assault

Re: What Champions supplements should I buy? Bare minimum: 1) Champions genre book. Inspirational, interesting simply to read, and sets "standard" benchmarks for you to ignore or follow as you see fit. 2) USPD (I and II). I don't actually have (II), but (I) is full of neat ideas, and essentially gives suggestions for modelling a whole bunch of interesting characters. 3) Gadgets and Gear. Likewise, only for focus using characters. Between them, these books should allow you to churn out literally dozens of characters. Whether they are interesting will depends on your writing skills, and your tastes. Incidentally, once you start designing a bunch of characters that exist in the same setting, you've started designing that setting! That's how you end up on the slippery slope to GM-hood...

Re: Marvel Civil War As A Gaming Campaign The government might have some heroes working for them, even if most don't. It is quite likely that these would resemble the Irons more than the Silvers. They might be more like cops, or a special forces unit, than Captain America.

Re: Steam Power in Fantasy This isn't a good comparison. A better comparison would be with the very first steam engines, not the last. These were much smaller, with many being under 10 tons. This is a much more plausible engineering feat for the Romans to achieve.

Re: Steam Power in Fantasy

Re: Steam Power in Fantasy They happened first, historically. Just like they weren't historically...

Re: Steam Power in Fantasy They would probably have had stationary steam engines well before they would have had railways. These would help to develop the infrastructure necessary to build railways. Of course the social factors would have been decisive, as they were historically. It is quite likely that the kind of technological advances we are discussing could have stalled after a while, if there was little economic/social imperative to continue with them. We could easily have ended up with a world that was a little more advanced than historically, but not all that much. The other thing to consider is that the eastern half of the Roman Empire was the part where most of the people lived, and most of the economic activity took place. Only looking at the western half tends to give the wrong impression of the situation.

Re: Ancient Cultures The thing that came to my mind is: where do they fit in to the cosmology? How does the universe work? What do most people do when they die? Why are these folks an exception?

Re: Any ideas for a National Hero for India? http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/i/india.htm describes a bunch of interesting Indian superheroes. Spider-Man and Superman are particularly "interesting". EDIT: And I recommend reading the review of the Indian Superman film here: http://www.stomptokyo.com/movies/s/superman-indian.html Quite hilarious. "There is something black in my lentils."

Re: Question: What different Game Systems for Superheroes? Are you referring to Squadron UK here? (http://squadronuk.co.uk/ ). This is the "new" version/edition of Golden Heroes. There are only very minor changes.

Re: Question: What different Game Systems for Superheroes? One more: an Australian produced one called Super Squadron. Very obscure, but I've got a copy. See: http://www.arielarchives.com/AdvSim.html Edit: I've noticed the author claims that Super Squadron was the third superhero RPG, despite being published in 1984. Obviously this is idiotic. However, from his description of his attempts to get Super Squadron published, it was originally written quite some time before 1984, quite possibly in the late 70s.

Re: Alignment Issues

Re: New Power - "Eternal"

Re: Could Destroyer Win?

Re: Could Destroyer Win?

Re: Could Destroyer Win?

Re: Orcs as Druidic/Celtic analogs?

Re: Archetype Twists I like Speedsters with Brick level defences. Aka Superman, Captain Marvel etc. Who says Bricks are slow?

Re: WWYCD: Whoa! Ninjas!

Re: Your favorite Fantasy Hero villains I tend to have plenty of judges, but relatively few lawyers. Most of these judges are politicians too. Not all of them eeevil, of course. After all, politics is a respectable career in an Oligarchy/Republic, which most PCs would be expected to participate in. Hmm... score extra points for evil then.

Re: Making colonization attractive? Fine. Except there wouldn't be a colonization effort, unless it made very good sense. That's where the logic comes in. Scientific outposts are more likely, since they aren't required to be self-sustaining or profitable. Some of these might theoretically form the basis of colonies in the longer term. In the immediate period, though, the personnel living at such outposts are going to be handpicked "best of the best of the best" types. Unfortunately for game purposes, there are only a certain number of scenarios you can really set in such outposts. That means that a game would have to go off on a funky tangent to be interesting. Which is great, of course. Incidentally, interstellar colonisation without FTL is extremely dubious. Any colonisation attempt that wasn't preceded by an extensive program of investigation would essentially be a suicide mission, and STL timelags make such investigation extraordinarily time consuming and complex. Of course, if you had a society that was happy to live in artificial habitats, and not on planets, you wouldn't necessarily need to investigate colony sites, apart from finding sources of raw materials. But artificial habitats would have all the charm and adventure of living in a remarkably small city, at a remarkably long distance from anywhere else. They are the kind of place adventurous spirits would want to leave, not live in.

Re: WWYCD: Whoa! Ninjas! Assault: (heavy sigh) "Not a-bloody-gain!"

Re: Irish republican army skill package? There's a "Terrorist" package in Dark Champions. Realistically, an IRA volunteer would be pretty much a normal civilian with at most a couple of unusual skills and perks (Contacts). They would have some kind of relevant psych limitation too. Also, the IRA has been on ceasefire for over a decade, so they probably aren't going to be especially young. There would be few if any under 30 by now. Cinematically, an IRA volunteer could be anything you want them to be.

Re: Alignment Issues If you say so... On a less trivial note, I've just finished skimming through Three Hearts and Three Lions again. I didn't see any good reason to implement a game-mechanical alignment system. The most interesting effects are those of holy symbols, names etc on soulless/faerie critters. The one time where this failed for Holger Danske was when he was thinking impure thoughts and not carrying cold iron. If you did want a mechanism to handle this, I would suggest considering the Piety stat described in Scott Bennie's conversion notes for his Testament game: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39605

Re: Alignment Issues

Re: Alignment Issues