assault

You can start with her not being washed ashore. Being stuck in the middle of the ocean knowing you are going to die allows for a lot of plots.

The problem is that at the moment, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is regarded as "Jewish hate".

I'd read/watch that. I'd even consider playing it. Probably need to mix in a bit of the Prancing Pony, since the Green Dragon isn't well described.

England beaten by Afghanistan in huge Cricket World Cup upset, putting title defence in real jeopardy

You can of course constrain characters by origin, or you can just base your campaign on the organisations implied by your PCs. Or you could just look at the characters and organisations that appeared in 1e Champions: VIPER, UNTIL, Mechanon...

Just go with Accidental Change in the alternate form. It doesn't matter if the character knows the limit. Word it so that the character can't just change back into the primary form and back again to bypass the limit. I can't remember how I did it with my Hourman build, but I had it so he couldn't just pop more Miraclo and start again, until at least another hour had passed.

Briefly back to vampires: there's a fair chance that they are accompanied by plague rats. Plague may end up doing most of the killing. It also keeps the clerics busy, while obscuring the vampire's kills as just a few among many unrelated deaths.

It only takes one vampire to wipe out an entire city. That tends to concentrate populations into the ones that have enough Clerics, in this case, to protect the population. Of course this assumes that there are enough Clerics who are on the same side, and not enough to destroy things.

What genre? Superbeings take longer than normals, for example.

I don't really care what kind of car a DM drives.

Like Skull-Face. Warning: this story is extremely racist, to a point where it almost goes in a full circle, making a good case for anti-colonial rebellion!

My prediction of a Collingwood victory was correct, although the margin was impressively narrow. 90-86. Having watched part of it, it is clear that I was correct in my assessment of the AFL's potential to become popular in the USA. Freedom Football definitely has potential.

Half time in the AFL Grand Final. Collingwood 63, Brisbane 57. Still could go either way. Australian Rules would be an ideal game for US audiences but there aren't enough ad breaks for US television. It would need a new name, to make it more acceptable to a US audience. Freedom Football?

A Swords and Sorcery game requires Sorcerors. Nasty ones, not PCs or friendly NPCs. At least a dozen of them, preferably more. I need some ideas. Not builds, but fluff text, and perhaps some suggestions for Disadvantages and/or Complications. Any suggestions you have for the magic bad guys Bob the Barbarian would run into would be awesome. (They don't have to be human, or even alive - just people who Bob would have to try to stick a sword into.)

Collingwood will win.

Characters can climb etc. without having to be Rogues.

I've been thinking of doing some old style D&D, except adjusted towards Swords & Sorcery. Characters are humans, and not spellcasters. In fact, I've been considering making all PCs be human fighters, who spend most of their time fighting humans. Alignments would be Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic, except the group needs to heavily tend towards one of these. Naturally all this would set up howls of protest about how it's boring, etc, if I described it in a more D&D oriented forum. All humans seems fine to me. Nonhumans in D&D tend to either be stereotypes, or deliberate subversions of the stereotypes, to the point of making it seem pointless to play that type of character anyway. Certainly, most of the stereotypes can be played as human. The bigger problem is the "fighters only" bit. Obviously people are going to want to play rogues, but that seems more trouble than it's worth given what can be handled as skills in current D&D. And besides, Thieves were only introduced in Greyhawk. They weren't in the original boxed set... Ultimately, it boils down to whether or not there is enough scope within the Fighter class to provide a reasonable range of PCs. I'm inclined to think there is, if you poke the players with a big stick made of suggestions. (This character is a Scythian-flavoured Amazon from the steppes. This one is a shield maiden from a vaguely Germanic/Scandinavian culture. This one was trained as a gladiator by a decadent civilization....) Hero would do it better, obviously, but D&D players are far more common.

First level (assuming any game that has levels) is generally the hardest to survive at. And it's the level at which first time players start.

A thief is an adventurer type, and so not what I was talking about.

After more consideration, and study of Burroughs (Edgar Rice), I'm an idiot, since one of the few tropes Carter didn't steal from Burroughs was that Barsoomian women were all trained to survive in a hostile world. Of course Burroughs himself didn't follow this, which is why the incomparable Dejah Thoris became such an archetypal Damsel in Distress. The Princess is, by default, a trained warrior, even if she concentrates on doing other things. That doesn't mean she has to be Joan Carter, but it does mean she isn't some feeble perpetual Damsel in Distress. (Don't get into a fight with La of Opar!) There are good examples in Aaron Allston's Lands of Mystery. I ignored it at first, but as usual I was wrong.

Lately I've been reading/re-reading some of Lin Carter's Thongor books. (They're fun but not very good.) Anyway, they include Sumia, Thongor's romantic interest, who is a stereotypical Dejah Thoris type Princess. She wanders around like a Fantasy Hero DNPC, without doing much that is useful. This makes her an exception to a group of people (Thongor and his friends) that tends to include various warriors, and even a wizard. She is the only female member of the group. 🙄 I started thinking: how could you make such a character a PC? She has a legitimate background - Exiled Princess (technically Usurped Empress). She's not a Warrior or a Wizard, but something else. Thinking further, I concluded that there was a whole set of possible characters of the type - ones who don't easily fit into the usual adventurer archetypes, but wind up on adventures anyway. Some examples: non-warrior aristocrats/royalty, scholars, merchants, Hobbit landowners... Presumably, they should have some adventure relevant skills - basic combat abilities, and perhaps some magic, but generally speaking their abilities aren't concentrated in these areas. They are certainly overshadowed by specialists in these. And yet, to be viable PCs, they still need to be able to pull their weight. Their viability would be determined in part by the adventures they go on. If it's all fight, fight, fight, or magic, magic, magic, they aren't going to be much use. Unless, of course, all the PCs are of this type. At one level they're not hard to build - shift their characteristics around, and, say, replace all or most of the skill levels you would give a warrior with non-combat skills or Perks. But still a bit tricky. Has anyone done this? Successful examples? Unsuccessful ones? Warnings, obviously. (Don't do it! These characters suck and are boring! Etc.) It seems to me that this is a case where Hero would be better than, say, D&D, where character classes are clearly geared towards adventurers, and zero to hero level progression will tend to drive characters into "standard" adventurer roles. The exiled Empress will tend to become just another high level whatever...

I was going to point this out too. Curse the need to sleep!

250. It worked well enough for "1st issue" versions.

Which is why creating such a "race" is so Evil.

One of the ideas that has become a big deal in D&D circles is that there shouldn't be inherently Evil races. I'll refrain from ranting about this and cut to the chase. Surely, creating an Evil Race is a very Evil act. The kind of thing that the Evilest of Evils would do, just to be Evil. (And because minions are useful.) So, in other words, if inherently Evil races didn't exist, they would be created! While I came up with this through an independent line of thought, Tolkien had already done it, as you would expect. He described the "creation" of Orcs as one of Morgoth's Most Evil Deeds. Evil races can therefore plausibly exist, and the fact of their existence should, in fact, be horrifying. If you need metaphors for racism, you can always look somewhere else. Just stay away from residential schools for Orc children unless you really want to go there. Also, "race" isn't a good term. Something else would be better. Thoughts?