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Ace of Spades

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Everything posted by Ace of Spades

  1. Slaughterhouse Novel Weapons In reading a number of fairly obscure cyberpunk / cyberfuture novels I am reminded of these weapon ideas... The Passive Aggressor... A powerful energy weapon constructed with an empathy chip. This high tech weapon is designed to automatically fire at the first person that exhibits hostile and aggressive emotions towards the individual carrying the weapon. The Judge Another weapon linked with super advanced psionic futuristic technology. The judge will only fire at someone that "deserves" to be shot. Legitimate "judge" weapons that have had their data chipware tampered with turn into a variety of related weapons... The Republigun - Guns that only shoot liberals. The Bi-Polarizer - A psionic weapon that makes angry and aggressive targets extremely passive and listless / depressed and listless targets into foaming at the mouth maniacs. =)) These are all offered with a nudge and a wink. Ace
  2. Start Small Everyone has different styles of planning and running games and many of them are great. Here is my own for what it is worth. I've always been more comfortable in using the general history of a campaign whether it is the Forgotten Realms setting or Ravenloft or the L5R background information as just large scale background information. Sure that is what has happened or may be happening in the great grande scale of world events but it has pretty much zero to do with the day to day lives of the little guy with the dagger in his boot and his wizard buddy scraping up a living in some village beset with local bandits. To often game masters, in my view, make the same mistake that film directors make. They mistake the big save the world, flash special effects, uber characters doing uber things story with a -good- story. How many times have we all been to fantasy or science fiction or adventure films where the uber unstoppable hero with the flashy special effects was in all honesty rather dull. In fact I've often found my stories to be MUCh more enjoyable and successful when the characters while heroic and involved in important local events are not particularly uber in themselves. If you write interesting settings, interesting character backgrounds and interactions and a fun / exciting story it really doesn't matter one bit how over the top the background campaign is. Reworking someone elses material, rolling Obi Wan Kenobi into a star wars game or pulling the uber samurai in the L5R books into the evenings table top L5R game really seems to be the approach of a less experienced storyteller in my view. I am always much more interested in the story when it seems original. A little harder to do? Sure. But much more rewarding. ANyway that's all i have to spin. Good luck on your game. Sounds like fun! Ace
  3. Hi Hero Games! Here is one approach to a Star Hero campaign set in the Terran Empire setting. Players are the captain and crew of The Gunslinger Betty, a battered old survey ship turned into salvage vessel ( read - space going garbage truck ). Where there are bright and shining examples of gleaming pinnacles of technology in the fleet the Betty is on the extreme -other- end of the spectrum. Barely functional from voyage to voyage and loving referred to as "The Coffin" or "That @!*# Death Trap..." the Betty carries it's ship's compliment and crew on salvage missions picking up on worlds which the line of colonization, high adventure and blazing starship battles have left far, far behind. If you break out your copy of the map of the Terran Empire and look at that region of space between the stable and productive outer core and the young and exciting frontier you'll find a forgotten region of space known as the "old" frontier. This is where humanity first encountered the Xenovore and epic, history making space battles were fought...400 odd years ago...battered by interstellar warfare these old colony worlds were first placed under Imperial quarantine and later opened up for slow resettlement..but that was all a long time ago. Now, with the technology of the hyperdrive carrying shipping from point A to point B without the inconvenience of physically passing through all the points in between ( hyperdrive = teleportation effect ) the forgotten middle ground of the empire has become something of a frontier of it's own but without the glowing rewards and gleaming resources to steer an Imperial fleet in it's direction to protect it. This region of space now lovingly called "Kansas" or "The Ass End of Space" by those who are working in it is run with a definate forgotten wild west theme with lots of odd anachronistic technology and cultures mixed in. One sector in "Kansas" called New Georgia may have starports with that tumble weed, dusty feel of an old western however New Georgia was named after the region of Georgia in the old earth bound USSR - signs are in cyrillic and the local strong man the heroes have to negotiate with is the somewhat corrupt Eastern Orthodox Cleric turned mobster who runs a forced labor camp outside of town. This has been a fun campaign to write. Happy to post notes about it and share information for other avid Star Hero GM's. Ace
  4. Over the years I've made a lot of really great friends through roleplaying games and through champions in particular. Many of the best friends I've had through college still live in the area and still look forward to the occasional game. So when I send out an announcement that I'm going to start running say, my new X-Force / X-Men universe based champions campaign there are about twelve people on the local list. And most of these want to play. Here are some tricks I've learned to keep the games moving, everyone heavily involved, keep the work load lower for me even when running for a huge group. Step One - Big Crowds Require Advanced Prep. To run for a large crowd it's always best to produce some props ahead of time. You'll need printed character sheets for the NPC's you intend to have in your various scenes along with a brief page long description /personality background. It's also helpful to print up some simple artwork for the npc's. In the marvel universe thankfully this is easy to do in most cases. Step Two - Offer options, allow the group to break up and splinter. In the comics and most fiction stories the heroes don't move around as one enormous amoebe from encounter to encounter. As the story moves along they split into teams to look into things. Having your group split up in a small game can be a serious pain in the bottom. In a larger game it is a great tool for storytelling. Let it happen. You'll use the players waiting when it's the other guys turns to rp to step into the roles of the npc's and villains. Step Three - Let your players in on some of the plot. Let them play the opposition and key NPC personalities in the encounters that feature their friends. Instead of a group of eight or ten players with four players involved in the current scene and four waiting their turn the other four players can be roleplaying the opposition, making their own villainous schemes and rolling the dice and making combat decisions for the bad guys. This is a pretty simple technique to use for running large scale champions games but it really works. Just finished our first X-Force game which had ten players present for a six hour game. Everyone was engaged and busy during the entire session even though the group quickly split into two different smaller groups to try and take care of different ends of the plot. Players had fun peeking at the plot behind the scenes but behaved themselves and didn't spoil the story for other players or metagame. Anyway. Just wanted to share.
  5. Hi Steve! Here are some of the more entertaining powers I remember from Scott Heine, Steve Holmes etc's Protector's and Protector's Cadets games. Missile Deflection / Teleport Gimic... I remember one character, a teleporter, that could throw up a field of energy in front of himself that acted like a portal to another dimension. Bullets and attacks launched against the character would simply pass through the portal into the character's pocket dimension. I seem to recall the character used missile deflection defined as absorbing the bullets through his teleport shield into the pocket dimension. A pretty simple power but one that I thought "Looked Nifty" on the battlefield. Ring Master One of the most hideous villains the Protectors ever encountered was a fellow by the name of Ring Master. Yes, he was a criminal master mind that operated out of an evil carnival / circus. What made him truely nasty was that he had a very high Mind Sense ability and a very powerful Mind Control that I believe was always on with invisible power effects that could only target mutants. I believe Scott limited the number of mutants he could control at any given time to a half dozen or so. The character had not other powers really to mention but even so he was incredibly dangerous. Mind Control vs. Mutants...an excellent power for villain master minds. The Ragman The Ragman came out of the twisted mind of Al Wenzel who used to play Mandroid in our games long long long ago. Ragman, as far as I could tell, was a scarecrow that had become sentient, animated and incredibly evil when it was exposed to some wierd magical eminations during one of our team battles. Later this fellow appeared on the scene as a major villain threat. He would sew up other full size ragmen and stuff them with some of the straw from inside his own body. ( he always seemed to have plenty of extra to stuff into other ragmen...probably part of the magic that animated him ) Anyway. The Ragman was fun to fight. He was always dressing his ragman thugs up based on the theme of that particular crime. I remember a scenario where his eight ragmen were dressed as mailmen, another where they were all decked out as santa claus..and on and on. The Ragman would manipulate his life size puppets from a distance and then attempt to flee the area if things began to go against him. His attacks were always incredibly brutal and caculated to produce the highest possible damage to normals. The Long Ranger Hardly anyone does nifty stretching powers any more. I recall someone writing up a hero dressed in cowboy threads that had stretching powers called the Long Ranger. Sometimes the right power and name match are a good combination just for hours of sheer laughs. Scarecrow Scott used to play this awesome vigilante character named Scarecrow...Scarecrow used to wear some sort of fire resistant pumpkin that he'd actually light on fire for a temporary add to his presence. Then he'd unleash a loud maniacal cackle that used to scare the bejesus out of me when I'd try and gm for him. I know your not doing gadgets int his book..but powers that make a character more impressive, temporary boosts to presence are fun.
  6. Reality Check Once upon a time a game company published a book aimed at allowing us to play a Mecha / Anime based game. A whole group of us, all dedicated gamers, half of us with degrees in engineering and math happily purchased this game and went off to work up our campaign. We quickly discovered that the rules were written with the critical eye of someone who wanted as much "realism" as possible in the design of Mecha ships for this -anime- / non realistic game. It took three of us eight full hours, working together, to slog through all the math involved in building a balanced and rules legal fighter. We were bright enough to figure out that while the math was cool to do none of us wanted to invest several hundred hours of work just putting together the vehicles for our game...we shuddered as we looked over the complicated equations required to track fuel consumption and how it gradually impacted vehicle manueverability during combat. Was it realistic? Yes the game felt realistic, very realistic. Was the math cool? Yes. Was the game playable as a game by any stretch of the imagination? Not really. We abandoned that book and I believe that was the last book printed by that fine company that we ever purchased. The bottom line needs to be whether the game is playable, generally balanced, easy to learn, and fun to play and write adventures for.
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