Great Beyond

Re: The Super Darwin Awards Oh, the Cyberpunk reminds me of the one time our group tried playing that game. We were a bit bigger back then - 7 folks instead of the four we have now. We had a mix of punks, outlaws, hackers and so on - and two cops: my character and this one other fellow (who, I must add, is completely and totally straight laced boy scout to the core. He quite literarily wants to be a paladin in real life.) So, here it is, the start of the game. I'm playing a cop of low moral fiber, willing to work with the just forming team - you know, play ball to get the game off the ground. So we walk up to the table in the back, where everyone is huddled, planning in hush tones. The first words out of my partner's mouth after confirming their identity as a bunch of criminals? "You're all under arrest!" A stunned silence fell across the gaming table. Seconds later there are five really big guns pointed at both of us. I'm franticly backing up, hands in the air all "I have no idea who this person is! Really, I don't!!! I'm not with him!" while he's continuing to brazenly attempt to Miranda them all. Things quickly turn into a gunfight and my character is quickly taken out of the fight in a hail of bullets (the player that did the deed was sorry that he had to, but the circumstance dictated that kind of response). The other guy somehow manages to hang on a bit longer. I come back from the store half an hour later and they're arguing the rules on if a .45 magnum wouldn't blow the head off his cop because he had a helmet on. That night didn't end well. . . .

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Mine last week was a show-stopper for the game. Discussing religion amonghst the character, Scarlet (who was a bonified gen-u-wine athiest until a greek goddess decided to pick her to dispense some justice) dropped this:

Re: The Two Funerals Pretty much all my characters would be cool, and tell - very forcefuly - any hotheads on our side to chill out. Now is not the time to start a rumble. Scarlet Arrow, on the other hand, would go over and pay respects to the other side, too. Sure it's a dangerous business, but she's big on being respectful of life no matter if you were a good guy or a bad guy (with just a dash of that Honorable Adversary thing that you find in anime so often)

Re: "I shoot the escape pod!!!" See it's easy to armchair quarterback these things when you're not on the hot seat. I was pretty quick to come up with "Well, the black button is deactivated. You guys will have to try one of the others." with the black one coming on line after the other ones have been completed. And youre right - if I piece together something from the old game, I'll figure out some way to throw the players a bone.

Re: "I shoot the escape pod!!!"

Re: "I shoot the escape pod!!!"

Re: God Package... Ok, two things - 1) This rocks. Found it quite by accident, as this internet thing tends to do, and I'm seriously impressed by the work put in. Even better, there's a strong greek theme running through the current game, so I might be able to steal - well, at least pinch bits conceptualy - for my current goeings on. 2) More please! 3) Do you figure that the mirror side of the gods would more or less have the same numbers? 4) Nice red uniforms. Oh damn, I'll come in again.

The thread title comes from the opening of Star Wars, if the "Hold your fire. There are no life forms aboard, it must have short circuited" guy on the star destroyer went "yeah, go ahead and get some target practice" and suddenly the 6 movie saga ends up being a half hour film. So last weekend, I was taking Champions out for a spin, doing my postponed Halloween game (on Christmas - very festive) where on a parallel world, a nanite accident sparked off a zombie plague that destroyed the world and the handful of survivors were coming over to the game world as a last resort. So we do some futzing around character building stuff before the swirly dimensional vortex shows up in downtown and survivors start coming over. As these things tend to do, everything goes wrong and the zombie hordes start tearing up the other side of the portal, and will soon boil over into the game world side of things. My intent, of course, was for the players to get over to the Zombieworld side of the portal and flip the big Off switch. The rest of the game would be them wandering around zombieworld, trying to find a cure and getting home JUST in time to stop the spread of the zombies on Gameworld. My plans went off the rails when the Super Genius of the group went "I fire up my EMP Generator and dispel the portal." "What?" "The portal's technology based right? My dispel works on technology. I shut down the portal." "Bu - bu - bu -" I stammer as she rolled, and rolled REALLY well. Something like 85-90 point of Make Technology Go Away. I'm desperately looking at the book, trying to throw in every adder I could think of, but even after all that, I'd still need to add in about 50 points of MacGuffin to keep the portal functioning. Yeah, I could have just railroaded them with an arbitrary "Nope, it didn’t work", but I hate doing that. If there's no free will, then whats the point of playing, even if it scuppers my game. And so two nights of gaming collapsed out from under me in about half an hour. Anyway, I was wondering if you guys had any exceptionally juicy "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy" stories. You know, make me feel better.

Re: Giant Brick Tricks I'm not sure if this is legal, but one idea I have for a giantess bad guy is: Throw hella far Leaping +1" (3 1/2"/18 1/2" forward, 1 1/2"/9" upward), MegaScale (1" = 100 km; +3/4), Can Be Scaled Down 1" = 1km (+1/4), Usable As Attack (+1) (3 Active Points); Increased Endurance Cost (x4 END; -1 1/2), Must follow grab (-1/2) Basicly she'll scoop up one of the good guys in her mighty fist and then throw them as far as she can - like into the next state.

Re: Brainstorming European bad guys? Oooh, I didnt know about that facility! Perfect! I needed an Institute for Advanced Science somewhere in that neighborhood anyway, to have an excuse to get the team's Super Genius character involved in the eventual plot. That's made to order! *heads off to Wiki to read up on the facility* Heh - power armor Volkswagons. I think - and mind you this is only just brainstorming, since I have put numbers to paper yet - that Vengeance is going to be more mental attacks and overwhelming presence than physical strength and power like the Golem. Conceptually the two are the same, sure - but Vengeance was going to be sort of a Total Perspective Vortex (to steal a concept from Hitchhikers Guide). A successful attack is an overwhelming sense of guilt and despair - basically every emotion from a concentration camp compressed down to one big ball and poured into a character's mind. Ok, I am SO stealing those two. I love the "We would fight, but I must now dance!" quote (I'd have to watch some old SNL with the Sprokets skits to get the right accent down ). You wouldnt happen to have the numbers for them hanging around somewhere, would you?

Oh man - the Kostnice Ossuary! How could I have forgotten about that?!? That's a damn sweet idea! (the one stop in Prague that I deeply regret not getting to. I would have LOVED to have seen that church). ***edit*** Is European Enemies out of print? I didnt see it listed for sale in the store. ***edit 2.0*** Oooh, never mind - I found some discussion about it via google. It was that bad of a train wreck, huh?

So having just spent 2 weeks in Berlin, Prague and Vienna, I was thinking of of course setting a game over there somewhere (you cant do that kind of field research without putting it to use!), and I was brainstorming some bad guys (or at least antagonists) for a big fight. So far I've got: * Iron Curtain - A pretty straight forward tank with a communist motif. * Stasi - a mentalist (The Stasi were the secret police and intelligence organization of the German Democratic Republic. All the nasty stuff that the KGB gets credit for? The Stasi did it too and worse, but didn’t get nearly the press the russians did.) * The Golem of Prague - created in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to defend the Prague ghetto of Josefov from Anti-Semitic attacks. According to the legend, the Emperor made an edict proclaiming that the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed (depending on the version of the story). A golem could be made of clay from the banks of the Vltava river in Prague. Following the prescribed rituals, the Rabbi built the Golem and made him come to life by reciting special incantations in Hebrew. The Rabbi's intention was to have the Golem protect the Jewish community from harm. As Rabbi Loew's Golem grew bigger, he also became more violent and started killing the Gentiles and spreading fear. (Some versions also add that the Golem turns on his creator and attacks either his creator alone or the creator and the Jews as well). In the face of the strength demonstrated and violence perpetrated by the Golem, the Emperor begs Rabbi Loew to destroy the Golem, and in return he would promise that the persecution of and violence towards the Jews would stop. The Rabbi accepted this offer. To destroy the Golem, he rubbed out the first letter of the word "emet" or "aemaeth" (God's truth) from the golem's forehead to make the Hebrew word "met" or "maeth", meaning death. It was made clear to the Emperor that the Golem of Prague's remains would be stored in a coffin in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague, and it can be summoned again if needed. * Vengeance of a million murdered jews - does what it says on the tin. The holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg gate was more than just 2,711 concrete slabs, but a powerful relic for drawing in and focusing psychokinetic energy from all over Germany and manifesting it into one powerful spirit. Originaly designed to serve like the Golem and prevent something nasty like the Nazis from happening again, the control Macguffin fell into the hands of Evil and the spirit is forced to do not nice things in the service of the bad guys. And of course I might have to bring out an old WWII artifact or two - in classic golden age style, you know a 200 foot tall steam powered robo-nazi mecha will have to make an appearance. Anyway, I havent put together any numbers for these guys yet - I'm really still just in the brainstorming stage (heck, I only have a vauge notion of a game, so everyone may not make the cut). Which is where I'm hoping I can draw upon you guys and your amazing imaginations to help ponder german/communist bloc/east german heavys.

Re: WWYCD (kind of): Advice Time for Scarlet! Thanks for all the responses (and the physical abuse) - that helped get my brain around this. The big selling point on not going public would be the "your parents are still controling you" button. That right there would probably make her rethink. Yeah, the poor kid has issues alright.

This one will be of real help, because it's actually relevant my next weeks game - Scarlet will probably have opportunity to pick the brains of many prominent supers, so some "real life" responses is perfect. The setup: Scarlet Arrow's parents were - well, they weren't abusive or anything, but they were very dysfunctional. Dad was a star football quarterback in high school until be blew out his knee in the middle of The Big Game and never played again. Mom on the other hand was an almost-ran for Olympics, trying for years and coming close but was never actually able to make the cut. Intentionally or not, they decided to live vicariously through their children and got them playing team sports and pushing them as had as they could. If they were a bunch of washed up has-beens, they were damn well going to make sure their kids made something of themselves. And so Scarlet bounced around from sport to sport, before finding out that she's really damn good ar archery and landing a spot on the Olympic archery team - eventually even making team captain. And then her one lone superpower - the ability to barely fly (It's just one inch with like x10 end cost on it. She can't fly very fast and it knocks her out within seconds) was outed by a long time friend and teammate. Being the Olympics, rules were rules and the committee had to dismiss Scarlet from the team (giving her position to the friend who outed her). Instead of becoming all despondent, Scarlet threw her energies into something that could help folks - being a superhero. Just recently Scarlet and her team wound up, as these things tend to do, in the middle of a global crisis where they basically averted the crisis and saved the day. Suddenly this competent but B-list group of super heroes were thrust into A-list fame. Newspaper headlines, dinners from the president, medals and ticker tape parades, that sort of thing. So - one day, during a quiet moment Scarlet slips away and gets a chance to bend the ear of your hero (she catches up to them on patrol, finds a quiet corner at a reception, or whatever) and basically tells you her story, edited the best she can to avoid straight blowing her secret ID to you. "So I was thinking of giving up the secret ID and going public, right there in front of millions. Not so much for me, for the nay-sayers and finger pointers and doubters and my parents who have done nothing but rag on me for most of my life now, it a giant middle finger composed of red neon fifty stories tall, that will burn forever in the night." "But that's a really huge, life changing step just for the world biggest 'I Told You So'." And she straight up asks "what should I do? If you were in my shoes what you'd do."

Re: WWYCD: Mindset You know, I cant think of a character that wouldnt be opposing her LONG before this point. As for working with her - on any level - completly out of the question. Undermining someones free will like that, even the free will to do evil, makes the good guys as bad as the guys we're stopping. Might as well just put a bullet in their heads. Quicker and easier that way.

Re: The Super Darwin Awards Yeah, that one was not one of his brighter moments. (And frankly if the Wookiee hadn't gotten him, everyone else in the crew would have jumped him seconds later. It would have looked like that scene out of Airplane! where they're trying to calm the hysterical woman, and the camera pans back to the long line of people with boxing gloves, bats, lead pipes, all waiting patiently to deliver some beat down)

Re: The Super Darwin Awards Oh, pitty poor danny - he had the amazing talent of getting killed once a week. It wasnt that he had a deathwish or anything, just that he had a complete inability to not die. This wasnt a Hero game, but a WEG Star Wars game from back in college. I was running a space combat where one of the Imperial Spacetrooper carriers (a ship with tons of airlocks, each deploying basicly a small mecha), and somehow he had snuck from our smuggler's ship over to the Imperial ship (deserted because the Spacetroopers were all out in combat). As he sneaks about, he finds one of the airlocks (currently empt and open to space) and gets the brilliant idea to open the door. I'm like - "are you sure you want to do that. It looks kind of air-locky". "Oh yeah, there's probably something good on the other side!" And starts rolling to unlock the door. Of course there are all kinds of saftey failsafes in place to keep the door shut. "Sorry, door doesnt open" "Wow! There must be something REALLY good on the other side!" he said, attacking the lock with vigor. (Said with total seriousness, mind you). I kept going "no, there's a BIG RED WARNING LIGHT on the door", but that didnt deter him as he kept at the lock. Finally, I just said "Fine - you open the door. There's quite literarly nothing on the other side" as he gets blown out into space. Other notable deaths: sticking his face into a xenomorphic face hugger egg, forcing himself onto the female republic marine liaison (her good friend the wookiee ripped out his spine for doing that), opening the vat of toxic waste and fishing around for his blaster that had fallen in, and jumping out of a perfectly working airspeeder (thinking that the rest of the team would come save him. They didnt). Poor guy went through at least 20 characters in 25 weeks.

Re: WWYCD "super" registration Natasha is pretty close to registered anyway - no secret ID, open relationship with the cops of her town (who all know where she lives), pretty open about her tanker powers - so all someone has to do is just fill in the blanks on her form. That said, she's probably in the best position to do something about the screwy law. Being a super genius with a not-too small invention pool to draw on, she'd take the easy way out: level the playing field. She'd build a one die persistant penitrating megascale transform: "give out one minor superpower to anyone who doesnt have one". A couple of twists of a dial and suddenly everyone has the ability to hover one inch of the ground, turn their skin blue at will, summon 3-day-old milk from their fingertips and other such fun party tricks. Then of course she'd set off the Powermogratron in Washington DC first, to get all the lawmakers in the first blast. Scarlet Arrow and Great Beyond would just both lay low until this really unconstitutonal law blew over. Heck, as slow as the courts move, they could keep on heroing while the judges sort out matters.

Re: Does your character keep a journal? I did keep records of the games for my Star Wars games - but I enivitably got lazy, kept notes with the intent of fleshing them out later. That of course was four years ago now - and I still mean to get around to it someday soon. Yeah, that'll happen. In game, however - my character maintains a blog and podcast, keeps a pretty extensive web presence (and even got her hero domain name, shockingly enough) and even has a forum where she'll post from time to time. No record keeping on the player's part, tho.

Re: Zombie hordes? Oh - so far I've got this for standard zombie powers: 1) Bite of the undead: Major Transform 10d6 (People into Zombies, T'aint no cure), Uncontrolled (+1/2), Difficult To Dispel (x8 Active Points; +3/4), Continuous (+1) (487 Active Points); Extra Time (6 Hours, Change may take up to 6 hours; -3 1/2), No Range (-1/2), Requires a sucessful bite (-1/2) 2) Zombifaction: Life Support (Eating: Character does not eat; Longevity: Immortal; Safe in High Pressure; Safe in High Radiation; Safe in Intense Cold; Safe in Intense Heat; Safe in Low Pressure/Vacuum; Self-Contained Breathing; Sleeping: Character does not sleep) and 3) Bite!: Killing Attack - Hand-To-Hand 3d6 (3 1/2d6 w/STR) Of course I'm still in the process of refining things, so these numbers may change up or down some. But that'll pretty much what every zombie comes with.

Re: Zombie hordes? Well, my 'out' comes in two phases: Phase one is the old comics stand-by: the parallel universe. Just next door to the current game dimension, the zombie apocalypse is 6-8 months along, and the world is pretty much at the Day/Land of the Dead stage, where there is more undead than living. A band of survivors (about 200/300 or so) have managed to gather at the Institute for Very Advance Science and gotten into the D-Tech labs, creating a portal to the game world where they can evacuate to. I was figuring three sets of survivors. Set 1 opens a portal and comes over (attracting the attention of the heroes who would hopefully come to investigate the proceedings), portal two sends over another batch of survivors - but when portal three opens, that lab on the other side is awash with zombies and survivors in a panic. Time to start in 12. . . . Of course the portal has to be shut down or the zombie hordes will get loose in the game world. The problem is - the controls are over there, on the Zombie World side of the gate. Shut the portal down and whoever does it gets stuck on Zombie World (and come on, tell me the players wont jump to be heroic and do that). This gives me the chance to set some fun at the end of the world without actually ending it. Also, along the way they'll figure out (hopefully) the nature of the zombification. I was inspired by this (warning, occasionally salty language in the link) - one of the players is a Super Genius and works with nano-technology in hopes of someday giving it to NASA and teraforming Mars or something. Well the Zombie World Super Genius accidentally created zombie nano-bots and they got loose. In short - the Super Genius accidentally ended the world (talk about an angst moment, huh?) (Even better angst moment - when I use the zombified versions of the players against them. Everyone should be easy enough to deal with, other than the Zombiefied Tank - who will be a bear to take out) But that gives me phase two of the 'out' - if she created it (well, Zombie World her did), then coming up with an "off switch" should be easy enough. The Zombiefication is too far advanced on Zombie World to reverse, but when the players get back and find outbreaks on their world (some people who were infected slipped through the portal and the disease started spreading at home), the process should be able to be reversed. That gives them a glorious chance to Save the World! Whew. Anyway, we're sporting about 400 points, with power levels topping out at about 80 active points or so - we're good, but not World Class yet. And yeah - any stats you care to let me shamlessly steal from would be dandy.

So this weekend I get to do my annual Halloween game, and I was going to unleash a zombie apocalypse upon my Heros (complete with an out so I don't actually end the world at the end of the game). I've got a couple of ideas for zombies, but I was wondering if anyone else had some undead ghouls in their portfolios they'd be willing to share, so I can mix and match ideas. I was hoping to work out the numbers for a couple of tiers of zombies, the Stormtrooper zombies that get knocked down pretty easy, the "Hey that was kind of tough" zombie, and the "Holy crap, everyone get over here and help!" zombie. And then of course the Boss zombie at the end of the game - but he's special beastie all by himself.

Re: Dr Who Here's a question for you - Just last night, me and my group were discussing healing and stuff, and the subject of a Time Lord style regeneration came up. Now putting aside the obivous disads of disorentation and a swap of face and psych disads, I wondered aloud what a "Can only be used after death" disad was worth (a pretty hefty minus, I would guess). One of the others was all "Oh, you'd have to pay for that. That's an advantage". I'm still not sold on that. I mean, your'e actually, physicaly dead - that's a pretty extreme set of circumstances to go to for a power to fire. Trigger, I guess - but it still seems that a power that requires you to sing with the choir invisible before you can use it is a negitive thing, not a good thing.

Re: Halloween Themed Session...ideas? It's probably too short notice to help you out now, but I hit upon an idea driving home yesterday that's a keen game plot. October 30, 1938 - Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast an "alien invasion" that panics large portions of the listening audience. It was, indeed, just the audio equivalent of soaping your windows and stealing your fence gate as Welles said, and the incident fades into memory as a quaint incident, a look how goofy we were back then. Meanwhile some 69 light years away, a race of aliens intercept this transmission (or as much of it as they can, thanks to the garbling, static and interference of outer space) and determine that the Earth is in dire peril and humanity needs their assistance! And so these aliens (who use similar tripod war machine technology - perhaps the leaders believe that a rouge element of the race has acted inappropriately, and a sense of duty drives them to help) gather up the armies and deploy at once for Earth. So just outside the campaign city, the first craft lands - a meteor crashes into a farm's field. The heat is tremendous, the hatch unscrews and the parabolic mirror emerges (a sensor array, but no heat ray). Ascertaining the landing zone is secure, they unpack their tripod war machines and start heading for the closest city, looking for the none-existant occupation force. As these things tend to do, eventually the military is going to start shooting first and asking questions later - and of course the aliens will defend themselves or assume that the invaders are controlling the locals somehow. Suddenly the earth is involved in its first interplanetary war over a misunderstanding. With alien war machines landing all over the planet, the players either get to beat down some aliens, throw down with the military to get them to stop attacking or otherwise get to the bottom of things, find out why the aliens are REALLY here and stop the real war of the worlds.

Re: WWYCD Genocide - or Genocide? To the nay sayers and table flippers - this isn't that unreasonable a scenario. For the sake of argument, lets say I'm a huge Doctor Who fan and think "Hey, wouldnt it be great to have some Daleks show up and start tearing up the city!" There's no reasoning with them. Any attempts to get all touchy-feely Picard "We're all the same, there's no reason to do this! Lets live together in peace!" will end in a one word response from the Daleks. Sure there's plenty of room for the players to run around and try and find The Big Reset Button to send them all back to their home dimension (or whatever), but there is going to have to be some beatdown along the way. Meanwhile, it's going to be real ugly outside, with lots of "EXTERMINATE!" going on. It seems to me to me that the key is in how you handle things. For instance Scarlet Arrow, who actually has a "wont kill, period" disad wouldnt be fighting. She would be doing damage control and clean up, saving people the best she could. (It also fits that she's wildly inappropreate to deal with a large scale planetary invasion. She'd be doing that, disads aside) Great Beyond brings more firepower and diversity to the table to deal with things, but she'd still be most efficiant at disabling and subduing instead of out and out killing. Freezinng the aliens in a block of ice in one shot is much easier than dragging things out by having to fight. Natasha, on the other hand wouldnt be fighting - not because of any pacifism, but because she's a Super Genius, and would be much better suited to working overtime to figure out where The Big Reset Button is and how to flip it, or building her own Put Them In Another Dimension ray to zap the aliens away.