BoloOfEarth

He's not using a balloon with a face drawn on it as a disguise to get into your base.

I think Marcus was talking about the story before that, where the off-duty cop attacked a NYC subway conductor.

Brad Holcroft used to tease his little sister Tessa mercilessly, especially about her collection of stuffed animals. Unfortunately for Brad, he didn't know that little Tessa was a mutant who could transform others into anything she wished. One day, she got sick of Brad's teasing and turned him into a giant unicorn (covered with pink fur instead of hair). Brad freaked out and gored his sister to death with his horn (not considering that she was the only one who could change him back). Now trapped as a big pink unicorn, he takes his anger out on anybody unlucky enough to cross his path. His attempts to have others bleach or dye his fur and make it anything but pink have only had limited success. The best he can do is make parts of it a garish purple; mostly, all various dye treadments do is make his fur stand on end in wild spikes. He's even tried having it shaved off, but it grows back amazingly fast. Angry at the world, he joined the Fluffies, taking the name Punk Unicorn.

The President rubbed his eyes tiredly. "These aliens make no sense at all! Even though they speak perfect English, communicating with them is like chewing tinfoil attached to a car battery! Who can we possibly make the new Earth ambassador to their planet? I mean, the Queegla are completely delusional, and their logic is as twisted and loopy as..." "...Foxbat's Master Plan?" the Secretary of State asked. "Yeah. They're as loony as Foxbat." The President's eyes met those of his Secretary of State, and both of them began to smile. "Bill, I think we found our new ambassador to Queegla."

Night Mind enjoyed chatting with Steven Spaulding, the Night Shift's liaison with the Daytimers. Though a normal (unpowered) person, Spaulding understood the complexities of superhero life since his mother had been a solo superheroine in Los Angeles before Steven's birth. "So, I heard you have a theory on why your psionics don't work during the daytime," Spaulding said. "Neutrinos," Night Mind replied. "The sun emits neutrinos constantly. They're subatomic particles that pass through normal matter unimpeded. I think the psionic energy I project somehow reacts negatively with neutrinos, kind of like shining a light through heavy rain. And since neutrinos pass through buildings and the ground like they're not even there, they disperse my psionic energy and disrupt my powers even when I'm not in direct sunlight." Spaulding considered what the mentalist had said. "But if neutrinos pass through matter easily, wouldn't you still have problems with the neutrinos passing through the earth from wherever the sun is shining?" Night Mind nodded. "I thought of that too. Perhaps the amount of mass being passed through can cause a very, very minor but significant enough change to the neutrinos to keep them from interfering with my powers. The more mass, the less interference I get. It would explain why the strength of my powers fades as sunrise approaches, and grows after sunset." He shrugged. "The exact cause is pretty much academic anyway. Regardless of the exact reason why, during the daytime my mental blasts only cause headaches, my mental illusions are ghostly images, and my mind-lock barely makes someone hesitate." "Yeah, Doc, but during the night you can rock someone's world. I loved how you mind-controlled Foxbat to do the whole 'I'm a Little Teacup' thing while the rest of Night Shift took out Exoskeleton Man and the others." Night Mind laughed along with the liaison, then checked his watch. "Well, Steve, it's getting about time for us to get briefed by Hallsinger on what the Daytimers have been up to before he climbs into his hidey-hole. Let's get the rest of the Night Shift moving."

Given the two separate engine housings in back, I figure the middle section is larger than it appears from this POV. If you consider the cockpit is actually to the right side of the front end rather than centered, the vehicle is wider (and overall much larger) than it appears from this perspective. Going by the stats in the book, the Moccasin is nearly twice as long and nearly twice as wide as the Chimera. Also, since the Moccasin is able to run underwater for up to 5 hours, I'm pretty sure the center section isn't open. Personally, I'd have a hatch/ramp located between the two engine housings for loading and unloading troops. As to the front of the ship, I'd look at it like a B-24 nose: gunner down low where the bombardier would be in a bomber, probably accessing his spot via a crawlspace, with the pilot and copilot raised up. Maybe a navigator/sonar operator sitting behind the pilot and copilot. Here's a cutaway of a B-24 model for reference: All of that said, I've really enjoyed all the colored artwork, and I'd love to see what you'd do with the Mech-Viper. (If you're, y'know, taking requests or anything. )

Do they have to be bears? If not, I have another idea. But for now, here's a bear-based one: Pain-da Bear looks like a fully-grown giant panda (6 feet long, 3 feet tall at the shoulder), but with fangs and sharper claws than a normal panda. It was a supervillain's genetic experiment gone slightly awry - though it was intelligent as a human and could teleport at will, it didn't have above-human intelligence as the villain planned, so he drugged it and dumped it in a city park just for fun. When it was found, the unconscious animal was taken to the local zoo, where workers thought it was a normal panda that had gotten loose after someone had smuggled it into the country for a personal collection. When Pain-da awoke, he quickly escaped, mauling four zoo workers and two security guards in the process. He took the guards' gun belts and pistols, which he combined to wear around his waist in a two-gun rig. Pain-da loves three things: taking a bite out of someone (much more carnivorous than other pandas, he particularly enjoys human flesh), blazing away with his guns (he's getting to be a pretty fair shot), and then teleporting away as chaos ensues. [bonus points to anyone who gets the reference.]

Q: How many lawyer jokes are there? A: Three. The rest are true stories.

(Tongue firmly in cheek) Eccentric scientist Dr. Penny Hym, who discovered the mysterious "Hym Particles" than can change the size of objects and people, was not a happy person. Her friends and colleagues had laughed at her idea of becoming a superhero and especially at her suggested name: Ms. Mite. "How the heck is becoming really, really small a superpower?" they scoffed. "Sounds more like an anti-superpower. Anti... get it?" Things might have gone a different route if a superbattle hadn't erupted in her neighborhood between Termite Man and SuperLogger (the mutant lumberjack hero who could grow to six stories tall; he used to be able to grow seven stories tall, but that's another story). The battle completely trashed her home (along with many others) and destroyed most of her cherished possessions. She blamed SuperLogger almost exclusively for the damage. (After all, it was his body that fell on her house.) Such wanton destruction by a so-called superhero could not be tolerated. She would show them. So Dr. Hym created a battlesuit that used Hym Particles to allow her to shrink and return to normal size. (She considered finding some way to control mites, ants, gnats, and other small insects but really, how useful could that be?) She also created a "Hym Particle Projector" that can shrink others for up to an hour, and she particularly enjoys using it on giants to "bring them back down to size."

You see Foxbat everywhere. (After seeing the trailer for Ant-Man) NT: Better names for Ant-Man than, y'know, Ant-Man.

As a GM, I always liked the Chimera. I've designed VIPER Nests with a main hallway wide enough and tall enough, and with big enough doors from the Motor Pool, that a Chimera could move around inside. Put one at an intersection and you have full coverage. Nasty surprise for invading superheroes.

Nope, Icarus (the son) is the one who flew too high, causing the wax holding the wings to soften, leading to his fall into the ocean. As to the OP, I'm enjoying the color images, though I agree the green on the aircraft (is that the Quetzalcoatl?) is too bright. And the canard wings are a nice touch.

I think she was referring to the sweet taste of victory over her foes. I've learned it's better not to ask.

Yesterday at dinner, I filled a glass with water, and then squirted in some MiO Black Cherry. As the dark red spread through the water, my youngest daughter (our would-be supervillain) said, "It looks like the blood of my enemies." I took a sip and said, "Mmmmmm... but this tastes sweeter." With a deadpan expression, she replied, "You don't know that."

Garble has the mutant ability to scramble a person's thoughts, hearing, and speech, making communication practically impossible. He isn't very close to the other members of Clatter, since his own speech is so garbled as to be nearly impossible to understand. He used to be a member of the Foxbat Five -- for some reason, Foxbat is the only person who seemed able to innately understand what Garble says -- but left the team after a disagreement with the Cowled Crusader. - - - - - - - - - - I've used this idea for a villain team in a past Champions campaign, but let's see what the people here come up with. The Alexandrian Order is a group of 6-7 individuals who use magic items to try and hinder DEMON. However, their view that "the end justifies the means" has caused them to commit many criminal acts and harm a few innocents, making them villains in nearly everybody's eyes. Each member should specialize almost exclusively in one type of magic item: - Potions - Scrolls / spellbooks - Rings - Wands - Rods / staves - Weapons / Armor - Wondrous Items - Runes - Artifacts - Intelligent Items

Tony Graham was bitten by a werewolf while on a camping trip with several college friends. However, the alcohol and recreational drugs in his system caused unusual changes in his lycanthropy: Tony turns into a wolf at sunrise, any day, and returns to human form at sunset. (The only exception to that is a full eclipse, when he turns human for the duration of the eclipse.) Luckily for Tony, he retains his intelligence in wolf form. Unluckily for him, he only has animal intelligence in his human form. As Sunwolf, he aids the Daytimers as their close-combat specialist. He's taken classes in Tae Kwan Do and is a pretty good martial artist. (And even he has to admit it's amusing to see a bipedal wolf in a martial arts gi practicing the tiger stance.)

No offense meant, wcw, but I'd have to question how "cautious or prepared" a person is who leaves a kid in a running car to run an errand. Even on a very cold winter day it's not like the car is going to turn freezing in a minute or two with the engine off, and if her errand was going to take longer than that, she shouldn't have left the kid alone in the car, period. (Personally, I don't agree with leaving the kid alone in the car even for just a minute or two. When my kids were small, the only time they were in the car when I wasn't was when I got out just long enough to get the mail from the communal mailboxes, and the car was not running and was in plain sight, just a handful of steps away the whole time. Otherwise, the kids went where I went, even in the midst of a hard Michigan winter.)

You discover that the date on your Rose Bowl tickets is the day after the game is actually played.

Once again, Hermit stuns us not only with a creative character concept but also an evocative backstory. Well done. I hope this character's powers aren't too sonic-y; I was going more with the concept of resonance. The son of a classical pianist and an opera singer, Jimmy Turner always wanted to be able to sing well, but his voice was at best pedestrian, and was most often slightly out of tune. His father attempted to help him overcome this mild tone-deafness with practice and many instrumental aids, including a selection of tuning forks. One day, after a particularly bad singing lesson, Jimmy was idly playing around with his tuning forks when he notice that each seemed to glow with a different colored aura when struck. His parents and siblings couldn't see this aura, but Jimmy knew it was there. As he looked around, he also notice that various objects also had slight auras to them. Curious, he looked at a stainless steel frying pan, with its tourmaline aura, and selected a tuning fork that had a similar aura when struck. Placing the foot of the fork against the bottom of the pan, he struck the fork -- and the pan cracked as if struck by a powerful force. With practice, Jimmy found he could see the resonant frequency of most objects. And by placing the matching tuning fork against the object, he could cause tremendous damage to that object. This worked best when dealing with thing of fairly homogenous composition; complex things made of various substances or parts (like living beings or intricate machines) have multi-hued auras and the results of "tuning into" them often produce less dramatic results. This would have been merely an interesting ability had Jimmy not also been the target of several bullies at school, the worst being Tom Denning. After one particularly humiliating encounter (where Denning dumped Jimmy naked in a dumpster behind the school), Jimmy became fed up and sought revenge. He sneaked up behind Denning, selected the tuning fork most matching one of the colors in the boy's aura, surreptitiously placed it against the base of the bully's skull, and plucked the fork tines. The resulting tone wasn't particularly loud, but it resonated with part of Tom Denning's brain and caused him to fall to the ground unconscious, When the school nurse was unable to bring Denning conscious again, he was rushed to the hospital, where they discovered that he had intense damage to parts of his brain. Since nobody else saw what Jimmy had done, everybody thought the damage was caused by a massive stroke. But Jimmy knew the truth. And rather than feeling remorse at crippling the bully, Jimmy felt flush with the power. He has since used his powers to take on a life of crime (breaking into safes and bank vaults being a particular talent of his). He has taken the name Resonating Man and joined Clatter because there's safety and power in numbers. He may look ridiculous with dozens of tuning forks hanging from his outfit, but few deny he can be very dangerous.

Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Actually my first thought was that you were going with "how" (since he can project how something happened at a given location), but then I thought maybe the location was the important part. (I also thought maybe you were playing a bit with words with his name, since "wire" sounds somewhat like "where".) Still, it all works well in the end.

People disagree whether or not The Voice has actual mental powers, but few dispute her ability to command others to do as she wishes, merely by singing to them. A finalist on American Music Star, Myra Scherzinger eventually came in second to a 12 year-old girl; in a fit of picque, started singing about everybody Kung Fu Fighting -- and the coaches, other contestants, and audience members all began brawling. She decided that, if her singing ability couldn't make her rich and famous, her powers to command others to do as she wishes would make herself rich and infamous.

I'm assuming Wire is "where", so that leaves "when" and "how." I'll take the latter, leaving "when" for somebody to post and then name the next team. Footsteps echoed in the dusty offices of the defunct Daily Tribune newspaper. Incognito thought it might be an ironic but appropriate place to call the team's new home, and Motive and Wire were checking it out in plainclothes. "Doc Yok, what's your take on Psychom?" Monty brushed some dust off an old office chair and tested it carefully before sitting down. "Don't you think it's odd he can't see anybody's faces or hear voices when he does his psychometry stuff?" The former criminal profiler shrugged as she looked around the room. "I suspect that's a mental block leading back to his father's stabbing death. Perhaps with some work and time, I can help him get past it." Monty looked puzzled. "What's his dad's death have to do with it? Howie said that cape, Vigilance, did it. His mom saw it and everything." Dr. Yokcor smiled without humor. "Yes, and we all know eyewitnesses are utterly reliable, now, don't we?" She pushed aside some old file folders and papers to clear a space for her to sit on the corner of a desk. "Our friend Howard also said he found the murder weapon, a steak knife, buried in their garden. That was his first experience with psychometric visions, as he relived his father's death. He said he couldn't see the face or any details about the murderer, just a gray form that could well have been Vigilance... or perhaps another person." Her expression was totally serious as she looked in Monty's eyes. "But why would a caped vigilante break into a home to stab an abusive man to death, using a common household steak knife? And then bury it in the garden?" She got up and walked around the office some more. "I believe our friend Mr. Dunlop saw something that he didn't want to see, perhaps involving his mother. He may have even heard things, which he also didn't want to hear. And so he blocked it out, and continues to subconsciously block out individual identities and mutes the voices in his visions. He can see how something happened, but not see specifically who did it or hear why they're doing it." She tested a window, which opened with a screech of protest. "As I said, I think with work I can help him get past those blocks, but it will be tricky and take time. For now, his visions help you identify locations where you can use your powers, or methods that help me exercise my talents." Monty blinked. "Wow. You think his mom did it, and blamed the cape? So, Vigilance is innocent?" "Of that crime, perhaps. But his illegal and antisocial acts are legion, so why quibble over one potentially false accusation when there are so many other true crimes he's committed." Ernestine brushed some dust off her hands and turned to Monty. "I think this place will be suitable for our needs. Let's go tell the others and we can get things moving. Talking this over has given me an idea for a way to get Vigilance captured and convicted for the murder of James Dunlop."

The only child of wealthy parents, Ella d'Ville was in elementary school when 101 Dalmatians came out, so of course she was tagged as Cruella and taunted mercilessly by jealous classmates. A once gregarious young girl who loved animals, she soon grew to hate her name, hate other children, and even to hate animals -- especially dogs. By the time she reached adulthood, Ella had become much like the Cruella from Disney's animated classic. She now trains dogs to help her perform crimes, particularly against the Disney corporation. - - - - - - - New Team: Yellow Journalism Members: 5-6 Yellow Journalism's goal is to use their superpowers and talents to root out and reveal the corruption, injustices, and hypocrisy in politicians, corporations, government agencies, and (their favorite target) superheroes. They feel that their ends justify any means necessary, including revealing national secrets, breaking personal privacy, and putting innocents in danger either indirectly or directly. The members of this team represent the "five W's" that are basic to reporting: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Since some include "How", a poster may create a character to cover that if he or she wishes. However, the five W's must be represented to make this group complete.

Last night, playing D&D 4th -- Our group of adventurers was at sea and were attacked by a larger magical ship, crewed by wooden automatons and led by a person who appears to have stolen the ship in the first place. Our sorcerer has figured out the ship is siphoning off arcane energy from any nearby magical items, and possibly from magic-using persons (like himself). After we defeat the captain and take the ship as our own, and the sorcerer is trying to figure out how to make the ship go while the rest of us are considering new names for our new ship. One of the female players innocently asks the sorcerer, "Aren't you worried about the ship trying to suck off you?" After about the third or fourth comment from various players involving either "suck" or "blow", the sorcerer said, "Okay, I have a name for our new ship. It's the Innuendo."

If the object of Slot 3 is to do at least some knockback, I'd just go with 4d6 Blast, Double Knockback. On an average roll, this does (((4 * 2) - 7)* 2) = 2m Knockback. Basically, something to maybe take a foe's feet out from under him (unless he has Breakfall). Or if the GM allows you to buy Double Knockback more than once, make it 3d6 Blast, 4x Knockback. On an average roll, this does (((3 * 4) - 7) * 2) = 10m Knockback. If the GM is pretty gullible, go with 2d6 Blast, 16x Knockback. Average roll = (((2 * 16) - 7) * 2) = 50m Knockback. Or take it all the way to 1d6 Blast, 1024x Knockback. Average roll does 2034m Knockback. Bam, Zoom! To the moon, Alice!