Scott Ruggels

Beast Boy had some of the best lines in the Teen Titans! (not GO!) animated series. For example, when asked why he won't eat pizza with meat on it: "Dude, I've BEEN most of those animals!"

He watches a lot of superhero cartoons, and comments on that.  His observations on how Beast Boy is underrated are accurate.  

Back in the day Mike Gray, one of the original Guardians, ran a fantasy hero game set in a fantasy version of the Bay Area.

On another tack, there is a discussion about AI and its impact on generating artwork that can be used in RPGs. (a lot of groaning about what it does in terms of putting artists out of work)
 
On the other hand, if you look at AI chatbots and look at the expert systems/algorithms that look at your buying history, viewing history, engagement history and pick what ads to show you, what suggestions to show you on amazon or what ends up on your facebook feed, I think there is a distinct possibility that you could generate an AI game master that could start with a seed of your favorite media, some Q&A about themes and tone and end up spitting out a game tailor made to cater to your tastes. Obviously, more difficult when playing in a group setting because it's hard to please everyone, but still an intriguing concept.

"Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.
"Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion. He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
"Russell's teapot is still invoked in discussions concerning the existence of God, and has had influence in various fields and media."
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

BBB is my favorite version of Champions. i was a little sad when my group moved to FREd.
 
But I haven't had a regular group in over a decade. Right now, I'd be willing to play just about anything.
 
Except Fuzion. 

No doubt; no game is immutable, particularly if something stands in way of enjoying the game.
 
I hit me as I was reading your reply that the most likely reason I never got into the old school revival is that, between Champions 2e and Traveller LBBs and pocket box Car Wars (and Truck Stop) as my go-to games even today, there is no "revival" for me.  I didnt leave the Old School.
 
Help!  I'm stuck out here with John Connely!
 
 

Sounds to me more like desolid, but with limitations. The entangle would stay for other characters, but the Druid would pass through. 

Sounds to me more like desolid, but with limitations. The entangle would stay for other characters, but the Druid would pass through. 

There was an early Meso-American civilization living on the northwest coast of Peru. It was mostly desert, and it didn't rain a whole lot. The farmers worked tight river valleys into the Andes.
 
This has a deliciously different take on a desert civilization without any Arab connotations.

Posted this on Facebook and Twitter, why not here.
 
Peanuts Manor of Mystery. Linus summoning the Great Pumpkin in 1930s. WWI ace Chuck Brown and his co-pilot/Beagle Snoopy. Peppermint patty and her secretary Marcie (Marcie served in the war and due to shell shock calls most people "Sir") Schroeder is a concert pianist and Lucy has come back from overseas studying under Freud and others. Sally is Linus' maid so she can be close to her "sweet baboo". Pigpen is the caretaker and has been under Linus' thumb for so long he's the Igor/rienfield of the gang. Franklin is the butler (no jeers it IS the 30s). You can't tell if Pigpen has been gardening or digging graves.

If you're going for a Fremen vibe, the desert folk might be working, slowly, to restore the land. Create pockets of soil that can support drought-resistant vegetation, gradually expand them. A bowl or basket of soil is an important ceremonial gift to establish one's goodwill. Especially if an important ingredient for turning sand and dust into soil is the bodies of the dead. "Know that I come in peace, for I offer you the bones of my ancestors." Which also means that soil theft is the most deadly insult imaginable, grounds (so to speak) for a vendetta that lasts generations.
 
The ruined cities are the cities of the ancestors. "When the land is restored, we shall live here again." Perhaps they have ancient tablets or scrolls copied and re-copied that describe and depict the cities as guides for the rebuilding. Or perhaps the elders keep the details in lore-songs and memory-cathedrals. If you visit a city with an elder guide, he or she can tell you the name of each street, who dwelled in the palace of which only sand-drifted stumps of walls remain, describe the long-vanished golden statue in what was once the main temple...
 
It's doubtful the cities would still have any artifacts worth looting and trading, even if they were not sacred homelands to be reclaimed in some future age. But deserts do have commodities of value, such as the frankincense trees of Yemen.
 
Dean Shomshak

Limited Tunnelling?
very limited Desolid?

They are a bit big and silly looking but net guns have never been compact: Anti Drone Guns

George R. R. Martin is at his core a nihilist, who loves a good yarn, but sneers at heroism, and all of his characters are disposable.  Great story, but ultimately pointless. I love the approach, especially the flavor of English History, but the observation that his characters don’t grow or change is accurate. He’s kind of soured me on reading fantasy because he makes other authors look like cliche’d fan fic(wth exceptions), so I’ve kind of stopped reading recently, though I will do in occasionally for a short, trashy space ship Nobel from the Amazon cheap seats. 

I found an old paper while cleaning my room that has a list of ideas for Champions campaigns of various types and power levels.I figured I would post them here to offer some inspiration for GMs looking to start up a campaign:
 
Part of a government or state official super team collected to fight crime and terrorism Each character is a child of an extradimensional being who has sown his oats widely - characters probably don't even know they were related. Dying alien distributes part of their power amongst all people gathered nearby to help fight his evil family.  Low powered game, possibly no other super types in the world Characters all awaken in a high tech lab in a dark  and dystopian future world, each with powers.  Who did this to them?  Why don't they remember anything? Regular people in this world who use a special device (alien tech? Magic item?  Extradimensional debris?) that ports them into the Champions Universe, with powers, but only for a set time period each day Members of an existing team with a base, contacts, history etc get into a dispute over tactics and goals and split off: the PCs are the new team Wake up on a deserted South Pacific Island with no memory, and powers.  They are in an alternate dimension where aliens are invading and have to fight them off.  But where are they really from? All were terminally ill of various ailments, even advanced old age, and submit to an experiment to save their lives.  The mad scientist is a supervillain who in exchange wants them to use their powers for him -- but will they? Very low powered police force members, part of a special powered task force in a big city to help fight low level street crime and minor supervillains Old retiring supergroup seeks out new members, holding auditions and picking a new team.  In the process a new potential member does not take rejection well, but is extremely powerful. Very rich old geezer wants revenge on the supervillain that casually crippled him in a battle with police in collateral damage.  He hires the PCs to deal with the villain, and the team stays together with his sponsorship. Individual superheroes are all captured by a big bad supervillain to keep them from interfering with his plan, they all escape and work together to beat the guy, and gain a nifty new base (with many secrets to discover) in the process  
I'm sure other people have ideas for campaigns as well

I am with you there, Sir.  Alas, my,most "local" store is two hours one-way, and I would have to tear gas the Magik and Pokemon guys to clear out some seats. (Does that stuff come in alternate fragrances?  Might as try to make the place smell less like "no one in here has bathed more recently than two weeks ago.")
 
Honestly, I don't know how you can have that much Dorito'a dust on your fingers and staining your beard and not have orange cards 😕
 
To the question:  yes; HERO is still one of my two drugs of choice.  Primarily 2e, with a tiny smattering of things pulled from 4e.  We pulled in a few things from 5e that we thought we would like (mostly modifiers), but eventually decided that we didn't need or want them, so while they are still on the table, so to speak, we haven't found any real utility to them.
 
We didn't find any of the "new" stuff in 6e interesting enough to try at all.
 
In all fairness to Steve, after watching that youtube cast (thanks to the outstanding human being who put up the youtube link), I think I may have been right in my earlier claims that the bulk of the last two editions "new stuff" was little more than addressing or codifying corner cases and edge items that just aren't likely to come up for most people.  Based on comments Steve made in that video, I suspect this really was the case (the "file of questions from over the years," etc).
 
As we have been playing since 1e, we have adresswd pretty much any edge case that we were likely to have encountered long before the rules did, and we just havent had that many.  Yes; I have just as much fun as everyone else picking at things that _could_ cause an issue, or noting how _this_ might interfere with _that_, but it is like getting killed by a tiger:
I _could_ get mauled to death by a tiger.  If I encounter a wild and hungry tiger, I probably _will_ get killed by a tiger.
 
Since I live in central Georgia, USA, in spite of all the potential to lose my life in a Duke / tiger encounter, I can one-hundred percent say that I am most certainly _not_ going to get killed by a tiger, and don't really need to invest much time or money preparing for that.  In fact, I have made it to the ripe old age of 62 with absolutely _no_ preparations for tiger attack, and- as I suspect is the case for all but possibly one HERO player out there, I will never be in a position to regret not,being better prepared for random,tiger attacks.
 

 
anyway:  Champions 2e is one of my two systems of choice, tied quite nicely with Classic Traveller (as much as I love my LBBs, my players tend to prefer the 3e Traveller Book for its slightly simplified combat and range bands and ship movement, so that is the one we use the most.)
 
Now realistically, we play way more games built on Champions, but that is because most of my players prefer the reduced lethality of that system, and even those with no preference have more experience with Champions.  (Oddly enough, we dont play a lot of superheroes).

I thinkI figured out how they built weapons with skill levels. They added the cost of skill levels directly to the Base cost of EB then applied Advantages then do the Limitations.

The balls of my feet cringed in anticipated pain.

D4s aside, this could be pretty expensive for me.

The latest She-Hulk episode had Daredevil in it, and they did okay with him, kinda.  The show has been overall just... bad, with poor writing and CGI, but I did like something about this episode: they followed the comic book rules.
 
1) when two heroes meet, they always fight
2) The winner of the fight is the one whose comic it takes place in.
 
I'm not sure how they got that right, maybe one of the few consultants working on the show told them about this or something.
 
 
"We're going to lose the shop!"

Whenever I see a line like "but there's so much no one's ever explored!!" my only response is, then you aren't gonna do Tolkien.  You're just going to slap the name onto a series to draw the people in, but it's gonna be based on the writers' and producers' notions, with little real connection.  The story said one of the pitches was to do Aragorn's wandering days.  Really?  From the books, it was...very low-key.  He was learning to command, learning the pains of the world, developing the empathy.  But that was, IIRC, 50 or 60 YEARS long.  And Gandalf might be compared to, say, a Belgarath, where he worked very quietly, mostly behind the scenes for centuries at a stretch.
 
Tolkien doesn't have lots of good dramatic story.  The First Age is all tragedy.  The Second Age is, IIRC, largely dull.  The Third...yeah, fine, they're there, but again in fits and starts.  Lots of it is slow decline, a la Arnor.  So in the absence of something dramatic...the writers come up with their own, from nothing.  <sigh>  That's where the fans' complaints come from because, well, you HAVE to bring in the recognized names even if they don't belong....
 
Yeah, I think Netflix' idea would've bombed.  Still haven't seen RoP...been a bad few weeks.  Plan to.....

I just watched the new Cronenberg movie Crimes of the Future. It is a future world with no space travel, where everything around us is totally synthetic, and that we are growing mysterious organs in our bodies. It has become performance art to cut into your own bodies and pull out these organs. Surgery has become an artform. 
 
Eventually it is revealed that these mysterious organs are designed to digest plastics. Our bodies are evolving to deal with the synthetic world. 
 
Kinda also forgot to mention, mankind can no longer feel pain. The worse one feels is extreme discomfort as someone drills into the back of your skull killing you.

We discussed AI drones racing against humans a while back. Here's one of the latest developments.