Rich McGee

I've played a lot of Sentinels and that definitely isn't the case for homebrew adventures, anyway. Montage scenes rarely require any GM planning at all, and Social scenes don't need anything more than maybe a list of what your NPC motivations and info are so you can carry out a sensible conversation using them. Action scenes are where most of the mechanical prep time for a session goes, and usually where the bulk of your table time will be spent because that's where most of the mechanics (and all the combat) live. It's really only that last category that calls for much detail, and even that varies wildly. When I'm prepping I'll prep a climactic combat (or chase, or heist, or whatever - they're all Action) and maybe a second Action scene to set up for it, but usually I do just one and throw together any others on the fly. Once you know your way around the scene design system and have a stable of enemies and challenges to draw from it's easier than it looks. That "Stop Fracture's Plot" thing isn't even a scene anyway. It's a (quite complex) challenge, which is a type of scene element. You have a budget based on how many PC heroes there are to "buy" scene elements when creating an action scene. That particular challenge is a doozy and probably counted as a Difficult element, which means either the whole scene was meant to be rough (which is probably the case - that scene was the adventure climax IIRC), or it "cost" two elements in a standard scene. Assuming there thing's written for 4-5 heroes there would be other elements - the villain Fracture is probably another one or two chunks of your budget, and there's likely an environment producing complications for one or both sides. For larger groups there'd be some lesser challenge or threat to deal with as well. If anyone wants to dig deeper into this chunk of Sentinels there are a bunch of articles on scene design, scene elements, and an example of a (rather over-scripted) climactic scene over on my Sentinels blog, which are most easily accessed through the sub-index page here. Interesting challenge, BTW. You really, really do not want Baron Blade completing that Meanwhile track (he'll escape if he does so, and this is a Doctor Doom-tier villain in the setting), so taking the shortcut route to draw out Fracture puts a real tight clock on you wrapping up the scene fast. You're probably much better off breaking in to the rocket and dealing with Fracture afterward, even though it costs more actions (and probably triggers more twists) to do so. Now that's a full adventure draft, and might even take multiple sessions. In Sentinels it would consist of several scenes of each type, probably something like: Montage scene to locate the Foxbat Cave (which is probably in the penthouse of an abandoned skyscraper knowing FB), maybe mixed with one or more Social scenes with potential informants. Action scene to deal with Leroy and the no-doubt fearsomely unreliable Foxbat Cave defenses. Montage scene to heal up (the system expects you to take damage a lot but heal from it rapidly during Montage breaks) and possibly get some clues/bonuses going forward from investigating the lair. Social scene to interrogate Leroy - a good time to use those bonuses from teh scene before if you have to improve your odds of getting info out of him. Probably a combined Action scene where the players need to split up at first to deal with the bombs, then come together to deal with FB in person - although there are other ways to do if you wanted. FB by himself isn't beating a hero team, but he might run the scene tracker out on them and escape if they took enough time dealing with a couple of complex bomb challenges - or if some heroes got blown up while trying. That'd be a full 3-5 hour session in Sentinels depending on how fast (and numerous) your players are. Only thing I'd be worried about is how linear it is - offering some branching approaches so everything doesn't have to be done in order would be less of a railroad, and provide a little more flexibility for when your players inevitably do something utterly unexpected.

That's a solid way to port the concept to Champions. FWIW, hero points in Sentinels are a sort of "temporary experience point" that you earn in one session to purchase perks in the next. They're fairly minor, closer to Champions Hero Action Points than actual xp and most of the perks are one-use, with a few lasting till end of session. The whole team earns HP at once, there are ways to earn them outside social scenes, and there's a cap of 5 HP per session (which is pretty easy to reach IME). Social scenes can also involve NPCs, and might occasionally include a die roll for an Overcome action if it seems appropriate. Many of the ideas on this thread would work fine in a quick social scene - which are probably the most common scene type in Sentinels, although you'll usually spend more actual clock time in action scenes where the bulk of the game's hard mechanics (and fights) live. In modern day campaigns. In Golden Age games your news media is more radio and papers than anything else, although some newsreels might be timely enough to matter. There's not much of a public internet prior to the 90s and when it matured into a recognizable form is still kind of a subjective call. Maybe there's BBS communities for super-news in the 1980s, mostly unknown to the general public. Super-tech might change that in a more divergent setting, of course. If Doc Tomorrow and the Chrono-Rangers won the Time War in 1946 and pulled an Authority move worldwide, blogcasts might be quaintly old-fashioned by the 1960s. A suggestion that might let some less common powers be meaningful: The hero sees a stray dog keep approaching people and attempting to get them to pay attention to it. Does it just want to play, or does its human need help and it wants you to follow? Lot easier to tell with telepathy or omnilingual communications or canine powers. If it's got a tracking chip some sensory powers will make it easier to return home, either way.

It's stating the obvious, but some defenses? Could just be your basic resistant costume, could be more obvious armor or a force field, could be cybernetic subdermal plating, or a mix of any of those. Maybe some sensory defenses as part of her (I assume cybernetic) enhanced senses. Like the multi-mode wolf gauntlet, that's pretty neat.

Y'know, I was wondering why I was getting all these notifications from a thread I quit ages ago that also hasn't been active for the better part of a year now - then I realized Duke Bushido was back and must still be going through the backlog from when he was AWOI (absent without internet). You outdid yourself on that Screech fiction last December, Duke.

Amusing. Good reminder of why we use dice.

I don't see this being talked about on another thread here, and I know some of you have paid to have Champions character art done by Storn in the past (a whole lot of artwork, in at least one case), but if you haven't seen it he's been calling for work over on RPGnet for a couple of weeks now and the latest post makes it sounds like he could really use it. So go check the link and if you can spare some the funds to give him some business this would be a good time to do so. Doubly so if you're a publisher or know one who might be interested, since a few commissioned pieces will help but a bunch of art for a commercial project would help more. Frankly, I'm kind of surprised he's having any trouble filling his schedule going by what I've seen of it.

Beat me to it, that was the first thing I thought of too. If by "finds murdered" you mean "accidentally got killed while breaking up the info exchange" then sure. But since Kirth stole the formula before the guy was even dead and was in the middle of kidnapping him for a bounty when he died, I guess the details are best left unexamined. Gerson's one stone-hearted guy. And yet Gerson looks at what the process entails (killing children, among other things) and destroys the instructions without regret or thought of disseminating it. Maybe not so stone-hearted after all? Of course, a cynic could point out he destroyed both sets of info and yet still remembered the counterfeiting cheat well enough to recreate it months later, and he's demonstrated nearly perfect eidetic memory in other instances... The biggest material treasures usually found in scifi RPGs are the starships themselves. If you can take a ship without having to shoot it to pieces in the process that's often more valuable than anything else you'll ever see, but you have to find a way to achieve legal ownership unless you enjoy being hunted as a pirate. That's one of the reasons Traveller has so many scenarios featuring hijackers, although the concept isn't confined to that game. For nonmaterial loot, one of the biggest categories would be exclusive knowledge of survey results. Even something "minor" like a planetoid known to be loaded with high-value substances (which might not be mineral - depending on tech and the situation a big water-ice find could do) is a fortune if sold to a firm that can extract the stuff. The stellar coordinates of a planet with a shirtsleeve environment would be worth impossible sums to a government or really big business concern - but with the telescopes we have even today the idea of physically surveying for that sort of thing is starting to look pretty outdated. There just shouldn't be hidden worlds out there, just ones that haven't been given a good look yet. Let the astronomers find a likely prospect, then send drones or manned scouts to check up on them. The location won't be secret, but accurate on-location data would still be worth something, maybe quite a lot to the right people.

That was certainly the intent of the scenario all along, but the 1982 version largely ignored the possibility of things going majorly wrong and a massacre happening, which felt a little naive even back then. There might be some advantages to the changed world of 2024 if you modernized things though. It's now much more plausible that the mercs and the less murderous villains (Scanner and Flare, really) will ultimately balk at killing hostages because they've got to realize they probably won't live to see trial if that happens. The mercs that aren't in sight of a villain are probably considering the mounting police presence (a lot of whom are going to be equipped with paramilitary gear) and wondering if they should just make a break now, or even surrender. An assault by heroes might trigger either response, reducing the pressure they put on the heroes in the 1982 scenario where the police are less of threat to them. The police are a much more plausible threat in 2024 than the 1982 versions (which lacked even basic body armor and carried only pistols and shotguns), which will further help the heroes even if they just provide a visible and audible distraction. Three of the villains are real threats to the hostages if they aren't kept busy once they're alerted. Denier is "a wanton killer" and killing a whole group to get his revenge plays to his psych disad, Sliver is an enthusiastic killer, and Briareus is both a puppet of Denier and a berserker. But the other two might just bail out in the face of the heroes, or even intervene to help prevent a mass killing if they think they can't get away and maybe get a lighter sentence than way. I'll agree that the situation could be therapeutically cathartic and an actual slaughter is less likely now than it would have been in 1982, but it's still a very sensitive situation to use in a game. There are multiple generations of children and parents who've grown up with the reality that kids are not safe in school, and some of them are gamers. If you do decide to adapt it more or less straight the best I can say is I wish you luck, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort or risk of negative publicity. Which pains me, because it's not only Aaron Allston's work, it probably had the biggest exposure of any Champions adventure outside of stuff published by HERO/ICE, period. Space Gamer's circulation was near its peak back then, probably outshone only by Dragon and maybe White Dwarf. That meant something in an era when gaming magazines were still a major news source for the hobby, rather than having been rendered largely extinct by the internet as it is now. I've known a lot of Champions players over the years who played School Holiday, and a fair number whose first exposure to Hero Games was through that scenario. But man, short of depicting a terrorist assault of the Twin Towers I can't think of a subject that could age much worse.

One that's likely going to cause even more trouble than century-old Nazi villains is Aaron Allston's "School Holiday" from Space Gamer #51 (readily available in online archives as well as the SJG store). In 1982 a scenario where a supervillain team and their platoon of SMG-toting mercs take an entire high school hostage was seen as a suitable opportunity for heroics that downplayed the possibility of a massacre by simply ignoring it. In 2024, with decades of mass shootings in schools behind us in real life, it's incredibly insensitive and the police response and merc escape plans (essentially "drive away in armored vans") are wildly implausible. No idea how you could make this palatable to a modern audience, but perhaps there are elements that could be salvaged and used for something less naive. If nothing else the school map is pretty handy (I've used in many times over the years, and not just in HERO/Champions) and the villains (while rather crudely constructed by modern standards) could be interesting enough if updated - and it seems a shame to let that Denis Loubet art of them go to waste.

For some folks, sure. Everything past McCoy is a little off-putting to me, and I prefer Tom Baker and earlier for the most part. Decent looking SFX and budgets larger than a grade-schooler's allowance are positively disconcerting with this franchise. That said, I don't hate the newer stuff and some of it is pretty great. It just feels wrong, like re-mastered Trek and Star Wars.

What Grailkight said is accurate, but Champions has a lot of roleplaying material wrapped around the combat engine that you might not need/want for a minis game. If you're after a pared-down, dedicated minis game rule set for supers that I'd advise taking a look at Four-Color Studios family of rules. Scott's been tweaking and revising his game engine for well over 20 years now since the 1st edition of SuperSystem came out. At this point he's got several variations to choose from, some with light roleplay elements (Super Action Roleplay going the farthest in that direction), some more straight combat games (Super Skirmish Gaming) and some straddling the line the same way Rangers of Shadowdeep does for fantasy (Slugfest). OTOH, if you want to branch out into roleplaying with a strong tactical combat system and the maximum possible character design versatility, HERO/Champions still has Scott topped. It's had over 40 years of development and a heck of a lot more people involved in the design work over the years, where Four-Color is a one-many op with a smaller fan base and much less exposure. Just plain more versatile at doing the roleplaying end of things. All a matter of how much complexity you want, most of which is in character design in both cases.

Perfectly viable technology within its limitations, and there are still autogyros being made today by a few manufacturers in small numbers. The most recent model AFAIK is the German Tensor 600X, a winged model designed for high efficiency and compatible with hybrid and fuel cell technology as well as conventional gas engines. First showed up in 2021, so quite new. Pretty little thing with a very scifi look to it.

What are you on about?

We had something vaguely similar with a shrinking/mind controller villain in V&V way back in the day. We knew he'd "infected" the mayor and were standing in his office discussing potential "treatments" for getting him out when the mayor gets an odd look on his face and we hear him say (in the villain's voice) "You know I can hear you, right?"

It really isn't. To paraphrase from a certain youtube creator, it's no trouble at all, barely an inconvenience. That said, Macris has been banned from a lot more than just that site. You have to work at it to get both the rpg.netheads and a fair chunk of the OSR crowd to shun you. I'm not even sure the group is aware of any of that, and I'm reluctant to bring it up because we all agreed to a set in stone "no politics, no religion" rule and it's effectively impossible not to bring politics in to the discussion when talking about him. Thanks, but I avoid Discord altogether. I'll mention it to the group and point them at the video, though. The two folks pushing hardest for it (who are also the only ones who've actually read it completely) seem to be in love with the log scale aspect of the game, and all I can think is how that didn't work out the last time I played Mayfair's DC supers rules way back in the day. Appreciate the help folks. More info than I had, anyway.