Markdoc

Re: Five magics An earlier take on this idea was van Vogt's "the book of Ptah" where teh idae was completely explicit - anyone could be come a god if you could get enough people to worship you, which led to some interesting power politics. cheers, Mark

Re: Playing 3.5 after Fantasy Hero Maybe - but after about 18 years I still remember a frustrating ADnD session where my character (Fonographix the bard, back in the days when Bards were the meanest thing you could be) faced off against 3 will o' the Wisps. I could only hit them on a 20, they could only hit me on a 20 and we spent about 6 hours real time playing out the combat. Feh..... scarred me for life, that did. cheers, Mark

Re: Favorite Pulp Character By Ace - the reissue included some other stories IIRC. As to when.... not recently, I'm afraid - I think about 10 years ago. (can't have been much more than that because it has a Kelly cover). It's still easier to find than the older Orbit version (the one I have) which was released in the mid 70's with a rather inappropriate Achilleos cover . cheers, Mark

Re: Favorite Pulp Character I like my Pulp heroes a bit closer to real life - thus Professor Challenger over Doc Savage, Biggles over G-8, etc. I actually find heroes with a 15- in EVERY skill a bit tedious. But one name that I don't see much is RE Howard's Kirby O'Donnell. He only appeared in three stories (collected as Swords of Sharazar (sp?) and recently reissued). I really liked those stories and since almost no-one I know is familiar with them, used them as the basis of several adventures that gave me a couple of months of enjoyable gaming in my FH game. cheers, Mark

Re: Playing 3.5 after Fantasy Hero We still play it from time to time: only one-off late-night, high-beer-consumption games, though. We tend to use 2nd Ed. AD&D mostly rather than 3.5 (since most of us still have the old books, while only one of us has 3.5) and we can do 2nd Ed. characters in 15 minutes rather than the hour you use for 3.5 (what's the point of playing 3.5 unlss you use all the kw00l options?) It's fun in a kind of "I'm a fighter, so I fight, you're a cleric, so you heal. Don't go taking none of them pointless damage type spells - the job of walking artillery piece is already taken by the wizard" sort of way. It's fun, but I can't imagine running a campaign using those rules again, or anything more than a kill-the-hordes of undead/orcs/giants game session. cheers, Mark

Re: Normal Characteristic Maxima A simple solution, which has worked for me is: Double cost of STR - this means that most primary stat.s give you a bit more than 1 for 1 in terms of points spent: I don't really mind that. STR has to change, since it's way out of whack, giving more than 3:1 Charge double over NCM (which in my game is 20) Reduce starting points a tad (I favour 100), so you have to give up something if you want lost of 18's in your Stat line, let alone a stat over 20. Enforce a style of play where having skills is important. Sure, a 23 DEX is cool, but it still leaves you with an everyman 8- climbing skill: climbing is about a lot more than DEX. An INT of 23 means an awesomely large brain, but the wit with Conversation 12- is still going to cut you dead at the earl's dinner party. In other words, don't let people make unmodified CHA rolls to cover skills they haven't got. And finally, I don't cap OCV, DCV or DC - but I do allow "powers as skills" (I guess we are supposed to call them Talents now). This means that players have "cool shit" to buy instead of simply spending experience for upping damage and CV - but that focussing on those things is possble if that's your schtick. The trick is you can't have everything. So you can get a duelist type who specialises in one on one weapon combat (very high CV, martial arts, damage bonus), a thug (Combat luck and high CHA) and a "dirty fighter" (backstab, eyegouge and special "not get hurt" powers like the "desolid dodge") all of whom shine under different condistions, and who all diverge from the standard fighter templates. If you encourage your players to develop in different ways they will, without needing any significant changes to the rules. cheers, Mark

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors? I own a fair numbers of old DnD modules which I mostly acquired after the DM had run them and then lost interest, and I actually got a fair amount of use out of them, although I don't think I ever ran one straight (aside from the fact that they were converted to Hero, of course). One example of the way I did things was the way I introduced a shipload of barbarians to the civilised lands. Having landed, gotten a couple of minor mercenary type jobs, they were down on their luck and short of cash. I took ... ummm (I think it was called) ... the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - which is about a fake haunted house and arms-smuggling pirates and ran it pretty much as written, though motivations and origins of the bad guys were altered to fit my own plans. At the end, the players get a ship and a clue to the next adventure, which IIRC correctly involved lizard men and Kuo-toans, neither of which exist IMG. So I took the basic scenario idea, replaced the nonhumans with human groups, threw in a cameo appearance by an NPC I wanted to use later and ran a heavily modified version of the module, but keeping fair number of the plot ideas. For example at one point the players realise they have the whole plot bass-ackwards, the arms smugglers they have so righteously slaughtered are in fact not bad guys, and they end up having to make a deal with their erstwhile foes - and pay for all the damage they caused. Oh, the tooth-grinding caused by having to pay wereguild and give up most of the loot they have so painfully acquired! Of course, that gave them the incentive to REALLY get the people responsible - so I flipped to a "temple set in a swamp" module from a completely different series (the name escapes me, but it had a naga as the big bad guy at the end), tossed out most of the monsters and replaced them with cultists and off we went. That adventure ended up with the players having mad-on for the thieves' guild (and vice versa) of the nearby large city where I wanted them to go, which led to a series of home-made modules dealing with covert trade wars between merchant princes (which in fact masks a larger conspiracy). Unravelling that involved a deal of travelling about and I used the occasional module (Isle of Dread springs to mind as one instance) as locations. At the end of this series of adventures (about 6 months weekly play), the players finally confront the mastermind behind the whole deal, tackle him and all of his nasties - and screw up! Instead of killing them all I simply diverted from what I had in mind to Escape from the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, which I basically ran more or less as is, just removing things like the Mushroom men and adding in a few items of my own invention to tie it into the existing storyline. So basically, although I'm running in a relatively low-sorcery world using Hero system and no non-human races, I still got plenty of mileage out of the old DnD modules - and the final fight with the thief-lords on the dock, while the volcano is exploding in the background, from Dungeons of the Slave Lords was regarded as a high point of the game for months afterwards. After 6 months of play and all the bad things that had happened to the players (and their NPC friends and family) along the way, taking revenge on the people responsible was obviously very cathartic for the players. Basically old modules are a fine source of ideas to mine for games, and what is in them is purely special effects - an adventure that is set in a "dungeon" can easily be converted to a castle or even a series of houses in a city. Some things won't fit in that setting, so just replace them with something that does. cheers, Mark

Re: Modern-Day Fantasy Oh, I dunno. I kind of like the idea of the IT guy running a registry check and then saying, he can't do anything and you'd better call a priest.... cheers, Mark

Re: [Pulp] Suggested Reads

Re: Winx HERO So that's what the hell that is! I've seen chunks of the series on TV in various hotels and couldn't figure what it was all about. Thanks for the summary! cheers, Mark

Re: A new take on "Deadly Blow" Yep - I've used this construct too, although I don't limit it - players can buy as much as they want. No-one has ever brought more than one level, though, I presume because of the cost (with one exception - a ghost-killing type character who had a spell that did this - the extra limitations brough the price into the acceptable range for him, but also meant it was rarely used, so no balance issues). The irst thing that set off alarm bells with deadly blow was the fact that - as you have noticed - deadly blow does exactly the same as this (rules-legal) construct but for half the price. cheers, Mark

Re: Talking with Ghosts: Alternative Necromancers. Two posibilities. IMG, the priests of the Dymerian religion have a militant arm whose job is patrol the necropoli where families bury and venerate their dead and make sure the dead stay where they are put. So the Deathguard have all the usual trimmings - black and silver armour and they're heavily into skulls for decoration: but they're good guys. They have some divination spells, but no "raise the dead" spells - instead they have spells for "putting down the unquiet dead". For a more shamanistic feel I had a PC in the game (a shaman) who carried around the skull of his Grandfather, who had been a powerful shaman. He could talk to Grandfather and possibly get useful advice (Grandfather was bought as a contact with useful connections, via a focus, but the invisibility advantage - the PC could talk to the grandfather but no one else could see or hear any replies. Everyone else thought he was cracked). The PC also had a variety of magical powers, brought with the special effect that his grandfather summoned spirits to do his work for him - and which didn't work if ol' Grandfater was upset with him (-1/2, since Grandfather wouldn't actually sit by and see his last remaining relative get squashed for no good reason) As a GM I loved this situation since ol' grandfather was an irascible old SOB who used to love to denigrate his squirming, useless worm of a grandson and unfavorably compare the other players to warriors "in his day" when men were real men and monsters were real monsters, etc etc. Also he required sacrifices and constant flattery to be of any use at all. You can get some of my ideas on spirit magic from: http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Grimoire/magic_systems.htm#On%20Stranger%20Tides and: http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Runequest/heroquest.htm cheers, Mark

Re: Armor costs The answer to how long to make a suit or armour is "not as long as you think" A competent armourer can make a suit of full plate in a couple of weeks, if he has all the tools and stocks to hand - less, with competent assistants. It actually takes less time to make plate armour than to make mail armour. A blacksmith, OTOH, probably wouldn't know where to start. Blacksmith (the kind you find in a village) is not the same as an armorer (normally a well-paid professional). My objection to the "make armour expensive" advice - which is OK advice, don't get me wrong: the stuff *was* expensive - is that it simply delays the day of reckoning. At some point if you make heavy armour desirable, then players will get their clabbered little paws on it. It's not a solution in and of itself. cheers, Mark

Re: A new take on "Deadly Blow" Lol - since I have already disallowed deadly blow, "deadly spell" is not on the menu. But as for the sneak thief attack, we simply went with Backstab "+1d6 HKA, can only be used against unsuspecting foe (-1), requires a killing weapon of opportunity (-1/2), real weapon (-1/4). Note that I did not give any STR Min, since this attack reflects the ability to put a bit of metal into a soft spot, not muscle power. This costs 5 points, allows the thief to use a dagger to do 2d6 HKA against unsuspecting foes (or a garrotte or a sword or whatever - even a hatpin would do) - the real weapon limitation was retained so that he could not - for example - garrotte a living statue made of stone, even if he sneaked up on it. Unlike deadly blow, however, it does not allow him to pick up a greatsword and do 3d6 killing. Given that a sneak attack a) allows an attack versus a DCV0 target and halves hit location penalty and c) doubles stun, even at 2d6, this attack essentially allows an instant kill on anything that is not armoured to the teeth - especially as the standard approach was an attack on the head or vitals, with a few extra levels added to damage, to make sure he didn't only do 2 BOD... You can see in my games why the burly fighter with the 4d6 killing attack didn't steal all the limelight! cheers, Mark

Re: Turakian Age: Far East Style? or you can try the cheesy, but eternally popular samurai-who-fell-through-a-gate routine, which has the advantage that you don't have to mangle the setting to cram him in. cheers, Mark

Re: A new take on "Deadly Blow"

Re: A new take on "Deadly Blow" As laid out, this is perfectly kosher. If you outlaw Deadly Blow (and I did as soon as we playtested it) then CSLs are an alternative - as are PSLs to hit the soft bits. However, my observation is that rather than taking CSLs only to increase damage, most players prefer to take just ordinary ol' 3 point CSLs that can be used on OCV/DCV/+damage. Since 5 point CSLs are the smallest that can be limited and you need 2 to get a DC, a -1 limitation for (only to do damage) is probably not enough. Compare for yourself. Which would you rather have? 5 points for +1 DC 6 points for +1 DC, +1 OCV or +1 DCV In general, the fact that that 5 points gets you ?1 DC with all HTH is not enough to outwiegh the charms of the 3 point level. Although it seems excessive, I'm tempted to go with a -1 1/2 limit for "only to do damage". That reduces the cost to 4 points per DC and makes a full extra dice 12 points. That's only slightly more than +1d6 of deadly blow, but does not give an increased base damage, which is at the heart of the Deadly Blow problem. You could limit it further down from there for specific circumstances. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy coinage Well, as pointed out fiat currency goes back at least 2000 years in the real world and some cultures in my game world use it, so I'd have no problem with it in a fantasy setting It's not necessary that the government be long-lived and stable, merely that people believe there's a very, very good chance that they'll be able to use it (in other words that the currency is not totally dependant on an unstable government) cheers, Mark

Re: Hero HERO Well, I'd rated Hero 4 out of 5 stars, pushing upwards, while I'd rate HotFD 4 leaning downwards. I don't want to post any spoilers, so I'll be vague. Plusses: good workmanlike storyline, with plenty of backstabbing and doublecrosses, but nothing too hard on the brain. Some nifty fightscenes, even if nothing as eye-popping as that first fight in Hero (I loved the shoot-4-arrows-very-fast-and-save-the-heroine scene) Nice cinematography - but again, nothing that actually makes your eyes stick out on stalks like a few scenes in Hero did Less wire-fu (that's a plus for me, anyway) Minuses Given that wire-fu was downplayed, the actual flying daggers did some totally impossible stuff: for some reason that was just irksome. It's not just me - the audience, who by and large were into the film, just laughed at some of these. and one spoiler I can't avoid - scroll down if you don't mind seeing it: The last scene. The final fight between the two main male characters takes place in a blizzard that blows up instantly out of nowhere. Nice visual, but like the flying daggers above, this just provoked derisive laughter. You could almost hear the director off-camera shouting "snowstorm!" The same fight in the snow goes on too long, with the characters inflicting totally ludicrous amounts of damage on each other and then, at the climax of the fight the "dead" woman with the dagger in her heart - who's mostly buried in snow by this point - wakes up to make a melodramatic speech and gesture - and then dies (again). In a Shaw brothers movie from 1979, you'd kind of expect this, but in a mostly serious story about love and betrayal, you don't want your audience cackling like a bunch of 6 years lining up for their Ritalin. I think that's why the mixed reviews: the movie is a solid martial arts flick, with production values waaaay above the average - but then in the very last scene, willing suspension of disbelief is dragged offstage and savagely beaten: and that's the impression you leave the theatre with. It's similar to the current asian rave-movie of the moment, Casshern, which has some cool ideas, really eye-popping visuals and style - and then does this incredibly awful Final Fantasy-style lecture at the end. The audience is squirming in their seats, going, "Alright, alright, enough already, we get the point, just DIE and shut up, so we can finish the movie!" And like all film reviews, your mileage may vary, not available in all sizes, colours may vary from those shown and void where prohibited. cheers, Mark

Re: bows and arrows What in the name of the seven gods of the yellow valley is an "assault bow"? cheers, Mark

Re: godless fantasy

Re: Post-apocalyptic fantasy And now there's a sequel too "St leibowitz and the Horse Woman" IIRC. Bye the bye, Fitz - who posted earlier - ran a post-apoc fantasy game that I played in - only briefly, alas - which was excellent fun. And I don't generally like post-apoc fantasy that much. cheers, Mark

Re: godless fantasy The simple answer is to MAKE them different. Maybe only "prayer" can turn undead or raise the dead - maybe gods can offer things that magic cannot. In my game, the gods are distant and (possibly) uninvolved. So some cultures argue whether there really ARE any gods. There are clearly powerful "somethings" out there but the differences between a really powerful mage, a god manifesting, or a demon might be pretty hard to work out for an observer. Which explains by priestly magic and pagan magic can co-exist. Both sides claim they are on the right path... cheers, Mark

Re: A question about dungeons. On a less comical note I have one good old fashioned dungeon, with tricks, traps, etc that I used. It belonged to a wizard who had from time to time problems with hero types (something to do with human sacrifices...). He was smart enough to know that fighting these people was a dangerous business, so when they turned up, he'd flee into the "dungeon" with them in hot pursuit. Then he'd take off at top speed through the trap and monster-filled place, avoiding the traps and opening the cages on the way through. By the time the heroes got out - if they did - he'd have had time to get ready for a fight, while they were ready for a rest :-) cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy coinage