Querysphinx

Re: WWYCD: Dead before your time... Let's see: Query: Query's hero form is a time manipulating sphinx who speaks and thinks only in questions lest making a statement cause a temporal rift. Her first thought would be, Was it something I said? Then she would, if possible, switch back to her human, Private Investigator self, and start the process of unraveling the mystery, starting by researching her "death." Thunder: Covers up distress with dark religious banter. "This can't be happening. I'm Jewish, even our bread doesn't rise." "So this is what it feels like to be converted." While she gets on frantically trying to figure out what happened. Curse: "Oh no, not again!

Re: What are you playing now? The last Champions character I played... Does my memory go back. Oh yes, that would be Thunder, the supersonic woman. My apologies for the old pic. That was about ten years ago.

Re: Politics or not Whenever you have three people, you have politics. I use politics a lot. My brand new, just-pecking-its-way-out-of-the-shell game involves the rather abrupt appearance of many people with superpowers all over the world. The world hasn't figured out how to deal with them yet, but people, being people, are being scared and panicky. The Pope declared the first public "Spark" to be a miracle (she saved a tram load of kids from plummeting into a gorge, so he didn't have much choice) and then quickly shuffled her under a nun's habit and made her disappear. Miracle workers should not be giving interviews. In the U.S. the national congress is slow off the mark, (as always) but state and local legislatures are passing laws against the "Sparks" almost as fast as they can type. Colorado (my home state) is trying to amend the state constitution to declare sparks "not" human, and thus a species to be regulated by the ag department. (For those of you who don't live in CO; the voters here will sign on to absolutely anything as long as it's a bad idea.) On the other hand, I don't use real politicians in my game, and sometimes I reverse or twist a party's platform so that it is not-what-you-expected. Right is sometimes so far to the right that it becomes left and visa versa.

Re: Create a NEW Zodiac I remember many moons ago I ran a Zodiac Conspiracy bunch of super powers BG's, and some of them were decidedly non standard interpretations. Pisces: A mind-meld-to-machines computer hacker. The internet was her ocean and she was the big fish. Gemini: A shape shifting power mimic who had forgotten his own identity. He becomes your twin. Virgo: A body jacker with no physical body of her own. (It was funny when she and Gemini would tag team a hero, now suddenly the PCs are fighting two copies of the same friend)

Re: Are we Ready to Rock? I dunno...are we? If You're going to have an alien in the band, it's got to be a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater. (And I hope I'm not the only one here old enough to get that joke.)

Re: Heroes I respectfully disagree that season 2 of Heroes is weaker than season 1. Aside from a few "Huh, what were they thinking?" moments, the pacing and plot are much better. Very importantly, the good guys actually seem to have a goal "bring down the company" and something resembling a plan. This is compared to 99.99% of all TV where there roles of the recurring protagonists is essentially reactive, responding to the crisis-of-the-week. Proactive plots in a major TV series is so incredibly rare that it's almost worth the price admission by itself. Combine that with cool complex characters and it gets my vote for best show on TV. Season 2 is better than season one. In related news. I like "street-level" champions games much better than high end games. I'm starting (at long last) a street level game tonight. It's very similar to Heroes or Wild Cards in that the players start out as normal people who only slowly discover their abilities. First the players make 75 base point builds without powers. Then each one will be given a choice of three "Code Names." Each code name has an attached powers set which they will discover as the game progresses.

Re: Superhero Images Here's Jacqueline MacLean, aka The Cockatrice, by yours truly Acrylics.

Re: Animated objects I havea character who does something very similar to this. Goblynne Greene She "Goblinizes" ordinary objects, which brings them to life and gives them certain monstrous characteristics. Imagine, if you will, a chainsaw with glowing red eyes, wings, and an evil disposition. It's accomplished though summoning with a limited range of effects. To avoid the problem of having a billion character sheets, I limited each summoned creature to three "characteristics." Size: Small/Medium/Large Toughness: Light/Medium/Heavy and Attack: Smash/Chop/Zap The Flying Chainsaw is: Small, Medium, Chop An Animated Automobile would be: Large, Heavy, Smash A Store Mannequin would be: Medium, Light, Smash Movement and Defenses are determined by size and weight. All combinations add up to the right number of points for the summoning. It was a lot of work to set up, but very easy to play (I just keep a scratch sheet for the goblins) which is the important thing.

Re: WWYCD: The rest of the world's Supers just changed sex. QUERY: Query is a sphinx, which means she's omniscient. She's also a mortal, which means that while she is literally the worlds biggest know-it-all she can't know it all at the same time. Her name is Query because she always speaks in questions because she can't make statements without messing up the weft and weave of all-possibilties. She may well assume that she was talking in her sleep again... As for her teammates, she would feel horribly sorry for them, especially Crysalis who was very upset at having been turned into a woman, and who is instead, presumably upset about having been turned into a man. She would engage in the long and tedious process of looking for the right strand to spindle to guide the world back toward central probability.

Re: Input on a bunch of bad guys?