Tjack

Do you really want Joe Walsh in charge of flying you anywhere? His brain is like the one IN the frying pan in the drug commercial.

I really want to compare lists, but I don’t want to give anything away.

I’d go with Justice Inc. rather than the Golden Age Heroes book because JI was more biased towards skilled normals instead of powered heroes. I just realized you weren’t talking about game genre. I’d just call it “War Comedy”. Things like McHale’s Navy, M.A.S.H., Hello Hello, Dad’s Army, Bilko, the WW1 season of Blackadder etc.

Is Horny a “Social Complication” ? 😜 Actually Kinch did pretty well considering, he got the girl in two episodes. The one where he and Col. Hogan go to Paris where a girl he went to high school with was now a singer and had the ear of a Nazi General who wanted to speak to the ghost of Bismarck. The other one he was the double for an African Prince and romanced the Princess. You’re right, I forgot Carter was the inventor of the rabbit trap that became the “Gonkulator” and he built explosives into ordinary objects like pens, electric shavers and table centerpieces. ** Maybe he took to sunning himself because he was used to being darker skinned being part American Indian? He was after all known to his family as “Little Deer who runs Swift and Sure through Forest”. This last one is the only thing I disagree with you on. The prisoners ate quite well...Not on what the Germans fed them. They got their groceries through the Black Market. LeBeau was shown making them such dishes as Beef Stroganoff, Co-Co-Van and Chateau Briand. (I can’t spell in French) It’s easy to pay those prices when you have your own cash printing press. As a matter of fact it was shown in the pilot episode (The only one in black & white) that they overate to such an extent that they had their own steam room. As Hogan said “A fat P.O.W. would give the whole thing away.” Oh well, “bye-bye and buy bonds”.

Wanna bet? Check out X-Men #268

I went with codes for Kinch because he had Morse code and had memorized at least the current code they would be using along with various call signs “Papa Bear” etc I forgot Bribery for several characters and I like you using Performer primarily for LeBeau, but to a lesser extent for Newkirk and Carter. All three actors were cabaret/nightclub performers in real life. If you want to see Robert Clary’s talent as a clown and dancer you can check out his performance in the movie The Hindenburg. Along with Handyman the Heroes also worked in the motor pool sabotaging and rebuilding Klink’s staff car. So you might want to include PS; Auto Mechanic. For the Martial Arts there’s Commando Training in Champions or there may be a package deal for Commandos in some of the WWII sourcebooks. I gave Kinch, MA; Boxing for the “Battling Bruno” episode where he said he fought in the Golden Gloves. (For non-Americans, it’s an national amateur competition that often leads to the Olympics or the professional levels.) This show was one of my favorites in syndication when I was growing up. So I love going through it like this.

I forgot about “The Carter Plan”. These could end up being expensive write-ups.

Ive been indulging in Sundance running six hour HH marathons a couple of times a week. So let’s see what I can do to help. First the group skills. All of the Heroes speak German fluently enough to fool native speakers, including paranoid types like Gestapo officers. They all also have acting and bluff and disguise on high enough levels to walk in and out of enemy headquarters on a regular basis. Kinch and Newkirk have vocal mimic skills. Everybody has some demolitions and engineering for building the tunnel system. Let’s not forget they all have the basic commando skills like map reading, parachuting, weapons training and martial arts. Now for the individual specialities. Sgt. Ivan Kinchloe Electronics. KS; codes. KS; radio operation. Mimic. MS; Stand-Up Bass. Mart Art; Boxing. Cpl. Louis LeBeau Lang; French, native. PS; Chef. PS; Baker. Contortionist (car trunks, dumbwaiters, any small space) CT; French Underground. Tailor. MS; Piano. Sgt.Andrew Carter Demolitions. KS; Chemistry. KS; Bombardier. Engineering. Lang; Sioux. Cpl. Peter Newkirk Slight of Hand. Lockpick. Security Systems. Disguise. PS; Safecracker. Mimic. Acting. Tailor. Gambling. Knife Throwing. Col. Robert Hogan Tactics. Pilot. Seduction. Acting. Bluff. MS; Drums. Most of this is off the top of my head. Skills were listed twice with the individual if the concentration should be higher.

Due to the excessively small spaces in a dungeon you may also want to look at the smaller type Captain America used in Infinity War. The “Shuri. Get this man a shield.” version. It covered mid-bicep to the point extending just past the fist.

There’s a joke in there somewhere about that fact and the static combat strategy of WW1 vs. rugby and the aggressive strategies of WW2. But we may need to send Mel Brooks to West Point to work it all out.

They did that. He’s called the Maestro.

They taught me two rules in command school. Rule number one is “Young men die.” and Rule number two is “Doctors can’t change Rule number one.”

Doc Savage and Lamont Cranston (Or Kent Allard if you prefer) are exactly who I was thinking of. They may be legal as far as things go, but they feel more like another era to me. I don’t begrudge anyone else from using them, but unless I were going to build an “Over the hill gang” kind of thing it wasn’t where I would want to go. And if I did it would end up looking like the group of pulp characters Doc Brass gathered in the pages of Planetary. I may be too close to the subject matter to have any fun with it.

All the lists I’m trying to put together in my head are either Pulp characters that don’t quite fit the timeline or just look like a carbon copy of something Marvel or DC already did.

It means “if it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”

I have a girlfriend....She’s not from around here, so you wouldn’t know her...She’s from Canada! I actually have TWENTY-FIVE girlfriends....and they all look like Cobie Smulders. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Thank you whoever voted for me. The rest of you can go pound sand. If anybody is interested, I was convinced to do some writing on this site under “Veteran of the Fannish Wars” on the Non-Gaming Discussion thread. It’s a true story that some people found funny.

Green Giant used to advertise that they used a special flash steam process to cook their corn to keep it crisp. I don’t know if they still do, or if others use it too nowadays. But that might be an answer.

If anybody cares, they can look for the thread “Veteran of the Fannish Wars” in Non-Gaming Discussions.

That’s all well and good, and I wish you nothing but good luck. But the project I’m talking about (and would be willing to help on) is a free giveaway sample that would be downloadable to entice new customers the way both D&D and Pathfinder have done to great success. That’s why it would need some official sanction from the company to differentiate it from the crowd of gamer stuff on the ‘net already.

I’ve got lots more to tell, if others want to hear them. But for a book I’d have to have permission from the people in them. And we don’t all come out looking so well. They’re safer as “No S#1t, I was there” stories.

All right kiddies, since you’re all tucked in and have said your prayers, Uncle Tjack will tell you some stories of his time working behind the scenes of a large regional Science Fiction Convention. Like Dragnet before me all the stories are true. (or else they wouldn’t be so funny) But I will change the names to protect the innocent and guilty alike We might as well start of with a bang so I’ll tell you about “The International Incident”or “Riverpuke” Once upon a time in an almost mythical land near the sea there stood a hotel we’ll call the Lark Llaza. And to their great regret they booked two things to happen on the same weekend. The first was a SF convention we’ll call Risa. This is where our hero toiled as a volunteer. Because he had in a previous life been an E.M.T. he was part of the Security Dept. And his seniority put him in charge of the overnight shift. This might have been enough trouble for any hotel but they also took the reservations for a touring road company of a Broadway show featuring Irish Step Dancing. (Yeah, that one.) The troup consisted mainly of young men and women in their late teens-early twenties and their chaperones. Friday came and went with no trouble. By the time the dancers came back from the show the relatively low key meet the guests cocktail party was winding down and the two groups never noticed one another....Saturday night was a different story. That was the night of the costume contest followed by an all night dance. When those poor waifs got back that night the lobby and mezzanine were packed with somewhat buzzed Klingons, superheroes and scantily clad warrior princesses of every type. And the main ballroom was blasting dance music and shone with strobe lights. So if you’re a teenager in another country for the first time and you see all this, do you... A) Go upstairs and go to bed the way your stern Irish mother would want. Or...B) wait until the handlers are asleep then sneak down and join the fun. Option B was taken by around 25-30 of the wayward youths with about half finding their ways to the many open door parties where upon finding out who the crashes were the party hosts began calling room service for bottles of Irish Whiskey, eventually emptying the entire hotel of every bottle. Somewhat after this point our Hero who was working away with his stalwart band of officers started receiving calls from everywhere at once about drunks roaming the halls from party to party. And a frantic radio call telling him to haul ass to the ballroom because “You gotta see this!” It turns out that when the DJ found out who the 20 or so crashers were he pulled out the CD of the soundtrack for the show and put it in. When our Hero hit the door he saw a full on, live version of the show from about a distance of 15 feet. The guy who radioed in told him what was happening and wisely passed the buck up the chain of command. Our brave Hero responded with a mighty....Uhhhhh. He himself was saved when the Convention Chair who we’ll call Mak-Kor-Mak was watching the whole thing with delight as the Hotel’s Night Manager was threatening to call the cops since that since the dancers weren’t part of the convention they could be arrested for trespassing or just booted out into the street. The mighty Mak wasted no time, grabbed the DJ’s mike and proclaimed that all the members of the troup were honorary Guests of Honor for their work in international relations. This shut the Hotel lady up and as she went back into her office she was heard muttering something about “God damned drunken hippie freaks.” The story doesn’t end there however. After the more sane/less hammered members went off to their rooms we in the department were still left with the more hardcore male members who were seeking meaningful companionship. Or in the words of one of them, “I hear ‘murrican girls like to fook!” Chasing them down lasted until around 4:30 am. I stumbled back to our hole in the wall office, rolled one poor soul off our only couch and laid down with my arm over my eyes and tried to figure out exactly when my life went so wrong. After about five minutes somebody knocked timidly on the open door way. I yelled “WHAT!” in a far too unkind voice. The quiet reply was “one of the Irish kids is puking all over the carpet over there. Without moving I said “Is he going to die?” The voice at the door looked over his shoulder and after a couple of seconds said “I don’t think so.” I gave that some thought and replied “Then it’s not Medical, so I don’t care.” The next day it was decided that the neither the theater company, the Hotel, nor the State Department who had issued the visas and should have technically tossed them out of the country wanted an incident so it was agreed that the whole thing never happened. The Convention was happy with the deal since it meant that it wasn’t legally responsible for either the damages or for getting the little sods tanked in the first place. And they all lived happily ever after....although I still go into a giggling fit every time I hear that music. If there’s any interest for another story someday I’ll either tell the tale of “Big Dumb Dude” or “How my buddies girlfriend became a Superhero.”

I’m hip, my brother. I’ve got those love/hate emotions about fandom in spades. In my foolish youth I was for many years a staff member of one of the largest fan run Sci-Fi conventions in New England. Since I was an E.M.T. I ended up in the Security Dept. Every drunken, ridiculous, proto-Karen (both male and female) in a costume came thru our doors. I’ve got some good stories that the statute of limitations are finally up on. So, if anybody cares I’ll tell some tales out of school on another thread.

How come? Granted it was easier back in the day to avoid the type of “Who can lift Thor’s hammer” type questions before the internet. But they’re no more or less interesting/annoying than any of the “How do you build this power” ones.

If it doesn’t set off anybody’s hot button issues, what is the Sad Puppies thing? Or at least point me to some where I can read the story someplace else.

Yes, he was Editor in Chief. I meant that the decision wasn’t made by an entire Editorial Department after a group discussion. Shooter made the decision by Editorial fiat, which he was within his rights to do. But to require a completely new storyline on a moments notice after OK’ing the old one months before was kind of a d1#k move. The original story was to be that the Shiar Empire took Jean Grey and gave her a psychic lobotomy completely removing all her psionic abilities. During the next couple of years of stories she would have to adjust to the equivalent of being blinded and deafened while still trying to make a contribution to the team. In a storyline ending climax fight where the lives of the team were at stake her powers would erupt again. Leaving her with powers at a level about the same as before the Phoenix incident. All dumped with only two months before the changes had to be implemented. Just because Mr. Shooter decided after seeing the issue when it came out in print where the alien race had been wiped out that the previously mentioned punishment wasn’t going to be enough. Jean Grey had to die for her sins.