Scott Ruggels

Build up the new restaurant.  This time, do not refuse Pepsi.  Conquer the world with military might.  Acquire a second restaurant location.
 
 

An update on Strike Force Organizations.
 
Cult of the Beast, Carousel (et al), Wanderers, and Yooso are go.
 
That is all.

We could not do "Gain of Function experiments in the U.S., so a few scientists talked to Chinese colleagues, and We spent two years in lock down anyway.

Oh definitely. We did a brief "All Powered Armored Suits, All the time, and though the campaign was short it had a unified feel, like a Television show. It was a lot of fun. Cold War, so it was the U.S. Versus the Commies, and the occasional villain group or malign corporation.

For this specific tool?  Depends on the law and the people who run the company.  But as I explained to a family member who is also in cyber, it is not possible to stop development of AI any more than it would be possible to stop development of, say, video games.  The U.S. government could ban AI tomorrow and AI development would promptly move to India or Mexico.

There is a new Ai bot called Sora. The prompts can now generate up to one minute of full motion video. Take a look:
 
 
This is under a company lock down, so it's not yet available to the public, but it would be a useful tool for generating B-Roll for YouTube, It as of now cannot generate Porn, celebrity look alikes or graphic violence. How long does one think those restrictions wil stay in place?.

Oh definitely. We did a brief "All Powered Armored Suits, All the time, and though the campaign was short it had a unified feel, like a Television show. It was a lot of fun. Cold War, so it was the U.S. Versus the Commies, and the occasional villain group or malign corporation.

There is a new Ai bot called Sora. The prompts can now generate up to one minute of full motion video. Take a look:
 
 
This is under a company lock down, so it's not yet available to the public, but it would be a useful tool for generating B-Roll for YouTube, It as of now cannot generate Porn, celebrity look alikes or graphic violence. How long does one think those restrictions wil stay in place?.

Oh definitely. We did a brief "All Powered Armored Suits, All the time, and though the campaign was short it had a unified feel, like a Television show. It was a lot of fun. Cold War, so it was the U.S. Versus the Commies, and the occasional villain group or malign corporation.

So many strongly held opinions about magic!  Although that is pretty normal--in the fantasy fiction discussion groups I frequent, "hard" vs. "soft" magic systems are always a topic of lively discussion. Naturally that would carry over to RPGs.
 
My preferences tend to come down on the "soft" side of the spectrum, i.e. mysterious and poorly understood.  I find that more well defined systems, in fiction, are uninteresting--being fully understandable, they become esoteric.  In some cases this also leads to some strange inconsistencies with the setting.
 
As others have mentioned, mysterious-and-poorly-understood magic is tough to do in any RPG that attempts to be balanced.  Hero manages to at least sort of address the subject with skill rolls, Side Effects, and other disadvantages.  Other systems, like Ars Magica, address it by leaving a certain amount of wiggle room in the effect.  Or in the more lightweight systems, almost not having a system at all.
 
What really sets Hero apart is that its flexibility allows it to cover multiple magic systems.  You can have the wizards of the Fire College go up against the Wild Pool Magicians with the assistance of the Vancian Amnesiacs.  After four decades of fantasy gaming I have yet to see any other system that can really do this.  Usually the best they can do is have you pick spells from a different list.  But the point is that Hero can really do both hard and soft magic, and I'm frankly astonished that no other game system has really tried.
 
Clerical magic is a whole other ballgame, as it directly involves the theology of the setting.  It's hard to be an atheist when priests are slinging flame strikes and blade barriers.  At that point, religion becomes less a matter of faith and more one of devotion and adherence.  It's a weird side effect of D&D video game magic, and to me it smacks of football teams granting magic powers to its craziest fans.  I have toyed with the idea of requiring clerical spells (prayers?) to be bought with Invisible Power Effects, just to make it a teeny bit less obvious to onlookers that The Gods Walk Among Them.  That only works for certain effects, but it does maintain a lot of the mystery.  Arcane magic might benefit from the same.

I am actually preparing one now.
 
All supers are the children or grandchildren of alien abductees.
 
As there has been no "alien contact" as of yet, ....
 
 
 

The Champions universe, like Marvel and DC and the Forgotten Realms, is a kitchen sink of ideas... super science, mutants, magic, aliens, beings from alternate dimensions, you name it, it's all in there.
 
Have you ever run or played in a campaign setting where the source of superpowers was limited to a single source?  All mutants, all from an alien virus (Wildcards), all super-science (super soldiers, cyborgs), all psychic manifestations, etc?  (Scott Bennie's Gestalt setting always fascinated me.)
 
My wife ran one of my favorite campaigns with an all-cyborgs theme.... there were no innate superpowers, only cyborgs and robots.  I find the constraints really satisfying, as the world and story having a solid thematic basis really helps things hold together.  You can have really great adventures in a kitchen sink, but I feel the constraints make it easier to achieve when everyone is on-board with the idea.

Yeah my Golden Age game all powers came from a single source (magic and Asgardian fruit).  Its very restrictive, in some ways, but in others it makes storytelling work better and the overall campaign has more cohesion and focus.

Many Fantasy Hero games do not allow frameworks, so a multipower might not be an option.  If the character has to purchase all the powers individually that will get very expensive. 
 
You only have to purchase the skills you want the other form to have.  I can see a character that becomes an animal losing some of his human skills because he becomes more animal than man.  That actually seems kind of fitting for a Fantasy Hero game.  If the character is actually becoming an animal instead of just assuming an animal shape losing the human skills and gaining those the animal would have seems to be more of how a druid would change shapes. 

I ran a Multiform character for about a year. When I created it, it seemed overpowered, but it was the only way to realize the character concept. It worked wonderfully. Each form had a distinct personality and motivations (with a specific common goal). But …
 
It was greatly overpowered. One form was a smooth-talking conman, another was a tracker, then a martial artist, and lastly a killing tank. Being able to switch forms, even requiring a full turn, made it much too easy to fine tune the character to most situations.
 
I thoroughly enjoyed the role-playing. But the power imbalance became a real problem. 

Not so much Social Justice but Wokeness. As an example, inherently evil monster races have been pretty much removed from Pathfinder 2. Especially glaring was the goblins , who were despicable little rapists and torturers, were added as a PC race. You are supposed to believe that X years of lore was accomplished by "bad" goblins but any new PC's and NPC's were good acceptable citizens. 

Understood.

A toss up between...
 
"A beauty? She is one without peer. The Lady has had many statues erected in her honor."
"...among other things."
 
or
 
"What his armor will not deflect, I am sure his skull will."

Okay, update -- The Circle is at ~18,000 words. All of the NPCs are complete, as is the description of the Garden. Next up are the scenarios with some updated NPC sheets. Then... well, then I talk to Jason. The Cult of the Beast comes up so much, I'd like to cobble together what I can and present that.

Current word count is: 68,000.

There were two campaign adventures for Danger International, they are very Cold War though. Both of them are on DTRPG. 

For those of wondering about my sequel to Aaron Allston's Strike Force, (Strike Force Organizations) , it goes like this:
 
1) I have completed work on Alien Research Laboratories, which is what Aaron renamed M.E.T.E. to. Everything has been updated to 6e, including the NPCs (some of which have more modern designs thanks to finding select files in Aaron's notes), the base, the computer, and several vehicles. I have completed work on the Blood. There are a lot more Blood characters than what appeared in Org Book 3. Several of them have character sheets while many of the original Blood NPCs have updated character sheets due to finding them in Aaron's notes. Also, Commodore has his base and vehicles included. I am currently working on the Circle. I found updated character sheets for almost everyone, as well as detailed backgrounds. Thus, the Circle will be more lore 'heavy' than the other sections.

Current word count is around 60,000 words. Once I complete the Circle I will talk to Jason about adding additional groups or seeing about some smaller releases of (perhaps) PDF-only content.

Valid points, but I take the oppoaite tack:
 
Villains who have been captured and processed no longer have a Secret ID, at least not most of them.   It would be difficult to run the fingerprints of Plasmus, for example.  Characters whoe develop physical characteristics that cant be concealed- well, they aren't going to easily handle Secret IDs, either.  As an example, Rook (former player's character now an NPC in the youth group's universe) is a brick who, like many bricks, developed immense stature and musculature. She is eight feet tall and wider across the shoulders than most doors and is seventy-two years old.  She couldn't maintain a secret ID if she wanted to.
 
Still, those sort of chracters are a minority of characters (at least, those who aren't bricks, who seem to receive physical grotesquery at a disproportionately high rate).
 
But again: the majority of villains who get even a little bit through processing are never going to have a points-worthy secret ID without completely changing their villainous ID, and in forty-four years of Champions history, I don't believe I have stumbled across one of those in any official product.
 
Still,like LL, I have occasionally enjoyed letting the villain's  secret ID assist the PCs on a case- in one case, I had a villain's secret ID who became a regular go-to Contact with the PCs-- to the point of eliminating four of his alter-ego's competitors, celebrating each victory with the heroes, ingratiating himself into their lives until they finally figured him out (caught him rifling through some,of their files on other "competitors" and after trying to figure out what they had in common, the high-tech HERO recognized the architecture of some spyware left behind in their systems--
 
The players were genuinely surprised, and genuinely felt taken in, and they somehow managed to both be furious and hurt by it as well as love it as a plot twist that they had fallen to, hard.
 
They were _thrilled_ when they finally took him down: it was very personal for every one of them. 
 
unfortunately, it also cemented in their minds that they should never reveal their own secret IDs, even to each other (which was always a problem even before that camoaign, and this made it worse), so we have an entire battery of various Bat Signals in use....
 
 
eh...
 
win some; lose some, I suppose.

Social “Justice” is not justice at all. It should be scrapped thrown into the garbage dump.

I don't think that's a good idea, with Tencent, being ye another arm of the Chinese Communist Party. On the plus side SOcial JUstice will be removed from the property, but on the other it will be nerfed to cater to Chinese sensibilities. But since having shifted the weekend games over to Pathfinder 2 I won't miss anything.

And they wander through fandoms one by one, to make sure the geek world complies.