Vestnik

Re: ORCS! What makes them our favourite enemies??? Considering the ease with which orcs typically get slaughtered, one wonders why they went into the warrior race business in the first place. They should give it up and take up shepherding or construction work. It's like D&D kobolds -- no race that weak would ever be f*ing with humans. They should be living on grubs in the forest, HIDING from the humans.

Re: The Italian Connection Actually I'm not even Russian, just have lived here for a long time. I look forward to seeing Super Dante. This could be cool. (Wasn't he guided to Hell in the first place by a panther and two other animals? "Midway through my life's journey..." Maybe they could be followers.

Re: The Italian Connection I remember about Dante now -- he put a lot of his Florentine enemies into Hell, in fact. I think Dante may have been a bit spiteful. Yes, until Gorby time most anything that came from the West was supposed to be a "product of the decadent capitalist West." Western cities were supposed to be dystopias of massive poverty ruled over by a handful of evil fat capitalists (kind of like how Russian cities are portrayed in the West today! ). Which doesn't mean nothing got through -- Tootsie was a big hit in the USSR, as was ABBA. ABBA supposedly had a deal with the Soviet government whereby they would get their records distributed in exchange for cheap concerts, or something like that. Depeche Mode was also huge. The Beatles were on the state record label. I like the plural infernos idea. If you took Dante too literally the Roman gods and any other non-Christian supernatural whatevers would have to be demons in disguise, which isn't very comic book.

Re: The Italian Connection Not a lot of RPG gamers. When RPGs got started this was still the USSR and they would have been seen as a "decadent capitalist" invention, so there's not much of a gaming culture. (There was a Soviet version of Monopoly though, so they could appropriate anything I guess.) But considering how many people here are addicted to World of Warcraft I could see it taking off. I was wondering where in Italy you were -- I used to date a woman from Milano. I had no idea where Dante was buried -- why not in his native Florence? I like the Beatrice idea. How is religion going to work in your game -- is the Inferno the real Hell?

Re: The Italian Connection Don't even get me started on Hollywood's crap depictions of other countries. Believe it or not, not everybody in Russia is in the Mafia. Just imagine, Russia is mostly populated by farmers, students, housewives, mathematics professors, and other such non-Mafia people! What a shock! Oh never mind. Well, Dante is also dead by this point in history. I like the idea of making him an interdimensional guardian -- he did pass through the worlds, after all. But it was Virgil who brought him through...

Re: The Italian Connection For some reason I thought Opus Dei was founded by a Spaniard who was close to Franco. But I may be wrong. I have never seen MI3, or MI2 for that matter. Maybe Dante returned from Paradiso with - SUPER-POWERS! That would be cool. And with his sidekick Beatrice.

Re: Superpowered Worlds It is my great fear that when the Legion breaks up, Triplicate Lass is going to end up like the cast of Different Strokes and wind up in the porn industry.

Re: Superpowered Worlds I'm wondering about dating customs on Triplicate Girl's world. Does every sexual encounter end in a six-person orgy? I am so totally going around Beast Boy world and heading straight to Triplicate Girl world.

Re: Superpowered Worlds

Re: Autofire Find Weakness Just out of curiosity have HERO products been translated into French (or any other non-English language), or do you use the materials in English. Merci pour l'information! Je serai bien reconnaissant.

Re: The Italian Connection Opus Dei?

Re: The Italian Connection And the Borgias! And maybe Dante really did go to Hell. This setting has real potential. Does the Vatican have a superhero team? Swiss Guard Man!

Re: The Italian Connection Let me expand on that. Julius makes his dark pact and is not murdered but remains Emperor, empowered by dark forces. Since these forces are not Roman, but Celtic, in origin, this p*sses of the Roman Pantheon of gods. So from this point you have a great, long struggle for the soul of Rome between the Celtic and Roman supernatural forces and their human respresentatives, culminating perhaps in the Caligula fire.

Re: The Italian Connection Here's another idea -- while off conquering Gaul, Julius Caesar comes across some dark temple in which he offers up his soul to some Dark Celtic God in exchange for becoming Emperor. Then, in out alternate timeline, Brutus, Marcus Antonius and Cassius are found ripped limb from limb just before the Ides of March...

Re: The Italian Connection By the way, the Djugashvili (Stalin) family is huge. His daughter Svetlana lives in the United States in the Midwest. One of his great-grandsons is a filmmaker in New York. The rest are mostly in Georgia I think. Anyway, perhaps the Fall of the Roman Empire had something to do with the vampires. Maybe they fled to Constantinople and continued to live an underground existance there, secretly manipulating politics in the Byzantine Emoire until the Ottomans took over?

Re: Superpowered Worlds Here's an idea. In a society of Beast Boys, would there be the problem of "going native"? If a Beast Boy starts spending a lot of its time as a dog, say, after a while does it start to identify more with dogs than with fellow Beast Boys? Perhaps it would eventually defect from Beast Boy society and go join a dog pack.

Re: Superpowered Worlds It's some kind of mobile phone payment card thing with a bunch of different cards. One of them has your emu on it, the others have other animals.

Re: The Italian Connection I like the vampires idea. Did Churchill really stay at Mussolini's place? I did not know that. (Perhaps there is something sinister up there in Salo.) I loved seeing Alyssandra (spelling?) Mussolini's election posters: "Vote for the party with the name Mussolini!" Anyway, I have another idea. If I recall correctly, Attila the Hun claimed he had Alexander the Great's sword, which made him unbeatable, and Emperor Constantine countered by saying he had a sword crafted from the One True Cross with magical powers. Maybe these artifacts were real?

Re: DOLPHINS! How would you GM them? Maybe the dolphins could use a kind of sonar spellcasting -- instead of incantations, they would project specific sonar patterns. (Inaudible to the human ear, but detectable by dolphins and maybe sea elves.)

Re: The Italian Connection Didn't he supposedly order his soldiers to fire arrows into the sea to kill Neptune? Perhaps we can posit some battle between Neptune-worshipping vampire hunter/paladins and the Forces of Darkness. What could you do with Il Duce? I know his grandaughter's alive. Maybe make her into a supervillain? (Though she is kind of cute.)

Re: The Italian Connection It's generally thought the Father of the Peoples (sic) died of natural causes, but Beria did engage in some funny stuff immediately after his death. Almost all the documents in Stalin's safe were burned. I have an image of Zombie Stalin bursting forth from the grave and going on a rampage. Maybe Rome could have been burned by some leftover Carthaginian vampire-hunters? I don't remember when Carthage was destroyed. But I'm pretty sure it was way before Caligula.

Re: The Italian Connection I thought about doing something like that here in Moscow with Stalin. Stalin is buried under these huge underground metal slabs. It's like they're worried he'll get out...

Re: Superpowered Worlds Maybe they smell differences in each others scents?

Re: The Italian Connection How far back in Italy's past are you planning to go for ideas? I think you could do some pretty cool stuff involving the Roman Empire. Maybe Caligula was an immortal vampire...

Re: Superpowered Worlds Are these super-people disease-free, or does their planet have super-germs? How long do they live?