assault

Apocalyptic literature will change from "fiction" to "current events".

What do you mean by "possibly including"?

Honestly, I don't think you need much more than a character sheet each, an impartial dice roller, a trusted way of keeping track of Body, Stun and End, a list of who goes when and where everybody is. Then the scenario goes: you are all at the Hall of Champions, for whatever reason your character would be there. Suddenly, Obnoxious Man flies in and says something that triggers at least one other character's Psych Limitations or Berzerks. Bar room brawl ensues.

As an Australian, I take pride in the fact that we are at least proportionately as evil as the rest of the world. And a little disturbed by the possibility that we may punch above our own weight in this respect.

I'm currently in near complete social distancing mode. In the last few days my father (last older relative) passed away, so I don't have to visit him any more. (Still working on his funeral, but it will be minimalist because of social distancing rules, and over with quickly). Please don't express sympathy - it's been done. Work shut down last Saturday. I'm on long service leave for the moment. I live by myself. At the moment, all I have to do is go shopping every now and then. This week, that will be Wednesday (payday). Unfortunately, my father's funeral is on Thursday, so I have to go out for that, and part of my shopping on Wednesday will involve whiskey and junk food to help me deal with it. I'll probably have to do another shop on Saturday to compensate. From then on, my only exposure to the Real World(tm) and to potential vectors of infection will be my occasional shopping trips. I'm in pretty extreme social isolation mode. So how am I coping? Well, obviously there have been factors holding me back from complete isolation until now. I've been quite annoyed by all the things involved in that, and wishing that they weren't happening. So to a large extent I am getting what I wished for. I've been using social media to hang around with my close RW(tm) friends. Our favourite pub is shut, so we, and the best of our bar staff(!), are hanging out in a Facebook group, where we are all taking turns going mad. My current madness involves listening to music and posting links to where my friends can listen to it too. (I've actually stopped doing that, because it's a bit like me appointing myself DJ). Aside from that, I am trying to crunch a set of Hero/Champions rules into a short enough subset to present it in what amounts to a picture book. I'll get some online RPG gaming happening at some point. I'm catching up on a lot of TV viewing. I've got a massive stockpile of books. And, of course, I'm drinking too much. Oops. I'll tone that down once things settle down a little. I've already given up smoking - I know what to do.

It sounds like a ripping yarn.

As far as the main question goes - how many dragons are there? Are they relatively common or vanishingly rare? And another question I will address in a minute. If dragons are rare, then that armour is made from Uncle Vermibob, and it might be recognized as such. The wearer might even be mistaken for the heroine that killed uncle Bob. If dragons are common, well, actually I don't care. How does a dog perceive a human that dresses in dog skin? How would you perceive someone dressed in human skin? The answer to the main question depends on what dragons are. Then there is the other question - what are dragons? Are they a naturalistic species, or magical beings - perhaps even humans or dwarves transformed by a curse? In the latter case, there's no reason to believe that the dragons in question know each other, or lived in the same century. Incidentally, cursed dragons are possibly the most likely to hoard treasure. There is a good chance that it was their greed that led them to be transformed in the first place!

Coronavirus projects are a must.

Some of sample character write ups in Champions Now contain a lot of the material that would appear in a playbook of the type I described. That's not a coincidence - I stole part of my concept from there. I stole other bits from elsewhere. Champions Now is full of interesting ideas, and worth reading even if you have no desire to play it.

I've been thinking of this too. Basically you create a bunch of, for want of another name, playbooks, containing what you need to know to play a particular character. Add some tactical hints, suggestions on END management and so on. Maybe even some suggestions for tailoring the character to the player's tastes. 8 pages would probably cover it. Or maybe 12. They could be freestanding, presented as members of a team, or both.

I found it! It was called Wildstrike! Obviously too simple and narrow in focus, but I wish I had it.

There's also that Champions: New Millennium combat game. I can't remember its name (it's very late here), but apparently it had a significant subset of the rules in quite a small page count. I'd love to see it, to see what it did, and therefore what can be done.

For the record, I learned to play chess from a picture book. I don't have it any more. My mother gave it away to one or another of my cousins. I can't therefore give a page count for a book capable of teaching a kid to play chess. But that's the level of complexity that is possible.

I've been looking at various picture books. 48 pages seems to be fairly common. Deduct half the page count for art, and you get the equivalent of 24 pages of text. Actually it's worse than that, since there are title pages, tables of contents and so on. If you include an index, a good 8 pages of the original 48 can be sucked up by that. That only leaves 20 pages... Of course you can go longer than 48 pages. 64 would be fine, but 96 would be pushing it. At that point you might be better off splitting it into two books. My train of thought here started from the observation that words are cheap and art is expensive. It might be worth putting the art first, and fitting in the words around them.

A picture book format is actually what I would prefer. The tricky part is that you need the actual text to fit in the equivalent of 24 pages or so. Double that with art. On the other hand, you could have a couple of different volumes. A lot of early RPGs had three volumes... The funny thing is that you could actually do something like that with HERO, if you had the rights to muck about with the rules. Unfortunately, the best genre to do it with would be superheroes, which doesn't need to be done yet again. Fantasy might work, but most other genres would be unsuitable for the format.