Lawnmower Boy

So here's the premise. I have this "Tatammy High" setting where the children, grandchildren, other-dimensional alien clones, etc of Philadelphia's old Liberty Legion go to school. And not only does it have a secret "superhero stream," it also has an evil stream, since due to union rules, the school board can't fire Professor Paradigm, who joined the faculty last year as the drama teacher, and has gathered some Evil Teen Supers around him. But, this is a summer story. Charlotte Wong, the protagonist, and her friends, Dora Guzman, Rose Eley and Bruce McNeely, are going to camp, and, of course, some of the Evil Teens will end up at the camp across the lake. Now, because this is a super story, it is going to be camp taken to 11. Instead of going to upstate Pennsylvania, they will end up on a mysterious human colony on a distant star. Every year, a ship shows up with a bunch of new colonists. In previous years, these have included the entire populations of towns in Northern Ontario, Nicaragua, and Oceania, as well as numerous strangely identical, incredibly strong and fit young men and women, as well as a sprinkling of famous people. They bring a few tools with them, and the ships' crews will let the colonists mail-order stuff, if they can pay for it with gold and stuff. I don't want to belabor the setting too much. Think of it as Fifties-meet-Frontier. Homes have pumps instead of taps, the only cars around have tailfins. There are guns and bushplanes and motorboats and chainsaws, but there are also horses, and no cellphones. The ecology is earthlike --weirdly earthlike. (Besides the clues I've already given you, think Warhammer 40k Dark Elves and check out Valdorian Age, and you have as much of the scenario as I've worked out for myself.) The kids are kind of stranded. They have a spaceship, but its engines are damaged and it can't go fast enough to get back to Earth until it fixes itself in two months. (How convenie-ent!). They can visit nearby systems, though. Charlotte is a mistress of Eight Spirit Dragon Kung Fu, and has a magic sword of Turakian vintage. Rose is a cyberpath speedster from a postapocalyptic future. Dora is linked through a mysterious force called the needfire to a being called the Maid of Gold, who dwells on the "far side of space and time." Bruce is a member of a Batman family. He's got gadgets, and he's just naturally good at everything. He's also a bit of a goof. Where I need help: i) What mysterious evil forces should be at work in the forests? (Bearing in mind that I have my Big Bad worked out, so we're looking for Little Bads here.) ii) What bits of Champions Beyond do you think are hella cool and should be worked in here? iii) What parts of Earth's ancient CU past are cool and should be worked in here? iv) I've got romantic arcs worked out for Charlotte, Bruce and Rose. (Thanks to the Arc for that one!) I'm still at sea for Dora, since she's a magical girl, and I don't know much about the conventions of the genre. Help? v) Any classic bits you can think of that go into the opposing-summer-camps-theme?

I'm not sure I approve of the way that Albert displaces his homoerotic impulses. Couldn't he find a way to be self-loathing that didn't involve blowing up so many cities?

Lord Liaden's candidates are good, better than any I came up with after reading the title of the thread. Rashindar, of the Indian Super Division, has the ego to be a member of the Illuminati, but perhaps too much ego. El Dorado, just because he strikes me as an Ozymandias tribute, is the best tycoon-superhero candidate for membership, but I'm not sure that one would want to push El Dorado towards his inspiration. That's one sinister character.... Hmm... How about Amazing Man? He's getting rich of his patents, and retired from active superheroing. Mr. Fantastic is a member of the Marvel Illuminati, isn't he?

Re: New Useful Things in the Real World! Pikers. You want actual, submerged continents? Zealandia (Shorter: New Zealand and New Caledonia are outlying surfaced remnants of a million-square mile submerged continent that was probably above water as recently as 23 million years ago. The linked Wikipedia article has a map. Kerguelen Plateau (Shorter: a microcontinent "three times the size of Japan" extending from Heard Island in the deep southern Indian Ocean past Kerguelen Land (ditto) has been above water three times in the last 100 million years. Sundaland (Shorter: as recently as the last Ice Age, the ocean bottom in island Southeast Asia was exposed, creating the now submerged continent of Sundaland, uniting western Indonesia with the Philippines, and linking New Guinea with Australia.) Submerged microcontinents (Shorter: bathymetric surveys not linked to the botanical and other studies that have established the extent and approximate history of the above have established the existence of submerged microcontinents on the Jan Mayen Ridge northeast of Iceland; the Rockall Plateau west of Great Britain; extending through the South Orkneys and nearby sub-Antarctic island chains; in the east Tasman basin; in the Caribbean; eastern Indonesia; and, as noted, "Mauritia."

Re: A starship as a PC for Galactic Champions The easy way to do this is to take the "mobile form" as the main character, and the starship as a Duplicate. (I believe the consensus is that using the vehicle rules is munchkinning.) You probably want to ignore the AI and "robot body" rules for the mobile form, as they tend to shape the character disproportionately. (You spend a lot of points for Takes No Stun, naturally, because it's a pretty significant power. It's just that that leaves you with very few points to spend on cooler stuff like cyberpathy and bullet-time kung fu.) As with Mechanon, you only need to specify that the AI form is "advanced enough to take stun." This obviously doesn't apply to the starship form, but, then, I assume that the starship doesn't have Matrix-style kung fu moves!

Re: Musings on Random Musings Hey, everybody, Cancer is showing off his fancy university edumacation again!

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Who needs to hear about this? Oh, yeah. This thread. http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/02/late-night-snacking[ATTACH=CONFIG]45705[/ATTACH]

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Or if you're in a hurry, the staff will just hit you with a shot of pepper spray.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Wow. With a tab that big, you would have to leave an entire Bible!

Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth? The Professor is the only man on Earth who has woken up to true sanity! ..And in all seriousness, seems a bit too easily manipulated to qualify as a true mastermind.

Re: But I don't want Grond to be a pushover... How about swapping out the Monster for Grond? You have to swap the plot around a bit --now VIPER takes advantage of the Monster, and throw in some Gothic colour, but the character is designed to put mentalists in their place. (No, I don't mean hiding behind something solid a half mile from the battle, sniping at people.)

Re: Elemental Planes in the CU

Re: A Thread for Random Musings In the business world, we talk about lean operations and doing more with less. What we mean is that we stop doing the little stuff. It's like skipping your shower or recycling a dress shirt out of the laundry because you just don't have time. With the flu, we've reached the point where we are skipping putting pants on. Sorry, world, no time for those stupid belts and that button at the top. Not to mention the time we save unloading all that caffeine! I wonder if anyone will notice.

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II Not to mention that Japanese submarines didn't fire the 25" Long Lance torpedoes. Remember that while the Long Lances had high automotive efficiency, the other reason that they were so effective is that they were big. submarines by definition go to zero metacentric height at the transition from positive to negative stability. That's why big submarines kept disappearing in the pre-nuclear age. They capsized. You want torpedo-firing "superweapons?" How about this one? [ATTACH=CONFIG]45505[/ATTACH] That's right. The original specification (admittedly for the Manchester, not the Lancaster) called for a torpedo-dropping, dive-bombing "medium heavy bomber" powered by twin 2000hp engines at a time when the Air Ministry didn'tder want engines that got to high horsepower by increased cylinder size, implying an unconventional layout, in this case the Rolls-Royce Vulture 24 cylinder "X." Oh. And it had to be capable of being launched from a catapult. Don't ask me how the Air Staff managed to summon up the willpower to cut the fins and ray guns from the final call to tender. (Image source: http://ww2today.com/9th-january-1941-maiden-flight-of-lancaster-bomber)

Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product The problem with the customisable nature of the Hero system is that is the flip side of the volume/labour intensive criticisms that the preferred "Dungeon Hero" concept is addressing. Dungeon Hero is going to be compact enough to include a mini-setting or whatever because it leaves this stuff out. But the problem is not insoluble. First, some anecdotal comments: a long time ago, I bought Justice Inc, and Fantasy Hero in no small part because it added rules to the system. The dirty little secret here is that I used to be a munchkin. I absolutely loved the "Psionics" appendix of the AD&D Players Handbook and carted my copy of Gamma World to gaming sessions in hopes of being able to incorporate material from it into the campaign. I didn't care that it would be a bit of a mishmash. I wasn't that sophisticated a consumer yet. Sixteen-year-olds just aren't. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks suggests that I wasn't alone in that. Now, the overall reception of this material suggests that these particular products weren't always the way to go. Splatbooks have flourished, catering to the munchkin in all of us, especially since the brilliant invention of prestige classes and class/feat optimisation progressions, but they have hewn closer to the overarching concept of the setting. Radically new material has flourished best in alternate settings such as Dark Sun and Planescape, and these have been criticised for diluting the AD&D core market. It is really this dilution concern that has, in my view, kept the AD&D mental universe so close to its proprietary origins. Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms work together because supplementary products work together. There are always class/races, a Vancian magic system, clerics who can't use edged weapons. And yet despite its suffocating feel, D&D has kept a powerful grip on the popular imagination. Why? Well, consider the Drow. They were introduced, purely serendipitously, as enemies in the "Descent into the Deeps" setting and caught the imagination of the RPG audience for reasons that aren't easy to replicate, but are presumably not completely opaque to analysis. the progression in this case is clearly enough. The Drow were glamourous, but they were also rule-breaking as player races. That might have been it for them. After all, ogre magi would have been gamebreaking had they been allowed as PCs in the mid-80s, IIRC, but of course there was no demand for them as PCs, and TSR did not publish material to allow them to be played as PCs. For the Drow, on the other hand, there was such a demand, and TSR complied by breaking the game. You want Drow? Here's Unearthed Arcana, complete with playable Drow. And paladins and cavaliers and duerro, now that we're into gamebreaking. And no-one cared about balance issues. They cared about the the cool characters. We know what happened from there: Drzzt, paperback sales, and the whole feat progression table thing to bring the game system back into line. And every one of those innovations led to more sales. If there is a "problem" with Hero, it is that it doesn't work in this way, and hasn't since the Big Blue Book. It's rules first, setting next. That's how it used to be. Now it isn't. Now it is setting and entangled rule set first. Oh, it doesn't have to be that way. After all, it has multiple rules-heavy tomes, available as PDFs at least, from which you can reverse engineer everything in the proposed FHC. There, a munchkin will find everything needed to design a Drzzt-like super character who could easily outshine a plain vanilla character build. So why not embrace that? I am arguing for munchkinism and unbalanced builds as a selling point. It is deeply cynical, but these things are proven selling points, and more-or-less baked into the concept of the product. You are going to be able to build more powerful and more flexible characters out of the various 6e PDFs and APHB, possibly even out of Champions Complete. That's just the way it is. So my challenge is this: imagine that you have five pages at the back of Fantasy Hero Complete, similar to the old Psionics Appendix. You're aiming to strike Drzzt/Illithid/Drow-like gold. You are going to present an optional player race/design concept/setting/template that makes some people say, "I want to play that," and other people say, "I want to match that." It's not unprecedented. Steve Long's Migdalor and Ulronai warrior mages are moves in that direction, and there's not much that can beat the power of the oblique references to the Thane in Terran Empire in the whole 5e publishing catalogue, to my mind. My suggestion, just to get the ball rolling, is a "modern day superteam," not necessarily from an overt four-colours setting, brought back in time by the mysterious rulers of a hidden city at the edge of the mini-setting. Call it something cool, like "The City of Silence," and make it Arcadia, from the CU setting, if the players want to use a CU-linked setting. Suggested members: -A qi-using martial artist, selling HSMA; -a gun (or crossbow) saint, selling Dark Champions; -A speedster, perhaps "realistically" the gun-saint, using the Speed Zone rules from Ultimate Speedster (hey, we're going full munchkin here); -An Empyrean-like writeup, for setting rather than rules-based tie-ins; -A Captain Comet-type mentalist, probably the best straight up introduction to the super hero concept. In my experience, nothing gets the teenagers like the thought of being "born a hundred thousand years ahead of their time," or whatever the line is, and science fiction has a host of powerful mentalist, superherolike characters who are not deemed to break genre because, you know, it's plausible that we'll evolve into supergeniuses who can levitate, turn invisible and brain blast people with their minds, and the teenagers eat this stuff up. -A super-mage who uses a radically more powerful/flexible magic system than the one incorporated in FHC. -A cat person. Because, you know. -Wolverine. Naturally, some, perhaps most GMs are going to be appalled. So what? The Psionics Appendix didn't hurt sales of the old PHB. It was clearly optional. In the same way that the Drow were.

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II HMS Hood Quickly, to the Too-Much-Context-Mobile, Robin! So, way back in May of 1916, the Brits and the Germans had a set-to in the North Sea. Pretty indecisive, notwithstanding the Germans having many fewer battleships. This was disappointing to the Brits, but, taking the long view through the Anglo-Dutch Wars, pretty much expected. Things haven't changed that much. However, the Brits lost three of their battlecruisers to uncontrolled deflagration of propellant in magazines. That wasn't supposed to happen! The fleet returned to Scapa Flow and quickly determined why: everyone had been ignoring ammunition handing regulations, so there was lots of flammable propellant tracked all through the ships, waiting to be ignited. It really had nothing to do with their being battlecruisers. No capital ship of the era was designed to exclude flash from areas where propellants could be found. The problem was that the amount of fuel present in these areas defeated fire protection measures. The only reason that it was battlecruisers that suffered is that it was the battlecruisers that saw more action. It was also terribly, terribly embarrassing. Court-martial most of the officer corps embarrassing. Only you can't do that, because you need someone to drive the ships, so the facts were put out, and everyone went on to live with it. Well, except for the "make it didn't happen" school of humanity, which is always making up stories about how they didn't do anything wrong, and it wasn't their fault. the fault of choice was the weak armour of the battlecruisers, the culprit was the old First Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, and, really, except for history books that are wrong (of which there are a lot), that was all there was to that. Jutland showed that, in general, British capital ships were underarmoured, due to the fairly common peacetime presumption that aggression counts for everything, and that if you hit the enemy lots, they will agreeably not hit back. Except that at the same time, the Brits were building the first of a new class of battlecruisers. That were, like all British capital ship designs to this point, underarmoured. Back they went to the design shops to receive heavier armour. Unfortunately, this was armour on the same scale as received by previous battleships, and not armour on a scale suggested by a leisurely postwar rething. The leisurely postwar rethink hadn't happened yet! This delayed their production, and the last three of the class were cancelled at the Armistice, leaving Hood, which had grown into an enormous monster of 45,000 tons displacement. Well, being almost finished, they couldn't exactly scrap the boat, and Hood, about as heavily armoured as any battleship of the era, which certainly wasn't heavily armoured enough. It also had a secret flaw: attempts to keep structure weight and cost down had led to a lightly built ship that "worked" excessively in seaways. Meanwhile, and in a completely unrelated way, navies all over the world were faced with keeping their WWI-era battleships in service for much longer than expected due to postwar austerities. Over time, most were refitted, notably by being given newer, lighter engines that freed up a great deal of displacement to improve their combat power in many ways. Of these, two refit trends stand out. The first is increasing elevation of the main guns to make use of better fire control coming in --pioneering electromechanical and pneumatic-hydraulic and what-have-you computers. This made hits at long range more likely, and hits at long range are more likely, geometrically speaking, to be slightly-less-glancing hits on deck armour. Note that battleships have always had deck armour. Even though hits on decks are less likely at short ranges, they still happen, and, besides, there are coastal batteries on higher ground and rolling to be considered; the whole "immune zone" thing is, at best, an oversimplification. But there was a new threat now: aeroplanes! While clearly no amount of deck armour could stop the heaviest bomb conceivably droppable by some aircraft that didn't exist yet, you could thicken up the decks. This might incidentally increase ship protection against shells hitting the decks, but, as Nathan Okhun points out, the last thing you want to do to a glancing shell hit is divert it into the bowels of the ship with an encounter with too-thick deck armour. In this, as always, battleship design is compromise. So what happened to Hood? Heavily worked by a run through high Atlantic seas, it turned away from Bismarck's fire to bring its broadside to bear just in time to receive a very ordinary 15" shell either on its rear deck armour, or, much more likely, through its 12" belt armour. That shell penetrated to a 4" magazine, that is, a magazine designed to supply 4" AA guns with propellant (I don't think that the 4" HA had fixed rounds) which designers anticipated might be penetrated, and which was therefore provided with venting that ought to have removed the expanding bubble of deflagrant gas from the ship envelope relatively safely. Instead, Hood blew up. Why? Examination of the wreck by submersibles has led to two main theories. Either the flash from the deflagrating 4" magazines spread fire through the fuel tanks that reached the forward 15" magazines, or, more likely in my view, the heavily worked structure failed to contain the deflagration overpressure, causing the ship's structural girder to fail, and Hood simply fell apart. Either way, it is a sad story. Ships are complicated all-or-nothing machines. One minute, you're safe as houses in a human-made ship pounding through the waves at upwards of 20 knots. The next, some critical aspect of this critical system fails, and you're swimming. Add in an enemy trying to do you harm, and a requirement to carry lots of incendiaries and use that tricksie, tricksie fire (Elvish thing, that), and you're just asking for trouble, as far too many sailors, on far too many ships, discovered in WWII. Just to bring out a lesson that deserves to be brought out, this was not all the fault of the "make it didn't happen" school of human thinkers. But here's another example of them, caught red-handed trying to mess up our understanding of the world. Boo!

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore ...Can you get extra toppings?

Re: To the Moon, Malice! I like your Selenites, Scott.

Re: Case study: What if they succeed? But so does Archon, the Empyrean superhero! I still want to know about the mysterious figure behind Teleios. Because if you assess the likelihood of a master plan's success by the amount of substantive resistance that it's receiving, this is the one that's working!

Re: The "Nice Happy" Thread You know who else was on the boards for a year? Hitler!

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares I would totally buy these.

Re: Mind Control with Dog Collars So this would be what the cool kids call over sharing, right?

Re: He's not Bigfoot! He's just a really tall, hairy guy!

Re: OIHID or Why Doesn't Billy Batson not Change Back? "Coming soon from the author of the sizzling expose, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex! Larry Niven's Bowel of Adamantium, Water Closet of Balsa, discussing the horrific implications of Superman's recent trip to Mexico; Micturation of High Pressure Superfluids, Ambient Temperature of Room, describing the consequences of wild steam in the built-up environment; Heart Beat of Sonic Boominess, Glass-walled Skyscrapers of Not-Standing-Upiness To the Spontaneous Cracking of their Entire Curtain; Exhalation That Has a Beaufort Rating and the Automobile Tires That Lack Traction in Shear, and other works that may or may not be published if the Apocalypse of the Silver Age Superman hasn't occurred first."

Re: It Beats the Alternative I heart Professor Alternative.