Markdoc

Re: What are _____ like in your game? Where did they come from? It's like that scene in Lord of the Rings, where Gandalf tells Frodo that someone "meant" for Bilbo to find the ring and that Frodo in turn was "meant" to have it. He's quite right, of course. The author meant Bilbo to find the ring and he meant Frodo to get it. Why was the sphinx beseiging Thebes? So that Oedipus could defeat it thereby becoming a hero, thereby marrying the queen, thereby getting to bone his mom. The author decided it. If Oedipus had arrived in a sphinx-less Thebes, he probably would have gotten a job shifting amphora on the docks, married a fisherman's daughter and spent his spare time drinking and complaining about how his feet hurt. All a bit too postmodernist for me, really. cheers, Mark

Re: What are _____ like in your game?

Re: "The sign reads 'Beware of the Grax..."

Re: What are _____ like in your game? And, strangely enough, pretty much how I handle the fae, who include both "elf types" and "dwarf types" as well as "giant types" and "troll types" as well as "dire beasts". It's one of the nice things about fantasy games in the Hero system. I tend to use far more unique monsters. So for example the players in my game recently fought a giant "star-worm tentacally thing". That is very likely the one and only of its kind. There will, to be sure, be other giant wormy things and also things bedecked with tentacles in their future. But they will also be unique, so I don't have to worry about breeding or "the ecology of the Beholder" or similar such nonsense. cheers, Mark

Re: Stupid firearms question I think it would be safer to say it might - for a while. Lubricants will boil off or freeze and ammo may well warp under pressure and temperature changes. If you were designing a regular firearm for vaccuum, you could meet all these challenges, but a regular gun might fire safely at first. Leave it very long in vaccum and there's a good chance it wouldn't. Leave it in space - with all the temperature changes *and* vaccuum and it's pretty safe to say it'd be useless pretty fast. cheers, Mark

Re: Elves

Re: Elves

Re: Elves

Re: Elves Actually this reminds me of an amusing conversation I had with a Danish friend a couple of years back. I asked her what "Nisse" were (Nisse are the elf-like folk that help Santa Claus* and also fill the role of house-elf in scandanavian folklore that brownies do in english). We were speaking english and she replied that nisse were elves. I then switched to danish and asked the same question - at which point she couldn't tell me they were elves because danish also has the word "Elves" and it made no sense to say that nisse were elves when they are clearly two different things. We settled for "like nisse, but different" - although nobody could identify exactly how or why different I escaped ire from my teasing by pointing out that I was interested in scandanavian folklore. Scandanavians, for all their success on the social and economic planes, retain a certain lack of self confidence - as a general rule, they are almost pathetically grateful for any expression of interest in local culture or history by foreigners. cheers, Mark *as an aside, at Christmas, I've noticed nisse outnumber the baby jesus about 100 to 1...

Re: Elves Yeah. I always get mild amusement from people who say "elves are really .." or "dwarves are really..." even if we skip lightly over the fact that we're talking about fictional critters here, until the last few decades, there *was* no fixed concept of what an elf or dwarf actually was (and outside the RPG/geek community, there likely still isn't - if you asked my mother what an elf was, she'd likely tell you a tiny person who sleeps in flowers and drinks dew). Tolkein's elves were taller and stronger than humans - and apparently generally smarter and more magical as well - but basically human (they could interbreed, after all). In english folklore, they could be big scary monsters, beauteous humanoids, malformed servants of the devil - or little people, a few inches tall, nut brown and wrinkly, either with or without insect wings, or.... In Runequest, elves grow out of seeds planted in the ground, while in Scandanavian folklore, elves are generally short, brown and hairy - and sometimes have tails (they are often hard to tell apart from trolls (which are themselves hard to define being large or small, sometimes hairy, sometimes not, occasionally human, but often not, etc, etc) or nisse (sort of pixies...). Given that all of these are fictional, one is no more canon than the other. cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic? I have both, in my game. The current setting (the archipelago) has low, wide magic. Many people have a magic gift, or learn spells, or both. However, most people only know a few spells - to become a powerful mage requires years of dedicated study (ie: lots of XP) - and usualy lots of gifts to potential teachers, so warriors normally know 3 or 4 combat spells, a wealthy fisherman might know a water-breathing spell, a weather-predicting spell and a fish-finding spell - but a poor fisherman, or a farmer, who couldn't afford the gifts needed to join a cult, would probably have have no magic at all. In contrast, some of the older, more established cultures have high magic which can be either narrow (The Empire of New Saharn, which views magic as a potentially destabilising dangerous force and strictly controls who can learn magic and what kind) or wide (the Dymerian Empire, where ordinary folk don't learn magic, but mages are regarded as skilled craftsmen like goldsmiths and every wealthy person has several mages on staff). I actually have barbarian magic of various kinds as well, but in general it is less efficient (and often much more dangerous to the user) than "civilised" magic. The Vanaquisl, for example, do all of their magic by summoning spirits and letting them possess the summoner. That actually gives them very powerful magic, but often with nasty (and occasionally fatal) side effects. Nobody said being a hero-warrior was an easy job! So that's high and narrow. cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic? Oh, it would. But there's two reasons: one cultural, one practical. The practical is that the archipelago is between a month and a month and a half's sailing time from the mainland (the traditional route is actually to sail west away from land until you hit the edge of the Great Shallows and then the currents and trade winds will deliver you fairly reproducibly to the northern kingdoms). In addition, the typical ships in use are similar to norman warships (about halfway between a cog and a longship) - they're designed for largish crews, rather than lots of cargo, given the proliferation of pirates and (ahem) unofficial toll collection along the coast. Getting a pair of destriers onto a ship like that and keeping them alive for over a month at sea is a pretty big challenge. People could still do it, of course, if they were determined enough, but there isn't that much interest - and the reason for that is cultural. Armigers - the warrior class (who would be the biggest market for that sort of thing) fight mostly on foot. The reason for that is that the inland part of the western archipelago is fairly mountainous and most people live in the coastal strip. So warfare is a mix of siege warfare and sea battles (if you look at the history all the big battles are either sea battles or coastal raids). Secondly, they fight with a mixture of pikes and two-handed weapons (axes and swords) which makes massed cavalry charges a pretty unappealing prospect. For scouting and light skirmishing cavalry, qurrocks work fine - better in fact than destriers, since they are more mobile in rough terrain. cheers, Mark

Re: TA: Wizards and Armor

Re: TA: Wizards and Armor As a matter of interest, have you GM'ed a lot of Fantasy Hero? My experience (with multiple groups) has been even those who start off with "armour is not in concept" rapidly change gears the first time they get an arrow through the chest. A force field usually can't be up all the time. As regards money and other things - few purchases are as cost efficient as decent armour. If you want unarmoured wizards, you need to give them in-game incentives to be unarmoured. That's quite possible - in my current game, we are 6 months in and even the fighters are unarmoured or lightly armoured. I'm just sayin' is all. Personally, I have nothing against armoured wizards - but I am also pretty restrictive at the roleplaying level about when armour is or is not appropriate. cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic? The difficulties of making up a setting with magic is common have already been described: to make an analogy, I am running my current game on an island group in which there are no large flightless mammals. There are only birds, including large flightless birds, that serve as mounts and resources. However, even that relatively minor change means all sorts of changes that ripple through society and through the game. It means more work for me and for the players. If you want a light-hearted game, then common magic is easy enough to do: you simply ignore the effect it is likely to have. If you want more immersion, you need a modicum of "realism". Now that can still be done - but it means far more work from the GM in designing a society because you can't realistically lift as much from historical settings. That's part 1. Part 2 is the actual game experience. If magic is common, then actually designing and running games requires a great deal more skill on the part of the GM. If characters can fly, teleport long distances, talk to the dead, see through walls, etc, most conventional fantasy tropes won't work: that means the GM has to be more inventive and more flexible. Again, that's doable: I ran a very fun game where essentially *every* character had very powerful magic powers. But it played very differently from most (actually, any) fantasy games I've seen and it took some of the players quite along time to settle down to it. In short, if magic is less common, it makes running a game much, much, easier. cheers, Mark

Re: Playing without END This is good advice. My current game is 50/50 hero noobs and more experienced players but none of them are rules junkies. I have introduced them to concept of END and told them we will use it later, but for now I simply keep a rough eye on END use, and have a list of how much people use at full speed so I can estimate when people are likely to run out. Then I just tell them "You are starting to get puffed" or " You are simply too tired to run any more" cheers, Mark

Re: Magic System Crunch

Re: Elves Amusingly, in my game the færy folk can literally breed with anything, if the whim takes them. So færy/human crossbreeds are possible, but so are færy/animal crossbreeds - that's where you get talking animals, beastmen, uncannily intelligent and belligerent ordinary beasts of various sorts, etc. It also explains the astounding variety of færies - you can get elf/dwarf crossbreeds, elf/goblin crossbreeds, dwarf/pixie crossbreeds, etc, etc. cheers, Mark

Re: What are _____ like in your game?

Re: Jeff Wayne's War of the World's meets Champions I'm glad you necromanted the thread - I missed it first time round, but it would have been interesting. The "victorian Hero" game I started (but which flopped due to lack of player interest) was going to feature a "war of worlds" theme. In my case, it was pulp level adventuring and I had planned to have the actual martian invasion happen while the players were out of communication in the Hindu Kush - to get around the players knowing the "they all die of the cold" scenario. However! It seemed a neat way to introduce "weird science" into the game, with the players (and spies of every nation) scrambling to gather up martian tech, find out how it worked and build their own fighting machines. They would then have had to avert a WWI fought in Europe with walking machines and land leviathans! (the plan was that some martian tech would have been too advanced for humans to replicate, so black dust and walking machines would have been possible, but heat rays probably not, which means that scavenging/stealing working versions would have been very important). If the game had culminated as planned, it would have ended with an earthly counter-invasion of Mars (led of course by the players!) I'm still kinda bummed I never got to run that campaign cheers, Mark

Re: Elves Yeah, but if you look at the older myths, they are sneaky, cowardly, magic-using beings more akin to elves than anything else. The "modern" dwarf with his chainmail, axe and pipe doesn't seem to go any further back than Tolkein: who *did* use a "Northern Hero" archetype. I think thats where the Dwarf = Viking thing comes from. Tolkein, for that matter, seems to be where "modern" elves come from as well. Through the last two-three years, I've been on an "early modern fantasy" kick reading English and Scandinavian fantasy authors from the 19th and early 20th century (I'm already well familiar with the Norse/Icelandic original texts and the romantic era German derivations - I've even held the 11th century original of Grettir's saga in my sweaty little paws, although I couldn't actually read it ) and I'm amazed at how much Tolkien, D&D and Games Workshop have first constructed and then solidified the concept of "fantasy races". Prior to that, a single author (Lord Dunsany, to take an example) might write several books containing elves, all completely different and none of them Tolkienish (in one, for example, elves are marsh spirits with no physical form, in another, there's no race - as far as I can work out there are 6 elves in all of creation). cheers, Mark

Re: Elves But of course! cheers, Mark

Re: What are _____ like in your game?

Re: What are _____ like in your game?

Re: How powerful should..... Well, you want your characters to fall down unconscious most of the time they get hit? Do you want a lot of player death? In that case, a blaster at 3d6 killing sounds about right. (Of course I'm assuming that people arent going around in heavy battle armour all the time, but if blasters are 3d6 RKA, they probably wil be....) cheers, Mark