Nemblamenchisus

Odd, I've read The Dying Earth many times but don't remember Vance ever really describing female clothing, or nudity...not one of his preoccupations. Could be wrong, but if a character happened to be nude, I don't think it's an important part of what makes the book. Vance is not to everyone's taste, that's for sure, though. The writing is stylised and elliptical, and lacks some of the features that are taken for granted in much of more recent, mainstream fantasy.

Jack Vance is a must. Both the Dying Earth and Lyonesse series.

or perhaps my favorite villian (sic) Scarlet Rouge

I've always wanted an aide like Lando's... Either that, or a hot chick with a ponytail, black-framed glasses and a clipboard

Your spidey-sense may not be as remarkable as you think - I can assure you that I have but one user name. In any event, my previous post in this thread expressed what I wanted to say on the topic.

Great article. Nice to see the framework of TFT/GURPS in there with Hero as they developed. There was definitely some back-and-forth there. TFT and Hero remain two of my favorite systems (not GURPS, for various reasons). Steve, have you ever had any chats with Steve Jackson about game design and the origins of the two systems?

Soo...you are basically sitting back and taking it easy with just half a dozen or so projects??

I just looked up the Wikipedia article on Hungarian mythology. Very interesting stuff. So there's just not enough English information available? Or is it scanty and speculative even in Hungarian?

It is surprising just how much stronger men are in upper body strength than women. I stress, lest I be lynched, that I refer to upper body strength, not any other physical or moral quality. This post brings the data (pdf link, to paper from European Journal of Applied Physiology) http://egitim.judo.gov.tr/Dosyalar/makaleler/-ENG-Hand-grip-strength-in-judo.pdf Takeaways: "the very strongest female athletes are barely above the median of grip strength for men. The top 75th percentile of female athletes are below the bottom 25th percentile of men. Ten percent of women have stronger grips than the bottom five percent of men. The very weakest male in the data set of nearly 1,700 males looks to be about at the 20th percentile for average women." This from a study of grip strength, n=1654 men, 533 women (including trained athletes and untrained people). There you have it. Frankly, a small guy can almost certainly beat a heftier-looking woman at arm-wrestling, due to nature having endowed men with about twice as much muscle mass in the upper body. None of these facts needs make any difference to your Hero characters, if you don't wish it, of course.

In addition to some of the ideas suggested above, I require purchase of a "Mystical Ability" talent for characters to be able to cast spells. This costs 1/10th of the maximum Active Points in the spells they can cast, and cannot be bought after initial character creation (in theory I might allow it later, perhaps at double cost, if they could come up with a good story for "discovering" an innate magical potential which they were not previously aware of).