The Mad GM

Thanks Thank you everyone who has replied. This is certainly a lot to look through. Wasn't there a Lankhmar supplement and/or game out?

Clarification, please Is this an always on sort of thing or does the character activate it? How long does it last? Is there a way around it for the bad guys (other than a crossbow bolt)? Is this enough to kill, or just cause pain? It sounds pretty powerful - kind of a "nuke-em all and god's already sorted them out" kind of thing.

Are there any really good City Setting resources out there for FH? How about general fantasy?

Sounds like you're both hooked on FHonics.

FH Form link problem On the Free Stuff page, the FH Mass Combat Form brings up the FH Race Form.

Binding My phonebook lasts a year. I'm willing to wait and see.

Whitebread Might as well fess up on my own behalf. I agree with Storn, it takes an effort of will to keep things fresh. That's one of the reasons I read National Geographic, so the next time an assignment says, "a ranger stalking a deer", I might see an aborigine with a blowgun rather than some clone of Robin Hood. I like my bard drawing too much to change him (though as I think about it, a number of cultural alternates suggest themselves), but the "group getting together in a tavern" and the "same group fighting orcs" were perfect opportunities to show more diversity, and I dropped the ball. Thanks for the reminder, I'll try harder next time!

Mine, all mine!!! I got mine Monday night. Thanks, Steve!

There were a series of short stories about the return of elves, and magic, that was limited to one town: Bordertown, Borderlands Just about anything by Emma Bull or Charles deLint would give an excellent feel for magic seeping slowly back. Tim Powers does an excellent job in Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, and Last Call. These examples aren't really of Magic Returning, just the character discovering that it was there all along. They don't deal with the idea of society's reaction to the re-emergence of magic. Larry Niven has written a series of books on a related theme, The Magic Goes Away, Burning City, The Magic May Return (actually a collection of short stories by various authors).

Game Haven in Winston-Salem, North Carolina apparentlly has copies, or had some this weekend.

Actually, I'm trying to think of ways for players who may or may not have any bardic talent themselves come up with something. I like the idea of filking a known song (for those who don't know, filking is a term from Fantasy/Sci-fi conventions for making parodies of popular songs, re-writing the lyrics to fit the genre in a humorous way). Then letting any bardic skill the character has polish off the edges. My group is old enough (all in our thirties+) that I doubt a comparison to English class will come up. But we are all really busy, so having them write up something ahead of time sounds impractical. I think what I would do is assign the task to the bard character (allowing kibitzing with other players if asked for), run the other competitions, then have the bard recite the piece.

I don't know about you, but I wasn't born under a rhyming planet. But it seems unfair to allow such a ripe opportunity for roleplaying to default to dice rolls, however. Any idea how this might be made more playable? I was thinking something more along the lines of "Who's line is it anyway?" No need to get epic, and frankly the tastes of most medieval fairs would have been more the bawd than the bard (at least judging by SCA revels, which may be dangerous).

I stand corrected. As I mentioned, this movies' primary good point is that it fosters an urge to reread the originals in an effort to purge the "Hollywood Makeover" versions from my mind. And the religious overtones of damnation were completely edited out. We're getting back to 'vampirism is cool' sort of thing, which is fine if you aren't claiming to have a Victorian literary source. But it is just such deviations from the originals, or at the least from an audiences' expectations, that need to be explained. One well delivered sentence would have worked, like "That annoying journalist Stoker got a few things wrong..." or something. Throw me a bone here, people.

LIGHT SPOILERS HERE The point of the book "Dracula" was to save Mina from vampirism, and they succeeded. Why did she leave John (they never mention this in the movie that I can recall)? If they wanted to use a female literary vampire, why not Lucy Westerna? Her surviving a beheading and a stake would be less a stretch, in my opinion. And Mina seemed unaffected by daylight which should have rendered her near catatonic, and they didn't even touch the religious issues inherent in Stoker's vision of vampirism. ***SPOILER*** Just how big is the Nautilas, anyway? Aircraft carrier sized as it first appeared or small enough to fit in an opening that I know isn't more than 60 feet wide. And I know he gets around alot, but was he ever a martial artist in the book? He should have pulled out a gadget and shot the bad guys, or relied on his sword. Jekyll should have placed himself in situations where Hyde's only course of action was to do the right thing, then drank the potion. Hyde's supposed to be a sociopath of the first rank. Sawyer, even if you discount the age discrepancies and the fact that the American government was still firmly isolationist at the time, should have been alot more consistently witty, and had a more pronounced accent. And if he was an agent of the American government, why did he never report in? Where was his backup? It would have worked better if he was working on his own, and lied about the agent thing. ***SPOILER*** DaVinci had nothing to do with the engineering of Venice, which is not built on stilts, and why on earth were the plans in the vault in the Bank of England? And why did he need to steal them? A truly military strike would have served his purpose better. ***SPOILER*** If you want to frame an invisible guy with a crime, you kill him and leave the body somewhere where it won't get bumped into, cause its invisible. Failing that, you carry around a few handfuls of flour and randomly fling it about. I know he's complicated, but how did he learn to stear the vehicle he stole, much less navigate? And how did Tom learn to drive? ***SPOILER*** Photos of the bridge of a ship wouldn't tell you squat about the nature of the engines. If you can invent a machine gun and a tank decades earlier than anyone else, why are you bothering to rob banks? The man should be insanely wealthy in any event! If you're in an insane hurry to get from point A to point B, shouldn't there be some trace of wind in your hair? And shouldn't a floating buoy speed rapidly backwards? If I was the main villain, and I knew about all these people, I would have arranged to confront them one by one and get what I wanted. Putting all your eggs in one basket is pathetic. The entire plot seemed like waaay too much effort for little potential return on the part of the main villain. I know this over-complexity of schemes is a staple of serial villains, but this was not a serial villain. And he should have been not only older, but just way more intelligent. Never run from a sniper across an open field. The main fight scenes were way too choppy. They gave me a headache. I'm not done, but I have to stop now. I need to calm down.

Hated it I was very disappointed. I don't think this film lived up to its potential in a number of ways. Any one of those characters was good enough for their own book, and squeezing them into one movie meant that none were allowed to shine, and no real interaction occurred. There were plot gaps you could drive the Nautilus through, and the bad guy acted absolutely nothing like his literary inspiration. The fight scenes were confused and the overall plot very weak. It has one thing going for it. It makes me want to re-read the classics it rips off to try to undo any cultural damage it negligently inflicted.

Purple Worm Swallowing opponent whole would be a really big grab attack, can affect all limbs and senses, with a linked HKA - teeth. And if they get down the throat, NND, can't breathe, possibly an NND killing attack for stomach acid. One worm can only 'grab' one person at a time, so for really big ones, add area of effect.

Powers as skills I'm not sure this would be any better than a simple skill, but: Detect: value of object, discriminatory, analyze. Takes full turn (+1?), concentration (+1), won't reveal hidden qualities(+1/2).

STR, x16 "KB", only for throws (-1)?

Fantasy is a broad category.... I've always thought of most gonzo martial art movies as being a subgenre of fantasy, since most of them involve manuevers that are essentially magic.

If you like Monty Python style humor, "Monty Python's The Holy Grail" "Jabberwocky" are good rents. "Eric the Viking" is another good comedy, with Tim Robbins of all people. Love the token christian missionary. Good take on gods. BBC did a live action "Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" a few years back, but it moves pretty far from standard fantasy I always thought Indiana Jones movies had an amazingly gameable atmosphere and visuals, as well as the original Star Wars trilogy, even though the settings are very divergent. Ditto with Harry Potter.

It's almost as if you felt you had alot to say on the topic. Heck, the bibliography is probably a short chapter from most books. Fess up, all the previous books were just a practice to limber up your fingers for FH, right? And FH is just practice for Dark Champions?

...but not both.

Increasing damage Remember that Martial Arts manuevers, while typically represented by some specific school or training, are only a game mechanic. If the 'special effect' is that you are just a darn good fighter, Martial Arts manuevers might very well be the most cost effective way to portray it. You do end up having to buy it 'usable with weapon type', but it is still cheaper. Of course, there would be no Style Limitations on them.

Reality break: Liquidmetal A real-world material, called Liquidmetal: "Liquidmetal alloys possess a unique, amorphous atomic structure that enables them to be cast into very thin-profile, precision net-shape parts while maintaining strength and hardness two-to-three times greater than titanium and other commonly used metals." It can apparently be injection molded like plastic, and retain detail (like an edge on a surgical scalpel) down to the micron level. Normal metals change shape too much during cooling to be reiably casted with that much precision, which is why knives have that shiny machined bevel at the edge. Check out their website: http://www.liquidmetal.com/ It kills me that the first application they came up with was a head for a golf club.

I am probably prejudiced about this, but I have always had a fondness in my heart for the big H and his nemesis Cardshark. It had a sort of bridging quality between DC and 4 color, like the old Batman TV show crossed with the movie Seven. And frankly you have to admire the persistence it takes to play a character that much in the face of being hunted by just about every other character in the group. I have a pretty good idea what gun #1's write up is, but I ain't tellin'. Basically it is up to the individual GM to figure out an attack that would do significant Body damage to the higher level bricks, then double it. Since Steve played him up from a regular four-color character, I'm curious what a 'hindsighted' version of a starting character would look like. I have a sneaky suspicion that he raised the starting points from 250 to 350 just so he could make a 'starting' Harbinger that he could live with .