allen

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions Yeah... there'll be something, most likely no longer than a box or sidebar though. Just answering some random questions I don't think I've answered previously.... There'll be an across the Ages of superheroes thing, but it's going to be brief. There'll be stuff about sidekicks, legacy, and "anti-legacy" (character's parent is villain). I promise to either name the High School after a fallen superhero, or its "mascot" (kind of like the idea of high school with indian or redskin or something for mascot changing it to Vanguard, and Vanguard sounds like a good mascot name to me).

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions Well, for your sake, as well as that of your countrymen, I promise not to have the quote for any British superhero/exchange student be: "Pip, pip, tally-ho. Rum shot there, old man."

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. I think it'll probably have more rules info... I need to sit down with it and make sure these ideas are worthwhile, but there're a couple things I want to play with... Archetypes will be presented differently -- i.e.: jock, skater, burn-out, etc. will be the archetypes -- then recommended standard archetypes will branch from there -- i.e.: jock as brick, jock as energy blaster, jock as martial artist, jock as weapon master (i don't know, maybe he throws trick basketballs or something ) -- so this might require more space. Disadvantages will be "redefined" -- maybe further defined and explored is a better way of putting it -- something like that. Hunted: Clique (Watching), for instance. Also, Social Limitation: Under 16, and Social Limitation: Under 18. Rivalries has a lot of potential, I think, in an enclosed environment like a high school. In other words, many Disadvantages not so appropriate to regular Champs can be made relevant in the melodramatic world of teenagers. DNPCs also warrant discussion... anyway tons of stuff here to discuss. Also in need of space is proper purchase of skills -- teenagers, unless playing Curve-Breaker, the Boy Genius, shouldn't have as many skills as normal (at least, normal for published Champions characters) -- so there'll be some recommended limits or something. Also need to address how to build powers with flaws, how to have fun with limited powers, and recommendations for how to model getting better with powers vis-a-vis spending experience points. Also need a general overview of parent/child relationship possibilities -- everything from superhero/villain for parent, to nosy parents, to negiligent parents, to abusive parents -- as well as a quick rundown of the law and minors. Maybe get into some gray areas, if I think there's potential for plot seeds -- for instance can Curve-Breaker, the Boy Genius apply for adulthood, and why not? Isn't he smart enough to go it alone? Is a character with a long-life, but who's slow-to-mature an adult at 18? Why not? More thematic elements to Teen Champions too -- more soap opera stuff -- so that'll need space. There's other stuff -- just kind of throwing things out there -- but I do think there's going to be more sub-genre information than Galactic Champions. As for heroes and villains, and settings. I've got the school situation broken down into four possibilities, each of which will be explored with heroes/villains and settings. Private school with secret superhuman program (Ravenswood). Private school solely for superhumans (Generation Viper). Public school kids (some Millennium City High School, unnamed as of yet). These three will be located in Millennium City, and have "interschool" rivalries -- public school kids don't like spoiled kids at Ravenswood, Ravenswood/Generation Viper have New Mutants/Hellions relationship, etc. The fourth possibility is kids on the run -- this will be covered with NOVA (from Champions Universe). General information and specific details will be provided for each setting, so a GM can run his own Teen Champions game in the setting. (Even the Generation Viper stuff would make for a good campaign setting, I think -- evil or deluded parents send good kid to bad school, and the good kids band together to make best of terrible situation.) At least one or two maps of facilities -- Ravenswood will definitely be mapped out -- we'll see about the rest. It'll probably be a little heavy on heroes for a Champions product. Normally I'm against that, but I think that'll be all right for this -- teen heroes always ended up in conflict with adults, including superheroes, because of either fanaticism, they're duped by the villain, or they're on the run like the NOVA team. Also the "boy hostage" scenario, and teen heroes often end up handing off the big stuff to adults. So, anyway, I think a GM of a more standard Champs campaign can find a use for superhero NPCs. (And teen hero PCs need rivals more than standard heroes, I think -- more likely to let jealousy, envy, hurt feelings, whatever stand in the way of common sense.) As for other villains... It'll have an overview of villain archetypes -- born evil, exploitive adults, victim of environment, too much power for too little maturity, rebel without a cause, etc. Each of these will have (at least one) corresponding villain. For those with DEMON, one will have been conceived in Boston in 1986 (hint, hint...). The Teen Dream, the perfect girl cum popstar. Generation Viper, mentioned above. Definitely some evil drug dealer guy. Plus it'll have notes on how to use published villains with Teen Champions campaigns -- specific plot seeds involving youth type stuff. So anyway... Fifteen or so superheroes. Twenty - thirty villains. Something like that.

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions BUMP Bumping for my own reference. Also, anyone who missed this topic the first time around and wants to add their two cents should feel free to do so.

Re: Good Champions 5e modules?

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was... errr... ummmm... Mars? ok. maybe not. well, to be honest, in my attempt to not back the guy who writes Solar Hero into a corner, i muffed it up. the description should include a passage along the following: Member nations of the United Earth in the year 2104 passed the Colony Act, which states the colony is the sole responsibility of the member nation, not the United Earth government, yadda, yadda, yadda, and at a later date, when the nation-states of Earth became parts of a one-world government, the Colony Act was then interpreted to apply to Senate Worlds also.

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was... Yeah, I'm here, but I'm not the person to give you an official explanation... however, when working on ALIEN WARS, I based the past on the Hero Universe document (that you can find here: http://www.herogames.com/FreeStuff/freedocs/HeroUniverse.pdf) To quote from the section on Solar Hero: "Solar Hero is a hard SF/low SF setting limited to our solar system, with perhaps tentative, slower-than-light (sleeper ship, generation ships, and the like) journeys to nearby systems...." From the same document, FTL-drives first come into use in the first few years of the Interstellar Era (starting in 2200 and described in the same document linked above), and that's the Alpha Class Hyperdrive.

Hey guys, I'm getting started on DARK CHAMPIONS: THE ANIMATED SERIES (DC: TAS, from here on out) and this is the traditional "What Do You Want To See" Thread. First a little about the book.... The book has two goals. First, to serve as a sub-genre book that covers two types of Dark Champions campaigns. (1) Non-superpowered heroes who have, to some extent, a four-color comic book attitude toward their vigilante activities (for instance, PCs with a Code Versus Killing). (2) Low-point superpowered heroes, aka street-level superheroes, like Daredevil and Spider-Man (the early years more so than lately -- back when Spider-Man fought the Kingpin, the Owl, Silvermane, and those sorts of guys on a regular basis). DC: TAS defines the differences between these two campaigns, including information on the prominent features and tropes of each, character creation guidelines, advice for the GM, etc. Second, to serve as an enemy book that provides a GM with antagonists for PCs in both types of campaign described above. Toward this end the book will have approximately 40 character sheets, give or take a few. A handful of those will be heroes. The lion's share of the book will be character sheets. So, keeping all that mind, I'd love to hear what you guys want out of this book....

Re: DEMON: Opinions (some spoilers) Hey thanks... high praise, indeed.... (please, call me Allen... not that old yet ) The idea for time-traveling while walking city streets actually came from Jack Finney's Time and Again. I tried to make it spookier than presented in that novel, but I've always liked the idea. As for Tim Powers... SPOILERS, btw. The idea of locating the Thirteenth Floor in Las Vegas came to me while re-reading Last Call, and for one possible idea concerning the cause of DEMON's problems in Russia, check out Declare. (As for Tim Powers's writing in general, if anyone who enjoyed DEMON hasn't read anything by him, I highly recommend his novels.)

Re: DEMON: Opinions (some spoilers) Well, you know, those beating hearts should be taken out during the sacrifice... On a more serious note, here's a website about organ donation. It discusses the facts about donation, including what organs are viable donations (and somewhere on that site is a listing of some urban myths... which are little less mythic in a world with things like DEMON running around... the bit about a recipiant taking on the characteristics of the organ donor can make for a fun hook for a DEMON adventure.) http://www.organdonor.gov/ Thanks for taking the time to review the book!

Re: DEMON: Opinions (some spoilers) Well most folk can always spare a kidney, and a sacrifice can spare two...

Re: The Valdorian Age i was thinking more along the line of lawn gnomes....

Re: The Valdorian Age

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions Hey, that's a good way of organizing the information... Great idea. Thanks!

Re: Early "What do you want to see?" for Teen Champions Hey guys.. yeah, I've been lurking on this thread. Thanks for all the great ideas and keep them coming. I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on one thing in particular... This is something that definitely needs to be addressed, and I was kind of wondering about a few things. (1) There'll be some box text about international "high schools," but it's going to be brief... mainly just some quick background in case a player wants to play an exchange student or a GM wants to send the PCs abroad as exchange students, etc. My question is are people honestly curious about this sort of stuff? Or, at least, are you curious enough to see it take up more than a page or so of the book? (2) The demographics for the HERO System, at least as far as I can tell from the forums, is pretty much late twenties to mid/late thirties. Which means a lot of us have been out of high school for a while. I haven't dived into any research or anything yet, but it seems high schools have changed a bit since I graduated (Class of '91). For instance, at my parent's church last weekend, a woman spoke briefly about the new rules concerning bullying, and my impression was the definition of bullying was expanded quite a bit and included stuff like verbal abuse, which when I was in high school wouldn't have warranted any sort of punishment... kids will be kids and all that jazz. Now this whole bullying thing could have a pretty pervasive impact on a game -- I mean, nowadays it sounds like Flash Thompson would be in detention everytime he passed Peter Parker in the hall. So do folks want a sort of primer on high schools circa 2004? Or would they rather a description of high school more familar to likely players, like say something circa late eighties or nineties? Or a sort of cinematic combination of the two, setting details that don't delve into the nitty-gritty of real-world high schools? All of the above. (My own thoughts are to focus mainly on a more cinematic sort of high school with notes given about real-world high school circa 2004 in sidebars and the like.) Some other comments.... There'll be something about sidekicks, and I guarantee the MS I submit to Steve will have at least one write-up of a 5th edition Champion's sidekick (as to who, you'll have to wait and see... will it be Ducky, dark fowl of the night? Tin Can, Ironclad's gladitorial water boy, come to Earth to follow in his idol's footsteps?... ). As for how much coverage sidekicks get, I need to check with Steve and Darren about how much concerning sidekicks will be included in either Golden Age and Silver Age Champions. A part of me says it belongs there as much as it does in Teen Champions, so we'll see... The other types will be covered as well, including legacy heroes and villains(hoping to get one of those write-ups in there too) and Billy Batson types. There'll be write-ups of students at the Ravenswood Academy kids and members of Nova, as well as some other heroes. There'll be a write-up and map of the Ravenswood Academy -- staff members, curriculum, etc. Hopefully a write-up and map of a public high school in Millennium City too. Write-ups of villains (of course).

Re: DEMON: Opinions (some spoilers) Hey all... just a quick note to say thanks for the kind words. DEMON was a lot of fun to write, and I'm glad people are getting a kick out of it.

Re: Champiosn Destinies -- Spoiler Request DEMON: Servants Of Darkness has a short section in the Gamemastering section entitled "DEMON 3000," which provides a history and means of bringing the organization into a Galactic Champions campaign.

Re: Thoughts on Arcane Adversaries(Spoilers)

Re: The Valdorian Age Thanks for the encouragement, everyone.... The Favor thing hinges on Magic Skill Rolls, so that's not a problem for using spells from the FHG and FHG II. There will definitely be a discussion of how to quickly make spells from those two books appropriate for sorcery in the Valdorian Age, mainly focusing on the Limitations a GM needs to apply to scale the spells. My hope is to have a Limitation called "Valdorian Magic (-X)" so a GM can just plug-and-chug, but I'm not sure that's going to work right now, so we'll see. There might also be a list of spells from FHG and FHG II that I think are especially appropriate to the Valdorian Age with "conversion" notes, but that'll depend on space considerations. Errr... I'm not sure. Right now the book's release date is December of this year. I'm afraid I don't know how long it usually takes for the books to make their way to Germany. If nothing else, the book should be in Hero Games online store sometime in January.

Re: The Valdorian Age Hey guys... sorry it's taken me so long to respond, took a vacation after GenCon... just a quick word about magic, which will hopefully answer some questions. The magic is very specific and requires entreating with other-dimensional beings, from demons to the souls of the departed (necromancy) to elementals to divine agents, to accomplish specific effects. All magic-using characters, including priests, depend on extra-dimensional sources for their abilities. In many ways, this simply becomes a special effect of whatever spell the sorcerer is casting. For instance, rather than a PC stating "I draw on my reserves of mystical might to change the weather" or "I draw upon the magical weave of the world to change the weather," a PC in a Valdorian Age campaign states "I'm summoning an air elemental to change the weather." (Looking at the most commonly read genre material, I'd say the magic is closest to Elric in feel. Although Summoning happens quite often elsewhere too, and IMO it's pretty typical a sorcerer in the fiction relies on other-dimensional sources for his magic. Think of Xaltotun in Hour of the Dragon summoning a "creature of the night" to paralyze Conan before that battle near the beginning of the novel -- the spell he works is a pretty simple BOECV Entangle with the summoned "creature of the night" as a special effect.) Of course things aren't quite that simple and certain events, such as failing a Skill Roll, lead to the sorcerer becoming indebted to the summoned creature. Think of it this way: magic isn't there to be shaped by a knowledgable and/or talented person -- it's not a natural power -- instead the sorcerer has to haggle with other-dimensional beings for his power. This is handled via a Favor system, an extension of the rules for Favors on page 57 of FREd. Just real quick, a sorcerer accumulates positive and negative Favor points. He can trade in positive points to cancel his "debt," ensure a spell succeeds, force a Summoned creature obeys his command, and other stuff. If the sorcerer allows his debt to get out of hand, an other-dimensional being will come a-calling, generally requiring the sorcerer to perform a task -- the more debt, the more unpleasant to the task. A successfully performed task cancels X-number of favor points, the actual number of points depending on the difficulty of the task. (An aside: these tasks also provide a very convenient hook for GMs to get their players started on an adventure.) Ideally this haggling between sorcerer and Summoned creature is role-played out between the sorcerer and other-dimensional being, but the point system allows it to be handled quickly and easily, so the GM can take care of it on the fly and doesn't have to break the action if he doesn't want to. To lend things a modern prospective, think of being a sorcerer as having an other-dimensional credit card Anyway, those are the basics... other things flow from this focus on other-dimensional beings -- such as Contacts and Perks (think: "I am king of Melnibone and my forefathers made treaties with you and yours, so you are obliged to help me now.) All sorcery draws power from an END Reserve with very specific Limitations on the REC (think: "Now I must dream the dreams of the Black Lotus to recover my power.") In addition to their more vaguely defined uses, Knowledge Skills have a very specific use of creating wards and charms to provide bonuses against magic, as well as identifying the weaknesses of Summoned creatures. (In some situations, the PC sorcerer is going to be really useful just because of his Knowledge Skills.) To address some other points: Someone asked about sorcery as "Tool of Darkness" -- while sorcery isn't a tool of darkness per se, as is hopefully obvious from the above, it is a slippery slope where if the PC isn't careful he finds himself increasingly the pawn of powers who don't necessarily have mankind's best interests at heart, and even if they aren't so bad, like divine agents of the gods, these powers could really care less what the PCs in the sorcerer's pary want... And of course many sorcerers are just plain evil. As for the effectiveness of sorcery, especially the combat effectiveness... a 150-point sorcerer getting all D&D in combat (meaning: transforming himself into walking artillery piece) is likely toast. But the rest of the PCs protecting the sorcerer while he casts his spell is (hopefully) an interesting tactical challenge. In other words, sorcery is effective enough to be very useful in combat, so it's in the best interests of the other PCs to plan not only to kill the antagonists, but also protect the sorcerer while he does his magic thing. (And there's a section in sorcery discussing these tactics in more detail in the appropriate chapter.)

Re: Reality TV game.. how would you do it? You should check out the game, InSpectres, (available online here: http://www.memento-mori.com/). It has at least one mechanic derived from reality television, where a player can step into the "confessional booth" (or whatever it's called) to replicate the segment of the television program where one person talks directly to the camera and comments on the action, what he's really thinking, how feels about the other people, etc.

Re: Thanks to Keith Curtis... yeah, me too... definitely a showcase for Keith's talents....

Re: Genetic Tribalism? There's a series of SF novels by Jack Womack, most particularly the novel Ambient, that deal to some extent with the theme of tribalism expressed vis-a-vis body modification. I can't recall if the modification takes place at the genetic level though. Errr... to be honest I'm not sure how helpful the novel would be from a GMing point of view. Err... to be doubly honest that particular novel is the worst of the bunch, so I disavow all responsibility if you read it and think it sucks... haha.. (IMO... Elvissey is definitely worth a read if you like near-future, dystopian sci fi; Terraplane is interesting, but kind of raw; and I'm not sure how enjoyable Going, Going, Gone is if you haven't read the other novels....)

Re: Obscure information You'll have better luck googling G. Edwin Bergstrom.

Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth has maps for a VIPER Nest and one of COIL's secret lairs (since the organization is just getting underway in the 5E Champions Universe, it only has four bases... err... that is until you run the adventure and the PCs discover one of the bases. After that it's down to three. Such is the life of a mastervillain... ) VIPER: Coils Of The Serpent has maps for two Nests.