Mark Rand

Re: What cities could Batman call home? One idea I had was Las Vegas. Batman, Batgirl, and their associates (the PCs) aren't the only heroes there. There's also Lady Arcane, who lives near UNLV, and her team who deal only with supernatural threats. (Her support staff includes her housekeeper, an electronics engineer, Lucius Fox's daughter, April, a nurse, a computer expert and a DOSPA liaison.) The general public thinks they work only for Lady Arcane, but gates give the four women access to the Batcave. Bruce, his secretary, Maggie, (who is secretly Batgirl), and Alfred live in one of the two penthouses at the top of a hotel/casino/resort Wayne Enterprises owns through its Wayne Entertainment division. The other penthouse is occupied by Lucius Fox and his family. (Lucius thinks his daughter works only for Lady Arcane.) When Bruce or Maggie place their palms against specific wall panels, they are transported to an area of the Batcave where they can change int their costumes or disguises. The Batmobile exits onto a cave north of Las Vegas. If anyone tries to follow them, all they hit is solid rock. The Batmobile and other Bat vehicles can gate to the Batcave, but other vehicles can't. This same precaution keeps unotherised visitors from accessing the Batcave from the penthouse.

Assuming he didn't live in Gotham City what real world and CU cities would Batman work well in?

Re: A Look at Millennium City in my Version of the CU On the supernatural side, we have all kinds of characters and items. Some preachers claim that Lady Arcane, and other magic-weilding heroes are trying to turn area youth to devil worship. Since vampires, demons and other undead exist in the CU, It isn't too much of a reach to add Slayers, Watchers and a Hellmouth. Some of you may have noticed that I've been adding car and horse tracks, a planetarium with the Zeiss Mark II projector, an ice rink for amatuurs and the same bars, nightclubs and supperclub to various cities. True, I have. However, they're only there if the city is the campaign city. If it isn't, they're not there.

Re: A Look at Millennium City in my Version of the CU Belle Isle doesn't have the only planetarium. There's one on the campus of Millennium City University, too. The layout of this one, The Harmon Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, is based on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's old Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, which was inspired, in part, by Chicago's Adler Planetarium. While it was being planned, Harmon Industries bought the old Zeiss Mark II Planetarium Projector, its control board, the 1,000,000-volt Oudin-type Tesla coil and the 10-inchSiderostat-type refractor telescope from the Buhl Planetarium and installed them in the new building. The Planetarium's two basement club rooms, or classrooms, and lecture hall, The Little Science Theatre, have state of art audio/visual equipment. The Planetarium Theatre, or Theatre Of The Stars, uses the now refurbished Zeiss, nicknamed Jake, daily. When it rises, the opening section of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, usually known as the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme is heard over the sound system. Besides the Siderostat telescope, the Planetarium has two other telescopes, a 4-inch refractor and a 18-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector that are, weather permitting, set out on the roof for star gazing. Only the Siderostat is used for looking at the sun, however, direct viewing isn't permitted. Instead, the sun's image is projected onto a screen. During a solar eclipse, a video camera is pointed at the screen and its signal is fed to monitors throughout the building and webcast through the Planetarium's website. During lunar eclipses, the video camera is attached to the Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector. The rest of the setup, however, remains the same. The building is open for classes all day Monday and in the mornings on Tuesday through Friday. The rest of the time, its open to the public. Next up, the supernatural side of Millennium City

Re: Looking for NEW words of transformation: (SHAZAM, Thunder! Thunder!...) Ah yes, from the live-action TV series and comic book. On the series, Andrea had to wear her amulet openly to transform (once she dropped it and had to go back and find it), but in the comics she didn't. The comic book also gave us the words to change back to Andrea. They were, as best as I can recall, "Ancient gods of time and space, put Andrea into her proper place".

Re: A Look at Millennium City in my Version of the CU Interesting ideas, Hermit. Thank you. Now, on to the bars, nightclubs and supperclub. The Ace 'O Clubs is a waterfront bar featuring a pool table, a juke box and an upright piano that one of the patrons play when he's in. The Cabaret of Magic is a supperclub/magic theatre with rooms for both close-up and stage magic. The resident magician is a young lady that's skilled in both kinds. Danny's is a jazz club. Although they have no official house band, the Jazz Angels have played there for four nights a week since it opened. The Falcon's Rest is a Middle Eastern nightclub that features, according to the management, "The World's Best Bellydancers". The dancers, who are paid $50.00 a night, must be booked through an agent, must be members of the American Guild of Variety Artists, and can work at the club only twice a month. The Funky Feline Bar and Grill is a casual place with feline touches. The staff all wear black pants and tunics with cat ears and tail. Although feline-style half-masks are a required part of the uniform only on Halloween, Jane, the day shift bartender, and Cathy and Sue, two of the evening shift waitresses, wear them all the time. Jake's is a Western bar. The staff dress like working cowboys and cowgirls. The Sucubus Club is a Goth nightclub. Loud music, from the DJ or occasional band, can be heard in the parking lot. Zorba's, a Greek bar, like the Falcon's Rest, is noted for its belly dancers. The first time a dancer plays the club, she works for tips only. After that, it's $10.00 for each time you're on stage. Although some dancers are booked through agents, a group, known as "The Regulars" book themselves. This group includes Salome, a highly-skilled belly dancer who wears long gloves with her costumes and does the Dance of the Seven Veils for the city's opera company when they do Salome, Nura, her mother, and Safura, their Israel=born teacher.

Here's my take on Millennium City. It's basically the same city found in the book. All we're doing is adding tracks, bars and other stuff. Two tracks already exist, Michigan International Speedway and Hazel Park. For those who don't know it, Hazel Park is a 5/8-mile track for harness, or Standardbred, horses. We're adding Millennium Downs and Millennium City Speedway. Millennium Downs is a typical Thoroughbred horse track with a 7/8-mile grass (turf) track inside the 1-mile dirt (main0 track. Millennium City Speedway is based on the old Continental Divide Raceway near Castle Rock, Colorado. It has a drag strip, a 1/2-mile oval and a 2.66-mile road course. The oval and road course use part of the dragstrip as their front straights and the oval's back straight is part of the road course. In Rivertown, besides the arenas mentioned, is the Millennium City Ice Arena. This facility has two rinks, one for figure skating and one for hockey. Instruction in both is provided at the arena and many area amateur hockey clubs use their rink. Bars, nightclubs and a supperclub are next.

Re: Upon Further Review: The Champions In the Champions campaign I'm working on, the characters are stronger than the ones they were based on. The players will have the option of creating new characters or changing and renaming the rest of the iconics. Guardian is Defender with better armor. Lisa, Lady Arcane, is Witchcraft with more powers, a different background story, a screech owl as a familiar and a different costume. (Lisa's identity is known to the public.) Donna is a Wendy clone, who doesn't want to be a heroine, Jeannie has a different last name. Denise gets a background story that covers her experiences as a theatre student and CIA black-bag jobs expert before becoming a DOSPA agent and team liaison. Carol, a new character, is the team's nurse. April, a new character, is the team's engineer. When Guardian can talk her into it, she either joins the team as Spirit Cat or backs Denise up. (Since the two women are good at being sneaky, they work well together.) I might rename Spirit Cat Nekokami, which is Spirit Cat in Japanese.

Re: Upon Further Review: The Champions

Re: Upon Further Review: The Champions According to the article Pointless Champions, by Theron Bretz, in Digital Hero #3, the idea of point limits comes from the hobby's wargaming roots. He advises scrapping the point limit system and letting the players make the ideal versions of their characters instead of rough drafts. To me, this is a good idea. Yes, it creates more work for the players and GM, but I think it's worth it.

Re: A Look at my Version of Pittsburgh in the CU Wayne Enterprises was put in because I was planning to have the CU's Batman in pittsburgh instead of Gotham City. If I don't, Wayne Enterprises will be replaced by another public-spirited corporation. Hot nightspots are this post's topic. The Cabaret of Magic, in the Strip District, is a supper club where stage magic is performed. Their resident magician is a woman noted for her close-up and stage magic skills. Danny's, on Bouquet Street, in Oakland, is a jazz club. Although there is no official house band, the Jazz Angels play there four nights a week. The Falcon's Rest, on Ninth Street, is a Middle-Eastern night club that has, according to the owners, "The Best Belly Dancers In The World". The dancers are hired through agents, must be members of the American Guild of Variety Artists, and can play there only once a month. The Funky Feline Bar and Grill, on EastCarson Street, on the South Side, is a fun place. The staff dress in black, complete with cat ears and tell. Feline-style half masks are required on Halloween and optional the rest of the time. The day-shift bartender and two evening waitresses, however, always wear them. The Succubus Club is a Goth nightclub in the Strip District. The music there is hard rock. Usually, it's provided by a DJ, or, occasionally, a band. Zorba's, on Forbes Avenue, in Oakland, is a Greek bar and belly dancers. Although dancers can get booked by agents, the dancers that regularly perform there have first call at the bookings and often commit themselves for the year by the end of January. This group includes, Salone, a 17-year old wonder who always wears long gloves with her costume, Nura, her mother, and Safura, their Israel-born teacher.

Warder is part of the local superhero team, which is using her fastness, which is near a local university, as its headquarters. The design itself is based on the Mobius from Mystic Masters, a fourth edition book. The first floor has only one gate, the east door. I'm adding four more, an extention to the garage; restrooms, a public conference room and kitchen for sandwiches, coffee, tea and soft drinks off the living room; a Japanese garden off the library; and a pantry/serving area connected to the dining room and kitchen. The gate in the east door (of the back porch) leads to additional quarters and either a church or a chapel. The second floor is unchanged. On the third floor, bedroom one is occupied by Donna, the team's housekeeper. Warder has the suite that includes bedroom two. She uses the living room as a private study. The basement has a gate that leads to the non-magical part of the headquarters, where the labs, computer room, hanger, communications gear, vault and workout rooms are. The mansion also has a resident ghost, a pretty woman wearing an evening gown and long gloves. She's polite, refined, and easy to get along with. Comment is invited.

In my opinion, Marvel's greatest team is the Avengers. I'd like to drop them in the CU and have them set up branch teams, one in the campaign city. Only the New York team gets its funding from the Maria Stark Foundation. The branch teams get their funding from the host country. What current New York City team do the Avengers replace, The Sentinels, The Justice Squadron, or neither? What would make the Avengers select the campaign city as one to set up a branch team in? What kind of support would they get from the U.S. government, money, personal or both?

Re: C.A.T. Version 4.563 for review I was thinking of the armor worn in the original version of the character. Wendy's Pulsecat armor would have to go back to the man who invented it to make changes. Of course, the artifact armor could have powers the wearer doesn't know about,

Re: C.A.T. Version 4.563 for review Where is it? I don't recall putting one in. If we use the C.A.T. armor as the basis for Pulsecat, Wendy's armor would be the default one. The default armor would also work as the basis for the one created by the ancient artifact, which may have come from space.

Re: C.A.T. Version 4.563 for review I like the concept. Keep up the good work. One thing that occurs to me is that it's almost a convention that an armored super builds his or her own armor. There are two other ways an armored super can be created. The armor could either be created by someone else (the hero either found the armor or is field-testing it for the government) or it comes from an ancient artifact that merges with the super-to-be. An example of the former is Pulsecat, written by Patric L. Rogers and found on the Morpheus Unbound website. PRIMUS scientist Colin Thompson was visiting Homestead one day when he met Wendy Brooks. Attempting to impress the scientist, she claimed that she was actually Defender's protege and she was temping as the housekeeper until her power armor was finished. He believed her story and, using mainly off the shelf technology, created the Pulsecat armor. After getting approval from PRIMUS higher-ups, three suits were created for field testing. Wendy received one. Defender is not happy.

Re: A Look at my Version of the CU The X-302 fighter is now the F-302 and the X-303 is now the Prometheus. I've figured out that a silver age Batman campaign won't work in Pittsburgh the way I want it to. He's too concerned about his secrets to let as many people in the Batcave as I want there and I don't think he'd let his sorceress friend help if it meant letting her identity be known to the public. Oh well, on to Millennium City with my version of the Champions. Look for a thread to start soon on it. Also, I'll continue with the Pittsburgh thread, in case something useful comes from it.

Re: A Look at my Version of Pittsburgh in the CU The Beaverun (or, more correctly, BeaveRun) Motorsports Cpmplex is in Wampum, in Beaver County. It has a 1.5-mile track and a karting track. There are plans to add a 2.6-mile track, making the road course up to 4-miles long. In real life, the old Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science is no longer active. There are plans to connect it to the Pittsburgh Childrens Museum, ruining the architecture of two wonderful buildings. His historic Zeiss Mark II Planetarium projector, as I understand it, is sitting an a warehouse near the water's edge. In the CU, however, things turned out better for it. Wayne Enterprises bought the building and equipment from the city, brought the building up to code, had the Zeiss projector, nicknamed "Jake", repaired, state of art audio/visual equipment installed in the lecture hall, The Little Science Theatre, and the basement clubrooms, and added new computer equipment and two telescopes, a 16-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector and a 6-inch refractor, that are used, weather permitting, along with the 10-inch Siderostat-type refractor telescope for viewing the stars. The rebuilt Zeiss is used daily. When it's raised the audience hears the opening portion from Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. This piece is better known as the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme. During solar and lunar eclipses, a video camera is properly positioned and the image is fed to monitors in the galleries, video projectors in the clubrooms and Little Science Theatre and also webcast on the planetarium's website. They also lease the clubrooms, lecture hall and planetarium theatre, The Theatre of The Stars, to the Community College of Alleghny County for morning classes at the rate of $1.00 per year. The people at the Carnegie Science Center aren't happy about the old Buhl Planetarium still being open, but nobody else cares. Both places draw big crowds.

Re: A Look at my Version of Pittsburgh in the CU I corected a mistake in the first post. Our look at interesting places starts with sports venues. The Meadows, in Meadowlands, Pennsylvania is a 5/8-mile, limestone-surfaced track for standardbred (harness) horses. Washington County Speedway, which is based on the old Continental Divide Raceway, consists of a dragstrip, a 1/2 -mile oval and a 2.66-mile road course. The dragstrip serves as the front straight of both the oval and the road course and the oval's back straight is included in the road course. The facility's home to many kinds of motor sports. The Pittsburgh International Airport area is home to Pittsburgh International Speedway, a 1-mile oval with a 1.51-mile road course inside. The track owners have no interest in hosting amateur racing. Beaverun Motorsports Park in Beaver County is a good track for amateur racing. The Pittsburgh Vintage Car Grand Prix will hold its first event on a 2.33-mile temporary street circuit in Schenley Park. Unlike the real Vintage, which is, at least, 20-years old, the Vintage in the game was, due to politics, held up. The only reason they got it started was billionaire industralist Bruce Wayne's threat to hold it at Washington County Speedway, which one of his companies own. Wayne Enterprises also own the Pittsburgh Ice Arena in the Strip District. When the Penguines, who want a new arena, heard about it, they insisted on certain changes before they would agree to play hockey there. Wayne Enterprises refused their demands.

Re: A Look at my Version of the CU The Pittsburgh thread has been started.

In this thread, we're looking at my version of Pittsburgh. Although it'll be home to a silver-age Batman campaign, that's a topic for another thread. In this thread, we're looking at the city and the surrounding area. Let's start with the real Pittsburgh, my home town. The city is having a financial crisis. Our mayor has two groups trying to get the city out of the red. One is a legislature-appointed Oversight Board. The other is the Act 47 Recovery Team. The mayor and the Oversight Board are at loggerheads. He wants new taxes and they don't. He's hoping the ACT 47 Recovery Team will see things his way. Alleghny County government is also in financial trouble. They're laying off 500 people, including, I hope, the useless County Row Offices. The Port Authority of Alleghny County, our transit agency, is having troubles, too. Since Pennsylvania doesn't have a dedicated transit funding method, state funds for transit, and county funds which are set by how much the state gives, are staying the same, or dropping while costs increase. Layoffs and service cutbacks are the result. Pennsylvania is the only state that doesn't let local police use radar to enforce speed laws. They think the communities will use it to raise money. Slot machines, which are legal in surrounding states, are illegal in Pennsylvania. Since people are going out of state to play them, the local horse tracks are losing money. Hopefully, they will be legal by June 30. Of course, it will still take several months for the gaming commission to get set up and organized and issue licenses. Next, we'll look at interesting places in the area. Some are real, some are taken from books, comic books, television, movies or gaming material while the rest come from my mind.

Re: Your Dark Champions Campaigns Is a silver-age Batman campaign set in Pittsburgh considered Champions or Dark Champions?

Re: A Look at my Version of the CU In case you're wondering about the Seabat, it was designed and built by the Nelson Institute of Marine Research for the United States Navy Oceanorgaphic Office (NavOceanO). The Scripps Institution of Oceanography is leasing it from them while they work on research projects together. This thread is one of a group dealing with my campaign. Others will focus on the campaign city (Pittsburgh), the superhero team (a silver-age Bat Team) and house rules and their base (the Batcave). Nurses are still wearing white uniforms and, occasionally, caps because they like the elegant look. Many in Congress prefer to support their big contributers instead of the regular people in their district. Responding to demands by wealthy contributers for greater police protection for them and less or none for the poor, they passed, by a veto-proof majority, a bill letting cities declare poor areas "zero law enforcement zones". (Name taken from Mike Surbrook's Kazai 5 campaign.) Some are run by crooks for their own use while others are run by the local prostitutes. (Sounds like I have another thread about my campaign here.)

Re: A Look at my Version of the CU Assuming the Society of Watchers, and (Highlander-style Immortals exist in this universe, I'm sure Immortals have encountered vampires. Some may have killed vampires and some pre-immortals may have become immortal due to vampire attacks. Although the Society would probably have known about the old Council of Watchers, the old Council probably didn't know about the Society, If they did, keeping in mind that they didn't seem to like outsiders helping the Slayer, the Council would have its thugs attack the Society. Of course, when they heard about this, some Immortals would, in return, attack the Council. The new Council, headed by Rupert Giles, on the other hand, would not object to Immortals helping the Slayers. If Immortals exist, Gabrielle might still be alive and the Amazon Queen, assuming that Amazons still exist. I can see it now, an Amazon Slayer. Way cool.

Re: A Look at my Version of the CU On to the Slayers, Hellmouths and such. Somebody has to fight the vampires, demons and other kinds of undead. That's where Slasyers come in. After the Initative left Sunnydale, they briefed UNTIL and the federal government's law enforcement and intelligence agencies about Buffy, the Hellmouth and the Watchers. The NID wanted persission to go after the Slayer and find out about her powers. The President refused and added that anyone in the NID who disobeyed would end up in jail. One group of NID agents tried anyway. They took Dawn and Willow prisioner to lure Buffy to them. Much to their surprise, Willow was a witch and Dawn, being the key, had energy powers. As the NID agents tried to flee, they ran into Buffy, Xander, Anya, Spike, Tara and the Initative and ended up in jail. After the Sunnydale Hellmouth was closed, resulting in the earthquake, Buffy and Giles put their heads together and wrote a new charter and bylaws for the Council of Watchers. She, Faith and Robin then continued training the Slayers that survived Sunnydale. Once they were fully trained, they began training the new Slayers. A trained Slayer, two Watchers and their students are assigned to guard each Hellmouth and the surrounding area. A Slayer gains her powers when she's 11-years old. If she's a minor, her parents have to give her permission to start her training and, if she's completely trained and still a minor, patrolling.