BobGreenwade

YES! Darkwing Duck rules! I'd been hoping someone would bring him up. Along a couple of other, similar lines: "Cowabunga!" or "Let's consult the Hong Kong Book of Kung Fu...."

I should point out that Phule's Company has three sequels: Phule's Paradise, Phule and His Money, and Phule Me Twice. Steven Lawhead's Empyrion Saga would also be an excellent resource for ideas, especially in the Utopia/Distopia corner. Also, how about the motion picture The Mouse on the Moon?

I'm a bit unclear on the relationship between the Extra Limbs Power and the Inherent Advantage. In the HERO System Bestiary (page 94), the Kraken's tentacles are Inherent (though not, I note, with the Limited Manipulation Limitation -- fodder for a separate question at some other time), but it doesn't appear to me that the Mon'dabi do (I still don't have the book, hoping to get it some time next week, so I'm using Segaro Krez'shul and Ghenak Vaa'resh from Star Hero as examples). Was this simply a difference in design philosophy, or was there some sort of "Master Plan" behind it? (Reading the appropriate sections of FREd didn't help.)

It's not really comic-book or superheroic in origin, but I'm personally partial to.... "Die, you gravy sucking pigs!" Then again, there's always the ID cards of the government agency of your choice, followed by, "Division Six. We'll take it from here."

Based on your suggestions, I think I'll go with the KS: Past Lives and +1 OSL. I won't bother with a Power to pass the memories on, since this happens at death and the memories are passed on to a younger generation just being conceived; I'll just call that a part of the natural reproduction process. Thanks, everyone! I'll still check on any further replies in this thread in case anyone else has a cool suggestion for this idea.

An addendum... any given individual receiving memories doesn't get all of the dead individual's memories. Any given specific memory (or part of one) only goes to one younger individual.

I'm trying to design an alien species with a hive memory. This is not the same thing as a "hive mind." The individuals all have their own sense of self, and their own thoughts. They keep their own memories through their own lifetimes. When they die, however, their memories pass on to the next generation. My question is, how would you write this up? My first inclination is to go with some form of Clairsentience, but I'd like to see what other minds come up with. (If there are any questions about more specifics on the species, I'll be glad to fill in whatever I can. I'm only holding back now because I'm using a borrowed computer and this non-ergonomic keyboard hurts my hands.)

The same concerns could be said for Star Hero, but that doesn't mean sci-fi has to be folded into other genre types because there are pure sci-fi setting types, just as there are pure martial arts setting types (ancient China and ancient Japan are just two examples, and probably cover more than one potential setting apiece at that).

That's more of an organization book (though I'd still love to rebuild VOICE in much the same way you describe). For a setting book, I'd probably do something historical in ancient China or Japan (and I can think of at least three established Hero System writers, Mr Surbrook among them, who could do a far better job at it than I could).

What we really need is a Ninja Hero setting book.

Setting aside anything obvious for the moment, I'd like to add Robert Asprin's "Phule's Company" series to the list.

Look again! The number of universes just on our own plane of existence (Type I) is infinite. By the time you move up to Type IV parallelism, even the rules of physics are mutable. Someone, somewhere, is watching these boards with great interest....

I don't have TE yet myself (insert sad moment of silence here), but in DH#8 Steve's Leftover Hero showed a basic format: an introductory paragraph, [Race Name] Biology, [Planet Name], The [Race Name] Howmeworld, and [Race Name] Society And Culture, with a Racial Package Deal at the end. The whole thing takes up no more than one or perhaps two pages, including illustration.

Actually what I think would be particularly cool would be full-page color illos in JPG or PDF format (the former in one ZIP file), for GMs to hold up and say, "this is who you see." Each download can represent one or two books for the same setting. (Normally I'd vote for published books along these lines, but I do understand how this would be prohibitively expensive from DOJ's POV.)

Hey, comics fans are the ultimate retconners. We have years and years of experience!

The consolidation (in the CU) could have even happened sooner than that, for unrelated reasons (though still probably for some reason having to do with some other difference between the CU and our own world).

So you're saying that this would have about the same odds as rolling each attack separately? If so, I think this would be a good thing to stick in the FAQ -- and someone will have to remember it if there's ever a second edition of TUV.

Well, someone already beat me to a good story for the first one. I was going to suggest a nerdy supergenius who built this powered armor to get VIPER to stop bugging him. He put gobs and gobs of high-powered weapons all over the armor because... well, he's Hunted by VIPER, for cryin' out loud. As for the construction worker type, I like the story of a former supercriminal gone good, especially if it's thought through in reflection of the destruction of Detroit. Maybe he suddenly saw himself going in the same moral direction as Doctor Destroyer, and probably with the same eventual fate, and didn't like what he saw, and so decided to become a credit to society instead of a scourge. As for a name, maybe he was known as Arc Welder when he was a villain, and now he could go by the name of The Builder. For a real name, try Ignatius Beam; it lends itself to the I. Beam moniker, plus Ignatius is something that a guy like him might want to abbreviate as just "I" (his friends just call him "Beam"), and Ignatius means "fiery" (or "ardent") so there you get a bit of synchronicity with his powers.

I, too, would ignore the "no bridges from Entangle" rule, counting the bridge as a form of barrier (unless using the Create Object Power from one of Steve's HEROglyphs columns -- DH#7, I think). Build a bridge using Entangle, Area Of Effect (Line; +1), Only To Form Barriers (-1). The Limitation could also be expanded to Only To Form Bridges (-1 1/2), and another Limitation, Only From Available Materials (-1/2), could also be added. The bridge would be able to easily hold things with STR equal to its DEF x 5; any weight above that does damage to the bridge each Turn, equal to the STR needed to hold the excess weight. That's my take. I find it much easier and better defined than trying to kludge together the DEF from a Transform (which could technically be as high as the player wants it to be).

Thanks; I appreciate the purchase support. However, you won't find the alternate gravity method in TUV. It'll only be found in DH#7 (which, by the way, you can buy separately, without a subscription).

If you want a different way of doing gravity in the Hero System, check DH#7. I had a different mechanic for it for TUV that I think you may feel comfortable with if you don't like the STR approach.

Not necessarily. Like I said before, this kind of thing hasn't really been explored all that well in published works to date. It could very well be that the Ghoul Princess has a COM of 20, but cultural differences mean that Humans wouldn't think of her as pretty (and by the same token Human women might not look so great to Ghouls, either).

Actually, I'd consider TV shows like The Invisible Man (both the recent Sci-Fi series and the less-worthy '80s series), The Six Million Dollar Man, Misfits of Science (a highly underrated show IMO), Man From Atlantis, and similar fare to fall under the Champions umbrella. See the discussion starting on page 15 of the Champions book for more on this (though my personal name for this style is Plainclothes Champions.) I actually would really like for Hero Games to have a locale in the new CU to exploit this style of play.

This could be just the sort of event that could end the Age of Superheroes (I think the year's 2020, isn't it?). All of the heroes on Earth -- and most of the villains -- team up to defeat Mechanon and Takofanes, resulting in the deaths of most of the former side but also the destruction (or at least the thousand-year stasis) of the two antagonists.

Something I'd like to see somewhere (in the book under discussion, in a series of DH articles, in a book of its own, or whatever) is a broader discussion of the "meta-genres" that have been examined in the genre books. Adventure is an obvious one and horror is close behind, but comedy, mystery, and romance are a little harder to pull off in a role-playing game and could use some guidelines. (Heck, if each meta-genre was given its own book, I have little doubt that I could manage the Mystery and Comedy ones. Such a series would consist of relatively small books -- probably no more than 100-150 pages -- but if done right they'd appeal to gamers of all systems.)