Darren Watts

Re: Where can I go to ask questions about Champions Live Action rules?

1. True. You don't want them to be *too* effective, do you? Also, that effect's built into the gun, so if a better marksman gets ahold of one,they can wield it with greater skill.

2. Yes it can.

3. Woot! dw

Re: Where can I go to ask questions about Champions Live Action rules?

1) Oops! That's a mistake- "Double Shot" was changed to "Autofire" late in the process, and it looks like we missed a place the old one existed. Use "Autofire" instead.

2) "RND" means "random (number)"- just use your PCD to generate a number and add it to the challenge.

3) We're actively discussing that right now with a few people. Please stay tuned! dw

Re: Silver Age Superman

The SA Spectre is built on more points' date=' I suppose, but I can't think of any other comic book heroes who might be.[/quote']

 

SA Martian Manhunter, if you include everything he's seen doing in a comic somewhere. He's a tick below Supes as a brick, but adds a full suite of mental powers and shapeshifting. Fortunately for the rest of the setting, he has both the most ludicrous Vulnerability in herodom and writers who can't keep track of everything he can do. dw

Re: Where can I go to ask questions about Champions Live Action rules?

Well, you're here now, so if I can help with the rules questions I will (I'm not the expert, but I was the editor.) If Jason or another actual mod wants to move this somewhere, that's of course fine by me! So what's the question? dw

Re: Silver Age Superman

Technically, Green and Red Kryptonite don't take away his powers, though Green makes them weaker progressively as it kills him. Red changes him into something else, but most of those forms have some version of Superman's basic powers. Gold Kryptonite takes away his powers, "permanently." dw

Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

The Atomic Eye tried out for the team' date=' but I thought we were going with the Atomic Pie instead, and having both on the team would just be confusing.[/quote']

 

The Atomic Pie was simply too delicious to live. We'll always remember him and his brave sacrifice for us, much like Ferro Lad or Wonder Man. In fact, we'll probably bring him back from the dead in Bronze Age, even tastier than before! dw

Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

Will reading these spoil any of the contents of the book? I already intend to buy it' date=' but I want lots of pleasant surprises. [/quote']

 

Hmm. I suppose it's possible in the broadest sense, but since I'm nowhere near writing the thing yet I honestly don't know what if anything from this game will actually make it in. We're very early in the process here. dw

Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

So, anybody actually reading these?

Session three begins with some group work on how exactly the team was going to function going forwards. They return to Earth to a massive planet-wide celebration of the comet's destruction, but also to a tense political situation as the world's powers would like to know precisely how this little South Pacific island became the leader in the space race. The PCs make a point of telling the world that more than half the team is American, which pleases the Navy- however, they decide to keep the existence of the Solonians (and their destruction) a secret. Chief Zuba of Bensalem agrees to have the team become business partners with their nationalized high-tech corporation, Saloman's House Inc., which helps defuse the US Government's interest in poking around too much in Myriad's activities; instead, President Eisenhower agrees to have them become government contractors as a private concern themselves.

Meanwhile, of course, the individual team members have become celebrities in their own rights- Atomic Eye and Matterhorn make a point of doing lots of interviews and going to the best parties. Myriad decides quickly that she's had enough of reporters camping out on the lawn near her lab in New Jersey, and accepts Zuba and Red Raven's offer to move the Exonauts' HQ to Bensalem, keeping a fixed transporter location in New Jersey so the team can get back and forth quickly.

After several weeks of establishing the lab and island, the team is almost relieved when another crisis arises. In the East German city of Leipzig, the government unveils a 100' tall statue dedicated to the working man, Der Arbeiter. At the unveiling ceremony, the statue seems to come to life, laughing manically while destroying entire buildings with it's massive sledgehammer. The Exonauts fly their ship to investigate, but the East German government denies them entry, insisting nothing is happening. Widget figures out how to turn theExonautilus invisible, and they enter anyway. The statue by this point has walked most of the way to Berlin, smashing up the countryside and ignoring the futile efforts of the East German air force to even slow it down. Atomic Eye leaps from the plane to lead the attack, attaching himself to the body with magnetic clamps and blasting away with his Gamma Glare (pat. pending.) This is of limited effect, and the statue eventually nails him with the hammer,, knocking him out (though Veil rescues him from a long fall.) The rest of the team joins in the fray, except for Myriad, who remains in the ship to study the strange energy field she detects around the statue. Eventually she finds traces of another such field, a couple of miles back down the monster's path, and heads off to investigate while the battle rages...

dw

Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

"And Now... The Exonauts!" Part Two:

Our team shoots off into space in the first (that they know about) spaceship, the Exonautilus (this campaign takes place in the same continuity as my last GA campaign, so slightly off from the Champs universe but close, and the players know the GA team went to space a couple of times.) The trip takes a couple of days, during which they get to know each other and are interviewed by Atomic Eye for his broadcast radio show. Eventually they arrive at Comet X, which they discover to be a big ball of ice around an apparently rock-and-metallic core. Exploring the surface, they discover the wreckage of a crashed alien ship, footprints leading across the ice and into a ravine, and then a hatch at the base of the ravine!

Inside, the last PC member, Veil, whose ship crashed into the comet while exploring the solar system for her extradimensional masters (whose existence has yet to be revealed) has discovered the core of the comet is a vast, empty spaceship whose cavernous corridors are patrolled by giant robots largely immune to her own mental powers. Hearing our heroes bashing around outside, she decides they must be more robots looking for her and decides to blow the spacelock hatch to get rid of them. Doing so shoots half the team into space when the atmosphere blows past them, but Widget recovers with his glider and rescues Red Raven, Atomic Eye and Myriad before they're shot into orbit. Meanwhile, actual security robots do arrive investigating all the ruckus and Rift and Matterhorn battle them to a draw, which is broken when Veil pitches in to help the heroes.

Everyone reenters the ship and the team slips past more robots, hearing cryptic explanations from Veil about how she arrived here a few days ago herself. She's convinced there are sentient minds on the ship somewhere, but their thoughts are somehow shielded and obscured from her. The team agrees that if there are living beings on board, they can't simply destroy the comet, and go exploring into the corridors.

Eventually they find a master control room, and upon entering meet the Warden Computer, a giant wall-mounted Kirby Machine that blinks when it talks to them. They try to question it, but it realizes they are not in fact a maintenance crew (as they claimed) but instead inhabitants of the world they're aimed at. The Warden Computer reveals that it is protecting the mental essences of the Solonians, a parasitic race of pure mental energy stored in crystals, who intend to take over the bodies of humans on Earth and once again live free after a million years of being trapped on this ship. Half the team battles more security robots, while Widget and Matterhorn get their bomb set up inside the crystal chamber. Once it's ready, they flee the Warden Computer; Atomic Eye uses his Penetra-Vision to find a nearer hatch, but it's still buried under ice. Rift says he can disintegrate a tunnel through the ice, but the Exonautilus will still be tethered too far away to reach. Myriad shouts "Don't worry- the ship will be there!" and they leave at top speed. Sure enough, the ship is hovering outside the hatch, since Myriad had the foresight to leave her duplicate behind to pilot! The ship escapes just as the comet blows up spectacularly.

Most of the remains are drawn into orbit around the sun, but a single glowing meteorite crashes into the South Pacific not far from Bensalem. It hits the ocean floor, cooling and settling into the muck. After a few minutes, a curious octopus approaches it...

Meanwhile, Atomic Eye's broadcasts are heard around the world, and everyone on Earth knows they've been saved by the mysterious Exonauts! Are our heroes prepared for the welcome they'll get upon returning to Earth? Tune in next week, for "Enter... The Monolith!!" dw

Hey guys! While I'm still working on Golden Age Champions in my copious spare time (Narosia and another top-secret project are taking up my daytimes currently), I *am* done playtesting it with my current group, who have made it all the way from 1938 to 1945 over four years of play. This means, of course, it's time to sic these talented roleplayers on the Silver Age! I'm starting this thread to keep Herodom informed on how they're doing.

To start with, they selected the team archetype of scientific explorers, a la the Fantastic Four or the Challengers Of The Unknown, with a hint of the Doom Patrol mixed in. They'll be proactively expanding the boundaries of superscience rather than stoppng bank robberies, and they've totally embraced some of the tropes of that particular subgenre, down to the mostly-matching uniforms. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the Exonauts!

Session one begins in the summer of 1959 with our team leader, Myriad, working on her latest gadget, a matter teleporter. As revealed in flashback, she's a brilliant polymath physicist who was once employed by industrialist Willem DeVries to build this very gadget. However, being an unsavory sort, he pushed her to test out the device before it was fully ready, even actually shoving her through an untested portal to see what would happen. (As it turned out, this gave her the superhuman power to duplicate herself, though he didn't stick around to find that out.) When she told him the device was still unsafe even though she apparently survived this hazardous test, she was summarily fired, followed by having her marriage to another of DeVries' employees break up. Penniless and on her own, she built another lab in the wilds of New Jersey and went to work recreating her efforts as best she could.

We meet her lab partner, a brilliant twelve-year-old named Widget, and in flashback also learn of his difficult past as a young technological savant, including his own experiments on himself that gave him both the ability to shrink and, given the time to prepare, to shrink other objects around him (which he has used to create a complete miniaturized lab he can carry in his belt.) That day, the two learn through contacts in the scientific grapevine that a comet has been discovered on a collision course for Earth, and though it's being kept quiet for now, soon the word will get out and planetwide panic is expected. They summon Myriad's other agents from their current secret mission and begin work on a spaceship capable of intercepting and destroying the comet before it destroys the world.

Myriad's two other current teammates in the Exonauts are seen working to rescue miners from a collapsed coal mine in Pennsylvania. The frst is Matterhorn, a dwarf who flashbacks reveal was once the henchman of an evil scientist himself and was exposed to a dark matter device that gave him the power to add mass to himself, either in the form of increased density or expanded size. The second is Rift, who was the first astronaut from a parallel Earth, and as trapped in space when something caused his entire universe to collapse cataclysmically, though he was rescued at the last minute after having been discovered by one of Myriad's dimension-scanning devices. Rift learned, to his horror, that the very matter of his body reacted negatively and explosively to this new universe he found himself in, and has resigned himself to permanently having to wear the protective suit Myriad designed for him. The two rescue the miners without giving away their involvement, and return to base to help with the rocketship.

However, it's not as easy as it seems. The rocket prototype is ready, but lacks a powerful-enough fuel source to reach the comet in time! Radium X, a longtime plot device element from the Golden Age campaign, is the only thing that will do, but only exists on Earth in microscopic amounts as far as Myriad knows. She begins to try to collect as much of it as she can, but since it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per microgram, she despairs.

Meanwhile, on the South Pacific island of Bensalem, a blind radio journalist begins to investigate the doings of a mysterious corporation headquartered there that has begun developing an unusual number of high-tech patents. Flshbacks reveal that this young man was once exposed to a nuclear bomb test while wearing faulty eye protection, with the result that his eyes themselves had become mutated into emitters of strange radiation. This made him both effectively blind but gave him both a special extra sense replacing his sight, as well as the ability to project destructive beams of energy, and he began to call himself the Atomic Eye!

The Eye investigates the company and learns it's actually based in a cave beneath the island, where he encounters several unusual traps before meeting Red Raven, a teenage girl genius who apparently predicted his arrival! We learn that she is the daughter of the Golden Age hero known as the Raven, and inherited his secret island base on Bensalem, as well as the loyalty of the natives... and their secret stash of tons of radium X! She has apparently manifested such amazing intelligence that she's able to predict the future with tremendous accuracy, including both the arrival of Comet X (as the public quickly names the deadly new addition to the nighttime sky) and Myriad's need for the radium X for her ship. She's contacted the heroine, and proposed a partnership. All six heroes gather on Bensalem, complete the rocket, and blast off into the sky as the last hope for an otherwise-doomed humanity! But what, and who, awaits them on Comet X? Tune in next time, true believers! dw

Re: Do you consider Batman to be a Gadgeteer or something else?

In Golden Age Champions I replace the Martial Artist archetype with the Mystery Man, which has several subarchetypes. Batman fits pretty much all of them, and IMO defines the main archetype. dw

Re: Experience with Narosia

Well, as of today, we're still waiting for the cash to come through from Amazon and Kickstarter- we expect it sometime at the end of this week or beginning of next. In the meantime, Shane and I at least are back at work, having finished the new outline on Friday. (The previous outline he was writing towards assumed this was going to be a supplement for Hero and not include the core rules- now that it's a standalone product, it needs some rearranging to accomodate.) I'm working for the next few days on moving the existing text around to match the new outline, which will give us all a clear picture of what remains to be written, and then the assembled writers get to work filling in the gaps. dw

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete

I think this one looks a little more like The Champions

 

Well, that's because it's the cover to *my* book, Champions: Live Action. And yes, it's awesome and no, Champions can't have it. Nyaahh! dw

Re: CHAMPIONS LIVE ACTION Kickstarter from Darren and Silverback Press!

I'm passing that request off to Ben, who orders the dang things. Let you know as soon as I have something! dw

Re: Nighthawk's Rogue's Gallery

Anybody from VIPER, frankly. Hazard once upon a time, but now they're kind-of friends. dw

Re: Tranquility Haven during WWII

whats the skinny on a new goldenage of champions?

It's coming! I'm writing as fast as I can! dw

Re: World War Two Campaign

In WW2' date=' though? In the comics written at the time?[/quote']

 

Not most of the time- he could easily outrun a bullet, or disassemble an entire car out from under a driver on the road. I have a late-40s story where he does race the electrical charge from a switch down a wire in order to defuse a bomb after the button's been pressed, though, which suggests in short bursts he could hit a sizable fraction of lightspeed-minus-resistance. dw

Please come by and check out what we're up to!

(Reposting this over here in case some people don't visit the Kickstarter forum.)

Adam Jury, Ken Hite join Narosia team!

Legendsmiths and Silverback Press are delighted to announce that we’ve added some phenomenal talents to the team we’ve put together for the upcoming title, Narosia: The Sea Of Tears!

First off, our Art Director will be the multitalented Adam Jury, co-founder and co-owner of Posthuman Studios. You’ve seen his award-winning work as the Graphic Designer of the Eclipse Phase titles, as well as on Shadowrun 4th Edition, Thousand Suns and numerous other games.

Secondly, we’ve brought in noted author and designer Kenneth Hite to contribute to the text and setting. Ken has designed, written, or co-authored more than 70 roleplaying games and supplements, including the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, GURPS Infinite Worlds, The Day After Ragnarok, Trail Of Cthulhu, and Night’s Black Agents. Outside gaming, his works include Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales, Cthulhu 101, Where the Deep Ones Are, and the graphic illustrated version of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to U.S. History. He writes the “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales magazine, and his essays and criticism have also appeared in Dragon Magazine, Games Quarterly Magazine, National Review, Amazing Stories, and in anthologies from Greenwood Press, Ben Bella Press, and MIT Press.

We’re absolutely over the moon that these talented fellows have joined up with Shane Harsch, the artists at Universe-M Productions and Darren Watts to bring Narosia to you at last.

Remember, the Kickstarter for Narosia goes live July 31st, and we hope to have your support! Please check out http://www.legendsmiths.com for continuing updates.

About Narosia: This fantasy roleplaying game, powered by the Hero System, delivers a unique fantasy gaming experience:

• Player-controlled divine favor system, allowing the Enaros to influence or intervine at any point

• Dramatic action supporting any type of maneuver (called shots, grappling, blocking, and more)

• Distinct magic systems for divine and arcane powers, including spell improvisation

• Detailed cultures and races integrated into the story of the world

• Numerous martial arts representative of the cultures from which they evolved

• Comprehensive system of Skills, Talents, and Perks to define any type of character

• Battle-tested system that scales from commoner to demi-god

• Setting specific bestiary that expands on the 300+ creatures from HERO System Bestiary

• Over 30 years of HERO System material to draw from (180+ sourcebooks)

Whatever your interest, whether dungeon delve, intrigue, or exploration, Narosia provides a rich background for the legends you forge.

Re: Battle of Detroit

That's just about the sweetest thing I've ever seen. Thanks for posting, Scott! dw

Re: Curious about your view on the current state of CO. (Anybody still play regularly

 

And, keep in mind, when CO fades, the IP of Champions fades with it. That's perhaps the biggest sorrow of it all...

Umm, that's not necessarily true. Hero retains the license to make new Champions material, and can pass that license on to third party publishers. I myself will be putting out Golden Age and Silver Age Champs at the very least, and anybody can apply to Jason for a license to make more modern-day Champs stuff. dw

Re: Mother Box, Legion Flight Ring...DCU Writeups

Cosmic Boy also used his ring once to make a heavy metal object move (it was a Braalian holiday where you're not supposed to use your powers, so he hid his ring inside it to make it move and keep his enemy from knowing about his situation.) dw

Re: Ideal: Basic Villiancy

Wait, that's the time you correct a typo? dw

Re: CHAMPIONS LIVE ACTION Kickstarter from Darren and Silverback Press!

Annnnd that's all folks! $9,368! Thanks so much for all your support! We're shooting to get hard copies in time for Gencon, so we're putting our collective heads down to finish editing this sucker, get it off to some LARP experts for review, and then get it out to layout and art! Meanwhile, there are several more projects for Silverback Press underway, so please keep checking in with us! dw

Re: CHAMPIONS LIVE ACTION Kickstarter from Darren and Silverback Press!

We'll see how this one sells, but we have plenty of ideas for additional books if it does well. The EOE gang is fond of using Teleios as a convention game baddie precisely because he's so easy to dress for by master villain standards... dw