Lawnmower Boy

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous)

The Partridge Family HERO

Says the guy who is trying to bluff us out of bringing out Brady Bunch Hero before he's finished the final draft.

Re: Legacies- Champions Universe style

Well, yeah. In fact, Doctor Teneber II is active right on these boards.*

(Arcane Adversaries, 96-7.)

Re: Who is the best Super in comics?

The Paul Kirk Manhunter.

Re: When Lois married Lex: more Superman Silver Age Silliness

Clark Kent and Troy McClure. Separated at birth?

Re: When Lois married Lex: more Superman Silver Age Silliness

The link worked fine before it was exposed to magenta kryptonite.

Re: This is Stupid...

Spider-Girl is an alternative continuity, and a very nice one, too, where people grow up and have lives.

Now for the meat of things: we haven't had a Canadian sword-wielding mutant ninja super-spy WWII veteran cyborg super-soldier pirate Victorian wild man Japanese pirate samurai, yet. I give you: Coolio. I haven't actually worked out a power set yet, but he's in a team book, so it's not like he needs one. I do know that he's an amnesiac, since otherwise it wouldn't be such a surprise next issue when it is revealed that he is a mecha piloting space marine Cthulhu investigator.

Summary

Coolio: Amnesiac Canadian sword-wielding mutant ninja Cajun super-spy WWII veteran cyborg super-soldier pirate Victorian thief wild man Japanese pirate samurai mecha piloting space marine Cthulhu investigator.

With a sword. That's psionic. Or monomolecular. Or something.

Re: Order of the Stick

Slow that Belkar-must-go bandwagon down a bit. I want to get on!

Re: Who lives in these quarters? Hero #1

I don't need no steenking format....

Hey, stop looking at me like that. You're reminding me of my thesis defence committee:(

The word that was sticking in EE Smith's mind (and mine), is "Palladian." It sounds a lot like "Paladin," even if it means something completely different.

Although The Palladian would explain why the two actually mean virtually the same thing.

Also, the world's leading politicians are all human-lizard hybrids from Sirius. (Or is that the next dimension over?)

Background: The Palladian is actually Jack MocCormick, a visual arts student at Millennium City College of Art. He sometimes claims to have developed his powers from playing tetris too much in junior high, but may be just an average ordinary mutant, even if he doesn't show up on mutant detectors.

Personality: Frequent mood and behaviour swings might lead you to think that McCormick is a borderline personality, but either they are only for effect, or he has better control than casual acquaintance shows. When threatened or simply engaged in a situation he is relentlessly analytical, level headed and under-stated, although still given to thinking "outside the box." (He hates that phrase, by the way.)

Quote: "That's not exactly how I see it."

Powers: His brain is big and extends across time-and-space barriers that we cannot even imagine. So he has mentalist, body control and precog powers. In functional terms, a martial artist with some ego attack and a limited teleport for movement powers. (or maybe a combat blink.) If I were to "design" him, I'd take Nightwind and rewrite the colour on his MP, buy some Ego Attack with the points dropped into his weaponmaster role, and throw in teleport instead of his running/jumping.

Campaign Use: Tactically the team's scrapper or flanker, but the teleport powers could be stretched into an infiltration mode. He walks "around" walls, as it were. Obviously a hook for extra-dimensional or even extra-temporal adventures, although any EDM powers he might spontanteously develop shouldn't be under his control. There's also the Weird Conspiracy angle. Some of the things he "knows" about the world might actually pertain to this one. If he ever sorted them out and realised that Major League Baseball controlled the international banking consortium using laser mind-control satellites (thank you, Steve Jackson), he might draw the team into serious trouble.

Appearance

He's in good shape, which in civilian life he often shows off with typically eclectic art school clothes. This doesn't work well in action, so he throws a long dark cloak and cowl on, perhaps inadvertently looking like the classical model of dark and mysterious mystic stranger. Because of the unusual way his "martial arts" work, the outfit does not get in his way, but rather flows about in a Todd Mcfarlaneish way. (Intellectual property lawsuit pending.)

Re: The cranky thread

It's called a toilet plunger. It's easy to use, and not using it is not an option. Not using it at work because of not wanting to use it? Not an excuse. Weirding out at people who use it instead of ignoring a stinky plugged up toilet in the customer's washroom? Not helping at any level.

Re: This is Stupid...

Retcon Man

Born late last week to one of the leading super couples (actually, half the supercouple plus a brainwashed clone of Satan) of the milieu, he was raised on an imaginary future time-space bubble 40,000 years in the future after being transported there by a Nazi-invented device that turns out to be totally cosmically omnipotent by his not-yet-born-sister from another reality by his actual parents (not including Satan clone) in alternate host bodies.

Returning to a dystopian future post-apocalyptic New York circa 1985, he fights Martian invaders who will soon come to have not existed before being brought back to modern times as a cyborg due to this week's disease of the week, where he fights for mutant liberation!

Not bad for a character who started out as Millie the Model's straight man, hunh?

Re: This is Stupid...

Awesome Girl

She's so awesome that I, as a writer, am not even worthy of cleaning her knee-high boots. She's so powerful that ...garh, she's powerful. And her bondage-outfit loving alter ego is even more powerfuller!

And she's a killer hot babe. But don't think you have a chance with her unless you can brainwipe her and convince her that she's actually her seventeenth century space pirate goddess great grandmother who is totatlly in love with you. Because for her, that's like bringing flowers on a date -just shows you're serious about being a good daddy to her imaginary android universal messiah children.

Re: This is Stupid...

He has a stomach maggot with a face tattoo?? Sweet!

That wasn't what I was going for, but this is me running with it. Huff, huff.

It drools, too.

Re: This is Stupid...

Badass Man! He's the best at what he does, and what he does, he's the best at. He has a Really Big Gun, knives sticking out of his knuckles that he can throw, he absorbs or emits energy 'n stuff, and he can stretch his skin.

No, really. Just the skin. It's a cool power, I tell you. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

Did I mention the stomach maggot and facial tattoo?

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

Just got a new bookshelf, so I was able to shelve away my "recent" reads, or partial reads.

Neil Gaiman, Stardust. Turns out this comics-writing guy also does modern fantasy. Hey, anyone else heard about it? Fun book, with very little of the great quack, Joseph Campbell.

Larry Niven, Rainbow Mars. Way better than Number of the Beast, so gotta give it credit for that.

Robert Charles Wilson, Darwinia. I can just see what was going through his mind. "What a great concept, and what an excellent opportunity to see how many levels a book can fail on!" Please tell me that this is a fix-up.

Connie Willis. Passages. Sheer brilliance.

Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer, Wizard of Karres. Started out a pleasant enough tribute, then went downhill to the point where I'd nominate the author of the mid-chapters to to write episodes of King of Queens.

Ursula K. LeGuin. Planet of Exile. Neither a new book nor a first-time read, but here's a textbook for several of the authors above.

Re: Who lives in these quarters? Hero #1

For some reason I'm thinking about that alien second-stage Lensman with the "multidimensional mind." [Ha! Nadreck the Palainian. Who says Wikipedia isn't useful.] His brain is big and extends across time-and-space barriers that we cannot even imagine. So he has mentalist, body control and precog powers. In functional terms, a martial artist with some ego attack and a limited teleport for movement powers. (or maybe a combat blink.) If I were to "design" him, I'd take Nightwind and rewrite the colour on his MP, buy some Ego Attack with the points dropped into his weaponmaster role, and throw in teleport instead of his running/jumping.

Oh, and he has difficulty sorting out which dimension he lives in, and a borderline schizophrenic's capacity to draw connections and see significances. He likes Loose Change, but sees it as an allegory about Jean Calvin being a secret Jesuit.

Re: Alternate Earth 4: First Nations ascendant

I'm not going to get into the nutritional value of corn, here. This got big play in grand theory pre-WWII (along with the whole "no B vitamins in rice thing). Corn's defenders have had their day since, and anyway there are other crops in the maize complex. (Also, pellagra, like malaria and psoriasis, was widely accepted in folk medicine to have symptoms or treatments with potential skin-darkening outcomes. Its social role in rural America --you do the math-- has complicated purely medical understandings.

All that said, the recent work has focussed on the claim of propagation lag, which is Diamond's explanation for the delay in the emergence of cities in eastern Woodlands North America.

As for Shenandoah horses --d'oh! You're so right, Cargus10.

Re: The cranky thread

Earth to Atlanta:

Seems we've sold 2--3 cans of Full Throttle in the last two weeks, and the backstock just keeps piling up. Meanwhile, we can't get the four-packs in.

The reason, as it turns out, is that our backlog of singles is all expired. It seems that the entire distribution chain is full of expired Full Throttle. So while there's plenty of product in the distribution chain, there's none to sell. Now we're going to have to tap the well and turn all this expired product around at massive cost (for the distributor) and considerable trouble for us.

Kinda reminds me of something. Fanta? Coke Blak? Hey, guess who distributes Full Throttle to us?

No fair; you guessed.

Hey, Coke shareholders? Maybe there could be, y'know, action?

Re: Alternate Earth 4: First Nations ascendant

Well' date=' there were no Dark Ages, plague doesn't work that way[/quote']

 

There are some bad ideas about how the world works lurking behind the "plagues kill everybody" and "Dark Ages" tropes. I'm a boringly serious person, so I wanted to make that point right off.

Now, on with the cool counterfactuals!

First, what kind of handwave destroys the old world? How about having a graser play on the Eastern Hemisphere in a rewrite of the Niven "Inconstant Moon" scenario. For most people directly exposed to enough gamma radiation to sterilise a woman, future generations are likely to be their last concern, but across the extent of an entire continent one could probably find enough people under shielding to have a good old fashioned war for control of the remaining fertile people. I offer this possibility because maybe the news of an angry bunch of Vikings coming to steal their children to get the Greenlanders to up-stakes and run for Vinland. I'm not painting a picture of a Viking New World here, but some level of intercontinental fertilisation makes this whole exercise a great deal easier to grasp.

Now, it seems pretty clear that Diamond's long continent versus tall continent thing (which is actually much older than Diamond) is wrong. Corn culture is in evidence very early in New York, so no gradual northwars movement, then. It urban development lags north of Mexico, there are far more complex reasons for it than that the corn doesn't grow.

It also seems at least logical that mound-building is an activity, and one deeply embedded in the eastern woodlands mental universe, rather than an activity of a specific people. Everyone built mounds, for a variety of reasons ranging from the practical (granaries need to be above the floodplain!) to the deeply esoteric, as sites of world renewal cult. The mounds do not indicate a local or culturally specific blooming of urban mentality, and the mound complexes probably were not towns at all. Nor did the Mound-Builders disappear or become decadent or whatever. Cahokia was not so much abandoned as moved up to nearby Kaskaskia as prestige trade goods began coming down the Illinois instead of up the Mississippi. --Or, anyway, it is a theory.

Diamond's point about animals is better-found. Argument goes round and round about beasts of burden, but as a big booster of taxpayer-funded R&D, I'm going to continue to plump for military uses here. Eurasia had bronze and mixed pastoral/arable agriculture in the same timeframe as the Americas. The difference is that it went over to industrial-scale bronzeworking about 18ooBC-1600BC and from there to the Iron Age. The reason for that, I think, is the chariot. And there are no horses in the New World, which is where my Greenlander scenario comes in.

What would an Iron Age New World look like a thousand years after the arrival of some skilled horse mercenaries? I could easily see power in the Northern hemisphere tending to concentrate on the Kentucky stud country and "emirates" controlling the horse trade with the trans-Mississippi. Kentuckian Empire in the east, Emirates of Des Moines and Vicksburg, Republic of New Orleans. New England might make a good Prussia to Kentucky's Austria. There probably would be some Norse touches detectable still. The New World could even be Christian, if it were wanted. But of course it would be overlaid by more typically Western Hemisphere cultural elements, whatever those might be.

Re: The cranky thread

The guy in charge of the dairy depatrment quit when he was told he'd have to start manning the registers. He don't like crowds.

I'm not exactly welling up with the sympathy, here. Why not share the burden with the frontline cash staff? It is possible to run a dairy department and still take time out to respond to lineups.

Re: Soviet Superheroes

Someone should definitely dress up in a Soviet flag suit and use her belt buckle as a throwing weapon. That would be cool

Oh, wait, not it wouldn't. It would be lame.

Seriously? Please, no bears, no winter powers.

Re: Alternate Earth 4: First Nations ascendant

Well, there were no Dark Ages, plague doesn't work that way and I've never noticed that Asians were particularly insular, but granting the handwavium? The Americas might be in the dawn of the Iron Age by now. Aztecs in llama-drawn chariots conquering Iroquois barbarians?

Or something like that.

Re: Steampunk and Advanced Industrial Era

Well, I'm giving you a crazy, unedited screed, but then you're asking a big question, and I'm not overburdened with time.

I even have an outline for you!

There's five interwoven threads here (in land warfare) in two sections 1, weapon factors:

i) infantry weapons;

ii) field artillery;

iii) siege artillery;

iv) fortresses;

v) cavalry.

2. Technically, there are two significant drivers:

i) the development of new steel products, including alloy steels and the machinery required to make them into novel forms.

ii) the development of new chemical products (this is more complicated, because it includes rubber for gasket seals, propellants, and bursters for more explosive power).

1.i New rifles are the main factor here, with machine guns as a secondary one. The main driver here is 2.ii. The last army to go over to breechloading rifles had already made that transition by 1870. The problem was still that breechloading gunpowder rifles give up muzzle velocity compared with old muskets. Better seals on the breech helped here, but the crucial innovations were new propellants: first guncotton, later dual-base compounds such as guncotton+nitroglycerine. These gave huge increases in muzzle velocit. The tactical consequences of this was greatly overstated at th e time. Perversely, one of the most important results was that it was much harder to upgrade machine guns to use high power propellants, so that armies were still in the process of outfitting with new generatin machine guns in 1914. However, the new propellants ultimately made bullet calibre reductions possible, and this made a huge difference, especially to African tribesman, because invaders could carry so much mroe ammunition. The major technological breaks here are 1880 and the late 1890s.

ii) Here it is 2.i that makes the difference. The introduction of large forging presses made it possible to make gun barrels out of alloy steel. At the same time, great improvements in machining made it possible to build recuperators and breech locks of unprecedented efficiency and size. The French army astonished the world with the result in 1898: a 75mm gun that could fire 20 15lb rounds a minute to ranges of in excess of 6000 yards, with automatically set fuzes. A shrapnel shell this size, fired from the M.1897, could put 250 shrapnel bullets (per shell) through a target the size of a barn at 5000 yards range.

And people wonder why turn of the last century generals were so unimpressed by machine guns! Howitzers, which were typically larger (115mm) guns, could put even bigger shells with even more shrapnel on target. Typically shorter ranged, their steep trajectory allowed them to "search" trenches with greater effect. In 1914 it seemed hard to believe that any army could occupy a traditional entrenched position without substantial overhead cover.

iii) In some sense, heavy artillery is a continuation of the field artillery problem. But here a new factor comes into play: simple weight. The British Siege Artillery was waiting for delivery of a new 9.2" gun that would require 10 tons of dirt shovelled into a front bucket just as a counterweight for the gun. These were steam age weapons that absolutely required huge traction engines to move into position. Their liberation from railways (whether existing or laid for the purpose during the siege) by large automotive engines is one of the great surprises of 1914. Tired of being described by Western liberals as "backwards," it was the Austro-Hungarians who pulled this one.

iv) the last third of the nineteenth century saw a materials versus shells race of awesome dimensions. Fortress designers innovated with reinforced concrete, various kinds of iron and steel armour, and ultimately just ended up piling dirt on top of existing works. A very influential British defence commentator named George Clarke, Lord Syddenham, tried to argue that all fixed defences were useless. The Liberal government, which didn't (quite correctly) want to build fortresses in continental Britain, gave him a great deal of attention, and consequently his ideas are still heard today. But he was wrong. In action, Verdun proved that fortresses really could compete against the best that modern artillery could throw at them.

Notice that in large continental fortresses, railways and fortresses have a complex interraction. And I think that's just the start of it. Designed fortresses tended to be few and expensive, but I seriously doubt that the great armies of 1914 intended to give up their big cities without a fight. Consider Vienna: the main downtown area is completely surrounded by subway lines, under which the main railways from the various parts of the Empire dive to underground stages at the main train stations. I doubt that this is an entire coincidence. Vienna's fortifications had been torn down, but the new civil engineering of mass transport simultaneously would have served as the backbone of the fixed defences in a new siege of Vienna. This is a huge vision that I am reconstructing, in which electrified railways and sewers and pumping stations and vast tunnel complexes are all interlinked. I can't imagine Vienna enduring long as a completely isolated position; but as a bridgehead position controlling a crossing point of the Danube --that I believe.

My crazy theory, mind.

v) Cavalry innovation was ultimately sterile. They just couldn't get it to work. And cavalry theorists actually understood that quite well. The crazy guy who wrote the 1911 Britannica article on cavalry seriously expected it to make sabre charges in modern war. But he also desperately called on armies to get working on armoured cars, bicycles, fast-marching infantry, aeroplanes --anything to take the main burden of reconnaissance and security off the cavalry, which could no longer do the work.

For various crazy reasons, some politicians and generals thought that "mounted infantry" would work better than cavalry, and modern science fiction writers are often led astray by these strange old men and their candy. Do not follow them!

Also, notice that everyone and his Aunt Sally has been inventing tanks, armoured cars and mechanised artillery for at least the last thousand years. It weren't the idea, it were the machinery, that made them possible in 1914.

Summary: i) cordite fired, breechloading repeating rifle.

ii) "Rapid Firing Gun" -- which is probably the biggest "secret weapon" of them all. I can expand on the technical issues here.

iii) Railway artillery.

iv) "Armoured" fortifications, and, if I'm right, urban development manipulated for defensive purposes.

v) No real solution to the problem of obsolescence immediately forthcoming, but aeroplanes the clear ultimate winner and various shorter term solutions (bicycles, notably) at least worth a try.

Re: Order of the Stick

I've a feeling that when we see Xykon's magic items, it'll be another "follow the bouncy ball" moment.

Re: Concepts You Just Can't Build on 350 points.

Hmm, I dunno. LapsedGamer's point with Meteor Man was that he was unable to stand up to CKC villains. If the character concept of Superman is "flying brick with energy powers who can take what top level villains dish out and stand toe-to-toe with specialist bricks and speedsters." Well, not so much. Bulldozer is 290 points, and I can't see getting useful EB, flight and X-ray vision from 60 points. Fist of Allah doesn't have the EB, and he still comes in at 375 points. Archon, who is still an underwhelming brick, pushes past 700. You want a Superman who loses an arm wrestle with Bulldozer? That you can do on 350 points.

Re: How Tough is Diamond?

Diamond (Champions Universe: News of the World, 50) has 45/30r PD: 45/30r ED; a 1HKA Damage Shield (Continuous, no Strength, Only Works When Hit, Not Grabbed/Grabbing [-1/2]); 2xHardening for 45PD/45ED; and Missile Deflection (Any Ranged Attack), +5 OCV.

Yes, I know this writeup isn't the only way to do it, but there it is in writing, and like the doll says, "thinking gives me wrinkles!"