ScottishFox

If you're going to do a kidnapping scenario it has to be done right.
 
For a friend's birthday I created a Halloween themed Fantasy Hero adventure.
The heroes were the Midnight Market and the scenario is that they were all going to steal Old Lady Nym's giant emerald for their last big score.  Characters were pregenerated as this was a one-shot.
 
Right off the bat they blew my timeline as they spent a good 90 minutes planning the heist, watching which bars the guards went to after work, etc.
They get inside eventually and begin to experience all of the weirdness and haunted-house-ness of the adventure.
They begin to have nightmarish vision flashes of being chained, being submerged in caustic liquids, etc.
A creepy child keeps climbing out of paintings, walls, a child's teddy bear, etc telling them he's there to save them, but his touch causes them to burst into flames.
 
Eventually, at the end, in order to get the gem one player has to operate a mechanism that kills off the rest of the party.  He gleefully does so.
Then old lady Nym appears and kills him.
 
Here's the fun part:  They were already dead.  The whole party of thieves had been caught and killed on their first try.  Old Lady Nym is a lich and has been feeding on their souls with a side order of suffering as she runs them through the night that lead to their deaths over and over.
The creepy painting boy is an angelic being who can barely pierce the wards of the lich's sanctum to try to free them.  His appearance is distorted and his touch free's their soul at the cost of annihilating their undead forms.
Only 1 person made it out and her burning to death scared everyone else off the creepy rescuer.

I would like to thank everyone who took part.
 
I would particularly like to thank Old Man, Psybolt and Sociotard for the grenades they threw which made everything that bit stranger.
Thanks to Lucius and Cancer who managed to finish quickly after we announced we were drawing to a close.
Thanks also to Enforcer84 and ScottishFox for joining in as Parish was out.

I've been running a game for awhile now and needed a break.  Convinced one of my long-time D&D DM friends to take the reigns for a few weeks.
 
He was sweating bullets, but by the end of the session he was getting the hang of it.
 
Resistance is futile.  They will be (Fantasy HERO) assimilated. 

I've been running a game for awhile now and needed a break.  Convinced one of my long-time D&D DM friends to take the reigns for a few weeks.
 
He was sweating bullets, but by the end of the session he was getting the hang of it.
 
Resistance is futile.  They will be (Fantasy HERO) assimilated. 

Had the DNC not screwed Bernie over in primaries I think he could have won.  I think most reasonably charismatic candidates could have beaten Trump.
 
Hillary's disdain for mere mortals was not helpful.

I've been running a game for awhile now and needed a break.  Convinced one of my long-time D&D DM friends to take the reigns for a few weeks.
 
He was sweating bullets, but by the end of the session he was getting the hang of it.
 
Resistance is futile.  They will be (Fantasy HERO) assimilated. 

Had the DNC not screwed Bernie over in primaries I think he could have won.  I think most reasonably charismatic candidates could have beaten Trump.
 
Hillary's disdain for mere mortals was not helpful.

Had the DNC not screwed Bernie over in primaries I think he could have won.  I think most reasonably charismatic candidates could have beaten Trump.
 
Hillary's disdain for mere mortals was not helpful.

Had the DNC not screwed Bernie over in primaries I think he could have won.  I think most reasonably charismatic candidates could have beaten Trump.
 
Hillary's disdain for mere mortals was not helpful.

If you're going to do a kidnapping scenario it has to be done right.
 
For a friend's birthday I created a Halloween themed Fantasy Hero adventure.
The heroes were the Midnight Market and the scenario is that they were all going to steal Old Lady Nym's giant emerald for their last big score.  Characters were pregenerated as this was a one-shot.
 
Right off the bat they blew my timeline as they spent a good 90 minutes planning the heist, watching which bars the guards went to after work, etc.
They get inside eventually and begin to experience all of the weirdness and haunted-house-ness of the adventure.
They begin to have nightmarish vision flashes of being chained, being submerged in caustic liquids, etc.
A creepy child keeps climbing out of paintings, walls, a child's teddy bear, etc telling them he's there to save them, but his touch causes them to burst into flames.
 
Eventually, at the end, in order to get the gem one player has to operate a mechanism that kills off the rest of the party.  He gleefully does so.
Then old lady Nym appears and kills him.
 
Here's the fun part:  They were already dead.  The whole party of thieves had been caught and killed on their first try.  Old Lady Nym is a lich and has been feeding on their souls with a side order of suffering as she runs them through the night that lead to their deaths over and over.
The creepy painting boy is an angelic being who can barely pierce the wards of the lich's sanctum to try to free them.  His appearance is distorted and his touch free's their soul at the cost of annihilating their undead forms.
Only 1 person made it out and her burning to death scared everyone else off the creepy rescuer.

Had the DNC not screwed Bernie over in primaries I think he could have won.  I think most reasonably charismatic candidates could have beaten Trump.
 
Hillary's disdain for mere mortals was not helpful.

I decided to  share some of my Rogues Gallery Articles, starting with my Convention bad Guys, or my Trademarked  Therapods, The Jaggiri. Sometime around 1986. Pete Shafer and I did prep work to run at a convention, when Origins was at The los Angeles Airport Hilton, that year.  After running some Champions, but more often Fantasy Hero, I decided to rune Fantasy Hero, with Pete Shafer as Co-GM for a table of around 14-15 people.  The game was full of shady characters, and a fairly deadly swamp (with some novel mechanics), but the climax of the adventure was running into these guys. I kind of disliked elves, but these kind of fell into that. Ancient Civilization with a fairly low opinion of Humans. I published a version of this in Alarums & Excursions, Lee Gold's Gamaing 'zine, but later cleaned it up, around the time I started working on "Champions the Computer Game in 1989. here then is their first appearance in The Rogues Gallery, issue 21. The following are scans from that issue.




















 
 




If you have any comments or questions, please post them here. Thank you.

Had the DNC not screwed Bernie over in primaries I think he could have won.  I think most reasonably charismatic candidates could have beaten Trump.
 
Hillary's disdain for mere mortals was not helpful.

Trump uses fear and hatred to motivate his supporters. To counter that the Democrats will have to offer a counter message, of hope and compassion. "Anybody but Trump" is not going to do it -- Americans are hungry for a positive vision. But the Dems will need someone who can inspire voters to hope again, as Barack Obama did. No more party apparatchiks like Hillary Clinton.

I wanted to further develop the thought on all good has an evil counterpart.
Flavor-wise I was aiming more for Good causes/invites/makes possible evil.
Prosperity leads to gluttony, sharing leads to sloth/moochers, peaceful society leads to perceived weakness and encourages aggressors, etc.
 
Some great writing by the group.  Glad I was able to participate.

Like most of philosophical leanings the more pure they get the more dangerous they get.
 
You can't boil down the complexities of existence and the human mind to a couple of bullet points.  Merciless competition is just as problematic as a world where the social safety net is so good you don't have to compete at all.
 
I had friends in high school who had this as their career plan:  Get pregnant and pretend I don't know who the father is.
I've known people who spent their entire working age years on welfare and their kids grew up and got on welfare.  The reasoning was simply that they couldn't make that much money with a job.  So why bother?
 
Granted I lived in an area with very good social benefits at the time so they were correct to some degree.  There was no entry level job that would pay even close to what they made not working at all.

Brilliant in Bladerunner whichever version you see.
He was very good in Nighthawks which is an underrated Sylvester Stallone film
If he was in it I went to see it like Blind Fury, Flesh and Blood and Split Second. He was the original vampire in the film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
And he was quite frankly terrifying in The Hitcher.
And there are still films of his I have not seen
 
RIP

Like most of philosophical leanings the more pure they get the more dangerous they get.
 
You can't boil down the complexities of existence and the human mind to a couple of bullet points.  Merciless competition is just as problematic as a world where the social safety net is so good you don't have to compete at all.
 
I had friends in high school who had this as their career plan:  Get pregnant and pretend I don't know who the father is.
I've known people who spent their entire working age years on welfare and their kids grew up and got on welfare.  The reasoning was simply that they couldn't make that much money with a job.  So why bother?
 
Granted I lived in an area with very good social benefits at the time so they were correct to some degree.  There was no entry level job that would pay even close to what they made not working at all.

Like most of philosophical leanings the more pure they get the more dangerous they get.
 
You can't boil down the complexities of existence and the human mind to a couple of bullet points.  Merciless competition is just as problematic as a world where the social safety net is so good you don't have to compete at all.
 
I had friends in high school who had this as their career plan:  Get pregnant and pretend I don't know who the father is.
I've known people who spent their entire working age years on welfare and their kids grew up and got on welfare.  The reasoning was simply that they couldn't make that much money with a job.  So why bother?
 
Granted I lived in an area with very good social benefits at the time so they were correct to some degree.  There was no entry level job that would pay even close to what they made not working at all.

Like most of philosophical leanings the more pure they get the more dangerous they get.
 
You can't boil down the complexities of existence and the human mind to a couple of bullet points.  Merciless competition is just as problematic as a world where the social safety net is so good you don't have to compete at all.
 
I had friends in high school who had this as their career plan:  Get pregnant and pretend I don't know who the father is.
I've known people who spent their entire working age years on welfare and their kids grew up and got on welfare.  The reasoning was simply that they couldn't make that much money with a job.  So why bother?
 
Granted I lived in an area with very good social benefits at the time so they were correct to some degree.  There was no entry level job that would pay even close to what they made not working at all.

Like most of philosophical leanings the more pure they get the more dangerous they get.
 
You can't boil down the complexities of existence and the human mind to a couple of bullet points.  Merciless competition is just as problematic as a world where the social safety net is so good you don't have to compete at all.
 
I had friends in high school who had this as their career plan:  Get pregnant and pretend I don't know who the father is.
I've known people who spent their entire working age years on welfare and their kids grew up and got on welfare.  The reasoning was simply that they couldn't make that much money with a job.  So why bother?
 
Granted I lived in an area with very good social benefits at the time so they were correct to some degree.  There was no entry level job that would pay even close to what they made not working at all.

I agree on macho (that was Kirk's schtick), but I would personally say he was the most heroic of the 4 Trek captains I'm familiar with (Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway) simply because he always wanted to settle things nonviolently if it was at all possible.   A good hero, IMHO, knows not just how to fight, but when.

We call that, "Foreshadowing".
 
Tziruü proclaims Our Interference: Telepathy via Earworm.  Within Our Domains, there is a clade of worms who (with acknowledgement of Har'Ak's Secondary Domain) can exist nondestructively within any sophont, though the introduction of such a worm is a little ... traumatic.  Those hosting an Earworm can communicate telepathically with any other sophont also hosting an Earworm.  Perhaps these folk could be called peacemakers.  Perhaps they are merely go-betweens. 
 
But ... if you want to communicate with anything... you can "Eat the Worm".  Or perhaps, let it eat you.

Tziruü proclaims a secondary domain: Disease and Plagues
 
If it lives, that life must eventually end.  It need not end in violence.  It need not end voluntarily.  With the Gifts to civilization We and Our Brethren have bestowed on the world, it is difficult to imagine it ending by starvation.  But it must end, lest the World be overrun by things that others do not want to eat.  (BTW, most other sentients think the Fsh'mrrm taste bad.)  And to that end, there are diseases and plagues.

Among other unique things extra-galactic visitors can see when they visit is the only known moon in the universe where Holy Communion was held (Buzz Aldrin).
 
Can't get that just anywhere!