Captain Obvious

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... I'm not finished yet, but I have to say Tales of the Far West is pretty interesting. It's a collection of short stories in a setting that's a mashup of westerns and wuxia, with a little steampunk thrown in for good measure. Supposedly the setting is being developed into an RPG, too. Good stuff if you like mixing flavors.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Presumably, a bakery ATM differs from a vending machine in that you buy stuff from a vending machine, but you withdraw baked goods from an account you've opened previously with a baked-goods deposit from an ATM.

Re: Dungeons, suitable for crawling or delving? I never liked wererats. Ratmen, on the other hand, would work. EDIT: IMO, of course.

Re: From 4E D&D to 6E Heroes: The Intimidation Factor The Mythic GM Emulator is a system that adds curves to the logical plot you come up with, so you can get that feeling of surprise reveals that GMs love to spring on their players, even without a GM. Most of it logical, common sense, but each scene, there's a chance for something off-the-wall to happen, and tables to give you an idea of what the off-the-wall thing is. I was playing with it the other week, messing around with Adamant Entertainment's Underworld setting. Without getting too sidelined with setting descriptions, the story I came up with involved the PCs witnessing a guy getting severely beaten. He's too badly injured to tell them why he was attacked, but there is a fort nearby, so they take him there for medical attention and possible clues to what exactly was going on. Turns out, the soldiers' leader was behind the attack, so the characters are on the run. They evade them and get to another pocket of civilization, get the guy some medical help, and start checking around for rumors about the attack and the soldiers' involvement. They find the guy had been partnered with the soldiers' leader in a treasure hunt...they had found clues about some legendary treasure and were working on it together, but the guy made a breakthrough on the location and unilaterally dissolved the partnership. So the PCs end up putting the clues together and going for the treasure themselves. They fit out an expedition and travel to where the hoard was hidden, only to find it guarded by a dragon. In return for not eating them, the dragon sends them on some errand. I got kind of bored with the whole thing at that point, and dropped it. But I didn't do anything to add any of the twists...the system added the twist and gave a general form that the twist would take, and logic and common sense filled in the details. I didn't even set the initial scene myself, but used the system to give a sort of cryptic clue that I then interpreted into "a guy is getting the snot beaten out of him". It's a pretty interesting little system. Worth the, what, five dollars it costs as a PDF. There's an expansion called Mythic Variations that changes up the basic system to make it work better for different genres, so your horror game takes different twists and turns than your court intrigue game, which is, IMO, also worth the cost.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Count Dookus of Hazzard.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore What is chik'N? Sounds like an abomination.

Re: Dungeons, suitable for crawling or delving? The One Page Dungeons can be hit-or-miss, but when they hit, they're generally pretty evocative, original, and/or amusing. I recommend downloading the compiled map PDFs rather than downloading each dungeon separately. It's easier to go through them that way. If you decide that you only really like one or two of them, you can always delete the compilation and download the individual maps you like.

Re: Allen Thomas projects? I think Alien Wars and Valdorian Age are my two favorite Hero settings. I sent an email to Allen Thomas via the forums a few months back, basically just thanking him for them. I can't say whether or not he still uses the email address he registered here with, but I never got a reply (and didn't really expect one, to be honest). But yeah, I'd be interested to see other projects he's worked on. I'm a fan.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares E.T.s vs Predators

Re: Fairytale Hero Minor wishes could just be a few dice of Luck. If the character's Luck comes up, he finds a pot of gold or escapes the dragon or manages to finagle a few minutes alone with the princess and make a good impression, whatever might at least work toward fulfilling the wish. Once the wish comes true, the Luck dice go away.

Re: Bas-Lag setting http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/25023-New-Crobuzon-to-HERO?highlight=crobuzon Looks like Curufea deleted his first post, and there's no telling what was in it. There's bound to be something usable in what's left though.

Re: Making a Summoned Being a Follower hmm...Never considered this sort of mechanic before. I suppose you could allow the character to allocate points from his summoning pool to the Followers perk, although the cost break for multiple followers might become something of a problem for creating the feel you're going for.

Re: Bas-Lag setting I'm pretty sure there are some random notes scattered here and there on the forums that could give you some of what you're looking for...racial packages, creature writeups, etc. As far as putting together a campaign based on existing books, movies, etc, my advice is to go back through and re-read (or re-watch, in the case of movies) every scrap of material you can get your hands on, taking extensive notes on everything. You may find that, as you systematize your notes, there are gaps that are not filled in the canon, and that's where you'll have to improvise. One of the gaps I can remember specifically for a campaign I did was Nehwonian money. Lankhmar's monetary system is pretty explicitly described, and Eastern money is at least alluded to, but there's not a single reference to whatever kind of money was used in the Eight Cities. Of course, Wikipedia makes a lot of this easier, as the broad strokes at least are usually already online.

Re: What "Pulp" have you read lately ? Pretty much everything I've ever read by Clive Cussler, while set in modern times, has a very distinct pulp adventure feel to it.

Re: So, anybody got any Opium? Danger International had a section on drugs and poisons, which should be easily converted even though it's from many editions ago. If I'm not mistaken, it has heroin if not opium. I'm not sure where I put mine though...

Re: "Neat" Pictures Who tf is Paul McCartney?

Re: Order of the Stick I guess we'll never get to see the epic battle between V and the sauce dragon.

Re: Fairytale Hero Reve: the Dream Ouroboros (the English translation of French RPG Reve de Dragon) and 7 Leagues (both by Malcontent Games) are pretty fairy-tale-ish. Actually 7 Leagues is directly and expressly based on fairy tales. Reading either of them over should be inspirational if nothing else. I'd lean towards the idea that Hero is a little too crunchy for fairytale type situations, but then again, Reve is fairly crunchy itself (in that old school way). I don't think I could pull it off with Hero, but I'd be willing to play in a Fairytale Hero game if the GM felt up to it.

Re: "Neat" Pictures That's super cool. I just wish I could zoom in closer to look at the book covers a little better. EDIT: Gah! Okay, so there is a zoomed version. Also, gah! I can't rep either tkdguy or Celt.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: "Neat" Pictures Haha! Really? I guess I didn't realize Peter Jackson had the Hobbits living so close together...when I said that, it was at least half jokingly....

Re: "Neat" Pictures Heh...it does, kind of. I was thinking it was a Hobbit apartment building.

Re: "Neat" Pictures My official source is over 200 years of family history in Appalachia and Tidewater Carolina. If there were such a thing, how I speak would be the Hick King's English.