egaroadkill

Exactly! Like myself, say he came from a military family that transferred to a new post every 18 months. He makes new friends easily and often, only alternate ID and children would be a slight emotional issue. The movie "The Man from Earth" comes to mind. I was actually playing a character with serial immortality in a recent game. His was a GM controlled Transform (Mental transfer) charge with limited lives that triggered upon death, exorcism, and then later choice once paid up the xp for it. I could also buy new charges but only upon completing certain tasks, usually remotely associated with the plot hook and new body. A cheap but very fun power that I think fits the AP cost of this thread.

Life Support (Immortal) Healing: Slow 1 point regeneration with limbs +2 Overall Skill levels or 4D Luck The money, technology, skills, contacts and other improvements will advance over time... first on the list... anonymity!

Re: Societies forming around advanced/alien/forgotten purpose technology?

Re: Planets of SF Author Hats Pournellion: Present day Earth but with Alderson drives, off world gulags and penal colonies for petty criminals, those who disagree, and who can’t pay the bills. Meanwhile, cultural philosophies polarize to the point of genocidal anger as a few military men and transhumanist scientists act on their own angles for a way out to carve their own kingdoms before the lights go out on the dystopic, corrupt civilization.

Re: 7 Sci-Fi Series Ripe for Movie Reboots Cool, let's hope they get B7 right. On a side note, I finally saw an episode of Hyperdrive. Loved the silly show! If they remake 1999, I demand twangy, funkadellic 70's guitar and that whooooooosh effect for every time someone gets to suck vacuum.

Re: 7 Sci-Fi Series Ripe for Movie Reboots I was actually excited a few years back when Darrow was angling to make a new series with his Kerr Avon reprise having survived and playing a sort of Napoleon trapped on St. Helena. Too bad it fell through. I agree, even though the original show’s dated, they really should leave it alone and go with a new generation. On another note, I awoke to my four year old boy cheering and giggling up a storm early this morning. It turns out he figured how to break into my DVD collection and play them on the machine. He was watching Robotech for the first time and absolutely loves it… This made me wonder. What about an animated remake of that old series, or even live action considering the recent transformer movies but, please, please minimize the Minmie gunk.

Re: 7 Sci-Fi Series Ripe for Movie Reboots I agree! Ugh... That series annoyed the heck out of me. Now what I'd like to see is a Blakes 7 movie and new series.

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) I never heard of Sky Scorcher, very cool. Thanks for the atomic holocaust tidbit. My favorite wow factor, I can’t believe they even considered it, atomic holocaust weapon is still the old SLAM from Project Pluto.

Re: Hard sci-fi adventures? My player’s say thier favorite episode I run is the one they nick named “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Universe” where the players small tug and salvage employer has assigned them to join up with a couple of other companies to prepare an obsolete, remote university astrophysics station (Bernal Sphere) for transfer and resale to new owners. A day or so after arrival, one of the few remaining university astronomers makes a discovery that he shares with everyone. There is a heat source he’s located far out in the ort cloud of the system that turns out to be a star ship. He’s even identified it as the long lost colonial liner Moscova. She’s a massive ship that was the pride of the Russian federation; reportedly filled to the gills with cargo and the personal treasure of 1200 people all lost decades earlier on her maiden voyage to the colonies! The party along with the other crews, the university staff and a few other “competitors” who hear this now must rush to make the claim. To make it fun I simply copied the characteristics of the competing actors from the old movie as captains and crew and let the chaos run rampant as people scramble for the salvage rights. There have been times when the game gets real mean with violence and nasty acts of sabotage and others turning to dirty tricks and friendly competition. The games with (IPW) interparty warfare breaking out were the absolute best! Towards the end, before the law arrives, the players might discover the ship was sabotaged and that even that went wrong. Instead of simply damaging the drives in Sol system, the ship was thrown far off course and drives ruined stranding the vessel in a distant systems ort cloud. The players can also find clues as to which government and corporation was behind it (The conspirators are today now key politicians and corporate execs, movers and shakers of the UN). A little later, an old black hat arrives in amongst the other government investigators to make sure the ships secret stays a secret. There have been other times I’ve thrown an opportunistic merchant/pirate into the mix who shows up after the UN investigators with guns blazing. Their second favorite adventure is when the tug suffers a radiation shield breakdown during a huge flare forcing the tug to land at a mining colony on Io. Then ensues a direct rip off of Outland. My own home grown Sci-fi game of three decades is a near future (70+years), human only (no aliens but some rare AI) hybrid taking stylistic hints from 2300AD (balkanization, familiar states the various Colonial Arms), Jerry Pournell’s CoDominium (corruption, oppressive bureaucracy, BuReloc), Ben Bova’s Planetary Tour (UN economic oligarchs, corporate intrigue, mass media manipulation, replace believers with political ideologs following collectivist demagogues), and a little P.K. Dick cynicism with sprinklings of cyberpunk and the wild, west on the dumping worlds. A real fun Dystopia my friends all say. I normally start the campaign using the tried and true Heinlein coming of age path with a hard dystopic twist (similar to “Higher Education”) starting everyone in one of the many CoDominium like “Welfare Islands” that players say are akin to life in Neo Tokyo (think beginning of Akira) only more vacant and run down because a quarter of the bums have been hoodwinked/forced migrated to the periphery. I quickly present them an option out of high school early, before becoming a 15th grade senior, and into work with a struggling but honest little orbital maintenance business (tug boats and orbital cleanup) and eventually into the real meat of the campaign.

Re: Long Distance Communication I’ve run many a fine 2300AD campaign starting the players off in an Xpress boat delivery service relaying data and parcels up and down the French arm. When, the GM forces data to travel at the speed of shipping between the stars, all sorts of room opens for adventure hooks and intrigue. Too heck with reliable instantaneous communications, gimmie a courier for good plot every time!

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea I’ve always liked the Pac Protectors from Larry Niven’s Known Space.

Re: What about a Space 1999 Hero Space 1999, gotta love that silly old show. Talk about suspension of disbelief! There used to be a website were someone counted every crewmember death and eagle destruction, listing them by episode, adding them all up to a total that suggested the moon dwellers died three times over. Look out! Here comes the Quella drive. Queue the stock explosions, laser beaming staple guns, decompression whooshing sound and flying bodies… Love it! Well, the first season anyway.

Re: Post Apocalypse Hero: I am Legend My only gripe is why in the world one would go mucking about with such a dinky weapon as a 5.56 M-4 when it’s obvious a good high capacity semi auto shotgun would have been more useful too shred maniacs. Just kidding, I thought it was a fun movie well worth the matinee price, although, if I had paid the normal $10 fee, I would have been upset seeing that’s what I’d pay to own a DVD of it.

Re: [PA Hero] Limited Nuclear War Not So Good I’d say forget the doom and gloom, atomic angst and radiation melodrama for now and save fretting over it if after they have thirty years of an unrestricted nuclear arms race and couple of thousand megatons between them. For now any nuke exchange between them would not be a radioactive world holocaust but it would be a prelude to one nasty real war between many other players that’s been brewing for some time.

Re: Favorite Sci-Fi Weapon My vote goes to the slaver weapon from Larry Niven’s Star Trek screenplay that eventually got made into one of those horrible Trek animations. It was a transformable device able to become many different tools of which my favorite was the matter/energy conversion at a distance power that looked like a thermonuclear blast miles away.