Jhamin

That's very cool. The PC in question has him as a contact, but only on an 8- so he frequently ends up deciding he has more important things to do than deal with her high school drama. (Which, to be fair, a lot of it is). He did come in handy when a weird interaction between Blue Wizard's arcane training, Archive's ability to randomly soak up knowledge, and a Halloween scary story contest summoned The Monster while shifting the dorms into a shadow realm. As the GM, I've been playing him as sort of a Doctor Strange character but willing to exorcise the living if he feels that someone recently dead deserves their body more. Other mystics find his philosophy repugnant, but he still wants to keep Tyranon or DEMON or the Devils Advocates from taking over the world & finds it disappointing that heroes like Dr. Ka and the Drifter have such limited imaginations. The PC is basically "mostly dead". The "rightful" soul for this body was a young psychopath. Probably not ever really super-villainous or even violent but destined for a life of petty, casual harm to those around her. The Sorta-Good Doctor swapped that soul for another. The new soul has no memory of who she was. The body was from a powerful and well-connected family, and was very attractive, and can pass for older than it is (the PC even spent points on a fake ID), but wasn't super powered. After the Soul-Transfer the body is "mostly dead" and has a suite of solomon-grundy style "zombie" type powers (strength, damage resistance, ect). That isn't what was supposed to happen and Teneber knows he didn't make mistakes in the rituals. He suspects some outside force interfering but is keeping it from the PC until he has too. He doubts telling her will matter for her life and doesn't want to over-complicate her adaptation to her new body. He is pleased with how the new soul is using it's new life and considers the whole thing an interesting "complication" of his procedure.

If it helps, here are some of the nontraditional students in my Ravenswood game: Senior Year: Thad Jones (Tower) - Brick. Big & Harry, oversized hands & feet. Never shows up cleanly on photography equipment. Raised by foster family & Isn't sure where his powers come from but finds himself most comfortable when alone in the woods in the Pacific Northwest. His laid-back charisma make him an excellent RA for the boys dorm. Christian Anderson (Tide) - Water themed powers (mom was a powered armor Naval Hero, Dad was an Elemental) and is able to shift into a watery form. Knows alot about the Superhero world from years as Mom's DNPC, but hopes to just focus on his music after graduation. Alissa James (Crawler) - Has some kind of insect powers but has never bothered to identify /which/ insect she might be emulating. More interested in psychology. Junior Year: The Blue Wizard (Ahmed Ghulam) - Has been learning magic most of his life from a spirit advisor only he can see. Very studios, a bit repressed, has strong opinions about the Simirillion Bustarius (Cyprian Krax) - Lemurian Weapon's master who is trying to live in the wider world at the urging of his Uncle, an escapee from Lemurian Society. Keeps failing Superhuman Ethics because he can't wrap his head around the a non martial philosophy of life. Weirdly best friends with Tower, Rodinia Ambrose (Concord) - Empath and star singer in the Choir Sophomore Year: The entire incoming Sophomore year except for Fortress chose to drop out of Ravenswood and join a rival school that may or may not be a front for something nefarious. Just about everyone is torn up about this but no coercion can be proven. My PCs are new Sophomore transfer students Carol Millner (Fortress) - Stubborn. Scads of special defenses and has the ablity to "root" herself. When rooted can ignore ridiculous amounts of damage as long as she doesn't take a step. No offenses whatsoever. (PC) Edith King-Johnson (Reflex) - Studious Geek with Photographic Reflexes (think taskmaster, but 15 and more interested in Parkour) (PC) Harper Cubbington (Jane Doe) - Anmesiac soul placed into an undead body by Dr. Teneber. Dealing with the fact that her body was formerly a mean girl queen bee at the rival school & her old crew are not sure how to handle her "new" more compassionate, moral life. (PC) Justin Cline (Junior) - A semi-organic bioroid "son" of Mechanon and the Engineer born after a battle in one of Mechanon's bases caused some weirdness in on of the manufacturing lines. Works hard to keep of his parent's radars. Freshman Year: Gabe Williams (Archive) - Memory beyond photographic. Can remember things written in a book he fell asleep on but usually doesn't understand it. Usually feels a bit overwhelmed Arianna Bellington (Fury) - Happy, Friendly cheerleader with an irritatingly sunny disposition. If pushed she transforms into a 12 foot furry beast with razor spurs. Not doing well at Enhanced Gym because she finds it difficult to find the beast as she really isn't that angsty. Jacob Singh (Athoeter) - Constantly afraid of accidentally using his power to disintegrate almost anything in a column in front of him Wilma Nessen (Sine) - Mousy, quiet girl with loud ear-shattering screams Special Mentions: Kyle Ward (Nocturne II) - A traditional student sent to Ravenswood by her mother to *try* to keep her out of trouble. He older brother is the sidekick to the Black Mask and they are both the children of a previous Black Mask. She is well aware of the secret parts of Ravenswood but thinks that she has fooled Headmistress Timmons into thinking she is an ordinary student. She thinks she is Bruce Wayne stuck in high school by a mother that doesn't respect her, but in actuality needs to learn some hard lessons about experience vs confidence, apparently from someone other than her family. Kalla Howery - Perfectly normal, under-confident girl. Has become friends with the PCs but doesn't know about their abilities. In several future timelines she becomes a time-enhanced solder opposing the villainy of either Junior or Jane Doe. This has resulted in several competing adult versions of her coming back to try to influence the present. Neither Junior or Jane Doe can imagine doing any of the things she accuses them of, but the secrets they are keeping from her 15 year old self make them worry about how she will react if she finds out about them or her future selves.

Be sure you don't overcomplicate your build. Building the Mecha as a character unto itself and simulating the various drawbacks as Complications or Power Disadvantages is often easier than trying to build all the various components as separate entities. A Mecha As a Character can run off their normal Endurance, and can be a Summon, a Multiform, or a Duplicate if you really need to tie it to a Druid PC

This sounds like the old 70's Marvel Comics villain "Swarm", only he had his old skeleton inside his bee-swarm body, and wore a cape for some reason. As I recall he had - Damage reduction to reflect that punches and bullets didn't do much to him. - Damage Shield to reflect all the stings you would get if you touched him (nnd, not vs rigid armor or poison immunity) - Stretching to reflect him putting out pseudo-pods of bees out of his body to sting people with his damage shield - Flight, because he was made of bees - Variable Area of Effect NND (vs rigid armor or immunity to poison) blasts to reflect him sending clouds of bees after people. In some versions he had giant bees he could command or had swarms of bees as followers https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Fritz_von_Meyer_(Earth-616) Someone armored like Iron Man could have made short work of him, but he mostly fought Spiderman or The Champions of LA (a *very* minor superteam that included Hercules, Black Widow and HellRider (whose flames helped out quite a bit vs Swarm)

In honor of the day, it is also time to remember that every year Santa penetrates the defenses of Apokolips to deliver Darkseid a lump of coal. Every year. Darkseid has rivals, and has betters. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FVXCQBs2iUU/TNpu07Bj9zI/AAAAAAAAE_g/a8ePJt-LKXk/s1600/darkseid.jpg

The Ultimate books are deep dives into their various topics. If you are just looking for some power builds you are probably fine with what you have, but the Ultimate books are going to go into a lot more depth/detail on how the archetypes work in various genres and how to really play around with their subject matter in a specific game. There is a decent overlap between Ultimate Martial Artist and Martial Arts 6th ed, but the UMA has a lot more genre stuff. On the other hand Champions Powers has a few pages on Brick Tricks (for example) and the Ultimate Brick spends several chapters on the subject. Its really a question of how much depth you want.

I've done both but tend to prefer fictional takes on real cities. My current Teen Champions game (and my more generic Champions games of the past) happens in Horizon City, which is neither Portland nor Seattle but may as well be. I like being able to mooch off of the pop-culture "feel" of a city without having to actually deal with things like "Is the Big landmark on the waterfront or downtown?" In Horizon it is wherever I need it to be the first time it shows up. I was a big fan of San Angelo for this basic reason. It is not an actual California city but has a lot of overlap with several. My last World of Darkness game (Changeling 20th anniversary) was set in rural Nebraska. I created a new county nestled between two real ones and stole the demographics and several historical tidbits of several nearby communities to populate it. On the other hand there is a part of me that has always wanted to run an Urban Fantasy game set in Duluth MN. Big enough to have most of the urban amenities but small enough that whatever the PCs are up to is probably a big deal. Lots of rust belt international heavy shipping mixed with beautiful countryside and a lively tourist trade. Then there are the harsh MN winters and the deep, cold murky depths of Lake Superior.

Not sure if that is a good example. When I'm talking about assumptions in various editions I'm talking about buying 2 skills or buying 9 for a starting character, or if powerful villains should have multiple multipowers, or similar. Is wealth worth buying or not? That kind of thing. NCM (and Does Batman/Captain America/Tarzan have it?) is one of the great disagreements of the Hero ages...... If we have to solve that to figure out Hero we will be here forever.

Well, it's an old joke in the Hero System that baseball bat (+2d6 HA, OAF: Stick of Wood) costs 4 points, or you could be Immortal for 5. I'd say that most of the "non combat" powers are already crazy cheap. Batman dropped 10, maybe 15 points on wealth but it comes up all the time. Being close personal friends with the Head of UNTIL costs like 10 points. I personally think it's fine that Tony Stark is loaded & Peter Parker isn't. Tony paid 10 points for the privileged and if Spiderman's player tried to get away with Social Complication: Almost Broke I'd allow it. (Parker's bank account creates about as many problems for him as Doctor Octopus does)

At this point it would make sense that Black Mask XI (formerly Nocturne) has probably been on the job for 10-15 years and Jennifer Ward's Son is likely well into his training to be Black Mask XII. He may even be a sidekick to Black Mask XI already. I've been having a lot of fun with this in my Teen Champions game.

They didn't really think through their timeline.......

I admit that I started with Champions 4th, and that tends to color my view but I'm really starting to wonder if looking at what was normal in various editions is holding us back. Champions 4th came out in 1989. Champions 5th came out in 2002 and is now old enough to vote. I think it's fine to pick an edition and play within it's assumptions, but gaming tends to evolve over time. 5th edition D&D is a very different game than 2nd edition was and Champions 6th edition is not the same game as the one from 1982

The choice will have a lot to do with how storied each individual member of the legacy needs to be. The Buffy Slayers only last 2-3 years and go back eons, but very few of them are known to anyone outside a few academics. Its more of a character template than a legacy as the individual slayers rarely have any interactions with the lives that come before them or even know the name of the person that will succeed them. The Black Masks from the Champions universe seem to last 20+ years each. They each seem to have a pretty distinctive style and each one gets a separate writeup when they appear in a book. (Never just "take the one from book x but ad horsemanship 15-) At least one was a member of a superteam whose members likely noticed that a Black Mask who was suddenly younger started showing up when their buddy retired. The legends of the Wild West Black Mask are likely pretty different from the one that is protecting Vibora Bay in the modern era. The Phantom had 21 people wear the mask over 400+ years, so ~10 years each. They pretended they were all the same guy and minimized any external differences to keep the mythos going. Individual Phantoms and their accomplishments were only known to their immediate family.

This sounds like a Campaign Guidelines issue rather than a moral one. One of the things you need to be mature about before playing HERO is the idea that you are there to have a good time and not there to "win". Most RPGs have specific guidelines about what is and isn't OK and there is a low-level war between the designers trying to make content and the players who are trying to Power Build. The GM has to enforce how wild things get. With Hero, there is *NO* attempt to say its illegal to build this that or the other character. The rules are a toolkit and The players & GM all agree what they want to do & they build characters that are fun for all. If someone is trying to showboat, it is because they are trying to showboat, not because they are more or less enlightened. If you don't like the ranges, change them. It's HERO dammit!

For whatever it's worth, this bugged me enough when I started out that I actually deducted a flat 6 points of dex from every character that had a dex higher than 16. -6 Dex and back in the older editions I docked them the two points of OCV/DCV that bought them. Simple to do in your head and the PCs no longer needed to have superhuman Dexes to hang in a fight with Ogre.

Robin.... varied a lot from one version to another. Some were OK, many were not. I always appreciated a character that was audience friendly but wasn't useless or irritating. I feel like a lot of folks involved in these projects assume children can only relate to idiotic bumbling cowards for some reason. I felt like this was and is a too common trope. Personally, I was a child of the 80s and my friends and I watched a lot of Toy IP Cartoons. Every single one had a character clearly designed for us kids to relate too and my friends and I hated them all!! Scooter from Gobots, Snarf from Thundercats, Orko from HeMan, Scrappy Doo, Godzooky from Godzilla, Tbob from MASK... I could go on. GI Joe for some reason didn't have an idiot sidekick.. at first. They eventually had ShipWreck who was an imbecile but could still fight and wasn't a child. The Transformers had Bumblebee but he was both brave and competent and just "one of the gang". We were OK with him. (and he is right up there in fandom popularity even today)

No villains J-L? I feel like the Agent Corps is a really James Bond idea that somehow took over Hero 3rd edition. In the comics agents are relatively rare. That said, I always liked the Jokerz from Batman: Beyond. Basically street thugs with a clown theme. They saw themselves as the heirs to *the* Joker. Batman saw them as a bunch of wannabes. (The man himself treated them like a pre-made henchmen brigade when he arrived on scene. Which was about as survivable for the Jokerz as it was for any of his other Henchmen)

GrailKnight, I nod to your HeroFu. Now that you say it, it is obvious to me the minion *is* an expendable Focus.

You aren't wrong. It isn't so bad once you wrap your head around things, but the learning curve is steep. I generally say that 3/4 of the complexity is in character builds, actual play is fairly easy once your character sheet has been filled out. It can be useful to have some sample fights with pre-generated characters out of the books to get a handle on how everything interacts. It doesn't help that the complexity is what a lot of us *like*, so it has trended upward over time.

The only situation I might be OK with such a limit is if someone was buying a portable power source that only worked for some things. "Glowing Crystal: End Reserve, only to power artifacts of the ancients" So you can open the teleport portal with it, or power up the forgotten temple of Atlantis, but you will not be running the camp lights or the space heater from home depot off the glowing crystal. The Power Supply for your Power Armor? I'd be inclined to say that is pretty specific already & doesn't get the extra point costs.

It was 15 with Drivers Ed back in the early 90s for me unless you got a farm permit. As I lived in a metro area with 2.5 million people that wasn't really an option. Farm permits weren't on the radar for people I grew up with. I just checked my state's (Minnesota) laws today. - Learning Permit: 15 years old, classroom instruction, enrolled in behind the wheel instruction, pass a written test. - Provisional Driving License for under 18: 16 Years old, completed behind the wheel instruction, Show a log proving 50 hours of supervised driving, already had a Permit for 6 months, passed a driving test Provisional Licenses let you drive on your own but no cell phones (even hands free, which is OK for full licenses), no night driving for the first 6 months, only one teen age passenger for the first 6 months, no more than 3 teen age passengers for the next 6 months. - Full License: 18 years old, provisional license for 12 months, must re-apply for license Farm Licenses are a thing. You have to be 15 & do all the stuff for a Learning Permit. You can only drive alone or with a parent (no friends or farm hands), only during the day, only within 20 miles of the farm, and only outside an city with a population less than 100,000. Parents have to prove they actually live on a farm. A day shy of your 15th birthday? No legal driving of cars or trucks for you. There are no age requirements for Tractors & Farm equipment but the Highway patrol has lowkey said they will start looking real close at the parents if they find a 7 year old driving a combine down the interstate. So yeah, *way* more restrictive and with a lot more requirements than when I was getting my license in 1990. There are also links to various studies that show how teen driving accidents went down markedly when the new laws were imposed. So maybe a good thing?

Does all of GL's extra PD go away when his ring touches something yellow? I"m willing to buy Green Lantern can't use big energy hands from the ring to grab Robin or punch him with ring-generated Boxing Glove while that cape is wrapped around his hand, but I'd think all his defenses would still work against that green slipper Robin is using to kick him with

But if someone wears it that just makes them the center of the explosion. Taking the crown off of them doesn't stop the effect, it just changes the center of it and I'm assuming wouldn't free anyone who is enslaved. Really, a foci should be removable and removing it stops it from working (generally) Although once again, if this is a story power more than a villain power I'd hand wave it.

This seems pretty legit. OAF seems iffy as it is doing this just sitting on a shelf so it doesn't need an owner to do this and there doesn't seem to be a way to "disarm" the crown (unless you can pull a glowing gem out of it or something). Otherwise pretty solid!

The power doesn't have to mechanically kill the minion. For Gm villains, it is enough that the side effects of the power *say* a minion dies. Curse: 5d6 transform (normal to cursed), Gestures, incantations, side effects (nearest minion dies). And done. Many years ago I remember there was a thread on the old boards where everyone was proposing writeups for powers that would destroy a planet. I recall one submission was something along the lines of "Badass Dude": +5 to Pre, 1 consumable charge, Never Recovers (Planet you are standing on) Everyone agreed that wasn't really what we meant, but it *was* mechanically sound.....