Lawnmower Boy

Re: A question to all Hey, if we're putting in requests, I'd like to see 600 point (Galactic Champions) characters...

Re: shadowcats superhero insanity shop: Justice Laundry Superteam Tide Stick --sharp shooting energy blaster "Starch--" The stiff, uptight team liaison And, of course, their flaky, New-Agey enemies whose evil mostly arises from their hopelessly ineffective, utopian schemes, Vinegar and Borax.

Re: shadowcats vehicular insanity shop: Henschel HS-129 Tankbuster On reread, the following is a rant that ought to be directed anywhere but at the ever hard-working Shadowcat, so my apologies in advance. Political reasons: "I'm the political leader here, so I guess I have to follow the advice of my service chiefs and scrap this stupid plane." Let me see: bad pilot visibility; poor performance; the single-seat configuration that sacrifices rear protection and the radio operator who is the most important weapon on an army cooperation type (and without the compensating VHF radio carried by Allied fighters); twice as many engine overhauls due to the twin engine configuration, in return for a whopping 800hp of thrust; a mission far more easily performed by obsolescent SE fighters; the need for a dedicated engine assembly line; the waste of scarce human (pilot --and twin-engine rated pilot at that) on a dubious mission.... Have I covered everything?

Re: Whatever Can Go Wrong When invited to the captain's table, your ignorance of fine dining causes you to send the gazpacho back for reheating...... What?

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares I remember that episode. If it weren't for Gilligan, they would have got off the island. Too bad Gilligan didn't want to go to a furry con.

Re: No Horses For You Hey, thanks, Chris-M. I was going to come back with references to my own library, but to my chagrin, I got nothing, whereas the Wikipedia article he links to summarises the overwhelming evidence that late medieval war horses were exactly the same size as modern saddle horses. Now I don't have to learn how to link, and can go back to teaching myself how to make fire with flint. (It gets dark in this cave after the great burning orb in the sky goes down.)

Re: The Book Of The Destroyer Just to clarify my own comments non-facetiously. You can take Dr. Destroyer one of two ways. The first is as a pure pastiche of one of the epic villains of comicdom, Doctor Doom. I'm sure that works for some, but for me, the Destroyer lacks the majesty of Doom!, and may not be able to grow into it. The other is to riff on the background we have. Obviously, the Destroyer is a former Nazi mad scientist. Gotta have Nazi mad scientists, so that's all right. What else do we have. Well, he left the Nazis, linked up with the CIA, and did dark and misty things in the Cold War days. What those were, we just don't know. We can go comic book. He programmed --or, at least, thought he progammed-- Mechanon as a last ditch doomsday device. But the 50s/60s are a territory sort of between comic book ages, an oasis of Le Carre territory where things can go darker, or, more accuately, more duplicitious. Moralities can be grey, and nothing is as it seems. Did he steal the mind-blasting remnants of the lost cities of Leng from the depot where the Nazis shipped them after looting them in the Soviet Union? Or did those remnants possess the shattered hulk of the man who was once Zerstroiten? I'm not at all sure that I would go with that spin, but it is a direction to take. The point is, the era that shaped Doctor Destroyer is an era of false legends and cover stories. So we can have that ephiphany where he suddenly pulls down his mask and reveal --oh, I don't know, the Skymaster, or an intelligent gorilla, or Archimago. Whatever, hopefully 3 players say, "oh, we've been so played," and the fourth player passed a note the GM five minutes ago predicting it and laying out his counter-plan.

Re: No Horses For You This is a bit of a myth. Heavy cavalry has been with us from Roman times to 1914, and as late as 1914, heavy cavalry horses were as or more heavily laden than any medieval destrier. Stud farming was the aerospace industry of c.1200--1900. It did not lose stuff that mattered. If you catch the Olympic equestrian events, you will see the lineal descendants of medieval destriers doing what they do best. It is true that heavy cavalry horses are not Arabian thoroughbreds. Horsebreeders refer to those as "warm blooded" animals, and suitable hunters (the basic heavy cavalry stock) are supposedly interbred European "cold" and "warm" animals. Not that this last is particularly scientific, or has anything to do with the use of these labels in biology.

Re: The Book Of The Destroyer There's a little latch. And a spare roll, hidden under the cloak. That Zerstroiten. He thinks of everything. And as for a picture of the face... I want Zerstroiten to have some secrets.

Re: Scientists claim warp drive is possible Other FTL drives only have three sides. Mine has four sides. And that's why it will work.

Re: DEMON's Inner Circle Is that bubbamancy, or is it just too random?

Re: Followers of Takofanes Go for it, LL.

Re: No Horses For You Dogs --not in RPGs, but in literature. You have to feed them meat! Or at least milled grains. Think about your economy, please, worldbuilder. Even your landscape is going to look profoundly different.

Re: Followers of Takofanes My last posting here was blurbish. Here's another take on my thinking. When I began buying Hero products again, I really didn't expect to take to the Hero Universe. By and large, RPG game settings have always seemed like the sandbox was a size (at least) too small. I was won over by what Steve Long calls the genericness of the setting, and what to me seems its generous and comics-like inclusiveness. In brief, if it makes for a good plot, it's in the Hero Universe. (It's rather like writing for the Silver Age, that way.) Is Chthulhu cool? He's in. Want your supers to fight Sauron? He's in. Eternals? Got it. UFOs? In like Flin. Dormannu? Cool. The trick for the GM, then, is to compose your own vision of the way the universe works out of these disparate elements, weaving them together in whatever way that suits you. I like Takofanes and Champions 3000, and am both disturbed and fascinated by the Qliphotic. I want to work all three together, but we know that Takofanes, like Doctor Destroyer, had a bathetic death some time around 2021AD. So if plans around Takofanes mature in 3000AD, they do not feature the Undying King. That's okay, though, because we can shift the focus to his "uncle," Krim, and, if it is necessary, revive his father, the Lord of the Graven Spear for the Champions 3000 setting, just as was done for the DEMON 3000 plot seed. What kind of plot is deep enough to extend 71,000 years? The big plot is the battle between normal universes and the Qliphotic. One of the odd aspects of the Hero setting is that even evil beings (like Krim) are opposed to the Qliphotic. That doesn't mean, though, that it can't be a selfish opposition. "Surrender to Krim as a price for thwarting the Qliphotic" selfish. The idea, then, is that Krim has been manipulating both the heroes and the Edomite himself on the road towards the crisis of 2012 when the Edomite tries to engineer the Qliphotic takeover of Earth (Earth's universe?) At that point, the heroes will be given a choice of accepting Krim's aid or being defeated. Accepting his aid will lead to return of the Lord of the Graven Spear in 3000AD. Played out, this campaign arc will take the heroes time travelling from the Turakian Age to the Galactic Champions era to the crisis of 2012. I also infer that Krim has a presence in the modern era, but a disguised one. Knowledgeable mystics can look at Takofanes and the Crowns of Krim rampaging around and congratulate themselves on knowing that Krim is a demon god of ages agone whose creations live on after him. Meanwhile, the real Krim, under an age-appropriate pseudonym, is engineering the climax of 2012. As for who that might be, I'll just resolve an atmospheric problem I had with Vibora Bay by saying that a godlike character in that book (if you have read it, you know who I mean), is pulling our legs a little bit with his back story.

Re: The Book Of The Destroyer Ah, it's just a rogue Destroyerbot.

Re: Followers of Takofanes Thorn --he's gullible. Vilsimbra (Arcane Adversaries) --she saw what happened to those who didn't get on the Kal Turak bus last time it left station. Archimago's Zodiac Working (Frag and Evil Eye) and Bromion. And, in a perverse way, the Edomite. For Krim is a pseudonym for someone very powerful, someone who has been working behind the scenes for a very long time indeed. The pieces are coming together, and the stars are right. When the time comes in 2012, this universe will have two choices: the Qliphotic, or the Ivory Throne. Though the consequences of that choice may not be manifest until 3000, and the being who mounts the throne will be Kal Turak's father....

Re: What Makes a Good Non-Human Fantasy Race? Authorial insert characters. "Yes, this new race is cool. But it's an NPC race only, and you can't play with it. You wouldn't enjoy it on as many levels as I do."

Re: Which super-powered villain would be dumb enough to work for the Black Harlequin? The only way I'd work for the Joker is if he paid big money and I were desperate and stupid. So, really, most low-life crooks would fit right in. As for supervillains, how about the Cirque Sinister?

Re: drone followers Szygy, a 783 point robot character in Villains, Vandals and Vermin, buys 12 independent "attack orbs" as a 220 point Duplication (creates 12 400 point duplicates). The orbs fly around, gather information, and shoot people, sending info back via Mind Link. Seems to be what you're looking for.

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? .....said the Black Knight.

Re: Galactic Habitable Zones But why is it the rim that is so highly radioactive? Usually it's the core zone that is uninhabitable due to high rents and property crime ...er, I mean, radiation.

Re: Handling day and night on infinite plane? Flight attendants have come a long way. They didn't use to have a reputation for being closed under all operations...

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? The United States went to war to enforce neutral rights (in commercial shipping) and stop impressment. Britain went to war because the United States attack it. Peace was signed once American demands on Britain were dropped. That be losing.

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? Still "reading my way into American history," to quote William Polk (Birth of America: pick it up for the footnotes, if anything. Seriously, lose your sense of entitlement and do some thinking to go with the reading before you publish). I've finally found one that a layperson might like if a layperson could like that thing. Jon Latimer, 1812: War With America (Cambridge: Belknap for Harvard UP, 2007; 978-0-674-02584. Don't confuse it with the lesser effort by Canadian author Mark Zuehnke, with its similar dust jacket design. And perhaps used caution if your veins run red-white-and-blue, as Latimer's point is that, bulletin: America lost. As always, the themes of the day invade history, and 1812 starts looking astonishingly like the misadventure in Iraq, with the difference that Madison had the good sense to pull out (and a great deal more help from Castlereagh and Liverpool than G. W. is getting.)

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Egyptoid, you've posted this in the wrong thread. This is "Genre Crossover Nightmares."