Nato

I'm looking for some adventures published along time ago. Was wondering if anyone would want to trade for them. I don't have any stuff to trade, other than my art abilities. Would be willing to draw a character portrait for some of these items.

My biggest want are these two:

Coriolis Effect

Atlas Unleashed

I don't remember if they're any good or not; I was a kid when I had them last. Just kind of want them for nostalgic reasons.

I might list a few more in the future.

Also would like to eventually get:

Champions 3D

To Serve and Protect

Never read them but sound good.

If you have any other old school that's worth trading, and want to trade, let me know.

Thanks!

I guess everyone's preferences are different. I'd rather see a good mix of genre books WITH supporting materials. I like having campaign settings, either to play directly or for ideas for a game. I like the current trend of publishing a genre books, and then supporting it with a couple campaign books. Then release a new genre book. Support. Then go back to a previous genre and release another product for it. I like that.

If the current support of 5th edition genre materials is any indication, then you Dark Champions fans should be very happy when that book finally hits the stands. I'm sure Hero will be putting out a lot of great supporting material for that as well.

I was very impressed CKC, and most of the Champs material to date for that matter. I think it blows away previous edition Champs stuff in terms of mechanics and writing quality. I like how all the powers now have names given to them in the write-ups. This makes the character more vivid, and the sheet easier to read. The backgrounds info is very well written, and I haven't read to many characters in CKC that I didn't like - unlike Classic Enemies, where I could flip through and be lucky to enjoy half of them. In addition to being better than previous editions, I think the new campaign material strikes a great balance betweem four-color style and modern or gritty. PSI is a great dark and modern villain group. The Destroyer rework takes what was great about the character and streamlined him, and trimmed some of the cornyness off from prior versions. I was also happy to have new artwork for the characters. I liked much of it in that book, and I think each book released has better art in it then the next. The Champions Universe gets more fleshed out with each book as well, and to me feels like a geniune comic universe. It seems to have a great sense of continuity, and each book seems to closely tie into what has been written before. It's also had the most material released for it than any of the other super-hero RPGs (other than the Marvel Universe game). I'd personally rather have 6 black & white books with excellent background information and useful game stuff than one hardback full-color book (even though I pick those up too.) All in all, I've enjoyed the new Champions products quite a bit, probablly more than when I first started playing in the 80s.

Nice costume design Mr.

I'm extremely excited to get a copy of this book myself, and look forward to hearing what people think about it while I await mine.

That film is very well lit. Not amateurish looking at all. Batman looks pretty cool. Could have done without the aliens myself. But I've always thought the idea of Aliens vs. Predator, or Aliens vs. Predator vs. Insert Superhero Here was always kind of stupid anyway.

I'm sorry, but I thought the Joker looked like ass. Sorry Ben. For the record, I've always thought the Joker looked dumb on screen with the white makeup and green hair. Whether from the old TV show or Jack Nicholson in the first movie. Dumb.

But really, quite impressive for a fan film.

T&A Fest!?! Are you and I looking at the same cover?

As for standard fantasy races... are a dwarf, human, giant, possibly an elf (the archer?), and orcs and goblins standard?

This would be a great aid to new players especially, or even for a GM wo wants a condensed sunopsis of his characters. So for powers with all kinds of limitations, do you maybe write a blurb of how it performs, minus technical jargon?

Don't feel bad. I'm not a newbie and I still don't know what they mean by that. I'm pretty sure it's not a game term. I think it's a figure of speech for something. Who knows.

Originally posted by Yamo

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Maybe.

Is this an NPC? If so, why not forget about mechanics for this one - if you find it being more pain than it's worth. Just make each of the characters as well as Psion the way you think they need to be. It's seems more like a story device to me anyway. Unless of course you really just like the challenge of making in a kosher write-up. I'm more from the school of making less work for myself, as long as it accomplishes the desired in-game effect.

*chuckles*

More like based off of "Stripperella."

Could put a splash blurb on the cover...

"Now with 100% more BOOBS!"

I mean seriously, how many heaving breasts do you need to draw? Why do you have to figure out every possible way to show some cleavage? Are you like 14 or something? Damn. Oh, and page 21 of Spacer's Toolkit... does that lady's grandma REALLY want to see her humongous melons? (even though I do.) Come on already, lay off the fun-bags!

Heh. Anyway, welcome to the Hero All-Star Artists Squadron. I really dig your stuff. And your egregious mammaries.

Originally posted by Citizen Keen

The art was solid, althought I do wish Nato had done some more of the drawings, I really like his/her work.

Thanks for the compliment Keen! I really appreciate comments like that. Makes my sore drawing hand worth it! It's funny to think that when I was told that I was going to get to draw a whole lot of ships many books ago I was terrified. The Ultimate Vehicle was my first time drawing ships and it was very hard work. But then the kind folks at Hero liked them and asked me to draw more! I was like "Oh No!!!" But now they're one of my favorite subjects. I love coming up with new designs now.

Originally posted by Storn

Here is a much beloved character in Neil's RDU champions game, Speedball, played by Geoff.

I think someone may be sued by Bitmap Bros for trademark viloation. http://www.bitmap-brothers.co.uk/downloads/images/speedball/index.htm

Cool pic.

I ran several successful, highly entertaining Champions adventures on WebRPG and OpenRPG. The only reason I stopped is that my freelance work for Hero was beginning around the same time, and some tight deadlines prevented me from being as prepared as I needed to be. I really enjoyed the experience, but I felt I was shortchanging my very reliable players by not always prepared everytime. I kept letting the "freestyle" - having them have conversations among themselves, but giving them no real plot. Anyways, did run a few combats and those went well.

Of the two programs I mentioned above OpenRPG worked the most reliably for me. WebRPG seemed more prone to crashes, and seemed to not handle heavy graphic maps and minis that well. Then they started to charge. I wished to OpenRPG, which was not only free, it had features that I like much more, and did a great job with maps and minis, and even had a nice Hero Dice Roller that you could turn on. I supplemented this by using Hero Combat Simulator to help manage my combats. It sped things up A LOT and I could run BIG combats easily enough. In fact, most of the time the players didn't even roll. They declared their actions, I let HCS do the rest in terms of mechanics. I then narrated the results back to them in story terms. This resulted in more flavor to the combat and they never knew exactly how much STUN or END they had left. I said that in very general terms. My players all said they really enjoyed the approach. Everyone loves to roll dice though, so on occasion they would roll their own attacks. It was a blast.

Things I did to prepare my camapign...

1) A campaign website. Since I do web design, I wanted to make it very visually appealing. Made a logo for the game, character sections, etc. I could also post campaign news here as well, or do visual aids such as mock newspaper articles. I often snatched the code from a news website and replaced the text and graphics so they felt they were reading about themselves in the Chicago Tribune.

2) Message boards. Pretty dang handy. Even though we played real-time, this was a nice way for people to play a little between sessions. I would post a general story before the session, and the players would respond with a story for their characters. This was optional of course, but I had the good fortune of having players who loved to write. This was great for setting up a session. That is important many times - to be able to start all the characters out in one place. It saves time to get them altogether in-character so you can get off to a quick start online. Boards are easy to get going and their are many options. Dan Simon hosts message boards for online campaigns, and their are a few web-based message board sites like EZBoards. There is also free software that is very similar to the boards here, that you can use if you want to host the boards on your own site, which is what I eventually did after trying all the other options.

3) Supporting cast. I made up most of my NPC cast before starting the campaign, and uploaded pictures of them to my website. I then made a sheets in OpenRPG that I could use to show the characters to my players whenever they encountered the NPCs.

4) Made minis for OpenRPG. These are basically small GIFs you use to represent your characters. Real easy to do, but you must upload the GIFs to a website somewhere in order for them to be used by all. To make your own, take a character pic and make it teeny tiny with your favorite image editing program. Or there are pages on the OpenRPG site that have some pre-made.

5) Collected maps. Again, just a GIF or JPEG of a map you wish to use, uploaded to the web. OpenRPG has nice mapping features, allowing you to overlay hex or square grids at many different sizes. Also has "fog of war" settings that hid map portions from players until they are ready to see them. Also has a whiteboard feature that you can use to draw on your map in-game.

6) Made a character sheet node. This is the character sheet for use in the program. I used them mostly in WebRPG, but also some in OpenRPG. I think in both you can add buttons that will roll dice for you. I made dice roll macros in Open that would roll for attack, determine damage, and remind you of the END cost of power. We stopped using alot of these when I started using HCS for combat.

7) Before adventures, wrote any siloqu-however-you-spell-its or game descriptions so that I could quickly paste them into game chat.

8) Entered all heroes and villains into HCS. This did all the fun stuff like determine SPD and DEX orders, roll my dice, track my END and all that fun stuff. Without having to remember all this I could run larger combats, or focus more on the role-playing aspect.

Hell, there's all kinds of stuff you can do to make the game more enjoyable. I've been wanting to get an online game going again for a while. Don't know if my schedule will allow it yet. Thought about doing a few one-shots and stuff. Anyway, I have a couple of players who've been waiting. May try to find a couple more so if anyone's interested, let me know. Most likely the game would be on Wed nights 6:00pm PST.

After watching Gangs of New York last night, I would say this almost qualifies as a fantasy movie.

Originally posted by Bartman

Ladyhawk - With Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer. Already mentioned, but an excellent movie. If it doesn't make you want to roleplay, you aren't a roleplayer.

Interesting you should say that. Back when VCRs were invented, my local video rental guy recomended I get this one. Said that it would give me some great ideas for role-playing. I still haven't watched it but it's probablly time I should.

Actually, Princess Bride is another one I have. It's great. A different flavor of fantasy, but great fantasy none the less. The whole fairy-tale medieval thing.

Thanks.

Having almost completed my first fantasy artwork assignment for Fantasy Hero, I find myself bitten by the Fantasy Bug. Can't get enough of it. When working, I often like to have movies playing. Now there are hundreds of thousands of fantasy novels to choose from, but I don't know of too many movies. Well, movies worth watching that is. I'm interested first in a great story, but will also settle for an OK story if the visuals are excellent - meaning great armor and weapons and period scenery. That sort of thing. Can you guys recomend some good one? Here's what I know of already...

LOTR obivously

Conans

Scorpion King

Really nice animation is cool too.

That's about it for me. Was never all THAT interested in the genre, other than enough to play the D&D basic set in junior high.

Thanks.

Nato

Don't forget to read The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted just for kicks.

HA!

I drew Grond for a chapter header in Millennium City and forgot to give him ANY pants whatsoever. Andy wquickly replied "Give that guy some pants!"