Big Willy

Re: New Power: Intangible What's wrong with "Old Power: Desolid"?

Re: Will the real Jolly Jonah Jameson please stand up? Jonah is Stan.

Re: My favorite player ain't coming back Pretend that the hanging plot threads are "being resolved in Miss Terror's spinoff solo title", and either never refer to them again or tie them up by GM fiat. It's a shame to lose a good player, but it happens and you have to move on.

Re: Captain Jack CORRECTION: The Christmas Invasion airs on Christmas Day (25 December).

Re: Calling Frenchmen and Francophiles M. leFort? Obelix? Porthos?

Re: Infinite Crisis It seems to me that Seven Soldiers stands in relation to IC in a similar way to how "American Gothic" stood in relation to the original Crisis: it's the secret apocalypse that the A-list heroes are too busy to even notice is coming.

Re: A little slang help please? Rerr website rerr, Baldy boy.

Re: Worldwide Champions Eckythump, Sean lad, A think tha's boggled yon'un. Hee hee.

Re: Super Bases and the Gm's who love them Ask the players what they want from a base. Discuss potential locations (abandoned mine, dockland warehouse, etc.) and methods of acquisition (squatting, takeover by force, purchase through shell company...) Then see if they have the points for it. If not, they'll have to pull a few jobs to "fund" construction & conversion - and the campaign starts rolling...

Re: Wanted! Too true. I am remembering THAT VERY PANEL from Wanted itself...

Re: Wanted! But it was hearsay. You get a few pages of action, and then there's two villains at the funeral and one's saying "That's the way I heard it, anyhow" (or words to that effect).

Re: Wanted! That's okay, I misunderstood your question as well. Thought you were asking from the PCs' perspective, and were being a little defeatist. No harm done. As I intimated, though, if you and your players were fans of Goodfellas, the Sopranos and Bendis' Daredevil, and your roleplaying tastes and talents ran to that sort of bickering and intrigue, you could play the villains - after all, people play Vampire, which is a similar sort of setting in many ways. Even then, though, there's probably more mileage in a game set further down the pecking order than among the Council of Five and their immediate hangers-on.

Re: Wanted! Me, I'd start small: forget about the top table villains to begin with. Way, way down the food chain you've got all sorts of lesser types and mooks cleaning up after them - bribing, coercing and mindwiping compliance from the media, the government, the cops etc. It's a dirty world, but so's the Question's Hub City or the Gotham of Batman Begins. Set up the PCs as cogs that don't quite fit the machine: the single honest cop, reporter, lawyer, whatever... Perhaps a legacy character or two... The conspiracy theorist, the old inventor who still has a few toys in the basement he's kept locked since his son got killed... It's not going to look like JLU straight out of the gate, but there's potential there.

Re: Wanted! Of all the criticisms that can be levelled at this series - some of them valid, at least from certain points of view - this is by far the weakest:

Re: Infinite Crisis Tack, or possibly tactic. The former is a metaphor from sailing; the latter makes it sound like I'm trying to pick a fight, which I'm not. I actually agree with a lot of what you said in your earlier post about exploring the repercussions of violence. Marvel put out a very good GN a few years ago called "Blockbuster", about the residents of an apartment building fighting for compensation after some superfreaks (the Silver Surfer and some villain I'd never heard of) crashed through it; and there was the classic "Best Man Fall" episode of The Invisibles (later spoofed as the "dead henchman" gag in Austin Powers); but it's not done enough, and I've seen too many episodes of The A-Team to tolerate any more villains crawling unharmed from wrecked helicopters and burning cars muttering "Phew, that was close!". So while in a 22-page monthly comic you can't linger every possible consequence of every punch/bullet/deathray that's thrown, I do think there's room in the American superhero genre for plenty more blood and guts than has historically been deemed appropriate. The only thing we really seem to disagree on is the extent to which a superhero universe should be permitted to mash genres together. I think comedy, drama, horror and tragedy can share the same setting; you don't. That's why I mentioned the real world: not to imply that random violence was somehow acceptable in real life, but just because I think ours IS a world that contains all genres of story. In a superhero comic, there's likely to be fighting: that's how these stories are constructed. But I don't see that one being a bloody gorefest or a slapstick knockabout means the next one on the rack has to be the same. I think it's best that individual series keep their basic attitudes mostly consistent, and save the culture clashes for the team-up titles, or one-off guest shots that actually say something about one character or the other (and I quite accept that I'm asking more there than is usually given); but I don't want to completely do away with the chance of showing the same characters from slightly different angles. It's a strange world. let's keep it that way.

Re: Infinite Crisis As voted for by the readership, who clearly had one eye on Frank Miller's hints in DKR about "what happened to Jason", and the other on the "goofiness" of the whole teen sidekick idea. Much of Batman's subsequent darkness proceeds in a straight line from that moment, and rightly so. But while it was a traumatic event, it wasn't enough to make his peers in the League doubt their own positions. Why not? Because, as he and they both know, they're not really his peers. Batman is out of his depth as a cosmic champion - for him, defeating Mongul, Darkseid or Neh-Bu-Loh isn't just about working up a good sweat and running the miscreant out of town: it's an extreme situation where he has to think outside the box, go beyond his established limits, risk everything on a million-to-one shot... and then go back to Gotham with a fresh lick of paint on his self-confidence and moral certainty. Clark and the others can't help being impressed by his sheer brilliance in deploying the tools he has; but they can still sleep easy in the knowledge that at least they're not twitchy psychopaths who put children in the line of fire.

Re: Original Supervillain Groups -- Get Creative! There was a plot seed in Adventurer's Club years ago called "The Gilt Complex", about a crime gang who looked like supervillains, but had hopelessly inadequate defences - it was kinda supposed to make the PCs think twice about the level of damage, KAs etc they were throwing around. I ran the scenario more or less as written, but jazzed up the baddies into C-class supers with one power each. Thus, The Bullion Bunch: Gold Brick had superstrength Gold Rush had superspeed Gold Fever had, IIRC, some kind of NND based on increasing body temperature Gold Digger had tunneling and was the getaway guy There was fifth member that I've forgotten - could have been Gold Leaf, with plant control powers, but I doubt it.

Re: Wanted! Now that the heat has died down in this dispute, I think at least we can all agree on one thing: it's a promising setting for a campaign. Run it "dark", in the style of the original, and you can have a bloody, morally-repugnant game of ruthless power struggles and mafia politicking - the Godfather with superpowers. Run it in a more conventionally heroic mode, and you can have a Star Wars / Robin Hood style struggle against the forces of corrupt authority, with a Magey subtext about freeing people's minds, in a world that can eventually be redeemed but has enough bad **** in it to keep the PCs occupied for years...

Re: Infinite Crisis I'm with Assault. I liked JLI and The Question. The wealth of a collaborative universe is precisely that you can have series with different tones all happening at once. So somehow, however hard Batman tries, the twisted psychetecture of Gotham keeps spewing forth more monstrous grotesques for him to fight; but meanwhile in LA-LA Land the Blue Devil can crack jokes while facing off against his enemy-of the-month and then retire to the poolside for a cold one without a second thought. You don't have to buy both books if you prefer one style to the other; but why deny the opportunity for a team-up where Bats can be as appalled by the Devil's sunny dilletantism as BD is by the Caped Crusader's breathless monomania? The real world has that kind of emotional range; why should superhero comics have to be one thing or the other?

Re: Sharing the Campaign ideas you can't use... yet I haven't seen it in precisely the form described above, but the theme: isn't entirely new. It was used in the short-lived STATIC revival a couple of years ago, as well as CAPTAIN BRITAIN way back in the 80s.

Re: [Hooks] News articles that could be Pulp Adventures Following the links, it looks like the Genghis expedition was inconclusive, but I was tickled by this bit of unfortunate proofchecking: There were giants in the earth in those days...

Re: Original Supervillain Groups -- Get Creative! One of my favourite theme teams was the Party Against Normal Taboos & Orthodoxy (PANTO). They were brought together as a sort of situationist-anarchist prank by albino former rock star Steve Pilgrim (aka Snow White), to pull off pantomime-themed crimes against the state - scattering stolen bullion all over the streets of London, for example. Their fatal flaw was that he'd chosen his associates to fit the theme, rather than for their political sympathies, and few if any of the other villains shared Pilgrim's airy-fairy ideas: they were just in it for the money. Cinderella was a mutant pyrokinetic. The Ugly Sisters were a duo of unpowered bank robbers, hardened thugs who committed their crimes in drag so no-one would recognise them. The Seven Dwarfs were a midget acrobatic team who'd turned to cat-burglary when their circus went bust. Alladin was a scientist who'd invented a "solid-light" hologram/forcefield projector. Puss in Boots had jetboots and a cat mask.

Re: Infinite Crisis

Re: Marvel Universe Question It's only really The Ultimates that's had that slightly grimy post-Watchmen worldview. Back when the line started, with Ultimate Spidey and Ultimate X-Men, it was just another in along line* of attempts by Marvel to pull in a new generation of younger readers (who are always thought to be alienated by the weight of continuity in the regular MU) - in this instance by going back to square one and restyling key characters as kewl bigfoot High School mangaforms-wid-attitood. The Ultimates, perhaps not coincidentally the only book in the line that's about grownups, is a completely different creature and the only one I have the remotest interest in (I gave UFF a try, but it was like one of those movies you'd have liked better if they hadn't bothered spending the licensing fee). Sadly, it looks like Vol.3 is going to change all that, to harmonise with a saturday morning cartoon series which I gather is on the way... *Going back as far as the New Universe, by way of M2, Heroes Reborn etc.

Re: PRIMUS and Homeland Security FEMA, the Secret Service et al still exist in their own rights. OHS is more of a coordinating channel, to formalise inter-agency communications and ensure that what used to be called loosely "the intelligence community" behaves more like a community than like a collection of feudin' smallholders . So PRIMUS' structure would remain pretty much unchanged, although there'd be an extra layer of bureaucracy above it.