Clonus

Responding to a break-in at a museum your character arrives to see a strangely dessicated individual stealing from an Egyptian exhibit. There's a museum guard cradling a dislocated arm and his gun lies on the floor. How do you handle it?

Re: Soviet Superheroes

Re: So, How do you take over organised crime in Huson City? Start by looking for a vacancy. Batman is a mixed curse. Sure, he's liable to take you down, but that means you can always look for an open territory where the last guys to attract his attention used to be. Then you can look for the weak mobster to move in on. Offer to help him. He's weak and presumably losing ground unless things are quiet. If they are quiet, shoot someone important without letting anyone know there's a new player in town until later. That'll fix that. Offer, in return for a slice of his action to take down his threatening neighbour. That way, you've got both his territory and his neighbour's territory. Moving into the neighbour's territory you have two approaches. Massacres are appealing, but probably attract too much attention at this early point in the game. Instead you should rough up his street operators, show them that you are bigger and badder. At this point you want a show of force, but not an all-out war. Push them to the brink of war, then arrange a meeting between the three of you in which you negotiate new boundaries and make marketing and franchising deals that leave you on top. If you've got more firepower this gives you the upper hand, but firepower between gangs as between nations is better used as a threat than as an actuality. Cops, feds, vigilantes and bigger fish will all be attracted by the smell of blood. When a vigilante does show up however, it's important to take him or her down, particularly if they have the kind of gunslinger rep that will intimidate your colleagues because if you kill them, or even take them out of action for a while their rep becomes your rep. Eventually someone will decide enough is enough. A bigger fish will take notice of you, or a smaller one will refuse to see reason. Assuming that you aren't prepared to settle for less than the whole city, whack their top man and see if you can't deal with their successor. If they're cohesive and out to avenge their boss, it's massacre time.

Re: A 'realistic' supers world? I'm rather fond of having China distintigrate back into the pre-war situation, with superpowered warlords and gang bosses dominating the scene.

Re: WWYCD: miscarriage of justice Be honest now. How often do you even check on what happens to the villains you apprehend?

Re: Setting: Powerbreed Shades of Sheri Tepper

Re: How do I make this a golden age character? By 1940 they were making a big deal out of Batman's refusal to carry or kill people with guns. http://sacomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/batman-and-guns.html

Re: How do I make this a golden age character? In fact, most Golden Age characters rarely used guns to kill people because, then as now, people were worried about the more imitatable forms of violence. That's not to say that they didn't pile up a substantial death toll especially during the war, but it tended to consist of things like blowing up a dam and flooding Tokyo, getting people to kill themselves ironically, or making their planes crash. You can also be misled by Golden Age covers, which would sometimes show Captain America operating a machine-gun, say, when nothing of the kind occurs inside. .

Re: What was Marvel's WORST decade? I'm gonna be the wild and crazy maverick and say that the 50s were the worst decade for Marvel. Lousy dialogue, cheesy giant monsters, and Patsy Walker.

Re: WWYCD: miscarriage of justice Nothing. My characters are in the business of foiling bad guys. What happens to the bad guys later is none of our business. If they're still loose, we'll just foil 'em again.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Chaotic TV show and card game That the gamers exist simultaneously in the real world and Chaotic at the same time is one of the most authentic elements of the show. It's exactly what would happen if you "uploaded" yourself into a computer. Presumably the tech is being used for other things elsewhere. We see very little of the physical world after all. It's possible that the owners of the technology are looking to achieve cybernetic immortality but first want to test it.

When in doubt: Steal Well you can start by stealing the historical Japanese superhero, Tetsujin 28-go (Iron Man 28). This historic giant robot controlled by a small boy with a remote-control watch was one of the earliest post war comic book superheroes in Japan, but his back story was that he was developed for use in the war, but buried by a bombing raid before he could be deployed. But of course he was the 28th prototype to be developed. The earliest Japanese robot hero was a weird shapeshifter who turn himself into a little tank or plane or sub and was actually pre-pacific war. He looked very inoffensive but apparently he was more than met the eye. His adventures were fighting Chinese in the sino-Japanese war but regrettably I can't remember his name. There was also a single panel cartoon during World War II which depicted a giant robot named "Science Warrior" smashing an American city. Personally I called my Golden Age japanese giant robot "Shinigami". (Which means "reaper/death god"). But Japanese and German villains are so jejeune. Let's remember that the Italians were in the war too. That's why I came up with Amaretto Verdi, an Italian contessa who has Poison Ivy's powers, Lucifer a pardoned Italian master criminal modelled on all those European anti-heros of the sixties named stuff like Maniak and Satanik, and I also looked to the sixties for Pantera Bionda, an Italian jungle princess. Turning away from Italy, you can always get some laughs by porting American superheroes over to the Axis. Kapitan Deutschland, Prinz Dagon der Subseeman, and Fackelmenshch for example.

Re: The most unbelievable trope in the superhero genre... Yes but will that change their day to day lives? Will skeptics stop being skeptical, and will the devout change their routine? But comic book aliens do not trade with Earth to any significant degree either because they don't have the concept of trade, or because Earth is such a dirthole that the only worth taking from it is superhumans. Note of course that Marvel Universe Americans are in fact more hostile and xenophobic than those of the three dimensional world.

Re: Soviet Superheroes Swan is a martial artist who can turn insubstantial and boost her jumping and kicking power. Yes, he's a focus-based mentalist. He's sort of all over the place. His strength, agility, hand-to-hand combat ability are all quite high, and he uses silly big guns (custom-made).

Re: Soviet Superheroes Ah...no. The Ilyanov ape-man already occupies that niche without being quite so stereotypical.

Re: The most unbelievable trope in the superhero genre... Starting in the 15th century cultures all over Earth started becoming aware of the existence of a more technologically advanced "alien" culture. How many of them were notably changed simply by knowing that Europe existed?

I have three characters, Russians from 1939. I have a ballerina with the power to control her own mass, a guy with a "psychotronic helmet" that amplifies his own relatively modest mentalist abilities, and a half-human half ape hybrid. I"m trying to figure out who their fourth member should be.

Re: The most unbelievable trope in the superhero genre... Supertechnology aside, I don't really see how any of those things would affect day-to-day life. Supertech won't do it either if the tech in question for some reason can't be mass-produced.

Re: Idea: Super Hero "Morality scale" And the Authority accurately depicts how most players would react to such a "dilemma". "OK, I pop his head like a zit. Who's next?"

Re: Idea: Super Hero "Morality scale" He was reluctant to kill because there was no point in lobotomising a dead man. (To be fair Docs lobotomies were superscience lobotomies way better than the real things). On the other hand Monk and Ham could throw a captured bad guy off the plane and Doc would react as if they were naughty school boys.

Re: Golden Age thoughts And of course Captain Marvel and the little marvels, Ibis the Invincible, who would do stuff like surrounding entire cities with impenetrable force fields, Samson, Hugh Hazard and his Robot, Magno. There were serious heavy hitters in those days.

Re: Good Luck, Superchuck GURPS Supers actually has a disadvantage called "Identity Magnet" which could take this form for a lecherous character. Although of course the assumption is that is that many of the characters you are accidentally creating will turn out to be your enemies since the template is Spider-Man, where every mentor he ever acquired after Ben Parker's death becomes a supervillain and tries to kill him.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... To Rule In Amber: You know honestly if you ignore the sacrilege of Amber books not written by Zelazny, the Betancourt trilogy isn't bad. It's actually more coherent because it isn't being written by an author who never bothered to decide what was going to happen or what was going on. While it lacks the excitement of actually introducing new ideas, it was a competent handling of already extent elements.

Re: Idea: Super Hero "Morality scale" Well heck, any time you kill a dangerous criminal you could theoretically be saving an innocent from harm. He might kill someone later and you'd be precluding that possibility. The thing is, pulp heroes and Iron Age heroes like the Punisher didn't necessarily restrict themselves to killing bad guys because the alternative was the bad guy killing some innocent right then and there. They'll kill bad guys because they are bad or because they're probably going to get away. This is not something that Joe Random Citizen can generally get away with. It's not even something a cop can get away with. A police officer is not (at least in theory) allowed to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back but Batman could and did shoot down a criminal's plane as he tried to escape in the first year when he was still in transition from pulp hero to superhero.