Big Willy

Re: Marvel Horror Heroes Amazing illustration... but this is a hoax, right?

Re: Bases and Places Wasn't there a Doctor who story where the Master's TARDIS was disguised as a horsebox? I remember reading the Target novelisation and thinking what a cool idea: get out the back, walk round to the cab and drive about..!

Re: Wanted! Metaphysician, what do you imagine organised crime is other than "having the villains cooperate"? WANTED is a Generation X rites of passage revenge fantasy played out against the backdrop of a mafia power struggle. That the characters are set up as an Elseworlds version of the Secret Society of Super-Villains is just a bit of local colour to draw in the spandex fans (the author included); but in that context, Trencher, it's worth bearing in mind that the protagonist is supposed to be the Deadshot of his world - the assassin who never misses - so his ability to take out the superannuated gimmick villains of the Silver Age with a single bullet to the head is both internally consistent and a "When I Become a Criminal Mastermind" style comment on the differing sensibilities of pre- and post-Crisis/Watchmen superhero comics. And Benzini, the fourth wall was broken on issue 1, page 1. How can Wesley be narrating this scene? And who is he talking to when he does? I'll concede that the final epilogue in #6 isn't strictly necessary to the story, but don't agree that it ruins it. We learn that after all his experiences (SPOILER ALERT!) ...Wesley has not "become a better human being", but has instead found a place at the top table of the world he hated so much when he was a disgruntled wage-slave. And, like nouveau riches the world over, he conveniently forgets the combination of luck, talent and contacts which helped him rise to his current position, and berates the rest of us for not having the psychopathic ambition to follow his example. I can understand people being accustomed to expect a "happy" ending, where having overturned the coup, Wesley turns vigilante, declares all-out war on the rest of the Fraternity and ushers in a new age of superheroism... But that would just be setting up yet another gritty masked crimefighter franchise, and I'm actually quite glad it went the other way for a change. It just chimes better with the prevailing mood. I'm really not a big Mark Millar fan: I think many of his ideas are a bit weak and predictable, and he often promises more than he delivers. But WANTED is easily the best thing he's ever written (The Ultimates comes close, but occasionally hits a bum note - everything else is way behind) and I don't understand why people seem to hate it.

Re: Your Opinion Please - Four-Color Appropriate? Regarding the model, I think it'll be fine if you repaint it in sky blue and yellow.

Re: Your Opinion Please - Four-Color Appropriate? Purely for information, as a service to those who don't know: THE SCIENCE BIT Prior to mass computerisation, American comics were coloured by providing the printer with what were called "colour guides" - that is, sheets of acetate, each bearing areas of solid black and halftone dot patterns (also black). When printed over each other in successive ink colours and lined up properly (using index marks - the little "targeting" circles you still see sometimes on the edges of newspapers), four of these templates - one of which was an acetate of the original b/w artwork - produced the final image. Pretty much all artwork reproduction was done the same way, and the same colour mixing principles still apply, as a glance inside your nearest desktop inkjet printer will prove. What's changed is the pre-press technology. Unlike the early newspaper comic features - Flash Gordon, Little Nemo etc. - or the British Eagle comic of the 1950s, which were hand-coloured in ink or watercolour and then had the colours separated out photographically using camera filters, mid-century US comicbooks had their colour guides assembled from scratch at the drawing board, using a limited range of Letratone or Ben Day dot patterns on sticky-backed acetate which had to be cut to shape with a scalpel. This was, of course, much cheaper and quicker (particularly if, like early Marvel, you limited yourself to only using 25% and 50% dot patterns), but the results, though vibrant, were pretty unsophisticated. Only with the advance of digital imaging did it become cost-effective to return to the subtly-graded colour palettes made possible by photoseparation. I remember DC experimenting with computer coloring in the 1980s (the graded fills in Rebis' coat in Doom Patrol spring to mind), but the real revolution came with the launch of Image Comics a few years later. The fact that more sophisticated colouring became available at around the same time that a new generation of comics writers were turning out more morally and psychologically ambiguous stories is probably just coincidence - but even in the late 1980s it was easy to tell the difference between the "new comics" and the direct and ethically-unsophisticated stories of the "four-color era".

Re: secretary to heroes You could just build her a house in the office.

Re: My New Project - 101 Days Of Champions Agreed. Too much choice is paralysing. Focus, baby, focus! Hope the experiment goes well.

Re: campaign story arc -- what do you think? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050930/ap_on_sc/gorilla_tools

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

Re: Names needed Your ex-hero is trickier, since apart from the teleporting it's a fairly generic concept - and if it was me I wouldn't want to base the character's public persona just on teleportation. It gives too much information to the enemy: better to leave them in doubt as to exactly what's happening when he appears and disappears like that (Is he becoming invisible? returning to his home dimension? etc.). A misleading name would help with that - something like RIOT GHOST or CONSTABLE OTHER; or even STEALTH MAN, implying (whether true or not) that his battlesuit and vanishing power is somehow connected to or derived from the next generation in the Stealth aircraft programme.

Re: Names needed For the villain: Never overlook the obvious. Ladies and gentlemen, preeeesenting THE ANIMATOR!!!

Re: Is a Jedi reasonable in a Marvel Avengers campaign? What a copout.

Re: Is a Jedi reasonable in a Marvel Avengers campaign? That wasn't something I'd thought through - good point. It probably depends what role the JK is going to play in the campaign, as well as how long he's been around or able to integrate into society. Given translation facilities and a bit of acclimatisation, I'd say a Jedi could pretty easily get used to the fact that legal process is a bit more involved here than at home, and that dispensing frontier justice without proper authority is just going to get him in trouble. That said, there's scope for his early adventures on Earth to have revolved around exactly that conflict. Such misunderstandings could by now have been resolved, or the character may have "fallen to the Dark Side" as a result, if the campaign is short of a Punisher figure. Both could be interesting situations - and both could be explored, if there were originally two Jedi in the ship (the classic master/apprentice team, for example).

Re: Tales of the Freedom Corps I love some of the names and terminology: The Singing Boxer! The Fanta-Beam! The Ruun (wooooh!) The Null Spider (WOOOOOOH!) The Toyotatomi (BWAHAHAHAHA!) The Crimson Battery! Dream Shift Jennifer Gallows There's some great... there must be a name for this: the mixing together of ordinary words to create concepts that take on a life of their own... going on here that reminds me of Jack Kirby or Grant Morrison at their most playful. Even on just a cursory read, I feel like I KNOW this world. Funky. Good work.

Re: Is a Jedi reasonable in a Marvel Avengers campaign? As someone already pointed out, the Marvel universe is crossovered like mad as it is. Thor and Hercules have been there since early on; Machine Man span out of Kirby's adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey ; Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, was the son of Dr. Fu Manchu; Captain Britain has fought the Special Executive, who started out working for the Time Lords of Gallifrey; Rom the Spaceknight may be long gone, but his enemies the Dire Wraiths still have a place in X-Men history; and who can forget Michael Golden's classic artwork on the original Micronauts run? With all this going on, why not Jedi, particularly as Marvel published the original movie adaptations? So: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, your NPC went into cryosleep/meditation - maybe fleeing the Empire, maybe on an exploratory mission for the Old Republic (or the New), maybe as an emergency procedure, maybe frozen in carbonite by some corrupt local official he was investigating - only to get lost in the depths of space and be revived when his spaceship crashed on Earth. Now, the last of his kind (at least as far as he knows), he uses his Jedi ethics and powers to fight for justice, peace and harmony on a strange new world. Okay, it's not terribly groundbreaking - but it works perfectly well, and if you wanted all-original concepts you wouldn't be running the Avengers anyway, right?

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu? My old Champs campaign was a straight sequel to my running of Masks of Nyarlathotep a couple of years earlier. I played down the effects of arcane geometry and extradimensionality as being no weirder than a lot of the other stuff in a superhero universe, and relied on scale, brutality and lurid description rather than game mechanics to get across the sheer cosmic horror of it all. Worked pretty well. What made it different from Zenith, say, was that my alien horrors were just horrific superpowered aliens: I figured that the difference between Cthulhu and Fin Fang Foom was largely one of storytelling style, and making the Elder Gods somehow "outside", or not native to the PCs' universe, robbed them of some of their menace. Rather than an all-or-nothing "close the Gates or we're all doomed" one-off, I decided it was far better to have Azathoth the Living Supernova sitting in ordinary space, surrounded by choirs of insane 1000+pt superbeings, like the blind idiot Kingpin of the Milky Way; the Mi-Go acting like colonial overlords, viewing the rise of human civilisation as little more than a slave revolt; Nyarlathotep playing the Loki/Mephisto role in a dozen subtle schemes at once; and so on and so forth. Partly it's down to the fact that I grew up watching Doctor Who, and so always imagine Cthulhu being played by a man in a foam-rubber suit, stomping dioramas beneath his mighty heel...

Re: Is Combat Driving Enough? In a heavily vehiculocentric campaign (say World War One Flying Aces, or Frontier Truckers of the ****ed-Up Future), I'd dispense with Combat Driving/Piloting altogether, and work out a bunch of Martial Arts manoeuvres usable with each rig. For more general games, I think they work fine as is - although you could differentiate between Combat and Stunt driving styles, if Jack Regan and Evel Knievel are both characters in your campaign...

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech What happens if you do manage to incarcerate a top-notch superhuman? The Marvel Boy miniseries from a few years back ended with Lieutenant Noh-Varr being sent to the Cube, a state-of-the-art superprison in the desert somewhere. His reaction? (I paraphrase from memory) Something like: "I'll be running this place inside a month. Welcome to the new capital of the Kree Empire." On the other hand, in Elliot S! Maggin's novel Superman, Last Son of Krypton there's a description of how Lex Luthor spends his time in prison doodling escape plans, then chewing them up and swallowing them. He's escaped so often using technology improvised from the contents of his cell that the only personal possessions he's still allowed are his notepad and pen - and he once devised an escape using only the components thereof; but he knows that if he ever puts it into practice, the next time he's caught they just won't give him his notepad and pen. BTW: I don't know whether Wanted was originally a rejected pitch to update the Secret Society of Super-Villains, but it sure read like it at the time.

Re: YOUR Favourite/Funniest/Silliest Presence Attack Moment? My favourite comes from the first epilogue to my old Overwatch campaign. It's the 22nd Century, and the entire human race has been enslaved overnight by a machine empire from another galaxy. Only the great immortals of the old 1960s campaign are immune, since they were never issued with the ubiquitous cyberware the aliens have hijacked. So the Amazing Bolt leaves his Himalayan retirement fastness; Duke Nightmare returns from Hell; God Girl pulls out of the Galactic Inter-Pantheon Grand Prix, leaving Nodens to triumph for the third millennium running... et cetera, et cetera. These are all 2000+ point characters, inspired by the inflatio ad absurdum approach of DC One Million. So they all get together and decide to wipe out the aliens, and I'm gearing up for a series of enormous space battles, with much shaking of the Saucepan of 40D6. But before they proceed to the heart of the alien empire, they have to liberate Earth - so Bolt flies up to the colossal Governor-vessel in charge of the Solar system, pumps all his VPP points into PRE, and says: "Oi! You! Stop!" The Saucepan shakes... D6 roll out all over the table... a couple of extra dice are rolled for reputation and the like, for all the difference it makes... ...and the Governor-ship does what it's told. It terminates activity. Full system shutdown, and no more signal to its drones on the ground.

Re: Alien Invasion I co-GMed an AD&D campaign where the moon fell to earth and disgorged an army of cat- and lizard-people: does that count?

Re: The first 5 years Who carried out the experiment? If it was a relatively small-scale study (thousands of people or less) carried out in one or two countries, then your idea of population-proportionate numbers probably won't fly. To get that kind of global coverage, you'd need something on the scale of a WHO vaccine rollout, which simply wouldn't be practical for the 1930s - and would also give you many more superhumans nowadays than you say you want. Possible exceptions might be something analogous to the Thalidomide scandal of a quarter-century later (if the side-effects typically aren't obvious till 3 generations later, the drug wouldn't be withdrawn so quickly, and would gradually be adopted by more and more countries after the war - setting up a demographic timebomb, X-Men style); or if the people originally exposed were a corps of WWII US super-soldiers (serving in separate units) who got frisky with the natives while serving overseas, leaving traces of their altered DNA in the genepool worldwide. ... Just a thought. On to the main point: Depending how secretive these early (50 years on!) bloomers were, the government may have paid more or less attention than the tabloid press. They may have been discounted as urban legends; but the occasional crank would have taken them seriously. Five years ago, all that changed - suddenly there's a crisis, and the cranks are the only people with expert knowledge (When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!). A major investigation has since been launched, but the supers' common origin may not yet be known - the announcement (or suppression) of the inquiry's results could be a great campaign opener. Alternatively, maybe there was a government investigation back in the day, and fifteen years ago they caught one (or ran tests on a cooperative subject) - in which case the link is known by Those Who Need To Know, and by the time of the first public case, a secret taskforce was already waiting in the wings in case of trouble... Either way, over the past five years it's become obvious to all that there are getting to be more and more of these people. Normals are going to react in all sorts of different ways, all valid from one point of view or another - how the proportions pan out depends largely on the actions of the supers themselves. Yes. All of the above, depending on the attitude of individual clerics. Yes. And in advertising. Not all, but some certainly would. A lot. Even the most benignly disposed would be a little jealous.

Re: Modern Gods Mammon, god of riches: king of the gods Laura Nauda, goddess of the state: queen of the gods These two have a fractious relationship, much like Zeus and Hera of old. Mammon basically expects Laura to dance attendance, clear obstacles from his path, and generally give him an easy life. She mostly goes along for the ride, but isn't above using his wealth for her own pet projects, and taking him to task for his philandering if he complains too much.

Re: CU Laws A few thoughts: As I understand it, US law already has provision for artificial persons to have rights - if they apply to corporations, I don't see why they wouldn't apply to androids, clones, golems etc. Extraterrestrials would have, at best, the same trouble with the INS as any other visitor/immigrant. At worst, they'd have a whole heap of different agencies hunting them as a threat to national security. The rights they'd be accorded would surely depend where on the spectrum they fell. Supernatural beings are a trickier call. I imagine there'd be a cases that turned on whether a given perp or victim could be proven to exist at all; and how do you prove murder if the victim has a track record of rising from the grave again and again? On that point, if enough people came back from the dead, eventually I'd expect sweeping changes to inheritance law: the seven-year limit for declaring missing persons legally dead might well be extended to everyone, just in case.

Re: Advice for Drawing Maps Crikey, that's enormous. That's like, what? 300 square miles of city? Talk about high fantasy! My brain hurts. I've obviously been playing Warhammer too long... I agree with Andy. Forget trying to map everything: it can't be done. In fact, forget about trying to map the whole city in as much detail as he suggests. Stick to the couple of square miles your players are going to operate in - not even a whole sector, but more likely some sort of transitional zone where two or three houses' spheres of influence overlap. The PCs will likely know this area extremely well (hence the map) but be completely lost anywhere else. The Merchant Lord's palace? It's about fifteen mile that way, guv - I was there for the changin' o' the guard once. South of the river? Are you out of your bleedin' mind, squire? That's enemy territory, that is...

Re: Advice for Drawing Maps Get some 5mm or 1/4" squared paper (preferably printed in pale blue rather than black, so your own lines dominate) - a looseleaf pad will do, but if you can find a stapled workbook and use that, even better: the double-page spread will give you more space. Tracing paper is also handy: you're highly unlikely to be happy with your first attempt, but there will always be things you want to reproduce exactly. At 8" to the half-mile, each square will cover 25x25 yards (or 20x20m at 5mm): not quite close enough to show individual houses in the tightly-packed warrens of the old town, but you'll be able to indicate major locations and carriage-navigable roads. (My Bartholomew map of Edinburgh is just about legible at about 4" to the mile, but most landmarks are noted in 3-pt type and even the most famous wynds and closes are marked but unnamed. For detail, as well as to avoid eyestrain and wristlock, you'll want to draw bigger than that.) Do like Shrike says and draw things in lightly at first. Make major thoroughfares 1/8th of an inch wide, lesser streets 1/10th or 1/16th. Narrow lanes, walkways and closes can be indicated by single lines; paths across open ground by dotted lines. Then take a 2B pencil and, always keeping it nice and sharp, darken the lines you've decided to keep. Flip and trace as necessary. For the final version, either photocopy the result on high exposure to bleach out the blue and 4H lines, or (my preferred option) top-trace it onto a large sheet of cartridge paper and ink it in either black or sepia with a .35mm or .5mm technical pen (these can be expensive, but a good refillable one will last you 10 or 15 years if you look after it; alternatively, disposables are available for a couple of quid - probably under $5 - from most good stationers). Write on the street names in black, use coloured pencils to make the river pale blue and the parks pale green, indicate important buildings in red ink, and you're away! Really detailed maps for scenarios, e.g. taverns, street junctions showing all shops and houses etc., can of course be done later, at whatever scale is more appropriate. Hope this helps.