Big Willy

Re: Advice for Drawing Maps It's "derring-do", though G-- alone knows why. I suspect the term was coined ironically by someone mocking upper-class English pronunciation. It does just mean feats of daring. Anyway, to the main point: Great city name! Really suits the genre you describe. Concerning maps, all Killer Shrike's suggestions so far are good. Other things that spring to my mind: You don't need to go into great detail with this one, at least initially. Get the overall topography settled - how big is the country? are there mountains/plains/forests/lakes? where are the major rivers? etc - and locations for major population centres will suggest themselves. Smaller settlements can be added later according to the needs of character background and/or the ongoing storyline. Break it down into provinces, if that helps: remember land ownership (and thus control of agriculture, mining etc) is power, so assuming Semona is the capital, the various great Houses will likely also have vast tenanted country estates where much of their wealth actually comes from. Neighbouring states don't need much fleshing out: just establish where the borders are and leave the rest to politics. Bear in mind that most frontiers will follow some sort of natural feature, with (currently or historically) contested areas usually being less impassable, and thus more heavily fortified/patrolled - the Franco-German border, for example, is an arbitrary historic division that's moved many times, while France and Spain are clearly separated by a range of mountains that's served as the marker since the days of Charlemagne. Again, get the topography right and much else will follow. You've already got the city outline, so just photocopy it down to about 1" a mile (if the city itself covers more than ten square miles it's too big, unless you have magical/technological support for public health, speedy communications etc.) and draw stuff in around the edges. Think about things like land use: this close to the city there will be no real wilderness, but there may be private forests and game reserves as well as the obvious pasture and ploughed fields. Also consider where tributaries flow to the major river. Roads aren't the only way of getting around. I'll talk about this in a separate post, as it merits discussion on its own terms, as well as technical tips on the actual drawing.

Re: Comic books Way back in my old Silver Age campaign, I had an NPC served with a writ by National Publications to stop her using the name "Wonder Woman", while Marvel's Spider-Man was going to be a licensed version of one of the PCs in the group, until negotiations broke down - at which point Stan made superficial changes to his character's name, "distinctive likeness" and background, including making Peter Parker younger (the "real" Spider was in his thirties) so the readers would "relate" to him better.

Re: Odd Skill Enhancer Question VIPER's newest recruit? Destined for great things if he passes his officer's exam...

Re: What is your ideal sized hero group I think it depends how much the PCs can do - I remember a highly enjoyable AD&D campaign I drifted in and out of, which started with three players and grew to about 12 or 14 before scaling back slightly: but for a cod-mediaeval war party, only two of whom are doing anything weirder than hitting orcs with bits of metal, that's perfectly manageable. If it had been a 12-member supergroup like the 1970s Justice League, with elemental powers going off left right and centre, the GM might have found combat a bit of a stretch. Campaignwise, the advantage of such a large group is obviously the range of possible character interplay, subplots etc - and in a supers game these subplots can be pretty wild - but it takes a lot of juggling, and you might wait a long time for any particular thread to get the attention it merits, let alone be resolved (just ask Chris Claremont!). Conversely, some of the best individual sessions I've been in (as player or GM) have been with only two PCs: it's a much more focused style of play, each player gets plenty of "screen time", and it's more appropriate for certain genres - particularly investigative scenarios, where the main villain doesn't necessarily have squads of goons or a doomsday ring to protect him. Inevitably, though, I find most of my games fall between the two stools, with a typical five-to-seven-PC party facing off against Major Threats every few weeks. I think four players would be easier, but it's not a number I've ever ended up with for some reason.

Re: How would you "Gath" Earth? How the Gathed America turns out depends on your enabling device - if you're using some sort of counterhistorical explanation, just run with whatever that suggests. In cases like this, though, it's legitimate to reason backwards from effects. Do you want fantasy equivalents of nuclear power, television, mobile telephony etc.? You can have them, but such a world will mainly be interesting in descriptive terms - like the Flintstones' Bedrock, it's our world with a genre makeover. For a longer term game, I'd be more inclined to restrict the tech/magical level somehow: say the enlightenment and the industrial revolution never happened, and you're stuck with a view of the world that's just developed differently since the 15th or 16th Century - so the United States (or an analogue thereof) could still exist, but miracles and witchcraft are real, populations (and tall buildings!) are much smaller, it takes months to cross the Atlantic depending on the wind, and so on. The West could still be Wild - lacking mass production and firearms, the white man's magic is less overpowered compared to the Injuns' spirit powers, and buffalo (many of them settlers transformed by the Ghost Dance) still roam the plains. New York would still be the merchant metropolis by which other cities are judged, Boston the premier seat of arcane learning, and Washington/Columbia the capital city of a continental empire still somewhat resented in the former French and Spanish colonies it has long since absorbed. The actual political complexion of this empire (neo-Caligulan excess? patrician federalism? despotic military state?) could be anything you like, depending on the needs of the campaign.

Re: Use the news

Re: I destroyed my CKC...on purpose Do what I did with my BBB: get a coupla hundred polypockets and stick them in an A4 ringbinder. Not only do you preserve the original pages, you make 'em splashproof, too! And if you get a binder with a display pocket on the front, you can even slip the cover into it.

Re: John Henry based brick Ah, John Henry: the man who worked himself to death for a bet. There's heroism.

It depends on the kind of campaign you want to run. If you want to go easy on the players, you can just "fudge" any legal issues that arise; but if you're actually interested in the legal process, and the implications of the characters' behaviour, then that implies a campaign that's about more than just pounding on the bad guy and going home happy. In this case, even if you're dealing with the sort of baroque, post-modern world where Atlantis is a member of the UN and teleporter booths have replaced the automobile, you still need to think about how the law would have evolved to deal with superhumans when they first appeared. A few things occur to me. Powers as Weapons Powers that clearly are weapons (gravity rods, laser pistols etc) would fall under the same legislation as knives and firearms. There would be classification issues around the firepower of particular systems - the Iron Man armour is clearly more like an F-15 than a .38 handgun - but basically it's a question of how far the right to bear arms extends. Innate powers are a much trickier issue. Just possessing them couldn't reasonably be a crime, any more than being good at tennis could be. Using them in the commission of a crime, on the other hand, would certainly be an aggravating factor, and a reactionary government might well consider outlawing the use of powers in certain, or any, circumstances. If you want an anti-super police state, this would be a logical way to start bringing it about. Secret Identities I can't imagine the authorities ever allowing someone to testify in court without knowing who they are. There are plenty of circumstances where a witness' real name and/or likeness might be concealed from the public with official approval, but the idea that the state would just take a voiceprint or retina scan from Batman and then make no attempt to establish his real identity is a complete no-no. Telepathy This is a biggie. In the early years of superheroing, it's going to be impossible to get a conviction on the basis of telepathic evidence. It would be like bringing a case on the basis of a Tarot reading: it's so off the wall that you'd need other evidence to corroborate the information, and if you've got other evidence then why bother with something that's going to be laughed out of court? That's not to say it couldn't be used, quietly, in an investigation - just that when it comes to the trial it better not be all you have. Even once the existence of telepathy is firmly established, it still needs to be determined whether a particular person has the gift. The mooted "3-telepath rule" for verification is a quick and dirty compromise, but ultimately individual telepaths are going to have to be accredited somehow if they're going to deemed as reliable witnesses. And the problems don't end there. Reading someone's mind is almost certainly a civil rights violation of some kind, and lawyers will argue for decades about how best to classify it. Is it a seizure of assets (information), that merely requires a warrant to enforce? Or is it a way of coercing testimony, which might be illegal under the 5th Amendment? Such questions will arise early in the development of telepathy law, and any proposed solution will be highly controversial. Considering all of the above, I wouldn't put an officially-acknowledged Psi Corps into any campaign before about 2020.

Ah, but the First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine does. Could we be talking schism here?

Ones I like are: parahuman - I first saw this used by Alan Moore, way back when he was writing Captain Britain in the early 80s transhuman - this one from the real world, being a loose philosophical movement concerned with mind-downloading and so on, and therefore a good match for cyberpunk-supers campaigns where powers come from high-tech body modification enhancile - an even more recent coinage, used by Warren Ellis in an issue of Global Frequency to refer to a cyborg, but applicable I suppose to any altered being Something I'd like to be able to come up with, though, and what it sounds like Trebuchet is looking for too, is a catch-all term that takes in aliens, robots, ghosts and stuff as well as those who're clearly just humans "with knobs on". Wildstorm comics sometimes talk about SPBs (superpowered beings), which has a nice Fortean/clandestine feel to it, but still relies on the dreaded prefix "super-" to make its point.

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I assume this was either a covert invasion, or one that was subsequently defeated by those same superheroes. Given the other divergences you mention (snipped here for brevity), I think you're already far enough removed from the "real world" that current events in I**q don't need to figure in your thinking at all. If you simply want to add topicality by having the USA at war with somebody, then go ahead. You prevented September 11; but was Osama bin Laden one of the people you arrested? Did Operation Enduring Freedom take place, or do the Taliban still rule Afghanistan? If still free, in one country or another, there's no reason he couldn't try something else - remember all the comparisons to Fu Manchu that were flying around in the press eighteen months ago: Osama is a textbook arch-villain. If you've already captured or killed him, who's to say it's not just a lookalike? Or that someone else won't emerge to lead his organisation? As long as your players are familiar with the setting as it evolves, you're on fairly safe ground, I would have thought; but I can see it becoming a problem if you're running successive short campaigns in the same universe with different groups. In this case, you may want to consider some sort of parallel universe and/or time travel option to acclimatise the newbies or reboot the world.

I thought VIPER was Villains International for Piracy Extortion and Revenge, vaguely reminiscent of SPECTRE from the James Bond books.

The tying up of loose ends. Look at Donnie Darko, The Invisibles or The Anubis Gates. However sprawling and convoluted the plot gets, every single thread eventually gets resolved - somehow. The philosophical tangles of trying to run a game this way can be nightmarish, though.

Sounds okay to me. With suitable pluses for extended range, it would mean you could do bilocation without the duplicate appearing right next to you and taking an extra phase to teleport to where you want it. That accords well with descriptions of the phenomenon in folklore.

I posted here this morning, asking about the new rules for Duplication. I just came back to see if it had been answered, and there's no sign of the initial post. What happened? Did I offend someone?

I'm having trouble getting my head round the change to Duplication in FRED. As written, the cost of the power is now based not on its effect, but on the total points of the character who has it. There are really two problems with this. Let's say, for convenience, you've got a 200-point character (100+100) who can make a single duplicate of himself. That means he's spent 40 points on Dup. So far, so good... but the duplicate is also a 200-point character, so either he's got Duplication as well (and it doesn't take a genius to spot where that takes you), or he's got 40 character points to spend on stuff that the original character doesn't have. That's the big glitch, conceptually. The little one is more of an accounting problem to do with upgrading. If the character doubles the number of duplicates he can make, it doesn't cost him 5 points (the listed cost); it costs him six, because his point total has gone up to 205... except it's really gone up to 206... except it's really gone up to 207.2, except it's really gone up to 208.64.... and so on. It's only a niggle, really, but it's unnecessary. 4th Ed had neither of these problems. The cost of a single duplicate was based on the points in the duplicate, and the cost for doubling the numbers was a straight five points a time, paid by the main character only, with no annoying recursions. Why the change?

Here's a scary idea that I only share because I'm not currently running a campaign. In a supers universe, Iraq is a ticking timebomb not because of bombs, VX or anthrax, but because twelve years ago the soil was contaminated by vast quantities of depleted uranium. In the real world, that means an increased incidence of birth defects; but on Earth-Super, it means a generation of children who're going to start developing superpowers any day now...