Shadowsoul

Re: High power magic (Brainstorming welcome and requested) Hmmm. Perhaps something like transform, megascale, turns target landscape or geographical feature, (forest, mountain), into a living being with extra limbs and multiform, plus various other appropriate abilities such as life support breathe under water and so on. This would be why the Elven forest seems particularly eery and is capable of informing its inhabitants that there are trespassers about or 'disappearing' said trespassers without any pointy eared help at all, also the kraken island or the insanely immense rock troll.

Re: Teleporting -- need a better name for it. Planeswalking. Celestial step. Moving Beyond. Wizard's walk. Ghostwalk. Corporeal Shift. Wending. Slipping. Corpus Agito, (Fantasy doesn't require good latin). Alternatively it could be part of a school or system of magic called 'Defying' which allows the practitioner to ignore natural laws by the power of their own will. The formal name would be something like 'Defying the Common Path'.

Re: Malazan Books of the Fallen HERO The Malazan series is a fairly awesome series and I think the setting was in fact intended to be for roleplaying; that may be how it started out in fact. The main problem apart from the complicated nature of warrens is the sheer number of immensely powerful beings wandering around the setting. A very brief list would include were-dragons, prehistoric undead, assassin mages and ancient superbeings. Not to mention the preponderance of godlike immortals and actual gods that tend to turn up whenever anything gets interesting. An adventuring party would have to either be very powerful or very clever and in order to stay true to the spirit of the setting I think you would have to allow different PC's to be built on different amounts of points. You would not have to reveal how powerful any particular PC was; no harm in keeping players guessing and it might help reduce any PC bullying. It might be worth creating a few rules for the path to ascendancy or even the path to incredible power and skill. Something along the lines of increased experience points simply for following destiny or the currents of power or whatever force you prefer to apply. The Warren system would mean that a mage or ascendant draws his power from a particular warren; thus a requisit skill would perhaps be warren familiarity? Elder warrens would provide more raw power but perhaps have less subtle applications. In order to simulate the warren's corporeal existence a mage character might be forced to learn one or two transport spells e.g. travel to warren or travel via warren. There are one or two other types of magic in Malazan aswell such as chaos magic and primitive or pre-warren magic; they might be best beyond the reach of PC's. Those are my thoughts for now, I'm afraid I can offer more in the way of Malazan expertise than knowledge of the Hero System. I will leave you with a few ideas for disadvantages. Ennui, (mental, major), - After millenia of existence you've been everywhere and done everything and now you can't seem to muster much interest in anything. Bridgeburner - Counts as 1d6 of unluck. Noticeable - Power draws power and therefore so do you. Mandatory for characters built on a certain number of points? You're a card - Character is associated with one of the cards of the Fatid and is thus highly visible to those who scry using the Deck of Dragons. Again this might be a mandatory disadvantage to those who reach a certain level of power although it can apply to more 'normal' characters.

Re: Pennsylvania Dutch Magic: design questions Specialised DCV sounds about right to me although one could interpret the spell as aggressive in that it tampers with firearms aimed at the caster; in which case the caster would gain the (unconscious?) ability to force anyone who fired at them to make a misfire/malfunction roll with consequences rainging from missing to breaking or even blowing up in their face. Assuming of course that the caster made their magic skill roll which might gain bonuses from the level of success of the roll for the original ritual or spell. That may be overcomplicated, albeit amusing, however and so for simplicity's sake it might best to stick with a specific DCV enhancement.