Clonus

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.

Re: A "realistic" zombie outbreak Given those parameters I'm thinking more nuisance than anything else. After all, few zombie victims would be left sufficiently intact to rise in turn and the zombies aren't especially efficient combatants. In order to have a good zombie uprising, you need your zombies to quickly lose interest as soon as the victims are dead.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I went to see 10,000 BC in the theatre last night. Having a protective magician to paper over the implausibility of the hero's successes was a nice touch. So I guess now that they've met the Egyptian Atlantean, the others would be the South American, and the Chinese?

Re: Golden Age thoughts About the same ones I'd use for a modern game. Although the Golden Age had a lot more characters who weren't using anything except college boxing and a peculiar sense of fashion, they also had some reasonably heavy hitters like Namor, the Human Torch, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Superman, who wasn't quite moving planets yet, but rapidly escalated from his initial parameters. As for gadgeteers, most of them are villains (there were good inventors but they didn't turn out one gadget after another), and they could make anything the plot called for.

Re: Poor Taste? One obvious problem with the character is that he's a criminal. The situation would have be pretty desperate before most of my characters would work with a graverobber any more than they'd work with a Robin Hoodesque character who robs banks for justice. Also, bodies have a nasty habit of decaying so the smell alone...

Re: WWYCD: <Your character>: The Clone Saga!! Is that Futurian's response to every situation?