The Mad GM

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel A good creepy bit you can use is the suddenly appearing insignificant wounds and cuts on the characters. For instance, you don't remember cutting yourself, but you have a couple of cuts on the back of your hand, already scabbed over. Or your knuckles hurt like you've been in a fight. Nothing that would affect combat in any way, just things that imply actions the characters don't remember doing. Not hotel specific, but it could easily tie in.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art That is really nice! You're not trying to take Keith "witty banter" Curtis' job, are you?

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel Hotel bits The Falling Body The PCs see a body falling past a window on a high floor, but see nothing when they rush to investigate, and nothing on the ground outside. This happens more then once, perhaps on a regular basis. The Mirror in the Closet When they open the closet, they are suprised to find a mirror on the inside of the door. But more surprising, the reflection shows them with burns that they don't have, in their clothes and on their bodies. There is a faint smell of smoke in the closet as well, and the doorknob always feels faintly warm. More creepy elevator stuff There are two elevators in the hotel, one on the right, and one on the left. Whenever you get in one, you seem to exit the other. The Argument A young couple seems happy when you first see them in the morning. By lunch they seem tense. They start sniping each other with nasty comments, eventually arguing loudly and visciously, bringing up embarrasing personal details and shouting them for the world to hear. Eventually, one of them leaves the hotel saying they never want to see the other person, only to die in a freak accident (hit by a car in the parking lot, struck by lightning, part of the hotel sign falls on their head, etc). The one that remains is inconsolable, and commits suicide in a obvious and public way (jumping from a high balcony, swallowing a gun, etc). The next day a different couple seems to be repeating the pattern, possibly even some key phrases. Phone mail The message light on the room phone is blinking when you first get to your room. The message is addressed to someone named Olaf, saying that the target would be arriving at exactly (insert time PCs showed up), wearing (insert clothes PC are wearing), and they will be in room (insert room number of PCs). The voice will also mention some relevant detail about the PCs that might be useful.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? Actually the idea of a primitive society invaded by a high-tech opponent coudl make for a good game setting where swords (or in this case spears) are prevalent.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? I thought it was Toy Sales

Re: Pulp Hero Resources I'm not sure this fits, but Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoons started publishing in 1918. It started out with sports, but soon moved to unusual facts. I haven't been able to find any sort of archive online, but it might be a good source for story hooks. They sell reprintings of the book collections, going back to the first in 1929. http://www.ripleypress.com Does anyone have one of these (or know of an online archive), and do they make good resources?

Re: Fantasy University Floor Plans I want a Fantasy U hoody. I can just imagine the mascot.

Re: Fantasy University Floor Plans For the hallways with dorms, just convert two rooms into one big communal restroom. Also, the L-shaped rooms near the stairs would be good candidates, but you'd need to shift the staff cafeteria over on the ground floor, essentially just squaring off the main cafeteria like it is near the kitchen. Like all your work, this is very professional. What's the name of the west door?

Re: Who knows physics? Orbital mirrors? Say six in orbit, with numerous banks of thin mirrors that adust to always reflect light at your park. If they are roughly the same size as the park, one at a time would be enough to get close to the right amount of light.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? I think someone already mentioned this, but in zero-g, there's no recoil from a sword, but there's a lot of spin. I'm not entirely sure how things would work out, but if you stabbed at someone, you'd also be pushing yourself backwards. If you punctured them, their muscles might constrict around the blade enough to prevent them being pushed away. Any swing would also cause your body to pivot, unless you use two swords and moved them in opposite directions, or perhaps had a weight in your off hand (a shield perhaps), that would serve the same purpose. All these things would be covered under a zero-g martial arts style (with environmental movement - zero-g). Chain weapons might be interesting in zero-g. " A hole the size of your fingertip is gonna be a LOT easier to slap a pressure patch on that a 3 foot long tear in the back of your suit." - AmadanNaBriona Good point. The same could be said about a shotgun blast, tho, and shotguns might have less penetration against hull plating as well.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? That's a good point - there is a more visceral intimidation factor with knives and wicked clubs, especially if they haven't been cleaned since the last use. You learn to fear sharp pointy things before you learn to fear a hollow tube pointing at you. A subtle but cogent point. I'm not talking about intellectual fear, I'm talking about gut reaction.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? 1 - My characters always seem to run up against trained opponents. 2 - I don't have enough real-world experience to argue that - but from a game point, guns cost no end. 4 - I had a friend (this is real life) open up his kneecap down to the bone with an ill considered swing of essentially a machette. I nearly lost a toe to an axe while splitting wood. The odds are skewed to the dramatic in a game, but they happen. 5 - 20' and decent cover is far enough. I'm just saying that justifications for swords need to be meta-game, not real. Most of my characters carry some sort of knife/dagger "just in case". Like, for instance, a post-apocalyptic setting where the main point of defeating an enemy is to steal their psychic life energy during the moment of death, and that can only happen while your bodies are connected by a length of conductive material (ie - a sword). Or because nanobots in the bloodstream can easily heal any wound that doesn't actually remove a significant bit of mass. The only way to truly defeat an opponent is to either disintegrate them, blow them into teensy bits, or hack them apart. Or, authoritarian police-bots are programmed to hone in on the energy signature of gun discharges, so muscle-powered weapons are favored by the shady. Or, the kirlian fields that surround living things are manipulated so that flesh, and anything it touches, can become stronger than steel. The only thing that can cut it is something held by another kirlian field, like reinforced sword (possibly made out of bone, who knows). Or some mad scientist invented a bacteria that eats gunpowder, or a beam that disrupts the workings of blasters.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? I really liked that movie. I think many of that directors films just aren't grokked by the critics, who panned it. Of course, it was billed as straight action, not drama. Same with House of Flying Daggers. Actually, the calligraphy/swordsmanship thing goes way back to Miyamato Musashi, I believe.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? 1 - Swords can require years of training to achieve real skill, guns take a few weeks. 2 - Swords require a great deal of physical strength and endurance for any extended combat. 3 - Marines have a dress sabre, but are not (I think, could be wrong) trained in it's use. 4 - But not safer to the ally standing next to you (critcal miss tables, anyone?). 5 - Swords may be less noisy than a gun, but a gun can be fired from a loooong way away, making retreat much easier. And a sword that hits armor isn't silent, either, nor the dying scream of someone who isn't instantly killed. This thread needs to look beyond practical justifications. Heck, guns even make better phallic symbols than swords.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? I thought of another reason for swords, but it's kind of out there, which is what the original post asked for. (in rereading this, it seems very derivative of Battle Angel Alita): Certain forms of cyber tech call for establishing a specifc state of mind, like a trance state, for total 'meshing' between computer and human. Some jobs, like navigation and piloting offer the opportunity to do this in an immobile meditative state. But others, like combat soldier, require you to move your body while maintaining a certain inner calm - and one of the methods used to do this is the internal martial arts styles, like tai-chi (which includes a sword form). Calligraphy and flower arranging would have the same internal effect, but for some reason, warriors tend to choose swords, even if carrying them is largely ceremonial/rank designation. As such, few carry them into serious combat, except as a badge of attaining one-ness with their tech. Outside of active fighting, warriors would carry them as a statement of skill. Just beware the quiet warrior that carries a brush.

Re: Three New Hero Plus Adventures Now Available!

Re: Three New Hero Plus Adventures Now Available! Are you riffing the old Hostess Fruit Pie ads in seventies comics? I can just see Steve in a Raven outfit, throwing HPA's out to stop Dr. Yin Wu from harrassing two precocious kids. "Curses, but at least I've got my HPAs with their creamy pulp filling!" "Gee, thanks, Raven!" "Remember kids, good nutrition is important!"

Re: Sci-fi wear swords?

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? I was assuming all those rounds stayed on the ship, you only carry a spare clip or two per gun, and that's packing heavy. But back to justifications - I had one Space Hero style character (1987 ish) who was a lumberjack, and carried a telescoping vibra-chainsaw. It was legal because it wasn't a weapon. Yeah, that explanation didn't always work with the dock authorities either. Another was an engineer with a powered wrench (similar in size to a large plumber's wrench, but with 'powered torque assist' whatever the heck that meant), and a Champions character who used a crowbar (picture the Shoveller, from Mystery Men, but with a series of crowbars). The powered wrench guy only got played once, and the jokes about marital aides versus martial arts got a little thick. I later played a janitor from Miscatonic university in a pulp-horror game who, when armed, used a variety of simple hand tools. Maybe I'm getting off topic here.

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? I was playing in a Traveller campaign where the laws stated that even though dueling was allowed, any innocent bystander killed during a duel was considered murder. And since most street violence was called 'a duel' by the survivor, it made more sense for gangs and whatnot to carry HTH weapons. Also, certain HTH weapons were legal to carry publicly, or even concealed, whereas ranged weapons were not. None of this applies worth beans to the military (where Traveller characters almost always get their training), or to onboard ship, or on frontier planets. That was just the way the core planets did things, so if you wanted to be armed on a core world or station, you either got a sword or got a mega-level security clearance. Oh, and for tight space, close-in fighting: wrestling. Every fight I've seen up close (which has fortunately not been many) has either ended very quickly or devolved into two or more people in a tangle on the floor. Most of them could have occurred in a closet with no loss in poise and grace. In zero-gee or random-gee, wrestling would still be a winner. It's just not as cool to imagine your character in a dog-pile straining for a wrist-lock compared to leaping and spinning and doing big action-movie knockback. Some day, some cinematographer will come up with a way to make wrestling more cinematic without being WWF cheesy, and suddenly wrestling will be cool again for a heroic setting.

Somebody had to invent it. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8180 $15 per square inch? Yeesh.

Re: Valdorian Age Campaign A Go! Rockets are out of genre.

Re: Valdorian Age Campaign A Go! I know someone who played an anti-druid with an exploding wildlife spell. It varied damage on cuteness/size. I think he did it just to make otherwise brave NPCs run away from bunnies.

I didn't see this on the board already. Apparently Stephen King has published a pulp type story in a series of books published by Hard Case Crime, an imprint specialising in pulpy detective stories: First heard about it at: http://avclub.com/content/node/41557 Publisher (love the covers): http://www.hardcasecrime.com/ It's just good to see Mr. King getting inspired by Mr. Long. But wait, I've never seen them both in the same place...

Re: Extra Extra: Is 5ER actually bullet proof I believe the test book was a damaged copy. It was a mercy killing.