Duke Bushido

Thank you, Sir. Mine was from a deliciously fun guilty pleasure of a movie called Highway to Hell-- back in the heyday of video stores.

Thanks for the rep, guys! Seriously: I appreciate it. I had only meant to do a little clearing before undergoing some surgery: trying to figure out what I knew I would not be able to finish against what I want to achieve before shuffling off, etc. Having completed my first two heart procedures-- which, _hopefully_ (but alas, not assuredly) will stave off the need for the big ones I can't afford-- I feel a bit more comfortable in my desire to start and complete _something_ useful for the community. To that end, if anyone who looks these two things over (and no; I'm not going to beg everyone to look them over: I know how it is: you are either interested in something or you're not, period ), if you wouldn't mind giving even just a tiny bit of feedback: what worked; what didn't. What was right; what wasn't. Things like that. Just to sort of establish a few guideposts should I ever get around to starting something new for the community. Thanks!

Isnt that the guy on the witness stand on the xover of that one issue of Adventurers Club? Currently not anywhere I can check that, and it could be that the simple fact that he isnt colored is fooling me into thinking he is wearing white....

and absolutely _not_ named for the coffee table you whacked your shin against while reading this post. Got it.

Considering where Judy Garland's kid ended up...... maybe a therapy bill back then would have been a good thing, too....

I had one in my sig line that, after a decade of non-interest, I finally took down, coming to the same conclusion: I was the only person here who had seen that movie. "Wait; Son! I fergot ta tell ya! There's sumpthin in that car! Sumpthin special!" Now yours, I confess, I _thought_ it was from Hell or High Water, but eventually I realized that the quote I was misremembering was "only @$$holes drink Mr. Pibb!" So no; I'm stumped.

Cant help you with "faux vision." I have wondered about that one for years myself. The one on the far left-- there's no way to be certain, but given that they are all villains and the scale-looking lap of the armor, I have always assumed that was Armadillo. No; I have absolutely nothing to base that on, but it's the judgement I made and I ran with it. Like LL, I never knew who the guy with the feathered hair was, either; I just assumed he was the GM's villain.

I'd love to try to help you, but I can't follow the link. I will try again later with my phone and see what I can come up with.

Thank you, Lone Wolf. I thought I was going to be the odd man out again. That's pretty much exactly how _most_ of my clerics work-- it just feels... "more correct," for complete lack of a better word. I also think it's why druids end up doing more of the heavy lifting on the traditional "clerical magic:" things like Healing, purifying (really purifying, like removing poisons from things and such; not "deleting demonic stain" type purifying), etc. It just seems that "putting the world right" or "restoring the natural state of things" would fall more onto those who draw their power from the rightness of the natural world....

And I am just going to point out that, while never done intentionally, it's pretty normal in my campaigns for druid types to have as good or better healing magic then clerics.

I guess I do this backwards, too. Generally, when creating a new campaign, I think about the very few things I would like to see in that world, define the genre, and a few very loose requirements and two or three "big things" that I will pretend are not negotiable right up until they are negotiated. Then I focus on the sorts of characters the players are interested in, feel them out for motivations, possible backstories, etc. And then I get down to work-- I have a tendency to build my worlds such that the characters they want to play will logically inhabit them. Even then, they aren't built whole-cloth. As the characters evolve, so, too, does the world in which they exist-- again, so that such characters could logically exist in them. Even as I write this, I can't think of a single campaign that didn't start out as two locations, four location names, and a crudely drawn map of the section of the current location in which the characters are standing. Honestly, until the internet, I had never seen anyone who didn't.

Barrier Peaks was a bad experience for me, too, but I realize, now, that this was not the fault of the adventure itself, but that I had gotten myself psyched up for a fantasy game (which is a bit of work for me, given that I generally prefer anything else) and then got hit with the bait and switch, then we were expected to just not have done any of that or made off with any of the spoils afterward: instant recon. There are other complaints, but honestly, I think I can lay all of them at the feet of the GM (which I do not do lightly; he was otherwise an excellent GM). I think had he done as Chris discussed doing-- been up front that "this is going to start as a standard fantasy quest but it is going to take a surprise twist or two" or even if he had said "expect three, maybe four sessions out of this, but keep in mind that it is just a one-off that won't factor into our continuity," or _anything_ other than just dropping it into our ongoing campaign, I probably would have had a much better time with it, and far happier memories of the module. I think that is why I dumpwd so many vignettes into the settting I built for Chris: give it a few stories, a few locations, and build a mini-campaign that can stand on its own merit, self-contained. And Chris: the town still needs a name.

I won't deny that; I've never even made a secret of it, but it's not something I got into as I aged. I paid thirty bucks to a junk yard to buy my first car (a '69 Falcon: the one that was supposed to be the 4-door Mustang until fans got wind of the idea and booed it to death, so the discontinued Falcon got on last year, in spite of the fact that it looked nothing like a Falcon and everything like a 4-door Mustang) when I was 13 and spent two years beating the dents out of it, learning body work from my old man, and rebuilding the motor, rebuilding the wiring harness, etc. I had it finished and painted when I was 15, got it re-certified as road worthy, and spent a couple of years making it not road worthy again. I already had been through a couple of motorcycles by then; the car was more just because I wanted to learn how to do those things, and I thought it was a cool-looking car (note: it looked much less cool in metallic brown). Mustang fans are weird: boo the 4-door and the wagon (also released as the Falcon wagon in '69) out of existence; boo the front wheel drive Mustang out of existence (it was released as the Probe), but slap a sporty set of ends on a Pinto and call it the Mustang II? Yes; please. the Fox body? Yes; please. (though to be fair: the Fox body was probably the single best-handling Mustang ever built before or since). Though as long as we're talking Pintos, here's something I always wanted to try but never got to. May I present the Ford Pinchero: It's not the best job I've ever seen (this was a really popular conversion for a while), but it's the best picture I could find. That bumper gap filler is as poorly done as is the bumper. Not sure why they didn't just keep the original bumper, honestly. There are other flaws, but still: it's a pretty clean conversion. Still, given as more and more people these days are dabbling in spanish, he should probably get rid of that custom "Pinchero" sticker. The most fun I ever had with car wrenching was jamming a 460 Ford engine into an AMC Gremlin. That thing was a hoot. But motorcycles have always been my thing. The only reason the Leviathan has seen so many miles is that about ten years ago the kids got too big to fit them both on the bike, so......

That, Sir, is the whole reason I do it: I can have as many magic relics as I want (or don't), and dont have to have the entire world at some,magic level that it almost makes sense that people lose these sorts of things without spending their lives looking for them again. While in some precious age, it might have been easier to just replace them, in this one, not so much. It also goes a long way toward justifying the inability to just buy or create another one od that cool magic thing the bad guy has. It helps explain isolated pockets of civilization without having to go into evolution and the migratory habits of African Swallows, and it allows unexplanable wonders to exist without explanation. And, in reference to another thread, it helps explain "mideval stagnation:" we aren't still here; we are here again. Yes: it does rule out some,interesting ideas, but the value it brings to our games far outstrips the potential missed opportunities, at least for us.

If you don't understand why this is a thank you, and you haven't checked it out already, please: So this one is actually finished! However, it's a bit niche, and out of respect for the fine people at HERO Games and those folks who publish RPG books, there are several references to other HERO Games materials (mostly Bestiaries and the like); it didn't feel right to include stuff that other people were selling, you know? A brief explanation: Chris Goodwin pitched an idea at me that tickled my fancy so thoroughly that I asked him how he planned to introduce the idea. He had hit upon the idea of revisiting that old love-it-or-hate-it classic, Barrier Peaks from TSR. This time, though, he wanted to run it as a western as opposed to a fantasy. Cowboys and Aliens (man, what an awful movie ) just tickled me enough that I became _very_ interested. He didn't have any real solid plans beyond the creature conversions: no setting; no introduction. At least, not yet. So I _begged_ him for permission to write something for him and his group-- a setting in which the adventure would take place; a series of hooks to draw the PCs into this classic bait-and-switch (which is why I hated it, originally, but Chris promised he was going to let his Players know up-front what was going on to prevent the extreme negative reactions that half of those who played that old module experienced-- myself included). At any rate, you don't _have_ to put Expedition to the Barrier Peaks in the center of this. You can put in some weird voodoo, or perhaps some native american spirits, or what-have-you. Please note that the idea and the Bestiary recommendations / conversions are not mine; that was all Chris' hard work, and frankly, I think he chose well. The Grey Men-- well, that's me, but it's really a universal thing, I think: the treacherous and horrible shapeshifter.... Or perhaps I've said too much. As in the thread I linked above, this one is for anyone who wants it: It's the best way I know to thank all of those who worked so hard on the old Web Ring of Heroes to keep the game alive when there was nothing else. Thanks, guys. I hope that there is at least some sliver of this that is worthy of all you did. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-spZFRGOvWxKneEvpTOy1OVAjHuCilKSJaGUiZxPc0E/edit?usp=sharing

Yeah; that's not much of a title. Sorry about that. So let me back up a bit: Some years ago, I made mention of a few things that were more-or-less standards in my (rare) high fantasy games. Of these things, my favorites are the Office of the Public Scribe and the Torchbearers' Guild. I don't actually think I went into any detail on the Guild, save how it came to be, but having told that tale I thought "hey, you know what? Here we are complaining that there aren't enough things for new players or enough inexpensive things that folks can use to get their own juices flowing.... " So I thought I'd write these organizations up under the umbrella of that whatever-it's-called "write your own HERO supplement" thing and put it out for like a buck. I ran into some snags-- formatting, styling, sourcing artwork, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Mostly time. I was getting really, really snagged with time. So it never got finished. However, as thought fodder, it's done enough. I might have been able to just clean up what I had and do a "generic dungeon crawler" supplement. But then I got to thinking about the old days-- the Web Ring of Heroes days. The days when everyone had a website, no matter how simple or how goofy or how fancy and slick-- and they just kept pumping out great ideas and great stuff and saying "here! Take this! It's yours! It's an idea I had, and I just want to share it!" I got to thinking about how much of my retro-future Atomic Rockets campaign has borrowed from the old Web Ring, and even from Nyrath's own web page of the same name (Atomic Rockets, that is. Great minds think alike; soft minds run together-- something in there explains it; I'm sure. ). So I have the urge to thank Nyrath. I remember how many times we revisited bits and pieces of Lord Liaden's Valley of the Night over the years, and I am struck with the urge to thank him (even more than I already have: I have thanked him for that numerous times, and it doesn't seem like it's enough ). So the only way I can really "thank" any of these people, I think, is to demonstrate how much I appreciated what they did, and the best way I know to do that is to do the same thing: I had this brain cramp once, many years ago, and it became the Torchbearers' Guild. It's not finished, but I've got three motorcycles to rebuild, an almost-eighty hour work week, a house full of teenagers, a semi-regular game group (soon to be too, as soon as a couple more folks get vaccinated), a camper to build, and a house to finish remodeling. If it gets finished by anyone, it's going to finished uniquely at each table that cares to try it. Have at it, folks. It's the best way I know to thank the best kind of people: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lID1Yboy9nAQnIGRdOeiq4SEI7ZvkH0EAqAWzG4FMIk/edit?usp=sharing Now, if someone can assure me that Chris Goodwin doesn't have any Players on this board, I've got one for the Western genre, too. Sort of.

This. _So much_ this! And that's why we end up playing a _lot_ of "early in this Age" or "after the fall of the last Age," etc. Sure; it's probably different for every group, but our groups generally want to have an impact on the places they adventure. To have an impact on a town of twenty-thousand you'd need to bring a small army and a siege engine. There's not much a group of four to eight Player Characters can really do to make a lasting impact. It'd be like rolling into the town in which I live with a bag of revolvers: So what? Right. Another reason we do it the way we do: we don't really have to justify a thousand years of sameness, because there _hasn't been_ a thousand years of anything yet. I guess we do "fantasy as frontier" more than anything else. Never heard that before. I rather like it.

There were also Pirate, Mythic Greece, Viking, and.... bah! I can't remember the other one-- that were ostensibly for Rolemaster but had HERO conversions and stats.

And inches.

All of them up until ICE went under, as I recall. There may have been some ICE modules that didn't have the conversions; I am not as certain of my memory as I once was. If you're genuinely interested, my sig lines contain a link to a spreadsheet in my G-drive (page 2 is what you want; ignore the rest; it's just workspace). You will find listed those Shadow Worlds supplements that are compatible with 4e (granted, that goes a bit beyond "features direct conversions") with 4e HERO.

Thanks, Carlos. Yes; I remember him, and sadly confess that I hadn't thought about him or his site in some time. Reckon I'll chastise myself a bit after I swing through and leave some encouragement.

I prefer smaller populations. In part because a large portion of the games I have enjoyed in the past (as player and as GM) have all been "age of exploration" type games-- the dawning of the particular Age in which we are playing. Frankly, the typical "city" is about the size of a Renaissance Festival (with way, way fewer costume sellers ). Really 'big" cities are very few and far between, and _might_ hit five thousand people for a true metropolis.

Had this one submitted some years ago: Running: +4' Extra Limbs, only while running: Character grows four additional legs. Clinging: only useable with Extra Limbs. There you go. Running: plus four feet.

1e: 1981 2e: 1982 (reprinted at least 3 times: clean color cover, over-inked "purple" cover, and black-and-white cover) 3e: 1984 (boxed 3-book set and perfect-bound all-in-one book) 4e: 1989 (hardcover and softcover) New Millennium: 1996 (first printing) New Millennium 2e 2000 5e: 2002 25th Anniversary: 2006 6e: 2010 Champions Now: 2020 Champions LARP: 21012 2e: 1982 3e: 1984 (identical contents; new cover) 2e: 1984 (not reprinted for 3e) I've got a link in my sig file that leads to a G-drive I've been using to organize the records of my own collection. It's not finished (my interest petered out with the combination of 80-hour work weeks, teenagers very active in extracurriculars, and the heart attack. I don't like to sit still for hours on end anymore; what can I say? HA!) At any rate, page 2 of the spreadsheet is the actual results (unfinished, but at last look (admittedly a couple of years ago), far, far more information than the wikipedia page offered. (Pages 1 and 3 are just workspace, and will make sense to no one who isn't me). I leave it on "share" so anyone can pop in and use it. There is a typo: I have one book listed as published in 2020 when it was decades before that; not sure how it happened, and I just noticed it pulling this information for you. Alas, I have little motivation to pull down the books and actually check the date at the moment.

I am going to spoiler this (I think; I've never tried that before) because it's a subject that-- I have no clue. Honestly, to me, the two subjects combined here are not social problems; they are not a political problems-- they are only "problems" because people being too hung up on what other people "should be," and too unwilling to say "I don't care who does this; it's a crime, and should be prosecuted" simply because of who is doing it. At any rate, if you are one of those people who can see humor when it exists, enjoy. If you aren't: it's spoilered. You don't have to uncover it, and no one else is going to make you do it.