Lawnmower Boy

Re: Super City A.C.R.O.N.Y.M Secret Base The Agency for the Coordination of Responses to Overlords, Nemesi and Y'know, Mind does not have its headquarters in Super City. The headquarters is comfortably and practically located on a Helicarrier that burns Norway's entire POL output. Normally, it floats over Washington for budget hearings so that everyone can do lunch with everyone. The helicarrier cafeteria is an especially famous place for confidential meetings. "What? I can't hear you, Senator! No-one can hear you. There's a 50 metre-long heliblade turning 3 metres above our heads. How do you like our salad? Our chef specialises in diesel fume-enhanced recipes! Oh, sorry, I'll text that to you." However, ACRONYM does need a secret base in Super City. (Shh. You're not supposed to tell anyone). It is a perfectly reasonable underground operation conveniently located under the downtown, complete with hangars large enough to hold an entire air cavalry division. (If you're ever wondering how to get something like this by the accountants at your corporate, just start with the Helicarrier. That will bludgeon down their resistance, so that by the time you start talking about quiet demolition explosives and tunneling devices, they'll just be modelling their Napoleon pose and reciting Gilbert and Sullivan to themselves, crazy as Britney on a bad day.) The only problem with the base is that it has no office space. Well, it does have office space, but with all the secret exits to SCTS, barber shops, dry cleaners, telephone booths, high schools and so on, there's practically nowhere you can actually go to get any work done without having a few agents suddenly pop in, often accompanied by nosy fellow students, girlfriends and wacky sidekicks. Also, it is apparently reserved for emergencies. So the next time superheroes are fighting an alien invasion, evil overlord, Atlantian attack, rampaging dinosaurs, super-strong, misunderstood creature or whatnot, don't expect all the air cav and super-agents to come boiling out of the ground to your rescue. Because for some odd reason, that only happens once a year.

Re: Order of the Stick Elan's greatest gift is this: any PC can end up being railroaded, but Elan can at least hear the train coming "I hear that train a-comin'/I hear it all the time..." It must be a musician thing. Bet he gets all the cool chicks, too.

Re: Interstellar flight by 2070? There's gotta be an algorithm that tells you how crazy a guy is by the number of uses of the words "I," "me," "mine" and so on. It would probably tell us that Pellegrino is, uhm, "reality challenged."

Re: TA: Turkarian age campaign level Player: "There's a swimming pool at this castle? Cool, my character loves swimming." GM: And while you're having a nice swim, ninjas attack!" Player: "Did I mention that I was wearing my full plate armour?" .... Oh, wait. Did you mean real life?

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

Re: Super City Incongruous Large Object Square Some cities have a cathedral as focus, while others sprawl around a giant statue of their founder, an ironwork tower, even a big Ferris Wheel. Mayor Nuthin's executive committee is holding a contest to determine what will work best for Super City, but no-one's holding their breath for the winner to be announced. Instead, City Works trucks a new large object into the central plaza periodically. What will it be today? A giant nickel? The world's largest ball of tinfoil? A statue of justice/liberty with a stone torch that mysteriously burns evildoers and/or commies? Come and find out, and bring an arch-nemesis!

Re: Champions Universe: The Valley Of Night Oh, and what I should have said before --"Very cool, LL."

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War I've been running around so fast at work, it seems like this thread just started. Have I fallen behind?

Re: The Worst character in comics

Re: Champions Universe: The Valley Of Night "El Dorado" is a little more complicated, since the term was sometimes used to refer to the Habsburg emperors/Kings of Spain, who often identified themselves with the Sun as a family or royal emblem. The Sun is, and has been since at least Assyrian times, been one of the preeminent symbols of royal power --and thus of the king of the gods. It looks like the Inca had the hang of this particular metaphor, too. Hmm.. it has been noticed that Brazil's preeminent superhero, Miguel Esconsada de Vllareal (Champions Worldwide, 105--107) has, oddly enough, taken the Spanish name, El Dorado. Since this clearly isn't some kind of authorial slip-up, there's a reason for a Portuguese-speaking hero using a Spanish name. My proposal: "El Dorado" has been shaped, or is shaping himself, into Inti's avatar on Earth. His philanthropic ventures make him the uncrowned king of Latin America, and eventually he will either channel Inti's power, or, in a more morbid scenario, offer himself as a human sacrifice to stop Eclipsar.

Re: Order of the Stick Lien, Lien..... Kids today.

Re: Super City Clanahan's Crosstime Strip Mall If you know Super City, you know Clanahan's bar. How could you not? There's a franchise on every block, complete with animatronic bar flies throwing out bad puns --when they work. Not as many people go to the slightly-out-of-the-way original Clanahan's, in a strip mall somewhere between downtown and suburbia, sharing space with Clanahan's Crosstime Escort Agency, Clanahan's Crosstime Sporting Goods Store, Clanahan's Crosstime Supermarket, Clanahan's Crosstime Comic and Game Store (featuring regular signing sessions by Grant Morrison). Plus two Starbucks and a Baby Gap. Whatever Clanahan's you go into, you get the same strange vibe that combines homeliness with strangeness. The odd, yet oft familiar patrons are always welcoming. There's the old, beared man in the hooded cloak, shoulders not quite completely cleaned of bird doo-doo; the tall, intelligent looking, grey-eyed Greekish woman, sitting at a table. Why do they ring a bell? Is it the T-shirts they're wearing? ("Kiss me --I'm Odin;" and "Get a clue! One last time, not Artemis.") Are these some kind of subtle hints of something deeper going on here? No, wait. That would be the 12 foot tall cockroach drinking Mai Tais at the bar. If he asks you to walk him home at closing time, this would be a good to peek at your character sheet and make sure you're built on 200+150, at least. And if you have the weirdest feeling that you might just be about to have a crosstime adventure in weird parallel universes where Austria won the War of 1866 or the world is run by the Zungharian Empire, don't forget to stop by Clanahan's. You can always find a bum who will trade a bottle of tequila for a used Crosstime Integrated Rail Transit System Transfer hanging around outside. But watch out for the CIRTS transit cops! They're minty fresh --and they have powered armour.

Re: Starships Shooting At Superheroes Some possible answers: The Champions 3000's personal flitter, The Meteor, has a Proton Cannon (RKA 6d6, Increased Maximum Range, 771,875 hexes, about 959 miles.) Mechanon 3000 is built as a gigantic berserker-type death star. His eye-beams are a 360 point Multipower, limited arc of fire, with megascale advantage (1000km=1 hex). His missiles are 6d6 RKA, 2xAP, Autofire (15 shots), increased Maximum Range, to about 450 miles. Terran Empire write-ups are in this range, but there is a much more extensive selection. I haven't bothered to look at Alien Wars, but it also has numerous starship weapon writeups.

Re: Super City Third Base Lookout Third Base Lookout is known as much for its romantic seclusion and natural privacy as for its 360 degree view of the vast and silent Super City North Woods, majestic Super City Mountains, stormy Gulf of Super City, harsh yet beautiful Super City Badlands, verdant Super City Bayou, vast wheat fields of the Super City Heartland, and the rolling fields, winding country lanes, trees and quaint nineteenth century farmhouses of the Super City Amish/maple syrup country. (As the Super City Tourist Board points out, amongst American cities, only Riverdale and Springfield can match it for variety of scenery and day trip activities.) Oh. And for the rampaging super menaces magnetically attracted to the first sign of a steamy window.

Re: The Worst character in comics Call me crazy, but I like both the Scarlet Spider and Cable. The problem with both of them is that they got in the way of the story that comics cannot bring themselves to tell. (How Peter/Mary Jane and Scott/Jean grew up.) Don't blame the characters; blame the industry, which for some reason thinks that comics characters can't have life cycles because we wouldn't identify with them any more. Some counter-intuitive choices: i) Superman/Doctor Strange/Spectre: "You know who would make a great protagonist in a serial drama? Someone omnipotent!" ii) Aquaman/The Submariner: Cool character or not, useful powers or not, they're underwater. There's no bank robberies underwater. Heck, there aren't even any refrigerators, although credit both series' writers for coming up with alternatives. (I just thank Heavens that no-one seems to notice that Susan Storm is Namor's mistress [and Reed and Ben's beard], because I like her and she's stayed out of the fridge for 40 years.) iii) The Phantom. "Thank Heavens us nice Black people have a White hero to defend us forever!"

Re: Super City And... in the spirit of the day Negligent Homicide Electronic Arts The amazing thing about NHEA isn't that they think that there's money in virtual reality gaming. It's that they still get playtesters. Good thing that playboy billionaires, mild-mannered reporters and FBI agents are always showing up and volunteering! "We tell all the new hires: 'Code 1' means prep the Persistent Vegetative Ward we built in the old company gym; 'Code 2' means 'get a mop and bucket, 'cuz Forensics is done here!'" Really, who would ever have thought that hooking up naked human brains to an enormous computer would be so dangerous?

Re: Order of the Stick Raise the Red Lampshade!

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) Paging the Greco-American Anti-Defamation League...

Re: Super City Well, the thread hasn't sunk below the bar, and I've come up with a few new locations

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... No, you're not. Trust me on this.

Re: Super City General Buck Turgidson AFB Conveniently located close enough to the nearest skyscraper for swing-facilitated entry, Turgidson AFB has an astonishingly large number of tanks for an air force base. However, its main purpose is to store an even more amazing number of nuclear weapons. Ranging from ICBMs perfect for inadvertently starting WWIII to quaint, retro-stylin' 1950s H-bombs that may or may not still work, the inventory has it all. This might seem a little ....reckless, but, really, once you choose a place as the location of the official Doomsday Weapon Program, what do you have to lose? And while security might be a bit of an issue, though at least there are options at hand when a rampaging radioactive dinosaur begins renovating the downtown core.

Re: Some questions about Stronghold Whoah... one of the plot seeds for Bromion (renegade Avatar of Order in Arcane Adversaries) has him subverting a prison on Earth. Of course, there's also a Demon: Servants of Darkness plot seed to the same effect:eek:

Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe And... the plot seed. Champions 3000 The Elder Worm attacks and the heroes beat him off, but in the aftermath, the heroes are blamed for the destruction and imprisoned by the Galactic Federation! Then the Sword of Ackal rescues them and reveals that Ackalian intelligence has detected a strange plague sweeping Federation. Strange, reptilian humans command planets and battleships in the service of elder horrors, and other species are succumbing, too. An ancient prophecy says that only the Progenitors can save the Galaxy by waking our sleeping Empyrean genes through morphogenetic resonance fields. All the heroes have to do is find the Progenitors and wake the sleeping Empyreans while evading Galactic law enforcement.

Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe

Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe To be frank, I'm more a high holidays kind of Lord Liadenist. Check in again if I ever run for public office, though.