Philipe d'Oro

Re: Harry Dresden I'm not ready to put the time needed into stating up this series, but I have thought about it. Just a few things off the top of my head: 1) In the books, Bob is an air elemental, not a ghost, and his primary attributes are photographic recall, huge KS: Magic, contacts (spirits and magical entities), and sex addict. Quite a different character from the TV series. 2) The wand and the hockey stick focus and control Harry's magic, they don't power it. 3) Mages use obscure and nonsense incantations to cast spells, but they do this to insulate themselves from the magic. They can cast without incantations, but the spell harms the caster as it's cast (this could be simply simulated by the variant rule in FH that you can ignore a spell limitation by paying extra End). 4) End is a big deal in the books and LTE even more so. Spell cost end. 5) Harry can brew up 1-4 potions in an evening if he doesn't have anything else to do. They use mostly mundane ingrediants, but some have special componants. These potions have a shelf life though, I'm guessing a few weeks. 6) Harry's world has: Elves, fairies, the never-never (alternate dimension, shaped by will, home to Elves, ghosts and who knows what), ghosts, 3 types of vampires, 4 or 5 types of werewolves, holy water, holy swords, a White Council (High Council in the TV series), of mages. . . 7) Oh hey, good to know, the White Council's number one rule: Don't kill any human by magic. 'Black' magic in the TV series, but just magic in the books. Self defence is a valid excuse, but don't wear it out. Killing other intellegent beings seems to be OK. The Dresden files seem just made for adaptation. Jim Butcher really lays out the ground rules in his books. I'm hardly a Hero guru to be adapting stuff, but if nobody takes this on by the time I finish the series, I just might. PdO

Re: Question Regarding Justice Inc Mine also has a Spring '84 Hero Games catalog. (Actually that, the postcard and some notes from an old campaign are all that are still in my box.) Man - A 96 page rulebook! That was all the Hero system I needed for years. PdO

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions Those are both good suggestions - thanks. Adapting an old Dungeon module is what I'm doing right now. I also appreciate the comments about balancing combat - which is also a little tricky. I'm coming into Hero from d20, so I'm used to pre-fab modules, and lots of them. So I'd like to see more for the Hero system, but I can see why they don't sell well - because the system is so flexable practically every campaign has different background assumptions for magic, psionics, tech, etc. so adapting a generic module to your campaign is almost as much work as adapting a d20 module would be. I guess I want that flexability more then the convenience. And yes, after a point all those splat-books make d20 much more complicated then Hero.

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions I'm just trying to learn my way around the system too, and I found Sidekick a great read, much easier to follow then the full rulebook. Now that I've read it though, I don't think I'll ever use it again, except hand to my players to get their feet under them. Hero Designer may actually be harder for a beginner to use then the old fashioned pencil and paper method. I can see it will be invaluable later on though. What I could use is a nice, completely statted out, adventure with pregenerated PC's. (I like to be led by the hand when learning a new system.) Unfortunately all the adventures I've seen for Hero are for Pulp Hero, which seems odd, because judging from forum traffic, it's the least popular genre. If anyone knows of a good starting adventure for Fantasy Hero, please let me know. PdO