Scott Ruggels

Man, I have to write all of this down, and make it happen.  THings are just falling into place.

In the context Scott and I were discussing, Elves are the nobility.

They don't mine because they have lackeys for that. They don't grow potatoes for the same reason.

And while we are at it: halflings pay tax, respect their betters, and are humorously bucolic. Goblins don't, and aren't.

Malkewiscz of Kolkur is a heavy set man apparently in his 50s with a salt and pepper beard, and a very solid gaze. He has a piercing, commanding voice, that he uses to dramatic effect when lecturing students, apprentices, or Nobles in his presence. He dresses in the dark robes of an academician, with a stole around his neck covered in characters few can read. He is a man of great courage, but of cold  fury when angered.  He can be very diplomatic, and patient, but has little patience for frivolity. He has devoted himself of the pursuits of the mind, so magic, a bit of engineering, history, and politics occupy his time.  He teaches the National Magic style well, and most of the senior military mages of the Kingdom have been his students, But he has studied the traditions of other lands, and has mastered a few, such as transformation magic.  When using the National Magic style, is shapes are precise, and geometric, The colors bright and clear, and the lines of force, direct and straight.  But the other styles are subtle, indirect, and quiet. About his only indulgences are food, and  High quality writing utensils. He is observant, but not pious, careful not to offend the higher powers.  It's not clear how old he is, but he's been in Kolkur since before it was a Northern possession. Three or four generations of students have described him looking as he does now, never younger, as if he had met the Victorious Dangar Ice Hand in the streets of Kolkur as a  50 year old human, politely pledging himself to Icehand's banner.  With him as the senior Academician, at the University of Kolkur, he has shaped it into a very focused institute of learning, and Magic in the northern provinces. 

I'm late to the party on this one. I made the mistake of thinking about it from multiple perspectives. NEVER wise on the internet. Leads to premature compromise and perhaps even empathy for those who don't think like you do.
 
Also forced me to admit some hypocrisy about myself in games. Like "Elves? SURE.... Dwarves? I LOVE those guys. Wait, what? You.. want to play a tiefling? Mmmph... ah...can I interest you in a nice half orc? " In Sci Fi as well as Fantasy; Every GM has their limits on non humans, it's just a matter how far it goes. Yes, I'm stating the obvious. I like my space opera with walking carpets and pointed eared know it alls, I like my fantasy with humans and a smattering of non humans with their own (often vast) civilizations.
 
I do think Dwarves and Elves have their place, mostly because their long lives, centuries instead of little less than a century, gives them an excuse for truly different cultures few human cultures could ever be said to quite fit. It's not the game mechanics of  Life Support: Slowed Aging, so much as things like "The humans have agreed the forest of Alderwyte belongs to we elves .What we don't tell them is that we plant seeds by night... in the last five centuries we've expanded our domain by a fifth, and without firing a shot for they think it's just nature" or other cultural moves that would seem really wild to shorter lived folk.
 
But my initial reaction to Tieflings was distaste. Why? Probably because they steal a niche I saw as reserved for half orcs mostly. That's not a logical reaction so much as a gut one. The 'humans only, please' crowd is a lot more consistent than I am. So, now I feel a bit sheepish
 
 
I think for some of us, part of it might be comfort food. The idea of non human playable races isn't a SACRED cow for me, but it is kind of like enjoying a nice hamburger. You can tell me how that Fish meal with humans only is better for your stories and I hope you and your players like your fancy lemon juiced trout, but I'm still chowing down on this quarter pound of Moo Meat. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

And now it's on Disney Plus!
 
https://www.disneyplus.com/series/jessica-jones
 
 

Yeah, I think HBO Max has an excellent amount of content.  Particularly if you count their access to TCM.

Nobody should ever need to justify liking or not liking something. That individuals have personal preferences is universal and involuntary. There are plenty of things I dislike that other people like, and vice versa. Sometimes I don't even understand why I have a particular preference. And I don't need to. As long as nobody's imposing their subjectivity on anyone else, it's not important.
 
The problem I see is that many people can't separate the concepts of "I don't like it" from "It's bad." Either someone wants to assert that their preference is objectively, absolutely right, or someone believes someone else's stated preference is a denigration of their own. That only matters if a person's opinion is tied to their ego and sense of self-worth.
 
I try to live by the motto of, "If we aren't hurting anyone, let's just agree to disagree." Don't always succeed, but I do make the effort.

This has been the blessing I have found for online play.  Face to face isn’t really an option for me due to my remote location, but there are huge groups of players from all over the world looking for a game. You can be a lot more selective. Find the players that are compatible. 

This has been the blessing I have found for online play.  Face to face isn’t really an option for me due to my remote location, but there are huge groups of players from all over the world looking for a game. You can be a lot more selective. Find the players that are compatible. 

That works too.  But it's definitely not a half-Phase attack, at least at longer ranges (98/115mph = 44/51 meters per Segment), it's remotely controlled, and there's a physical structure that can be damaged or destroyed.  Once you add Limitations to reflect those things, IMO it's easier to do a vehicle write-up.  But that's just my preference.

Poking around on my Mom's HBO Max account, it's not that it is bereft of content, it's that the menus suck. I mean really suck, but there are a lot of classic movies on it, as well as a large amount of animated content (I am a sucker for cartoons). The selection is admittedly not as good as Amazon Prime, but it's a bit more varied that Netflix. 

Never trust a game system that is under 30!...?

It's on HBO Max.

I think it was.  This matches what Arneson said when we talked to him at a Bay Area Con in the late 80s. 

Many years ago, my group was dedicated to AD&D and Traveller.  When I discovered the 4th Edition BBB, I saw the light and immediately converted our campaigns to the Hero System.  Some time later, the Traveller characters acquired an old, beat-up Gazelle Close Escort, the "Windfall Prophet".
 
Over several years of gaming and technological advances in my Traveller Universe, the characters made a number of upgrades and enhancements to their ship.  When shadowcat1313 and FFE released Traveller Hero, I picked up a copy and, using his Gazelle Close Escort as a template, was able to upgrade the characters' Gazelle to 6th Edition.  Attached is the current iteration of the ship.  Included deck plans were obtained from the Web.
 
The ship itself was based on shadowcat1313's Gazelle build.  I imported it into my own Hero Designer template which combines the features of a Vehicle with those of a Computer, without having to design both separately.
 
 

Was working up for a Solarsystem limited game, before the players decided for me, that I would be running Cyberpunk Red.
 
The ships in the game were varied, with most ships being a "Torch Ship", but some being "rack ships" which were basically radio tower structures with a reaction engine on one end, vacuum tight shipping containers all up and down it, and the living quarters and bridge on the other (though many of them were robot * radio driven). Rack ships were the slowest and cheapest way to get from point A to Point B. , Then there were landers, and those were everything from winged shuttles, and space planes, to Space-X style  up and down rockets. I didn't get too much further with this, but that was kid of the framework.  IT was influenced a lot by "The Expanse", though.
 
I also played a lot of Traveller, and Space Opera, and very briefly an FGU Offering called "Other Suns", which had incomprehensible mechanics so we dropped it. Other Suns was also the Genesis of the furry fandom.
 
 

I am having a hard time with Netfliz' cartoon adaptation of the notoriously difficult video game Cuphead.  Which seems incredibly bizarre and at the same time pretty familiar.
 
I understood much of what was going on, not from playing the game (I didn't) but from a knowledge of the history of animation -- specifically the brilliantly flawed early soung cartoons of the Fleischer brothers (better animators than Disney, but terrible businessmen who were eventually at each others' throats).  The legacy of these shorts (which originated the character of Betty Boop, and don't get me started on how controversial she was) were among the first American productions to regularly feature the great black musicians of the day. But they also had issues with racial caricatures (one short, built around Luois Armstrong's recording "I'll be Glad When You're Dead (You Rascal You)" was placed with a cartoon about fleeing a "primitive cannibal tribe", a common racist trope in those days. (There were also anti-Semitism issues in other shorts, because stereotypes about "greedy Jews" were still considered funny, although the Fleischers were Jewish immigrants themselves).
 
That in itself made Cuphead the game controversial -- it used the Fleischers' stylings in art and music without really dealing with the racist times that generated them.
 
And it is the disconnection with the times that bothers me about The Cuphead Show. Not so much the racial issues, which strangely do not bother me as much since I know the producers were in no way making that a focus. NO, what bothers me is that I'm unclear who their audience is.
 
How many people starting out with Cuphead on Netflix know who Max and Dave Flesicher were? Or who Cab Calloway was? Although Calloway was one of the great cultural treasures of the 20th Century, we are now almost a quarter of the way through the 21st. So to have a major character modeled on him is one of many in-jokes that nobody outside a niche group of fans will get. There are also several snatches of Calloway-like music from the modern composer of the score, who could ape his style but not capture his genius. And while I am not at all into Satanic Panics... well, I don't think this will spoil anything.
 
The chief antagonist of Cuphead and Mugman is the literal Devil, who is drawn black from head to toe and voiced like -- well, you'll have to hear it to believe it.
 
 
(The actor is Luke Millington, and he everything he says comes out that way. I saw a clip of him recording that song, and he had a lot of fun!)
 
So while I am the sort of person most likely to appreciate The Cuphead Show, I am not its intended audience. So is the problem with the show or with me?

"Oh, him?  Yes, indeed; very important man.  He's the Head of Commodities and Consumables."
 
 
 

The Idea of power levels are a legacy of D&D and video games, and do not really work well in the Hero system.  In D&D and it works because the game is a level-based game that is narrowly constrained.  Trying to measure the power level of a hero character is like trying to measure the temperature of a sound. Even if you manage to create a rating system will it provide any useful information?  In D&D and over level-based games “Power Level” is a way to make sure that the product is suitable for the characters being run.  When the module says it is a low-level adventure you know that your 16th level sorcerer is not appropriate.  Hero System is a lot more complex, and its ratings are going to have to be equally complex.
 
Instead of trying to figure “Power Levels” what you need to do is to start thinking in terms of campaign structure.  Most games I have been in the GM (or the group) decide on caps of various aspects of the character.  This usually includes but is not limited to things like DEX, SPD, CV damage classes, defenses and a few other things.  We usually add a short description of the campaign to expand that out. and to clarify why some of the restrictions are there.  In one game the GM wanted guns to be a threat to the characters so the DEF especially resistant were capped lower than normal.  The GM also wanted to limit the damage the characters could do so the DC limits were also reduced.  The campaign focused a lot on investigation, so skills were more useful than in many campaigns.  Combat powers were more restrained, but other powers were not. Many of the characters had out of combat abilities that outstripped characters that cost several hundred points more.  Instead of using the label low powered we used street level.
 
A more useful system would be to define campaigns and give them a label instead of a level.  
 

After major heart surgery and a small stroke I had to spend time in a rehab hospital to re-learn walking and climbing stairs. They only had one closed circuit TV channel and it played movies . On the weekend the guy who programmed the movies took off and would leave three films on a repeating loop. From my first day there on Friday afternoon until Tue morn. (Holiday weekend) I was trapped in a bed watching Snow Dogs, Legally Blonde & A Beautiful Mind.
   Try watching A Beautiful Mind for four days straight coming down off of heavy medication while having short term memory lapses.

what Steve said. Get Asian Bestiary for a start. Then use their bibliography to find all the stories you can about Japanese supernatural creatures, because it's always best to go back to the source.
 
As for, "How would you place them in a Hero game?" that requires an essay, not a post. And I wrote that essay: "Faeries in the Campaign," p. 195 of The Ultimate Mystic. Buy My Book! 😈
 
Dean Shomshak

Thank you!
 
 
I mean, it's the "violence is caused by video games" argument.
 
In the beginning, all was peace and tranquility....  Then, into this perfect world, came the one they called "Pong," and Eden was lost... forever....
 
 

They used to run Joe Bob Briggs reviews in the "Pink Section" of the San Francvisco Chronicle, and those were always a joy to read. He knew what we all wanted....