Vestnik

Re: Unified Field Theory I was thinking of Russell and Whitehead too! Do really need Metarules? An Ultimate Ontology of the Hero System?

Re: God Package... Amen to what Kirby said. These Olympian write-ups are great.

Re: Unified Field Theory I think it would be interesting for people inhabiting the upper stratosphere of "game theory" (ha ha, I made an esoteric funny). That said, I don't think any newbie would ever BUY a game like this.

Re: Vampires in Supers Setting Thanks Kirby. I know they've been done to death, but I've always wanted to play Dracula With A Heart of Gold. I tried doing this with Frankenstein's Monster (frozen in a block of ice, thawed out in present day, yada yada yada) but I just couldn't make the character competitive without totally changing the conceot, at which point he was no longer the Monster.

Re: Vampires in Supers Setting Come to think of it, the classical Vampire is not portrayed as an ass-kicking machine -- as you allude to, they're sneaky more than tough (except for being unkillable by normal means). Vampire, Frankenstein's Monster, the Werewolf, the Mummy -- the only classic movie monster I can see being "superized" without really changing the concept is the lycanthrope. That's basically what Sabertooth is, right? Supers would roll over all the others in combat.

Re: How do you use Surbrook's Stuff? I've spent hours at work perusing that site. It really damaged my productivity fow a while. It rocks.

I know they are cliched to the point of, well, being a cliche, but every campaign needs vampires. Here's my problem. I was writing up a classic cinematic vampire as a hero with all the cliche powers (turning into mist, wall-crawling, changing into a bat and wolf etc.). In the course of doing so I realized that vampires, well, kind of suck. I couldn't see a classic Dracula-type character as having more than a 30 STR, 35 tops, giving him a whole 6d6 or 7d6 attack. Any ideas as how to ramp up a vampire so as to make them competitive with superheroes, without leaving the "classic cinematic vampire" model behind?

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) Oh, I totally forgot: Boy Band Hero

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) Microbe Hero. The characters play common unicellular organisms. Tapeworm Hero ("I sit in my host and absorb food from his gut") Fish Hero ("I swim around and eat stuff")

Re: Wierdest powers... Better yet, he could be a spider bitten by a radioactive human being. All his powers would be bought in an EC: Human Being Powers. Increased DEX (opposable thumbs), Transmit for Hearing Sense Group (vocal cords) and so forth. It's brilliant, I tell you!

Re: Wierdest powers... I like the idea of Human Guy. Bitten by a radioactive human, he receives all the proportional strength and agility of a human being.

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Ah, thanks for the correction. Vale!

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help Unless of course they think that you are dead and decide to hit on your wife. In which case you are honor-bound to KILL 'EM ALL!!!!!

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Was that deliberate? IIRC it is a central argument in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which I have never read, though a highly abridged version of it is on my shelf) that the Romans' adoption of Christianity wussified them to the point that they were no longer up to maintaining the Empire. Although I don't think Christianization interfered with the Games. St. Augustine curses them as frivolous in the Confessions, but does not point out the whole blood sport thing as being sinful itself.

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Human sacrifice is out of religion. Blood sports are for ENTERTAINMENT. I think the Romans are near the bottom of the historical barrel, if one ois judging past societies by modern standards (admittedly a somewhat silly endeavor).

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Well, English has "decimate," but then that was the Latin word. If I recall correctly they also had "comedy skits" -- women fighting to the death against dwarves, reenactments of the conception of the Minotaur with a slave girl cast as King Midas' wife and a bull as the Bull of Jupiter (leading to the woman's death). What a nice bunch of people!

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design What the heck was the life expectancy of a gladiator? Sports were for Real Men back then. The stuff nowadays is so pansy by comparison. What we need to do is bring back the blood factor -- put spikes on football players' helmets, intermittently release lions onto the playing field, and so forth. Perhaps the ball can be set to detonate if held for longer than a given period, thereby certainly speeding things up. And we can sacrifice the members of the losing team to the gods, ensuring all-out committment to the game.

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Supposedly, the Karaite Jews and Crimean Tatars of Ukraine (the latter havinf adopted Islam) are the remnants of the Khazars, as are the Krimchaks in the Caucasus. That's what Solzhenitsyn says in his book on the history of Russo-Jewish relations anyway -- although admittedly he is not a historian and the book is problematic in some respects. My knowledge of that era is fuzzy. My main interest in the "medieval" history of the region has to do with the origin of the Cossacks, and they didn't start to show up until the breakup of the Golden Horde. (This is all off-topic, of course.)

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Heck, those pesky Mongols RULED Rus', which is why lots of Russian names have Mongol origins (Rimsy-Korsakov, Bukharin, Kutuzov and Akhmatova, to name a few prominent ones) and Russian has many words dealing with commerce and government derived from Mongol and Tatar. What is Turko-Mongol wrestling like? I know nothing about it.

Re: Suffer, Kate! Well, that's true of a lot of things. Logically characters should be disoriented after recovering from Stun or unconsciousness, for instance, but that would be complicated.

Re: Wanted - Comprehensive Western Martial Arts Design Sambo is of 20th-century origin I think, specifically Soviet. I guess it may have had an earlier precursor. AFAIK Sambo is based on Judo, but I may be mistaken. Putin is a Sambo master.

Re: L.A. Caveman Let's see, short, broad and physically powerful... Danny DeVito on steroids. I think it's incredibly sad that the Neanderthals died out. So much the better though, probably. Considering what a hard time human beings have with the concept of race, can you imagine what things would be like if there were two sentient hominid species walking around?

Re: What is Munchkin? The sword is too heavy for puny mortals to wield. This could be bought as a multiform, but that would be a Power, not a cost savings.

Re: Neolithic Hero It did! Thanks mucho. Thag, Cave-Man GM

Re: Neolithic Hero