Markdoc

Re: Fantasy Cliches

Re: [Compilation] "to Fantasy HERO Conversions & Adaptations" What? Are you Kenn Starr in real life? cheers, Mark

Re: Campaign idea! In the Immortal Tarot Game I mentioned, Death had XD Teleport (only to areas where Mass Death is occurring, -1). The power was not "no conscious control" but since the character did not know originally he had the power, he used it reflexively - meaning he often teleported without intending to, just by expressing a desire to go somewhere. It really messed with the player for a while, because he flitted from battlefields, to plagues, to earthquakes, and the idea planted by some evil GM or other (the rumour of the "Knight of the Black Rose" who appeared as a sign of evil) was that he was *causing* these events, instead of just using the lost lifeforce to power his movement. cheers, Mark

Re: Fixin' what's broken - switching from d20 to HERO In terms of raw power, 30 points of magic (active points, not real cost) is about the same as a 2 handed sword or a longbow in the hands of somebody strong. In other words, hit somebody with 30 points and if they lack any sort of protection, they're gonna be smarting some (at least...). But it's not overwhelming at the instant-kill level. 40 points is merely 25% more powerful, so there's no huge difference. However, 30 points of magic is way more flexible than a two handed sword. It's enough for pretty decent flight, for basic invisibility, for illusions powerful enough to fool someone (but not enough to inflict damage), to entangle someone in spider webs so that only a Conan-type can shrug it off. To put it in DandD terms, you can do a fair number (but not all) 2nd-3rd level spells with 30-45 points. cheers, Mark

Re: Morwold: So how does a Fantasy World Come to Be? It might be worth looking at the vast steaming cesspit of Gloranthan material on the net - it has much of the feel that you seem to be going after: many wacky races (but well-integrated into the setting) and a mass of religions that interact, agree on the basic structure of the universe (that the world was created, that it was almost destroyed, that the devil is trapped under that huge block of stone you can see poking up over the horizon...) but disagree on virtually everything else. The dwarves think the universe is a giant machine put together by the maker and that they were created to oil the cogs and keep the whole thing running smoothly. Other races think the world was grown, or created by the uttering of a word, etc. They resolve these religious debates in the usual way - by spattering the brains of heretics on the ground with a sharpened piece of bronze - which offers plenty of excuses for player-friendly conflict situations... cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Cliches Ah but there is fine (and unrecognised by the Dragonlance writers) line between archetypes and cliches. Tolkein took the (thoroughly archetypal) old, wise magician and made him a distinct character by integrating him into the background story and a certain amount of gentle characterisation. Terry Brooks took the same ageless archetype and turned it into a 2-dimensional rotting hulk of cardboard by being shamelessly derivative. Both Julian May (in her Pleistocene books) and Robert Holdstock (in The Hollowing) both take the archetype of the Devouring Fool but do *completely* different things with it. THAT's the difference between archetype and cliché. We're all playing with the same basic stories - the key is what we do with them. cheers, Mark

Re: Fixin' what's broken - switching from d20 to HERO Here's a simple way to think of it. Joe Normal, the average human hero, has a base of 10 in his Stat line and a NCM of 20 above which he pays double. In short, he's got a 10 point range before he starts to pay double. Mal Halfpint the Halfing hero has the same 10 point range, but his goes from 5-15 in STR: above that he pays double. His starting points are adjusted to reflect his reduced starting stat.s - and normally a minus in the starting line is compensated for by a plus, or a special power somewhere else, so Mal doesn't feel like he's getting shafted. Does that help? cheers, Mark

Re: Fixin' what's broken - switching from d20 to HERO Couple of things to keep in mind, from someone who has made the conversion. 1. YES - Hero can be a lot more lethal than D20. Your sneaky demon may or may not put the hurt on Sir Pher the sunbleached if it catches him with all his armour on, but catch him by surprise when he's at the beach in just his heralidic swimsuit and he could easily end up dead. This - to me - is a feature, not a bug, because it ends the 120 HP tank guy phenomenon, but it does mean you have to be bit more careful with PCs. My suggestion is to start your combats off with smaller, feebler foes until you're hip to the system and can better judge what will and will not lead to massive player death. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art

Re: Herophile Fantasy art The angry guy has a sword. The degenerate longhair has a lute. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And this is just a screen-doodle playing round with a rogue concept. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Thread necromancy! Here's another header for the game site. I've been home sick (very sick) the last week or so and did this (and the pic below) yesterday while in the recuperating phase. This is another header for the current game. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Adventures Or Why are we always underground...again Oy - space opera. The game where I spent hours making a character that was too stupid or puny to gain any useful skills or have any significant life expectancy - and then I was expected to play him? Nuh-uh. Spent another few hours making some ridiculoulsy uber heavy-gravity-world command type, at which point we had entirely exhausted our fascinatin with the game and went back to Traveller:idjit: Never tried Powers and Perils, but gamed for some years with one of the people involved in its design. From some of his comments I think he was a bit hurt by its reception by the gaming world I had a copy of Earthdawn, won at a gaming convention as some sort of prize or other. I may still have it ...somewhere... Anyway, trying to deal with the magic system was enough to kill my interest, although I liked the background. cheers, Mark

Re: Suikoden Effect: Giving Players a base through contacts/followers. We did this in a long ago game and it was huge fun. One of the characters started the ball roling by deciding to build a castle. First we had to scrape up all the money to pay for construction (that means adventuring - you don't think we'd work for it, do you?), find the builders, shepherd them carefuly to the castle site and protect them from the Bad Things That Lived In The Woods until they could build enough walls to live without permanent supervision. In the meantime, the others were scouting about and recruiting soldiers, etc. We were almost finished when the Bad Things That Lived In The Woods got organised and came rampaging out in a great horde to burn the lot to the ground, leading to an all-weekend "defend the half-built castle" game. We eventually buried all the dead, hired new workers, repaired and finished the castle just in time for invasion of the Bad Things That Lived In The Woods II: Electric Boogaloo, followed by a series of punitive expeditions on our part to subdue the surrounding wilderness - all the while trying to get enough of an economy up and running to support the castle. It was just about the most fun I think I've ever had roleplaying. You could stat it out, but you equally well could just say: to build a castle (or whatever) you need a master mason, some journeymen and a couple hundred laborers. Oh, and someone to feed them. And... cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Cliches

Re: Campaign idea! I ran a game like this - all the characters were immortals and the orginal people on whom the tarot was based. So we had Death, The Fool, The Devil, The Tower, the Hanged Man and Trey of pentacles. All of them started with false memories - and in different places, so I played a series of solo adventures until they were all together. I got them to hoose a tarot card to represent their character and then made the characters up myself so they did not know what their powers were. The basic plot was that someone/something wanted them out of the way. You couldn't kill the immortals - they'd just pop up again in a new body somewhere else and you couldn't easily imprison them, unless you did it so they could not kill themselves. so wiping their memory - and giving them a fake identity seemed like good plan. Once the players worked this out, they started to try and find out who had done it to them - but there were plenty of other immortals kicking around, most with heir own agenda The game only ran for about 6 months - then shifting house, shifting girlfriends and working on my PhD took over - but it is still remembered fondly by me and the players. cheers, Mark

Re: But I want to play Champions Yeah, join the club. Our group has 2 other people who GM, but one of them is out of the running (new baby) and the other one only does d20 (he's also got a new baby, strangely enough, but he's soldiering on). So if it's hero system, it's me to GM. Sigh. I miss the gaming group in Maryland cheers, Mark

Re: combat luck My approach is that in superheroic genres, where people buy their defences "combat luck" is merely a special effect. You can stack anything you got. So it's only really an issue for Heroic games. In my Heroic games, where equipment is free, you can't stack free equipment with anything - that's part of the "real" limitation. The exceptions are that you can, of course, use your STR with a free HKA/HA and your personal PD stacks behind armour for the purposes of stun. But that's it. So combat luck cannot be stacked with armour - you would get the best of whichever applied. However, if a wizard buys combat luck and a forcefield, that would stack, since the character paid points for both. As an aside, in addition to combat luck (in my game, traditionally referred to as "Ha, you missed me!") we have another armour power (referred to as "it's only a scratch!") This is invisible armour bought with the limitation "does not stop first point of BOD" and is bought to reflect movie-star style toughness, where (for example) the character gets hit in the face and gets a line of blood from one side of his mouth, or gets stabbed in the shoulder and bleeds, but is otherwise unimpaired. Such a character can get nickled and dimed to death, so it's not a surefire defence, but is much harder to take down than a normal man. It also does not stack with any form of free defence. I've not found it to be abusive: most players prefer to save the points and rely on armour, which is after all, free. But it is good for tough guys and differentiates the real tough guy from the fast, canny fighter. cheers, Mark

Re: HOWTO: Hamfarir I'd go with summon for what you describe, but rather than concentrate - which leaves the caster at DCV 0, and prevents other actions, I'd suggest as side effect (-1?) in which the caster is physically immobilised until his spirit returns. That would let you use a mindlink and clairsentience to see/hear/smell what the familar does. Make the summoning slavishly loyal and you can have either a single form or many forms at a reasonable price. One caveat though - the writer of the article you liked to is doing a bit of new-agey alteration and blending of quite different traditions. In the norse legends, there's no body left behind - the change, though it often involves an animal skin or a magic cloak, is real. When Loki gets caught in Freja's falcon cloak, it's not a familiar but the real, physical Loki who has to bargain for his life. When Odin stole the mead of Kvas, it was he himself changed to a snake, then back to his own form to seduce Sutting's daughter, Gunnlod and drink the mead, and then changed to an eagle to fly back with it to Valhalla. Likewise Bjarki, who can take a bear's form and fights for the king in Hrolf's saga is said to physically change shape. Some norse "shape-strong" wizards may have had many forms (Odin did - one of his many names was Fjolnir ('many-shaped'), but most seem to have had only one. So if you want to go with the Norse approach, I'd recommend multiform. If requires some sort of ritual to change, that could easily bring the cost down to a point where it is quite affordable. cheers, Mark

Re: Overall Levels are they too good or not good enough? I'll join the "priced right" crowd. I think the most I've ever seen on a character was 3 and he was diplomat/merchant type with a lot of diverse skills. Still 30 points is fair investment. 30 points sunk into regular CSLs would be a lot scarier. My problem is not with the 10 point level but the 8 point "all combat" CSL. Not that it's abusive - quite the opposite. Why would anyone pay 8 points for "all combat" when they could pay 10 for "all skill rolls and all combat?" cheers, Mark

Re: Valdorian Sorcerer Tasks Thread OK, here's an easy but potentially debilitating one: "Go into the first tavern you pass after nightfall. Buy a beer and spill it on the first man you see on entering." As a GM, this sorcery system is great. It makes it hyper-easy to introduce NPCs to characters. As in: "Hey, isn't that the guy who spilled beer on you a couple of days ago?" cheers, Mark

Re: kind of fantasy Actually I wrote *even* the Edo period because compared to the Heian and later part of the period, the early part of it was a time of relative social and cultural fluidity and social upheaval. That's one reason it's popular as a Chanbara setting. But still, by modern standards, it was extraordinarily rigid and oppressive. For my game, I chose the Sengoku era because it was even more fluid, but even so, on reading up on the period, I realised that I had to make the same compromises as any author working with that period and ignore many of the real-life restrictions that existed. Lone Wolf has to slip by guard posts on the roads (as did my players) but I dropped the requirement from real life that you needed multiple passes to get around or into most cities - Edo, for example, had walls and moats between each district and you needed a pass for each one. The same goes for the noble thing - I also used this trick (stolen from Japanese source material) of allowing nobility to open doors, but in real life the power of the nobility was extremely limited and strictly fenced about with custom. When Emperor Godaigo was clearly losing the war to regain imperial influence, his own courtiers and guards began politely ignoring his commands when they threatened to be embarrassing, pretending that no-one had heard. The nobility was revered, but not necessarily obeyed. And in my case my task was easier, because it's very, very, loosely based on Japan . In the end, it's no big deal - it is an essential part of the story. cheers, Mark

Re: kind of fantasy Oh I've read and like the series. I'm pondering buying the re-release (but there'ss so many of those little books!) - and I appreciate the amount of period "flavour" that has gone into the series and the work behind it. But at the same time, we have a character who can moves in a country apparently unhampered by taisei, despite his lack of papers and distinctive appearance. He fights a fair number of totally improbable ninja types. Many of the characters behave in a fashion more appropriate to a comic than to real life. As you say, that's necessary. The comic would have had a pretty short run otherwise! But my comment was not meant to be dismissive, merely descriptive. By way of comparison, I also like Blade of the Immortal, which I would describe as "totally fantasy Japan". As an aside, if you have not seen it, there's a really nice French comic callled Kogaratsu which also makes an effort to provide authentic atmosphere. It's slightly less fantastic than Lone Wolf and cub in some regards (the main character is not nearly as uber) but slightly more fantastic in others. Even so, in real life I suspect the main character would have been killed pretty promptly or ostracised for his slightly westernised attitudes Even Edo period Japanese society does not lend itself to episodic adventurers! cheers, Mark

Re: Savage Earth reviewed on Dragon's Landing podcast Well-deserved: it's a very cool site. cheers, Mark

Re: kind of fantasy Fantasy doesn't have to include magic. Ain't in the definition. It just has to be fantastical - and Lone Wolf and Cub is most definately fantasy - we have a supernaturally-skilled swordsman wandering a landscape that bears a loose relationship to historical japan and fighting all manner of wierd and wonderful foes - while at the same time being more or less immune to weapons, wounds and weather. If that ain't fantasy I don't know what it is. cheers, Mark