Theron

Re: what types of injuries could result from forge accidents? A friend of mine who's a blacksmith has broken several bones in his feet dropping heavy things on them by accident (hammers, pieces of metal, anvils). He's rather clumsy, though. Burns and smoke inhalation can be problematic, especially as some metals give off noxious gases when heated.

Re: Do any of you still play 4th edition and FH Circa 1990?

Re: Useful weapon/armour resource I hadn't seen this one. Thanks for mentioning it, rep on the way. Nicolle is an outstanding weapons historian.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... The most recent one I've finished was Steven Erikson's Deadhouse Gates. Two-thirds of the way into Gardens of the Moon, I'd resolved to finish it, but not read the rest of the series because it wasn't doing much for me. < *sigh* > Now, I own the series through Bonehunters and am about 200 pages into Memories of Ice. Oh, and Deadhouse Gates is quite good. Better than the first book by a significant margin.

Re: Home-made Castles This one isn't as ambitious, but it has the advantage of being fairly nearby I took these a few days ago. They're from Commanche Lookout Park in San Antonio, TX. The tower is a 1:1 scale replica of a 12th century Norman keep. It was built in the 1920s on top of a one of the highest points in the San Antonio area by a retired Army colonel. Originally, it had floors and stairs, though these have long ago rotted away. In the 1930s, it housed WPA workers, and then it sat neglected for many years, mainly serving as a haunt for high school parties and urban legends of devil worshippers. In the 1990s, the city of San Antonio acquired the property and turned it into a park. The tower is fenced off from the public and accessible by hiking trails. My son and I had a dandy time storming it the the other day. (The first two pictures were taken with my lousy camera phone facing almost directly into the sun. The polarization gave them a wonderfully shadowy effect.)

Re: Lace & Steel RPG... worth it? If you're going to mine it for ideas, it's extremely well worth it. One of the most unique settings of the 80s. I've got the original TAG edition and the US version that came out in the 90s, but was essentially just a reprint in a single volume.

Re: In which Chad thanks those who probably will never read this. Awesome post. Occasionally, I go online looking for Chris Hall and Charlie Russell, two of my original Champions gang (Chris was my first GM) but their names are just too common to track down via the internet. I hope they're still gaming somewhere.

Re: Why do you like to play Super Hero Games? Most of my old gaming group were comic book guys. It's a point of mutual commonality. Comics were kind of our default choice, especially since there was one player who hated fantasy stuff and another who had a lot of odd religious qualms about playing anything but. As a GM, it's the genre I'm best at running. Of course, my current regular group actually plays D&D more or less exclusively and there are a couple of guys who've never been into comics, so I'm not sure I'd even want to play a superhero game with them (I've had some very unhappy experiences playing supers games with folks who weren't at least 50% into the genre).

Re: From Tiny Campaign Acorns, Something...Something...Happens Ah, but bear in mind, you already have superpowers. If you go to the other side, you may have MORE superpowers, but you won't be yourself anymore.

Re: From Tiny Campaign Acorns, Something...Something...Happens

Re: From Tiny Campaign Acorns, Something...Something...Happens I guess there's nothing new under the sun. If you can give us updates, I'd love to see how it plays out.

Here's one of those little ideas that could turn into something big and different, and it seemed fairly cool to my admittedly jaded about superhero settings self. I only wish it were my idea; it actually came from one of my gaming buddies who's using it as a one-shot for a convention game he's running, but the premise seems like a really nifty starting point for a campaign. The high concept is that the campaign starts off with a somewhat gritty, low-powered superhero world. Sort of like the "Heroes" TV show, but a few years further advanced with superhumans being somewhat more prevalent and a good deal less secretive (though still relatively rare). The PCs are members of a government agency saddled with assessing and responding to outbreaks of metahuman activity. Sort of "X-Files" meets "The Six Million Dollar Man." With me so far? Good. Because things are about to change. During a fairly routine investigation of metahuman activity in a small Colorado town, the PCs find themselves on the sharp end of nothing less than a full-scale dimensional invasion by gaudily, ridiculously costumed individuals from another reality. A big, crazy-wonkers Silver Age reality. For lack of more precise terminology, Apokalips has just invaded your gritty reality. And established a beachhead in the central United States. As the beachhead expands, the influence of the other reality leaves a footprint, changing the world you know into a world of comic book reality within its boundaries. What do you do? Do you remain as you are, superpowered, yet gritty, or do you cross the boundaries, transforming yourself into something more powerful, but...less...yourself? What happens to America when the heartland really adopts the ethos of a simpler time and black and white morality? Of course, since this was a one-shot, we simply stopped the invasion cold by destroying the Boom Tube-ish device and busting heads with superpowers, SMGs, and an exploding school bus. But in a long-term campaign, I think it would make an interesting starting point, with the heroes barely getting out in time to get word to their superiors and having to make some of the choices noted above along the way. Anyway, that's it. Just a kernel of a campaign premise, really, but it seems pretty keen to me.

Re: Are we Ready to Rock? I dunno...are we? In my experience, rock and superheroes blend only slightly worse than superheroes and pro wrestling. Good luck to you.

Re: Watchers of the Dragon vs. Ninja Hero Ninja Hero (the 4th Edition version) was really a forerunner of The Ultimate Martial Artist, with a decent amount of genre discussion and a couple of scenarios aimed at different (though mainly heroic power levels). Ninja Hero (5th Edition) is a guide to martial arts genres. Neither has much bearing on Watchers of the Dragon, which is my hands-down favorite 4th Edition supplement.

Re: Your characters, favorite by Archetype I'll probably include some favorite NPCs or villains I've created, since I've spent far more time GMing. Brick: Gibraltar. Brit with density control powers. Illustration on my wall by Denis Loubet. (PC) Energy Projector: Spectrum, Your Radioactive Pal. My first and longest-running Champions PC. Illustration on my wall also by Denis Loubet. (PC) Gadgeteer: The Mighty Man-Frog. Not my character, a PC in one of the campaigns I ran. A gadgeteer with a frog motif. What's not to love? My one regret is that I never got to inflict Toadie, the would-be sidekick on him. (PC) Martial Artist: Troubadour. Warrior, Poet, Lover. That's actually what his business card reads. He owns a jazz club. He's hunted by the Troubadour Revenge Squad, made up of women he's spurned over the years. He's also the best martial artist on the planet. (PC) Mentalist: Embryo. Imagine the most powerful psionic on the planet as a very cranky baby. Embryo is a monster, plain and simple, a glowing egg-shaped force-field with an angry infantile mind powering it. (NPC Monster) Metamorph: Captain Stretchy. Not my character, the creation of one of my players. He was an obnoxious shapeshifter, like Plastic-Man with no social skills. Rented himself out as the "Eat Me Ice Cream Blimp" to make ends meet. (PC) Mystic: Witchfire. My wife's character, the latest in a line of witches who control a single elemental force tied to their birthsign. (PC) Patriot/Avatar: The All-American III. Third generation patriotic hero, a cross between Doc Savage and Captain America. Unfortunately ill-suited for the game he premiered in, I later salvaged him as an NPC in my own campaign. (PC/NPC) Powered Armor: Peacekeeper Blue, the official superhero of the UN Peacekeeping mission. The schtick was that there was only one set of armor, but a great many different pilots, a fact only known to the staff of the Peacekeeper Blue program. (NPC hero) Speedster: Impulse. No, not that one. This one was female. And invented about fifteen years before Bart Allen. She was a speedster who got her powers via a cybernetic implant that also allowed her to communicate with computers and control machines WITH HER MIND. Which was still a fairly novel concept back in 1983. (NPC heroine) Weapon Master: Tempest, a stone-cold Iron Age assassin nemesis. Master of a high-tech version of the Indian Madu, he's one of the top killers for hire on the planet. (NPC villain)

Re: Mad, Beautiful Ideas A communist bear wearing a jetpack getting kicked in the face by a teenage girl.

Re: Teen adventure ideas? Go pick up a couple of trades of "Runaways" and "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane." They're cheap (about $6.95 per volume) and will provide you with ample teen hero fodder for months/years to come. Ultimate Spider-Man trades are also good, but they're pricier.

Re: Suggestion Box: name our Teen Champions team If the kids are coming up with the name themselves:

Re: Anyone own Just for a counter opinion... I really, really don't like this product. I think the authors had a rather superficial knowledge of Silver Age comics, and the characters felt like specific roles on a checklist being filled. The fact that the default setting is a group of fictional islands off the coast of the US where an unreconstructed Confederacy still holds sway hit my hot buttons in a major way, even without slavery. I will concede that the overall idea of the book (a history of a fictional comic book company) was a nice conceit. I just don't feel it was done very well. (All of the above IMHO, YMMV, ONVINJ) That having been said, five bucks is just five bucks. If you like it, you've gotten your money's worth. If you don't, you're out the price of a combo meal at McDonalds.

Re: My First Game of Champions!

Re: The ol' name game Deltas (Mathematically, Delta is a measurement of change, IIRC)

Re: My First Game of Champions! Did you publish some of that Hellenback stuff on Red October back in the day? The name sounds familiar.

Re: DC's Captain Marvel: OIHID or Multiform? Yeah, I was trying to figure that out myself. Especially since the Ultra Slot of a Multipower was NAMED for Ultra Boy.

Re: The cranky thread [Marital Vent] I love my wife. Dearly. We've been together over fifteen years and I wouldn't change it for the world. But she has this blind spot when it comes to clutter and trash that drives me crazy. It's not that she can ignore clutter. No, that would actually be reasonable. The problem is, she's this weird combination of a Clean Freak AND a Dumper. What do I mean by Dumper, you ask? If I wasn't utterly appalled by it, I'd show you our garage at the moment. Or her closet. Or our son's closet. Or pretty much any storage space that doesn't involve being out in a visible public part of the house. Now, it's worth noting that I am NOT a clean freak. I don't get bugged by stuff stacking up. She does. It drives her nuts. Which means she ends up dumping it somewhere (typically the garage) until it becomes so bad/impassable that she then declares that we have to do something about that mess. At which point, all activity on Earth must come to a halt until said mess is sorted out, things that should have gone straight to the trash are finally tossed out (she NEVER throws out a box associated with a piece of household electronics, whether it's a Tivo or an electric pencil sharpener). Inevitably, I end up breaking my back for a day or two sorting things out and the cycle begins anew. Honestly, I could stand her using the garage as a dump if she put some effort into it. But her version of putting things in the garage is finding a spot of more or less clear space within five feet of the doors (either the one into the house or the front). Which inevitably leaves the only ways in or out somewhere between utterly blocked and merely hazardous to life and limb. And when something needs to be recovered from this fearsome pile, who is it that is inevitably tasked with said quest? Need you ask? When we were younger, and had less storage space, it was less of a problem, a mere walk-in closet worth of junk. But then, when we were expecting The Kiddo, we rented a house with a three car garage. In short order, two cars' worth became a sea of junk and boxes (having a baby means lots of new stuff and boxes). Even after we moved into this house, we've never quite recovered from it. Worse, is her similar approach to trash. Once it's in (or piled on) the can, it is no longer her responsibility. Case in point, over nine months ago, our neighborhood was annexed by a nearby community, which meant a change in trash pickup and a change in pickup policies. Chief among these changes was a restriction against putting trash in cans out for pickup (bags and boxes only). This has been going on for nine months now. And yet, every time I go into the garage, I find one of our old garbage cans filled to the brim with unbagged refuse that she's taken out of her car or otherwise disposed of on her own volition. Said trash inevitably has to be bagged for collection. By me. By hand, so I don't end up spilling the remains of three week old Starbucks soy lattes on the driveway. Today, I finally hauled the cans off. I should have done it months ago. [/Marital Vent] Wow. This is actually rather therapeutic.

Re: DC's Captain Marvel: OIHID or Multiform? It depends on how the player wants to play the character and what parts of the character they choose to emphasize. If the Billy Batson identity has substantial adventures (something that was pretty common in both the Golden Age stories and the Shazam! series from the 70s, I think a multiform is the way to go. If the focus is primarily on the Big Red Cheese's exploits, on the other hand, OIHID.