Markdoc

Re: Adapting D&D Worlds Is it set in a country you run right across in a couple of hours? cheers, Mark

Re: Ceator God, Destroyer God, Sub-Gods and their priests This would be quite playable - in fact in many ways it sounds similar to Runequest, where the gods are real, active and each have specific spheres. A great deal of political maneuvering is based on religion. To give some examples, The Lunars - who essentially worship the Goddess of Taking Other People's Stuff - have outlawed the God of the Wind and Storms, because he's the chief god of the people whose stuff they just took. They give his kisman the God of Death the hairy eyeball, but haven't outlawed his worship - because, well, he's a bad one to get on the wrong side of and they have no problem at all with his kinswoman the Goddess of Plenty because she's largely apolitical (everyone's gotta eat, after all). In this setting, although you have different cultures and some overlap in function, it's not like people worship a culture-specific Sky God. There's only one sky god. Different cultures have different reactions to him and different names for him, but everyone agrees it's the same guy (hairy, bad-tempered, likes cold weather, etc). The same for the sun god, the learning god, the god of killing nasty monsters, the many and varied gods of the nasty monsters, the god of cutting people's heads off and keeping them, etc, etc. Last time I looked, there were over 400 gods described in some detail. In this setting, virtually everyone has magic and most people get their magic either from their cult (little spells you can learn and which the priests hoard and dole out in exchange for money/services) or directly from their god (big, nasty spells). A few people have non-god-related magic that is learnt and taught like technology, but everyone else considers them dangerous wierdos. cheers, Mark

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Just finished reading the collected Fahrd and the Grey Mouser series (re-released in two volumes by the Fantasy Masterworks series). Oy. Read the last two novels and several of the short stories immediately prior end to end last night and overdosed a bit on Nehwon. Still, most of it is is much better than I remembered (at least as far as light fantasy goes). The final book is worse: if you like the characters don't read it - I'll summarise. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser get fat and petulant. There are some extended B and D scenes. They retire from adventuring, meet some of their children and the Mouser starts a shipping business. The end. Trust me - it's better this way. Still worth 2 quid for the whole series, though And as an aside - has anyone else noticed that the plot of Swords and Ice Magic is almost exactly the same as Neil Gaiman's American Gods? Hmmmm. Also just finished the Second book of Robert Holdstock's Merlin Codex. *Not* light fantasy. The guy writes strange very well. If you loved the Mythago wood series you'll like this. If you hated it, you won't like this. Very different story, but some of the same feel. But for me any book that mixes up Arthur, Merlin, Jason and the argonauts, Medea, the celtic invasion of Greece, the Kalevala and a simultaneous war between Celtic warriors and the Kingdom of the Dead has got a fair amount going for it. Lots of literary references - part of the fun is playing "pick the legend". cheers, Mark

Re: Combat Maneuvers I'm pretty loathe to give people "naked modifier" powers in FH, even though their gear is free. Indeed, this is a pretty good general rule - I'd only allow a naked modifier if that were the only way to do the power in question: not just as a way to save points. To take the example given, to take the naked modifer AP on any thrusting HTH weapon costs 7 points. That makes it more or less equivalent to Find Weakness in effect, but without the need for a skill roll. If a player wanted to start with a magic weapon, he'd have to pay full price, despite the fact that ordinary weapons are free. And he'd only get one. Thus, in my game - although I'd have no problem with a player having this power - he'd have to buy the full power. For example: HKA 2d6 AP (45 Active Points), OAF: HTH Thrusting Weapon of Opportunity (-3/4), Real weapon (-1/4), STR min (-1/2 IIRC...) cannot do more damage than type of weapon used (-1/2) Real Cost: 16 END Cost: 2 That costs about the same as Find Weakness with a decent roll. Unlike Find Weakness, it never fails and takes no extra time, but you can't reduce the target to less than than half defences, which seems about right as far as balance goes. The fact that you can counter AP with hardened is the same as countering find weakness with lack of weakness. You might object to the price - 16 points is a fair investment for a FH character - but someone with this power is going to easily put BOD damage through plate armour with anything heavier than a rapier, while his companion's weapons go bling! That can be especially grim if you use hit locations since you double BOD in head and vital locations AFTER armour. A head hit with a normal weapon (say, 2d6 total) will do no BOD on average to a heavily-armoured foe - this power allows a thrust to do 6 BOD off the same attack.... He'll put a lot more stun through too since he not only halves their armour but also the nonresistant PD behind it. And with a two handed sword, he will readily make holes in things like Iron Golems that can shrug off most non magical HTH attacks... So beware of making it too cheap! cheers, Mark

Re: Atserix the Gaul When I was a kid I loved Asterix - I got the books as Christmas and Birthday presents. i had every one in hardback up to #22 (the Great Crossing, IIRC). And one year I came back from University and... "Mum - where are all my Asterix books?" "Oh, I figured you were too old to read comic books now - I gave them to the school fete." nnnnnnnggggh! cheers, Mark

Re: Good Fantasy Movies Just to avoid confusion - Dreadful Melody is the same film as Seven String Demon: just a different title. To the list, I'd also add Bride with the White Hair: a betrayed female martial artist comes back from the dead to avenge her clan's destruction. A Chinese Ghost Story: (can really only recommend #1, but it absolutely kicks butt!) in which a timid tax colector and a Taoist priest try to save a soul from the clutches of the evil tree demon. These (like the others) are high fantasy, wizards and flying warrior movies, not more "classic" wire-fu movies like Wing Chun. cheers, Mark

Re: Inu-Yasha HERO Missile deflection, plus a triggered Aid (only on reflected attack, -3/4). Since, strictly speaking, Hero uses a geometric progression you would only need to add one DC to "double" the attack, although you could buy more if you wanted. I'd be inclined to buy 5d6 at standard effect, so you could add a d6 of killing or 3d6 normal to the attack - or at least add something to an attack with funky advantages, but that's just me.

Re: Hey Surbook:

Re: Good Fantasy Movies I agree the ending of Zu is lame, but it just had so much good stuff in it that I like it anyway: what's not to like about the Temple of Scary Things in Pots, or the Masters of Evil? I did a homage to them in my Sengoku-era campaign, including the monk with the staff of lightning. Kung Fu Cult Master is great: I showed it to some friends who had never seen a wuxia film before and they had rollicking time (once they got over their initial "Hey! That guy can fly!" reaction). cheers, Mark

Re: harnworld -- worth it for HERO? A lot of the work has been done for you actually - a friend of mine an old gaming buddy from University days - runs a game set in the Harn world, but using Hero rules. There is IIRC a mailing list devoted to precisely that. cheers, Mark

Re: Hey Surbook: Sort of true: but only if you make the equally common mistake of confusing "western Ogre" with "D and D Ogre": Many Ogres of original western myth had magical powers (shapeshifting was a common one, as in "I bet you can't turn into a mouse") and all the trappings - magic swords, invisible castles, etc. In this regard, they are not so different from Oni. cheers, Mark

Re: Good Fantasy Movies or, indeed, more bizarrely. These are among two of the strangest chinese movies I've seen, and that's saying something. Two slightly (but only slightly) more coherent fantasy superhero movies frm HK are Seven Strings Demon and Green Snake. cheers, Mark

Re: Gladiator's Net - what stats should it have? I suggested the net have +3 because several weapons already give you +2 to bind and grab maneuvers (the sai, for example, or the swordbreaker) - I guesstimate a net would be a little better, hence +3. This balances off against the fact that you can't stab someone with a net and it's pretty useless for parrying - although if it's weighted you might want to add +1d6 HA. Also remember that to target a focus (ie a weapon) requires a -2 penalty on top of the grab penalties. So in the hands of a trained fighter, with grab and bind maneuvers, it could be a very effective weapon. It's not a super-weapon though - in many cases I'd rather have a shield and +3 DCV! Also, it's very much a one-on-one thing. If you are fighting two guardsmen, #2 is likely to stick a spear in you while you have #1 grabbed, unless you are careful. cheers, Mark

Re: Gladiator's Net - what stats should it have? I'd consider it to be a bonus to the grab/bind maneuvers (+3 sounds about right) and possibly a small bonus to STR for those two maneuvers. Entangle doesn't seem right, because that means a) you could toss it over someone and truss them up. It's a small net - in real life the person could simply grasp the edge and throw it away in a few seconds how easy it is to counter depends on your STR - but it's hard to see anyone below Conan level tearing it apart: it's more a case of wriggling out of it. You might want to go for the no-DEF option, I suppose c) as far as we can tell the retarius rarely threw his net like a fisherman - it was used to trip, or entangle weapons or head, but he retained his hold on it. cheers, Mark

Re: martial Arts Comedies Why? So he can get beaten up by some guy with a chair? cheers, Mark

Re: Anybody ever play Fantasy Superheroes? I ran a short (6 month) game in which all of the PCs were immortals (sort of demigod types, from my original fantasy game). Characters were built on 100+100 or 150+100 depending on the archetype they chose at the start of the game. To give a sense of scale, a standard city guard is 10 points and a veteran soldier 25. 100 points would be a whop-ass elite guardsman, so these guys registered significantly on the power scale. It was hilarious for me as a GM, because all the players started with total memory loss. They really were immortal - kill one and they'd pop up again somewhere else in a new body (built as a triggered summon: exact duplicate, and random teleport) that only occurred at the instant of death. Since the bad guy (another immortal) couldn't kill them, casting a forget spell was the easiest way to get them out of his hair. This meant a) the players didn't know at first they were immortal. they didn't know what their powers were. Most of them had powers as well as, or instead of, spells. The players took to it in different ways - one gamed the system almost from the start, working his way up a temple hierachy, intending to build a powerbase (he could shapechange and read/influence people's emotions). One rapidly realised he was essentialy the ultimate munchkin and started behaving like a WW vampire character (He had a variety of Death powers and was essentially a one-man army, but angsty with it), two did strange but extremely entertaining things (one was a mimic wo could duplicate other people's powers and skills, athough the process was rather gruesome, the other was essentially a gadgeteer: he could build almost any sort of magical device) and one simply had no clue what to do in the absence of clear plotlines and staggered from one disaster to another (She had "competence" powers: loads of dice of luck, loads of skills and skill modifiers and loads of 10 point levels, so, while not obviously superhuman the character could perform well under most any conditions: juggle, sing, pick locks, speak any major language, use any weapon, discuss early Ened-Hetet philosophy, etc). I started the game with all the players running solo for a while, before runing into each other - amusingly enough the first layer fatality (well, sort of fatality) occurred between two PC immortals meeting for the first time. It was a popular game, but eventually it ended (the plotline unresolved) simply because of the time pressure of new girlfriend(s) and having to get my PhD wrapped up. cheers, Mark

Re: Using Images to Change Environment? Yeah, but if you use images to create light, then you have a chance for smart people to realise it's not real, right? So Thrud the mighty (INT3) can see just fine, but Whizzo the magnificent (INT30) realises the light is just an image and falls downstairs in the dark? This is, in my ever so humble opinion one place where FREd got it wrong confusing special effect (images-which-are-just made-of-light) with mechanism (make not-dark). cheers, Mark

Re: Help me build a spell: Never-Ending Arrows Well, in fact the arrows *would* fall pont first. Not that it matters - they'd be falling more slowly than if shot with a bow under normal conditions, and I'd still rule that only one arrow came out per phase, so he'd be better off just shooting them. In other words, I'd allow the trick, but reduce the damage by 1 or two DC and reduce his OCV to 0 (dropping an arrow back end first out of quiver doesn't count as aiming....) to take account of the fact that he was getting a 0-END attack

Re: What Da Hook Gonna Be? The "fight a giant ape in my garden" idea is kind of naff (It's hell on the petunias, for start) but I have used the idea of the captain of the guard hauling a bunch of PCs off the street and setting them a task to get a group started. The rationale in this case was a murder investigation and the captain of the guard wanted to recruit newly-arrived strangers in town for several reasons: 1) he was concerned that people high up in the town's hierachy were involved in the murders (which clearly had a sorcerous component) and those higher-ups almost certainly had spies in his own corps of guards. He did not necessarily want them to know what he was doing. 2) If it went really high up, then perhaps it would be best if the mystery was solved "discreetly" - in which case no-one would care if his motley crew of new arrivals were suddenly "disappeared". Doing away with a half dozen city guards on the other hand, would be a bit hard to hide. 3) If the investigators stirred up too much trouble, he could disclaim all knowledge of them and then have them arrested and executed to shut them up. To ensure their compliance, he had stolen goods planted in their rooms, in case they turned down his big payment (although as it turned out, no-one did): he revealed reason #1 to explain the whole deal to the PCs. That worked OK, since once the adventure was run, I let the players find out about the possibility of being "disappeared" which led them to go on the lam together (safety in numbers and all that). cheers, Mark

Re: What Da Hook Gonna Be? Add "me too". One of the most fun series of games I ran was "the brothers Snøttgøbblerson" in which 3 of the 4 players started as brothers. Like Fitz's game that was also very low powered - one chain mail shirt and one sword between the three brothers (there were lots of arguments over who got to have them) and most of the initial fights were simply fisticuffs. Of course such things never last - two of the brothers Snøttgøbblerson went to the great warm pastures in the sky. But that led to a bonus - the last and oldest brother swore a blood-oath to avenge them, which led to a nice revenge scenario as he hunted down the guy he blamed for their deaths. It ended in a sleigh chase by night through a snowstorm and a final killing on the ice of a frozen river (can't really call it a duel since one party was blubbing and begging for his life...) That worked so well, that now I always lay out groundrules to the players beffore they start making characters, so that they start with a reason to work together. cheers, Mark

Re: [Pulp] Suggested Reads

Re: historically correct simulation of armour Yep - it's worth pointing out that this is true even though many of the swedish soldiers were using what were either short halberds or really big axes (the swedish word for both is "Okse" and they helpfully translate it into English as either "axe" "halberd" or even "hatchet"). So even 1 1/2 to 2d6 HKAs were not doing that much BOD damage to the armoured bits. However, what did cause torso wounds were mostly crossbows, maces and a big two handed spiked mace popular with Swedish levy and mercenaries - not swords or spears. This was despite the fact that plenty of skeletons of people were found with the legs cleanly sliced off, apparently by swords. I've been to Visby - definately worth a visit - and the museum has one poor chap's skull preserved which has two crossbow bolts still stuck in it - good shooting eh, what? Anyway there's a whole page of useful videos by the Society for hitting things with sharp metal things, here: http://www.thearma.org/Videos/NTCvids/testingbladesandmaterials.htm which shows a range of effects - in a one cases, a sword swung heavily against a helm simply snapped off, while in a second it made a small shallow cut. In neither case would it have inflicted serious BOD on the wearer - although he probably would not have been feeling too happy in either case. Interestingly, a pick swung against a helm in one case simply bent its spike - although the hammer side seemed to work OK. It begins to look like all thouse stories about longbow shafts going through armoured knights and armoured people being sliced from guggle to zatch were a bit of exaggeration by enthusiastic writers. So in short, the effect of armour in FH is probably about right: if anything it might be a point or two too low. cheers, Mark

Re: Time Travel Another source of useful game material: Feng Shui (the game) had time travel but only to limited crucial periods (called conjunctions, IIRC). Altering the world situation at that period would define what the future world looked like - so of course you have multiple groups all fighting over each one. Of course this setup was really only a kludge to let you use characters with different distinct backgrounds, but it actually worked pretty well. cheers, Mark

Re: FH Magic Colleges But why not have them as one of your factions? They'd be helpful and potentially powerful, but not as powerful as suggesed. Sure, they can ravage your kingdom with famine - but the traditional answer to that has always been to send all your soldiers - in this case, together with your death-dealing magicians - to THEIR territory, where there is plenty to eat... OTOH, if they're nice to you, you be nice back and everybody benefits. That kind of balance is what you are after, correct? cheers, Mark

Re: Mike's Quick and Dirty 1st Ed. AD&D to HERO There are two ways I handle "magic resistance" IMG The first is the desolid thing already mentioned. To avoid the necessity to buy "affects solid" on everything I simply placed it on a trigger (magic use) with a "detect magic" power. That way when a spell is incoming, the desolid is triggered. This has the drawbacks that: a) it's all or nothing - this is really spell "invulnerability" the user needs to take a half phase to reset the trigger (no biggie, really) c) since I didn't buy "affects solid" the character cannot use his own abilities during the phase that the spell is triggered (at least, not after it is triggered). The second is similar to what Mike described but using suppress instead of dispel. The reasons for this are: a) it's cheaper - 6d6 suppress is still a useful tool - it turns a 10d6 fireball into a 4d6 one, essentially, whereas a 6d6 dispel is not much use for anything - to make it useful you have to buy lots. it gives a graduated effect, much like DnD magic resistance: big-ass spells will just trample over it, while small spells will have little or no effect But it has the disadvantage (for simulating DnD magic resistance) that it always has some effect. Magic resistance in the Other Game was more or less likely to work, depending on level, but either it worked perfectly, or it didn't work at all. You could simulate this using desolid, but placing it on an activation roll based on the number of points of the attacker (pretty cheesy, but not unprecedented). Just use the percent table Mike posted, to set your activation roll and then rule that it went up or down by 1 for every X points of the attacker (+0). X being one level. cheers, Mark