Matt the Bruins

Re: Succeeding The Blood Does interbreeding with Empyreans result in apparently baseline human offspring that don't have the hidden booby traps the Elder Worm put into humanity's DNA? Kind of like Maharet from Rice's The Queen of the Damned, keeping track of her descendants down through the millenia and providing a common link for all the branches of the family? Something that pops to my mind as an alternative to either Elder Worm or Empyrean hybrids is the CU's equivalent to Marvel's Deviants: the Lemurians. Weren't there supposed to be throwbacks to their serpent-people origins that occasionally cropped up with assorted powers–including shapeshifting–but who tended to be outcast from orthodox Lemurian society? Right there you get conflict with your parent culture (Lemuria) and its enemies (the Empyreans) as a good reason to hide among the rank and file of humanity.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Does this mean my Dr. Pepper consumption allows me to add the title to my name without an extra four years of college and writing a dissertation?

Re: CHAMPIONS VILLAINS Sneak Peek #1: The Triptych Cover! I love it that the Champions Universe's analog to Magneto has a personality and mindset that owes more to Paris Hilton than Malcolm X.

Re: Life Energy/Memories Stealer This character concept terrifies me as my favorite PC is a lothario who'll sleep with anyone and for whom I've used Kavan Smith (the actor who played the unfortunate quarterback eaten by Alyssa Milano's alien-possessed hoohah in "Caught in the Act") as photo reference. He'd be reduced to asking everyone what his name is 5 minutes into this adventure! For the must-drain-memories-for sustenance aspect, you might want to simplify things and just use a Susceptibility that kicks in any time she goes too long without draining someone's memories. The way Atlanteans' Susceptibility to being out of water might be a good model. As for other powers, high PRE (gotta lure the poor suckers in somehow!) and an Aid to an assortment of physical Characteristics like STR, CON, BODY, STUN, & END linked to the Transform that represents the memory drain would be standard for the psychic vampire trope.

Re: Do you buy Resistant alternate defenses? I've bought Resistant for about half of one character's Mental Defense to represent active reinforcement of psychic defenses rather than just strong will and resilience. But I avoided doing so for other exotic defenses. I figure if published stats for gods and a freakin' King of Edom don't make use of Resistant Power Defense, I'll neither need nor be able to justify it for one of my characters.

Re: A Modern League of Extroardinary Gentlemen I know it can be kind of difficult to tell with the 70s throwback perm William Katt was sporting, but wasn't the lead character of that show male?

Re: A random thought I had - A valid HKA Usable As Attack... Yeah, it seems a bit cheesy to me since the target of the UAA isn't the person who's actually affected by it. I suppose I could see it in the case of granting someone an attack power with the Damage Shield advantage, but it seems like a combo of IPE and Area Of Effect (Surface) would do just as well without being so dicey from a rules perspective.

Re: '70s TV Supers Vestnik, have you seen this? Oh man, now THERE'S a game concept. Make some of the characters be displaced 70s era heroes in the modern world Austin Powers-style, with the others grittier ones native to the current campaign setting.

Re: Welcome to McGuffins. May I take your order? In the movie version one could only alter one's own destiny, not somebody else's. Was it more versatile in the novels?

Re: Death Traps #1: The Piranha Tank (5th) If those tiny little teeth are Armor Piercing I assume there has been some steel razor blade dentistry at some point in the process.

Re: Welcome to McGuffins. May I take your order? I think the secret of that Pill of Immortality that Dr. Yin Wu created for himself would qualify. I can certainly see Dr. Destroyer, the Warlord, and a whole host of lesser villains doing a scavenger hunt for it if they knew of its existence.

Re: Oil spill Super Model can't really do much about the spill directly. She might participate in charity benefits to help fund cleanup efforts. Likewise, Young Scratch doesn't have any powers that could help with the disaster situation (and attempts he might make could result in it becoming a worse catastrophe). But he could be exceedingly effective at giving the responsible parties motivation to do better in their attempts. Kurzhaan the Conqueror would have to have someone explain to him exactly what offshore oil drilling is, but once he understood the problem there are any number of possible solutions he could apply through magic. Swimming down and patching the ruptured pipeline itself with a custom-tailored Transform seems the easiest. This is the kind of thing Earth Girl was created to deal with. A nice walk along the ocean floor, using her earth-moving powers to seal up the bore hole the oil's rising through, and a few weeks spent swimming around in the Gulf to purify all the sea water polluted by the oil slick, and Bob's your uncle. But the cleanup process would take a long time, and expose her firsthand to a LOT of poisoned marine life she couldn't get to fast enough. I wouldn't want to work in any of BP's corporate holdings when the mysterious sinkholes start opening up.

Re: Who is an Empyrean? After that "Glitter in the Air" performance at the Grammys I can certainly see it. And didn't her first video feature her sailing a motorcycle off the top of one building and into one across the street? Maybe that didn't involve visual effects... I'd assume Ashton Kutcher must be nearly invulnerable if no one has killed him in annoyance by now.

Re: Armor Wars At least in the Champions Universe, I'd think the fact that the most prominent villain is a powered armor genius might give pause to mass production even if it were otherwise practical. No one wants to hear Dr. Destroyer mwah-ha-ha-ing "Fools, your control safeguards were child's play to overcome! Your USMC armored battalion is now a thousand Destroids under my command!"

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore The double down is really only worrisome in that it's a combo of several high-cholesterol foods and likely to be so filling that people won't eat many vegetables along with it. I'd imagine that any food with a comparably-sized entree serving of beef or pork would be worse for you, for example.

Re: Young Scratch And here's the 6th Edition conversion. [ATTACH=CONFIG]36015[/ATTACH]

Re: Laser Cage stats? There's a similar power build in the write-up for Feurmacher in Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks.

Re: SFX Question: What should, or shouldn't, an electicity based force field stop? There's also the possibility that highly conductive materials like copper and silver would allow the effect to pass along/through them without disintegrating. Not a problem against run-of-the-mill bullets, but don't talk smack to the Lone Ranger!

Re: Character that keeps on going, even if in pieces... Maybe simulate it with TK Area Of Effect as the animating force behind things like entrails roping opponents and so forth? I don't think you could feasibly get past 2 hand attacks + 1 bite in a phase on muscle power alone once the body comes apart...

Re: Really, Hero Games? Two Rulebooks? As for the hard vs. copy PDF pricing, let me assure you that product development prior to printing is a huge component of the overall cost to publishers. I would assume that DOJ prints the major releases in sufficient quantity that per-book materials and printing costs are relatively small thanks to volume. But each book is the result of hundreds or possibly thousands of hours of hard work by a number of skilled professionals.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore You should see their perspiration and dirt flavored sodas! (No, I'm not kidding.) On the upside, their strawberry lime flavor is probably my favorite soda of all.

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes It probably helps that he has that "lifting objects by force of will when flying" thing going on, so all the stopping power isn't focused at the contact points and snapping her ribs and femurs like matchsticks. I don't think Tony Stark's hoochie du jour would be so lucky if caught by Iron Man after falling off a rooftop.

Re: How best to replace "Find Weakness" Using Combat Skill Levels to add DCs to an attack would seem to a be an approach in the same spirit as the old Find Weakness power, though of course the mechanics are very different.

Re: The Warlord's Other Hobby... The Warlord has lots of Hzeel technology, doesn't he? What if he brings back some horror from Antarctica to his labs and triggers an "Elder Worm presence detected – sterilize this system!" warning beacon from his scavenged equipment?

Re: Gladiators vs Werewolves I suspect that's not nearly as much of an issue for something that can use its own fingernails and teeth as weapons.