assault

This is partly a "here's my cool idea I might never get to use" post, but I think there is a more general point. So... the situation is: For centuries, the Dragon-King has ruled the Kingdom. By ruling, of course, I mean appointing human puppet rulers, sitting on ever increasing piles of treasure, and eating regular sacrifices, including the obligatory virgins. You know, politics. What happens when some idiots (guess who!) kill the Dragon? --- So far, so good. I'd read the book/watch the movie. Why not? From a game perspective, there's a bit of a problem though. Dragons are Big Nasty Monsters. They don't generally get killed off early in a campaign. This is more obvious in zero-to-hero games (like D&D), but even in Hero, killing off the biggest, most powerful monster near the start seems a bit off. If nothing else, it means that the PCs can do this, even if they need help, and that suggests they can handle nearly all subsequent threats too. In combat, anyway - and that reservation makes all the difference. (I kind of want to run it in D&D though, to melt the faces of the "Lawful Good is Lawful Stupid" crowd.) --- For what it's worth, I'd see the Dragon monarchy being replaced by an oligarchic republic, headed by some of the Dragon's former proxies. (It's been centuries since there was last a human king - nobody cares about the old dynasty, except for those who do.) This might not go down well with some of the PCs, unless they just want to ride off into the sunset. I'd probably build in some hooks to encourage them to stick around. Any thoughts? Feedback?

Definitely not a Tolkien thing. I'm a little unimpressed with all Dwarves being Lawful Good, given that Elves are usually given a probability of being Neutral. I'd extend that to Dwarves as well.

I treat Gnomes as a subrace of Dwarves. I call them "Burrowing Dwarves". No real place for them in my current game though.

I appreciate all the input. For what it's worth, this is the same world that has ornithopters being launched from Stone Age technology (Melanesian/Polynesian etc) sailing canoes. And there are Halfling sized people living on an island which is totally not Flores. Mechanically, I will, in the end, make my own decisions, of course. But I appreciate the suggestions - I wouldn't have asked for them if I didn't. And yes, besides my "here's my cool idea! What do you think?" motive, I am concerned with any sensitivities involved: we live in the era of culture wars, where disrespect and edgelordism is rewarded, and where respect needs to be asserted against them. (And that can lead to a measure of hypersensitivity.) In this context, I chose to err on the side of respect. (How woke of me! Clearly I am some kind of communist bed-wetter...) So it looks like I've mostly got it OK. Thank you. And yes, the Flores Hobbits are coming. Think North Sentinel Island with very small elephants, not the Shire... Don't get me started on Komodo Dragons, yet, anyway.

So, I'm toying with adding a new area to my game: the Pearl Islands. This is a small group of islands noted both for the high quality pearls grown there (hence the name) and the population of Sirens that make them dangerous. There is a small human population - the Pearl Islanders I am talking about. I'm thinking that this group experience hereditary deafness, giving them immunity to the Sirens' calls. They communicate with sign language, which is also understood by some of the merchants who trade for the pearls, and by some of the Sirens. Marriage outside their community can give rise to hearing children, who are at risk from the Sirens. They can also intermarry with the more friendly Sirens (merfolk), giving rise to aquatic half-breeds who, if they can hear, are resistant to the Sirens' calls, and well equipped to harvest the pearls. So, how to build them? Within their own community, their deafness is no big deal. However, they still have trouble communicating in poor light (at night!) and may not be able to detect and respond to certain dangers. They also have obvious difficulties in communicating with outsiders. Clearly some kind of Disadvantage is appropriate. Not as bad as if they were Deaf within a hearing society, but there are things they can't do. On the plus side, they are immune to the Sirens' effects. That's the first necessary build. The half-breeds aren't really necessary, and can be based on any aquatic humanoids. Again, they have the immunity to the Sirens' effects, being part Siren themselves, but are otherwise stock demi-humans, with both some extra abilities and limitations. Straightforward enough. The hearing children would be standard humans. I'm not sure how they would survive on the Islands, which suggests they are rare, or living off the Islands, perhaps with their Deaf parents. This suggests my next point. I suspect that the Islanders (the ones living on the Islands) would be somewhat genetically isolated, or more bluntly, inbred. The interbreeding with the Sirens would assist with this, but I doubt it would occur frequently enough to eliminate it entirely. Maybe over time it would have an impact on the small population, gradually shifting the population away from a pure human one to one of demi-humans. Any thoughts, ideas or condemnations? I am, after all, walking through the "disability" minefield, and representing a Deaf culture from outside. Urgh. A cool fantasy idea, but I may not be the right person to write it... I may need to bowdlerise it somewhat.

If you want to be fancy, try Action Comics #1. That gives you Superman, Zatara and Slam Bradley, who is Batman without a mask. Add Captain America, the Human Torch and Namor if you want to extend your range.

Why six attributes? You need the attributes that matter. That doesn't necessarily involve "characteristics". What distinguishes one character from another? That's what matters. From your past posts, I gather you are a big DC fan. What distinguishes Batman from Superman, Aquaman, Robin, Catwoman, the Penguin, Lex Luthor or the Joker?

What could possibly go wrong?

If you were using In The Labyrinth, once you had allocated stats, you had to pick Talents and spells based on Int. It was kind of a double points system. Buy Int with points, buy talents/spells with Int. Superhero 2044 didn't use random tables, at least in the core rulebook. George acknowledged the influence of Wayne Shaw in allocating powers.

I'm not sure how you would write a game based on the antics of Peter Venkman, arch-sleaze.

There's a reason why defining your goals is step one. Write them down, and organize them. Defining your goals means deciding exactly what you are trying to do, what kind of superheroes you are talking about, and so on. It's the point at which you go from Vague Idea In Your Head, to something practical written on paper.

That's the issue. An extra "level" is half the initial cost. So 30 points gets you two levels. I'm just sitting around having a beer, so check the rulebook, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.

The key word in Package Deal is Deal. Early on, there were Package Bonuses, which offset some of the cost of the package, and even some of the Characteristics you needed to buy. In return, the Package would include stuff that such a character should have, but wouldn't be all that useful in most games (and thus wouldn't be bought if you were strictly minmaxing). Such bonuses were eliminated later on. The remaining benefit of using Packages is speed of character building. You don't have to plough through huge lists of stuff deciding what you need. Instead, you just pick a Package, buy appropriate Characteristics, and add a bit of stuff to make your character an individual. Much faster. If I was at home I would build a character in real time to show you how it works.

Check how many points he spent on Martial Arts. If it's 22, 6/7.5 is correct. If it's 30, 7.5/9 is correct.

Related to the combat system, just like Hero's standard humans are 2 metres. I still like the 4.35 mile wide coins and tiny humans. Was the problem with the units in the PDF, or a Duke's phone issue?

I'm planning on building some Fantasy Hero characters to test this soon. My gut feeling is that "a Package, required Characteristics and a bit of stuff to individualise the character" would probably work, but there are obvious questions with spellcasters, not to mention characters that want to buy a bunch of Packages and the Characteristics to match. Requiring them to suck up the Disadvantages needed to balance the points is fine, but once every character is built like this it makes more sense to bump up the point total. Everyone wants to play an edgelord...

Pre-generated "pick from a list", with the original system behind it in "another book". (Not necessarily a literal book. More probably a file.) A loss in universality, but a gain in playability. There would need to be enough explanation to be able to use the spells. That would pad up the page count.

New variant options like repriced Disadvantages could go into Espionage II without causing too much angst. Just mark the whole thing Optional and you're good. Of course my hidden agenda is to leech off all this work to build a shorter "my version" of Fantasy Hero.

I'm not a fan of introducing another set of Disadvantage values. Two is quite enough, if not too many.

True for most superheroes too, especially during the Golden Age.

Ignoring guns for the moment: Package Deals are a big thing. If you have a tight focus - CIA agents, in the case of Espionage, it's easy to fix. But if you have a broader focus, things get weird. You get duplication and potentially double dipping. Suppose you have a package with characteristic requirements. Suppose your packages include duplicated skills (Weapons Familarity is likely). Suppose your package includes Disadvantages of the same category of those in other ones. Characters will need to be recalculated because of those. It's a pain, but can be handled. You just need to handle them.

For military use, scythe blades were typically set on their handles polearm style, not sticking out to the side as in their civilian use. Still a rather dodgy improvised weapon but not entirely useless.

What happened to the Zeus that would turn into a cow & pick up chicks?

One of the classic cases is the Ancient Greek Hoplite. Most had some degree of training, although the amount of that could vary from Spartan to almost none. Hoplite spears seem to have been longer and heavier than those used by most of the infantry used by the Persian Empire. Many of the latter used bows instead, of course, but there were plenty of spearmen.

So, Wut is the true sun god? Yes, this is what I meant.