Vestnik

Re: The "Classic" Elements

The Ethereal Plane then?

"In his stoichiology Aristotle adopts the four elements, or radical principles, which Empedocles introduced. He teaches, however, that the celestial space is filled with a body different from the four elements. This seems to be the part assigned by him to ether.{64} Ether, then, is neither a fifth element entering with the other four into the constitution of the terrestrial world, nor, as is sometimes maintained, an undifferentiated substratum, like the apeiron of Anaximander, from which the four elements originated. It is the constituent of celestial bodies. The natural motion of ether is circular; that of the other elements is upward or downward, according as they are naturally endowed with lightness or with heaviness. It is hardly necessary to remark that until Newton's time there existed the belief that each particular body moved towards its own place, upward or downward, in virtue of the light or heavy elements which it contained." http://www2.nd.edu/Departments//Maritain/etext/hop11.htm

Re: The "Classic" Elements

Okay who wants to help me out?

 

 

(geez don't all raise your hands at once...)

 

 

I know the classic Greek and Western Elements are:

 

Air

Earth

Fire

Water

You left out ether.

Earth moves downward, water to slightly above it, air to above that, fire goes straight up, and ether moves in circles (it's what the heavenly bodies were supposedly made of.)

Re: Weapon Designs -- opinions wanted

The AWP is just a heavy caliber sniper rifle. In counter-strike its frustrating because typically you can kill someone by hitting them ANYWHERE, including a hand, tip of a foot, etc... and you die. A lot of servers ban it because its ridiculous, it bypasses armor, etc.

 

Double barrel supershotgun rocked... if I remember right, there was a regular and a super that did more damage. =) LOVED that gun.

 

I loved the weapons in Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. The bow with explosive arrows, the thing that homed in on brainwaves and burrowed into skulls, the ricocheting shotgun... It did rock.

Re: The Five

 

As part of the Fiendish Plot of the Fearsome Five, the world's symbolic leaders, key media figures, were replaced by Clockwork Robots.

 

The deadliest of these robots were the Coulterites and Limbots; both models were used for security in the Five's hidden city.

 

Complications included the fact that some of the media figures had been evil robots from the beginning.

What a great idea!

Re: The Five

This year was planned out as openning with a major challenge fight, then going to an investigation (which could have lead to a mook fight), a mook fight, a challenge battle, and a final major villain battle. Stealth options and shortcuts were available, and every play group found at least one (not every group met the Limbots, not every group fought the Coulterites, not every group went to Greenland). It had to be cut much tighter to actually work in 4 hours, but that meant both cutting some combat time and leaving out some back story.

 

On the plus side, the players were happy with it, and that's the primary goal.

Please, I have got to know the Limbots and the Coulterites.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

 

Amarok is a giant wolf in Inuit mythology. It will hunt down and devour anyone foolish enough to hunt alone at night. Sometimes considered equivalent to the Waheela, a wolf-like cryptid reported from Nahanni Valley in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

[The waheela might actually BE a prehistoric bear-dog (an Amphicyonid), or perhaps a Dire Wolf (Canis dirus), a creature that co-existed with the gray wolf in North America during the Pleistocene. The waheela is reported to travel alone and not in packs as modern wolves do.]

Thanks a lot for the input.

I think I'm going to go with the giant skeleton hound idea. I like the image of a 50-foot-tall cadaverous zombie hound who can breath great gouts of flame and cold (that is, heat-ray vision and super-breath).

I'm going to try to write up the first one of these guys this weekend. Probably Streaky because he's got the simplest power set (in my interpretation, he's a speedster with vicious Killing Attacks).

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Nyarlathprotep?

 

Just an idea.

THANK YOU!!!!

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

I would suggest studying Pre-Dynastic and early Old Kingdom Egypt, and their neighbouring societies in order to get a feel for the interaction of these factors. While you are at it, do the same for the Sumerians and their neighbours. Advanced students could consider the Indus Valley, China, and so on...

Didn't the Egyptians get their ass-whupping ability from the invention of the chariot?

Re: Making a Swarm Effective

Swarms are one of those things that are usually written up (from what I've seen) in a way totally unlike what they are like in real life.

Another is 6D6 NND (Removal of Oxygen). I am sorry, if you remove the oxygen from around someone they start to slowly suffocate, they do not take a big blast of damage.

Re: Making a Swarm Effective

Let them crawl under armor. NND HKA Does Body. Link it to a DEX and/or Running drain or Change Environment (target struggling with little beasties all over him/her).

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

And Morpheous was taken? Also Metamorpho... Running out of possibilities here. How about a title like 'The Amorph"? Who is only ever mentioned or spoken of in the 3rd person' date=' as it's personality is so unknowable?[/quote']

 

Nyarlathotep?

 

I just want to get the letters "pro" in there somewhere.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous)

Dante's Paradisio HERO (where everyone is so delieriously happy there's no reason for them to act)

So basically the same as Brave New World Hero, eh?

Actually I think one could run an interesting and unusual game in Dante's Inferno (sort of like what Niven and Pournelle did). Hell would be a giant fake created by aliens and peopled by genetic construct "demons" or something like that.

Re: Populating your Lost World

Whoa... now you're talkin' crazy!

 

(No idea, really)

Man, I would LOVE to see the stuff in After Man statted out. I spent hours and hours over that book in Junior High School.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous)

Waiting for Godot Hero ("My character sits down and waits.")

Brave New World Hero ("Let's all go to the orgy!")

Dante's Inferno Hero ("AAGH! The Devil's chewing on me! I'm in pain! Make it stop! AAGH!")

Re: Elves

I knew a linguist when I was in grad school whose master's thesis was on Pictish.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Thanks Transmetahuman. I like that idea for Comet.

Thus far I have:

Beppo Muhaba Mimbe (great ape magician)

The Jade Streak (discussed above)

Coma (the nightmare/psychic thing)

and

The Crypt Hound (animated skeleton of Fenris Wolf or some other pseudomythical giant canine I will make up)

I need a name for Proty. Proteus is too obvious.

Re: Batman vs Midnighter

Streaky can fly at trans-light velocities. He could reduce Midnighter to a red mist before Midnighter's computer recognized that Streaky was there.

 

I might buy that issue.

It would be sweet.

Then again, if Spider-Man can beat Firelord...

Re: "Monkey Ninjas...ATTACK !!!"

Ninja gizmos involving bannanas. Bannana-kin, slippery bannana pills to put enemies off-balance.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

His piece of Kryptonite X was originally just lying in the woods where Supergirl tossed it, though the ball of yarn thing sounds right. From a mechanics POV, why not make the (imobile) Jade Jaguar Statuette the always existing power source, and Evil Streaky a transformed house cat? That way, if Evil Streaky gets killed or captured, you can always have some villain or other get hold of the statuette and start again. For an even weirder build, make the statuette the character, with Summon for Evil Streaky and a mind link to keep in contact with him, maybe with the SFX that the Summon transforms a local cat? That allows the players to capture or kill Evil Streaky only to have him show up again the next day.

 

The Bestiary has rules on swallowing things whole.

Don't have the Bestiary, will likely never have the Bestiary. I'll think of something. Probably some sort of Entangle.

I am liking the transformed housecat ideas.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

OK, here are my tentative ideas for the Dark Legion of Super-Pets line-up. I'm thinking of building them on between 500 and 800 points, depending. I'll see how it works out in the designing process.

Krypto: Fenris Wolf-type, can grow to enormous sizes (how does one write up a "Swallow Whole" power?).

Bleppo: Dark Priest of a Lost City of African Super-Apes. Brick with Control the Jungle powers. Don't want to Growth characters in one group, so the King Kong trope is out.

Streaky: Aztec jade jaguar statuette brought to life. Scrapper with mystic powers of some sort (didn't Streaky get his powers from a ball of yarn or something? I have to factor that in).

Comet: Nightmare motif (D&D nightmare, that is). Probably psychic powers, primarily. Not sure how to work in the morph to human when there is a comet around bit.

Proty: Proty, the Crawling Chaos. Primal ooze predating mankind enfused with great magical powers. Metamorph with a Magic VPP as well. Probably the leader of the Dark Legion of Super-Pets. (Dark Krypto is more powerful, of course, but Proty has him on some kind of leash, ha-ha.)

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

That's why you don't need to upgrade Comet to the Iron Age.

 

Let's face it, you've got a hawt teenager married to a freakin' stallion. This is grosser than most things you would ever want to think about.

What with that, the Wonder Woman bondage obsession, and the Batman/Robin thing, I think the evidence is clear that Silver Age DC writers were sexually Just Not Right.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Hmmm, African Ape. South American Cat, American Dog, European Horse and then Proty becomes some sort of Asian Snake shape changer? It's a regular UN here.

Evil knows no nationality.

I picture Proty as some kind of primal ooze from beyond the damn of time. Maybe he started the Legion. Although Krypto was first in comics.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Sounds like a groovy idea. The LoSP rocks.

 

I have a Digital Hero article something like this that I need to finish, and a few Super Pet write ups. Here's one tribute to Krypto I did for my New Circle games.

Awesome Oddhat! Thanks a bunch.

Sleeping world, the Dark Legion of Super-Pets doth come on fiery paws and hooves of destruction. The day of reckoning is upon thee. Doom trots and scampers across the horizon.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Can't rely on European myths for Beppo. No apes in Europe.

I'm thinking some kind of maxed-out Lovecraftian African Ape God, as in that story the name of which I can't remember, with some Rovert E. Howard touches.

Maybe Streaky can have an Egyptian theme. But cats were symbols of good in Egypt, so maybe that won't work. Some sort of big cat twisted by black magic? Aztec jaguar! That's it!

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Good idea. Or perhaps Cerberus for Dark Krypto?

Dark Comet needs a multiform NCC of some sort.