perfect lair for a diabolical media tycoon...

Re: Strike Force

There's a copy listed at http://www.abebooks.com at the moment, but sit down before you look at the price...

Abebooks is a good place to keep an eye on, actually, and you can sign up for a watch list, so they e-mail you when a copy is listed.

Re: Strike Force

I bought a copy about six months ago, and it took roughly half an hour to track down via the Internet. eBay is the first stop, but when the book does appear there it often attracts silly money as mentioned above. I found an individual's website where he was selling a few games at reasonable prices. Deciding that I could risk $10 I ordered it and, luckily, everything went splendidly... so it is possible to find the supplement without resorting to a massive cash outlay if you have a little luck.

Re: Captain Jack

For any Captain Jack groupies with a taste for pantomime, John Barrowman will be appearing in Cinderalla:

http://www.theambassadors.com/newwimbledon/sp_p2043.html

Can't say I'll be making the trip myself (and it's even further to go for most posters on this forum) but apparently he'll be singing and avoiding any Doctor Who references.

Re: 'Excellent."

Who is just as well-known in Britain as rougish veterenarian Tristan Farnon in the TV adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small as he is for Doctor Who.

And given your sig I'm surprised you didn't mention his role as Campion.

Re: Top Ten All-Time 'Favorite' Superhero RPG Books Ever

I'd be inclined to nominate Silver Age Sentinels to that list. Not only does the deluxe edition look gorgeous but it was the first supers RPG for ages to get back to actually, unapologetically being heroic. Blending the best of the Silver Age ideal and freshness with noughties sensibilities was quite an achievement, although the game does have a few flaws.

Perhaps for Champions players a better nomination might be Omlevex, which aims for the same goal with more humour (and HERO stats!) albeit without the glorious colour interiors.

Rats. Now you've got me itching to look through my supers games...

Re: All heroes are NOT created equal

I've never tried to adjust point totals for Champions, since I'm no more into creating deliberately unbalanced characters than I am deliberately balanced ones: I just try to make characters I'll enjoy playing.

One of the best features of the old Golden Heroes game, for me, was the way it introduced an interesting element of balance to an inherently unbalanced random power system. After creating your character you had to negotiate with the GM for any powers that seemed not to fit. This meant coming up with a good backstory and character concept, or else the GM could just veto whatever seemed unsuitable. Now, this kind of balance is different than point balancing, because it's all about creating a good story and a really solid character, not just a random - or perhaps even deliberately over-focussed - group of powers. Something similar might usefully be employed by HERO GMs to allow Thor and Falcon-types to play together.

Re: Flash (DC character, not the power)

I'll have to dig out the comic to confirm this, but I seem to recall in Kingdom Come that The Flash moves so quickly that he can see across numerous planes of reality; and he grabs the spirit form of Norman McKay from one of them, pulling him inot Flash's "real world." Aside from being a wonderful bit of gobbledigook this would potentially make Flash far more powerful than just a chap who could move quickly.

Re: 'Excellent."

Probably no Cybermen in it, but for tonight's "Children in Need" appeal the BBC will be showing a new Who short, featuring Rose and the Doctor. It's on BBC1 at nine tonight, but for those of you not blessed with access to the Beeb it will apparently be on-line at half past nine (British times, by the way):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/appealnight/doctor_who_special.shtml

Re: Featuring Special Guest Star...

I always used to base my superhero games (Champions and Golden Heroes) in the nearest town to where I lived, which back then was undergoing a bit of a building boom and provided fertile ground for combat and adventuring. The familiar location helped to make things a little more realistic to my players, several of whom had expressed reservations about superhero gaming as being too divorced from the real world. Considering that they loved playing Space Opera and Chivalry & Sorcery I never quite got the argument, but still...

Using real celebrities seems to be a similar mechanism to me, particularly useful now that I've moved to a town where the players know the layout of the place far better than do I.

One of the best things I ever saw on the "City of Heroes" game was when a player created Barry White as a superhero, complete with white suit. I'm proud to say that he was in my superteam for a time, until I moved house and lost access to the game, and the sight of The Walrus of Love standing in Atlas with numerous groupies bowing down before him is one that has stuck with me.

Do any of you use real world celebrities (alive or, alas, dead) as characters in your games? Failing that, would anyone care to write up Barry White in Champions terms?

Re: 'Excellent."

Yes.

 

And the primary terror that should be emphasised in a campaign including them is that they were once human.

That's a vital point, and probably beyond the scope of game mechanics. Cybermen have given up everything that made them human in order to become "better" than human. They represent a whole mess of questions and issues for PCs if handled well.

Edited to add: And please, ignore the ridiculous vulnerability to gold. In some of the shows it had reached the point where a Cyberman fell down if someone so much as flashed a gold-toothed smile at him.

Re: 'Excellent."

One of the Seventh Doctor and Ace novels (name escapes me at the moment) featured a rather sensible update of Cybermen. The cyber enhancements made them fast, extremely fast, and the integration of cyber technology on Earth led to a division between countries where it was allowed and those where it was not. So America actually ceased to be a first world country because cyber enhancements were outlawed.

Lumbering Cybermen always seemed to me to be a product of "children's telly scariness" (i.e. encroaching horror is fine as long as our heroes can run for it, and sudden brutal attacks are too frightening) and the limitations of telly and budget throughout the sixties and seventies. Mind you, in the seventies they had flares, which is scary enough. An updated Cyberman ought to be physically beyond human capabilities, including speed of movement and action, if they are to retain their menace, particularly in an RPG where a lumbering horror is a bit of a joke unless handled skillfully.

Re: HPA #7 now in Online Store

Ah! Thanks for the info. I was concerned that I might be lacking a bit of essential software on the Mac in order to use the whole adventure, but if it's just an extra for CC then that's no problem.

Re: HPA #7 now in Online Store

I may have missed this being explained elsewhere on the boards, but the store entry for "Locomotive Pirates" says that it contains an FCW file - would some kind soul tell me what an FCW file is, please?

Re: Cadillacs and Dinosaurs HERO

The Dark Horse collections are the cheapest way of getting the important parts of the story so far, although they miss the short tales which were in the original comics and the first collected editions. If you can find the deluxe hardback editions of those earlier collections they have some additional sketches and info, and are rather nicely put together (but being signed and limited edition they can be hard to locate, especially the first volume).

The only reason to seek out other GDW games to supplement Cadillacs & Dinosaurs is if you are going to use the original rules instead of converting. Twilight: 2000 supplements are useful for this (and now cheaply available on DrivethruRPG.com) but offer little that is not currently found in the Hero range. As Prometheus pointed out, Hero already has all of the technical odds and ends you need, so what you really require is the background and characterisation. Since the comics are some of the best ever produced, in any genre, getting up to speed on that side of things will be a pleasure for you.

One thought on the post-apocalypse aspect: The characters in Cadillacs don't think of theirs as a post-apocalypse world. It only becomes known during the storyline that the ancients (us) lived in a world without dinosaurs, and finding out what changed is part of the story involving Hannah and Jack.

The cartoon seems only to be available on secondhand VHS, but you can still find odd copies of the PC game floating around eBay.

Re: Captain Jack

TV. The Beeb is showing a short season of Shakespeare modernisations with a wide variety of well-known (or at least moderately well-known) actors, and much as I usually find updates of the Bard execrable, these seem to work quite well.

There's probably some info about it on the BBC website. I'll see what I can find.

Re: Captain Jack

And speaking of people out opf their natural time, or place at least, I just saw Billie Piper in a modernisation (and quite a decent one, actually) of "Much Ado About Nothing." Very entertaining, except that every time she was on screen I kept wondering when Jack and the Doctor were going to walk in.

Re: Old Traveller RPG comic

Good heavens, haven't seen Harrison's strip in years. Suddenly I feel aged and weary...

Re: Sci-fi wear swords?

As far as I'm concerned, one excellent justification for having swords in sci-fi is that player characters are considerably less dangerous with them than they are with ranged energy weapons. Perhaps I am bitter. The memory is still strong of my character being held hostage with a gun to his head, by a villain wanting my colleague to hand over our ship. Had a sword been involved it could all have turned out so differently, but - alas! - 'twas not to be. My good friend raced to the ship's turret and with a shout of "Hang on, I think I can pick him off over your shoulder," fired the energy weapons.

... forgetting that our ship was equipped with twin meson accelerator guns with a forty metre burst radius...

Re: Robert E Howard or J.R.R. Tolkien?

May I interject a vote for gooseberry pie at this stage?