Durzan Malakim

How Tony Stark Spends his experience points seems to mirror how veteran Champions characters spend theirs. 
 
 

I picked up the Traveller core rulebook update 2022 and discovered that we made some rolls incorrectly for some of our life events that involved skills. Evidently you're not supposed to add a characteristic modifier to these rolls, but since we're simply using them as inspiration for Star Hero characters I don't think we need to be sticklers. Rules as written, there should be many low-stat and in-debt Traveller characters who live short brutish lives. I suppose Champions and 5th edition D&D have spoiled me for starting heroic characters. I look forward to a life of piracy in and around Drinax.

In the Traveller Hero game I’m starting, for the first character I converted over I set a retired Brigadier General perk as 3 points (half what the Perk is in HD for an active member of the service and much less than other sourcebooks had it at), thinking this would still allow the character some access to Imperium military bases and additional other uses where being a former officer might be of benefit. To simplify things, I’m treating it as a form of limited security clearance with other small benefits thrown in.
 
The retired, scarred, arguably slightly embittered sergeant in the group may be charged a point for having a retiree military pass, so he can at least get on to bases without fuss. He won’t be invited to tea with the base commander and swap war stories like the general will though.

I converted over the first of the PCs to 6th Edition Hero on Monday, and it went pretty well.
 
Brigadier “Mes” Meson came out to a surprisingly high 225 points after converting his stats, adding in the package deals for Marine and Marine Officer, some bonuses to those skills based on his career events and some extra tweaks I threw in. His high point value was almost all due to skills and perks. Thanks to having four ranks in Leadership earned during his illustrious career that ended in honorable retirement, his highest characteristic is a 20 PRE (since setting it at 19 bugged me), further boosted by some positive reputation bonuses.
 
Complications weren’t that hard to do based on his life events. A Hunted earned from his career events, the Imperium officer he reported for failure after a fiasco mission which later earned Mes a promotion for doing so. The package deals also gave some very good suggestions for psychological complications that fit: Marine Code-never leave a man behind. I added in “The Burden of Command” which I can’t recall right now if it came from the book or was my own idea.
 
For his Equipment load out, he has some mesh body armor (not battledress), an auto pistol and a cutlass. All in all, he would not be out of place as a “sword and planet” hero.

It's a pre-campaign character-creation-minigame where much of the effort is on us PCs. We're the ones who concocted the stories that connect our characters. Mostly @Steve just had to look up tables and the results of our rolls. Although he also gave us our official campaign introduction to Drinax and our beat-up pirate ship in need of repair and a crew. The premise reminds me a bit of Our Flag Means Death with our group playing a mixture of the Black Beard and Stede Bonnet roles. Our ocular-challenged gunslinger might be Black Beard (Black Eyes?) and the two brigadiers have delusions of being gentleman pirates. We'll see if our campaign of piracy is more Captain Nemo or the Three Stooges. Daddy warbucks might not be happy to learn that his famous brigadier son has gone rogue. Much depends upon how well we follow Dexter's code: Can we prey exclusively on other pirates? Can we cover up our crimes and keep our secrets? Can our veneer of civility inspire the the remnants of the Kingdom of Drinax enough to transform a pirate fleet into an actual navy? Too bad literally none of us actually had a career in the navy. We've got an abundance of swashbuckling and a dearth of deck swabbing.

It's a pre-campaign character-creation-minigame where much of the effort is on us PCs. We're the ones who concocted the stories that connect our characters. Mostly @Steve just had to look up tables and the results of our rolls. Although he also gave us our official campaign introduction to Drinax and our beat-up pirate ship in need of repair and a crew. The premise reminds me a bit of Our Flag Means Death with our group playing a mixture of the Black Beard and Stede Bonnet roles. Our ocular-challenged gunslinger might be Black Beard (Black Eyes?) and the two brigadiers have delusions of being gentleman pirates. We'll see if our campaign of piracy is more Captain Nemo or the Three Stooges. Daddy warbucks might not be happy to learn that his famous brigadier son has gone rogue. Much depends upon how well we follow Dexter's code: Can we prey exclusively on other pirates? Can we cover up our crimes and keep our secrets? Can our veneer of civility inspire the the remnants of the Kingdom of Drinax enough to transform a pirate fleet into an actual navy? Too bad literally none of us actually had a career in the navy. We've got an abundance of swashbuckling and a dearth of deck swabbing.

Ah, I did miss that.
 
Based on my past experiences with the game in days of yore, most Traveller characters will be Average Joes struggling to make a living in unusual situations, which would translate into lower-point Hero characters in the 8-13 primary characteristic range. Our cyber-eyed gunfighter will probably have an 18 DEX as his best characteristic.
 
The Trojan Reach looks like it will have plenty of adventure potential.

Jeez, it's like you had to run a campaign before you could run your campaign. 

I picked up the Traveller core rulebook update 2022 and discovered that we made some rolls incorrectly for some of our life events that involved skills. Evidently you're not supposed to add a characteristic modifier to these rolls, but since we're simply using them as inspiration for Star Hero characters I don't think we need to be sticklers. Rules as written, there should be many low-stat and in-debt Traveller characters who live short brutish lives. I suppose Champions and 5th edition D&D have spoiled me for starting heroic characters. I look forward to a life of piracy in and around Drinax.

My group had our character creation session for the new campaign using Mongoose’s Pirates of Drinax campaign setting this weekend. It was quite a lot of fun, like a time-compressed pre-campaign session, and everyone had a great time following their character’s life paths.
 
One character started out with a fantastic stat set (three 12s rolled in front of me) and the other two were closer to average. Of those other players, one had his best stat as his social standing, and the third was fairly average with social standing as his dump stat (a five as I recall). Because there was a pretty big difference in the totals of their characteristics, we all decided to let the two with lower characteristics have some rerolls on their life paths to make up the difference.
 
They all then decided to go to the military academy for the Marines, and that’s when the fun began. My player with the golden stats failed to get into the academy and was drafted instead, ending up in the Marines anyway as a private. The low SOC player managed to successfully enroll on his first try and the third used one of his rerolls and managed to get in on his second try (and we explained that as his high SOC meant Daddy pulled some strings).
 
The other two later managed to graduate with honors without rerolls, entering the service as lieutenants, while the stat-lucky player finished pounding it out in his first enlistment and was promoted to a higher level noncom. The player kept joking about “college boys” like that sergeant character from the old “Black Sheep Squadron” tv show.
 
After that, things continued to be interesting. The golden-stat player kept getting injured and ended up losing both eyes, one each on two separate tours of duty which were replaced with the marines covering most of the cost. Meanwhile, the two academy grads steadily ascended in rank, never once failing an advancement roll and never getting injured that I recall. They also accumulated a small collection of contacts, rivals and enemies during this phase.
 
The high starting SOC player served his entire career in the motor pool, and the other graduate was a Star Marine.
 
During one particular enlistment later on, there was apparently a disastrous military campaign that took place that was the fault of the commanding officer. The low SOC player decided to turn in his commanding officer and received a bonus to his next promotion roll and advanced again in rank. The noncom player ended up getting injured in that mission and lost his other eye, getting that one replaced and picking up a bit more medical debt.
 
The golden-stat player, having had enough of the dangers of military service by this point, changed his career to being a corporate agent and then ended up almost burning his face off on his first tour of duty for his new employers but gained the Demolitions skill. This added to his accumulated medical debt for more repair work. Even before this, he was being compared to a young Nick Fury.
 
The other two players retired as Brigadiers with pensions and earned a lot of mustering out benefits. They also decided to pay for anti-aging treatments. The formerly low-SOC player finished with a 10 SOC thank to his rank, and the other somehow managed to become a decorated war hero with a SOC in the low teens all while commanding the motor pool.
 
After everyone settled their medical debts, the two Brigadiers joined up again with their old service buddy, who had become a deadly gunfighter based on his skill levels by then, and they ended up in the Trojan Reach together to begin their new adventure.
 
I’m now going to take their rolled characters and convert them over to Hero.

My daughter caught it last week along with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, around June 1st.
 
The in-laws went and stayed in a hotel when they first manifested symptoms and he tested positive. They just came back home yesterday after their symptoms were gone. He was vaccinated and she wasn’t, but he had the far worse case. She only had very mild symptoms.
 
My daughter had three days with a sore throat, then three-four days with cough, body ache, loss of smell and extreme tiredness, and then it faded back to just a sore throat and tiredness as she recovered. She never had much of a fever, like only one degree. She tested positive last weekend and missed her promotion from 8th grade. She was all better again as of Friday.

Die Hard: the story of a family away from home witnessing miracles ("You asked for miracles; I give you the FBI") and the rise of a savior.

Believe it or not, it was 20 years ago today that Darren Watts, Jason Walters, the Secret Masters, and myself bought the HERO System (and its related IPs)!
 
It's been a wonderful, amazing journey ever since -- one with its ups and downs, like any journey -- but still an awesome one. My deepest thanks to all the HERO fans out there who have made it possible!

I'm testing your hero vtt for our long running campaign.  Even though we were new to Foundry, My friends had fun beating up thugs  . 
They already have enthusiastic upgrade suggestions, but loved the first time. 
 
we Found some bugs.  And submitted to github.  
 
I'm an old coder and working on some JS macros.  
 
Should be fun.  

I don't know if these youtubers are accurate, but I think they make some good points.
The TRUTH about padded and leather armor (Gambeson / Aketon)
Testing the effectiveness of a spear throw against padded armor

Hi there everyone. I've been working on a module for playing 6e Hero in Foundry for a bit now, and it's finally ready enough, I feel, to be used publicly. I've submitted it for approval to Foundry itself, but in the meantime, I've made the repository containing it public and if you're interested, you can check it out here:
 
https://github.com/jared-l-vine/hero6e-foundryvtt
 
Fair warning, it's pretty feature-light at the moment. There's a lot more I want to do with it, but it's taken some time getting these basics up and running and learning how you even develop a Foundry module in the first place. Feel free to take a look and submit and bugs you come across and feature requests for anything you'd like to see. It's really important to me to make Hero an accessible system that can be played quickly and easily, and I think that a module like this can do a lot of good for the game and the community.

I miss it as well; we had just gotten to the climax of Act 2, poised for the home stretch. And then...quarantine! I still suspect it is all merely a stratagem of Mr. Timothy Ledoux; the difference between fiction and reality are as naught to one such as he; the 4th wall is the least thing he has shattered in a long existence occupied by the ceaseless pursuit of unwholesome power.
 

 
I have kept my hand in with Here There Be Monsters a bit in the interim however, slowly but surely chipping away at porting content. I finished porting the Zombie Apocalypse Vignette this weekend and am pretty happy with the results...
 
Zombie Apocalypse

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to run it. It remains as ideas on paper and in the back of my mind.

Suddenly transferred into a medieval fantasy setting, a handful of people from our world find themselves inhabiting the bodies of powerful heroic figures there.
 
For their own reasons, the gods of this fantasy world selected people whose personalities matched certain criteria they were looking for and were about to die in our world. Perhaps one was flatlining on an operating table, another was seconds away from a fatal car crash. Plucked from our world, they are given a choice: accept the death that was coming for them or take a chance on this new world.
 
The bodies they are given to inhabit are individuals who have the right skills and abilities to get the job done that the gods want taken care of, but their minds are too much a part of the world. In a sense, the gods wanted heroes who could bring fresh perspectives to problems. The spirts of those heroic figures were taken by the gods and went on to their rewards, leaving a still-living body behind, complete with all of the memories and abilities of the former person.
 
Not every life being given to the Rescued is a heroic one. Some may have lived lives of villainy, forcing that Rescued person into dealing with bad past choices. The bodies given them may be older or younger than the ones they had or may not even be the same gender. Maybe they are even non-human. Of course, all of this is determined by each player when they build their characters.
 
To make things easier, they are transported from wherever in the world they are to a central meeting point and shown images of their future teammates.
 
Because the gods have a sense of humor and understand fantasy cliches to some degree, everyone gets to meet at a tavern.

"If we can't accept limitations, we're no better than the bad guys." - Tony Stark. I honestly found that a compelling argument. As Rhodey pointed in CW, the Sokovia Accords were supported by the United Nations, representing the governments of the whole world. It was reasonable for Rhodey to call Cap arrogant for putting his judgement ahead of theirs.
 
 
"We have orders. We should follow them." - Steve Rogers, Avengers.
 
Cap's focus up to and during WW II was to be of service. As a soldier he accepted that he was under a higher authority, and he didn't question that that authority was for the good.  His journey as a character in the modern world, which often caused him to question and challenge the methods and motives of present-day authority, led him to the conviction that he had to stand behind what he believed to be right, even if the whole world told him he was wrong.
 
Tony Stark's character arc over the MCU movies was essentially the opposite. His origin as Iron Man in that cave changed his motivation, but he still chose his actions based on his judgement alone. He famously bragged in Iron Man II that he had "privatized peace." Over time he came to see that he had to be part of something greater than himself, and to submit to it. His sacrifice at the end of Endgame was not only selfless, it was an act of faith that he was following the course Dr. Strange foresaw.

One of the basic tenets of the superhero genre is that the system of government and society most of them live under, i.e. in America, is fundamentally just and benevolent. There may be injustices and abuses, but that's the fault of some people, not of the system itself. Most pro-active superheroes try with or even within the system to correct what they see as flaws. Some may function like real celebrities, using their fame to support political or economic causes. (In the history of the official Champions Universe, a number of superheroes were prominent in the civil rights movement.) They may investigate organized crime like the police, or Batman, with the intent of dismantling it altogether. Or they may use their powers directly to correct long-standing problems: clean up pollution, build affordable housing or infrastructure, combat global warming effects, and the like.
 
Problems arise when the heroes try to subvert or supplant the existing order with something "better," like the Squadron Supreme, the Justice Lords, or the Authority. Their powers and abilities become their justification for setting themselves above normal people, whereas true superheroes accept that they are fundamentally the same as everyone else. That's the path to them becoming an unaccountable, entitled ruling oligarchy.

I think superheroes can get involved politically.
 
To give a real-world example, Oregon in the last election decriminalized hard drugs. In theory, that'll take out a huge chunk of the profit incentive for organized crime to be part of that, decrease the property crime which occurs because people need large wads of money for drugs, and make it easier for addicts to get treatment for their addictions.
 
Oregon in fact is planning to use the funds from drug taxes to pay for addiction treatment for its citizens.
 
I could see superheroes taking both sides of that issue. And both political sides actively wanting to use their superhero supporters in attempts to sway the voters.

Goals are the most important thing.
 
Unfortunately, in some of the source material, "proactive" means becoming fascist dictators or going on a murder spree. That's no different from being a supervillain.
 
In a more general case, proactive means seeking to make change. That can occur on different scales, and that means that power levels are less important. It doesn't inherently require becoming authorized to do things either.
 
An example: if you are living in a crapsack environment, your characters can act towards changing that. If a city (or town) is being held back by a network of corruption and organized crime, for example, the goal of breaking up that network becomes worthwhile. That requires more than just stopping individual crimes - the symptoms of the problem.
 
Once you break up that network, ordinary people can then start to fix up the rest of the problems. Of course that leads into everyday issues of power, wealth, racism and all the rest of it, which is a bit beyond the normal scope of superpowers.
 
But maybe you can break up the local Klan-equivalent, expose the environmentally destructive practices of the local Evil Corporation and it's Evil Corporate Overlord and...
 
At the very least, this is different from sitting around waiting for the Bat-phone to ring.
 
A fun option: stopping "proactive heroes" who are being murderous fascist jerks.
 
 

Technically this is exactly what Adrian tried to do in Watchman. He quit being a superhero and used his corporation to try to make a better world.
 
Of course, his idea of a "better world" involves mass murder...so be careful how proactive your heroes get.

According to the post Simon made, Steve doesn't currently have time in his schedule.