Markdoc

Ol' Nyarly is the essence of unpredictability. Only he knows the rules of the twisted game he is playing, as his dealings with Randolph Carter would suggest. He also has a sort of rivalry, and utter contempt, for many of the other Old Ones. He could have seen Arthur as a way of punishing them for offending him, to be discarded when no longer of use (or when Arthur's own character flaws make his position untenable). considering that Britain returned to a somewhat chaotic sand non-unified state once Arthur was gone, this might not be too far off... For an interesting take on this idea, look at the Slaine cartoon series that ran in the UK fantasy scifi weekly 2000AD. The titular hero Slaine (A celtic warrior-king, veeeery loosely based on the Irish mythic hero Cuchulain) takes the Arthur role, supported by Myrddin (a survivor of Atlantis, whose super-science passes for magic). The story is a pastiche of celtic myth, new age pseudo-celtic goofiness, the Arthur legend and Lovecraftian beings. I drew heavily on that material for a campaign in the "celtic analogue" part of my game world (Sort of a Slaine/Mallory/Jack Vance/Alan Garner/Lloyd Alexander/Lovecraft mashup). It was a fun romp, with the table ringing to "Kiss my axe!" and "In my warp-spasm I killed thirty men and there are none who say it was too many", etc. cheers, Mark

People might say that California has pretty much every kind of terrain, but they'd be totally and utterly wrong. I lived there for years and travelled to pretty much every corner of the state, and it has about what you'd expect: a Mediterranean climate on the coastal side of the mountains, shading off to desert on the landward side. I can attest from personal experience that it's got about as much climactic variation as Greece or Italy - and indeed of much the same kind, plus a bit of desert, all packed into ... a larger area. To be honest, people say the same thing of New Zealand: "It's like the whole world packed into one country!" But really, it isn't. It has about the same range of environments as California (not the same ones, though), or for that matter, France. So I agree with the criticism. I think realistic geography helps, not just to get a feeling of verisimilitude, but because unrealistic geography says to me that the creators of the game world really didn't think about the setting very much - either that, or they're just not good at it. In either case, why would I be interested? It's more than just nit-picking: if the game is going to be more than just hack n' slash, the setting plays an important role. As an example, in a D20 game from a few years ago, we turned up (as starting adventurers) in some podunk village. Our role (as it turned out ) was to defeat a band of marauding goblins - pretty standard intro stuff: a bunch of strangers have to band together to survive, etc - but on arrival, my wife (who was new to roleplaying) was all fired up to investigate the "mysterious village" - I mean, it was on no major trade route, was almost unknown, but it had three big spacious, stone built inns! Who were they intended to house? It had masses of big, expensive houses. The locals all pretended to be poor farmers, but then how come they lived in these mansions? Who built the expensive fortifications? Where were the military who must obviously man such an important outpost? etc. She was actually kind of deflated, when everyone else assured her it was just a village. That it wasn't really intended to make any kind of sense. As it turned out, that was pretty indicative: our characters spent most of the rest of their brief lives under a major city in an extensive sewer system that housed all kinds of nightmare creatures, killing thing and every few days retreating upstairs to rest and sell the loot garnered. It's also indicative that all of the group refers to places in that game as "that village with the goblins" and "that big city" etc., because none of them were places, as such. They were just very loosely sketched concepts. Contrast that with last weekend's game. The players refer to places by their proper names (well, many of them ). They refer to people who live in those places by their proper names not "that one old guy from the village where we fought some goblins" Last game we had a hard choice and I clinched the argument by referring to prophecy we had heard 3 years back (game time) and about 4 years (real time): everyone still remembered it. It's still a D20 game world, and it still makes little sense economically (podunk nowhere towns still have big inns ) but at least by attempting to inject some basic design sense, it engages the players much more deeply. cheers, Mark

Either of those could be worked in through roleplaying, though (which to be honest, is how I'd do it). Want top recruit apprentice mages? Start a magical college. If you want to recruit a loyal follower to run the college, instead of entrusting it to an NPC wizard - say, Ridcully the Brown - you could certainly spend points on that. Finding suitable faculty could be an adventure in itself! Want to recruit ogres? Well, you're going to need a recruiting team that can recruit and train ogres without getting eaten and that has a certain tolerance for banjo music Want better ironworking - recruit a ferromancer. Or some dwarves. You get the idea. If you don't want to do it yourself, buy a contact or follower to do it for you. My own experience has been that players don't want to run around sweating all the small details, but they do want trusty sidekicks to run things. So they tend to spend plenty of points on social skills, contacts, and followers. At the extreme, we had one PC (modelled on Blackadder the first) who had few, if any marketable skills, but was rich and had a mass of followers. His solution to combat was invariably to hide behind somebody else and then yell helpful commands like "Frow him wuffly to the gwound! No! Wuffly, I say!" Cheers, Mark

We've run three games where this was the focus (in two of them I was a player, in one the GM) but in none of them did we make the PCs pay points for stuff directly (in all of them players chose to spend points to help them gain/manage/keep their spoils, but that is a seperate issue). Everything else was handled in-game. In other words the PCs got a watchtower by finding a site and hiring labourers and guards, not by spending points on a base. We roleplayed out aspects of this. To take one example from one of those games (one set in during a quasi-historical first crusade), I couldn't shore up the defenses of my little town, because there was a shortage of skilled masons: they had all gone off to Jerusalem, where there was more work. That might sound like busywork, but the result was a) sending one PC all the way back to France to recruit commoners (at vast strain to our economy) a war with our neighbours sparked by our need for more cash, and our desire to steal some of their workers.I think that's more fun (and adds to flavour) compared to just spending points. Cheers, Mark

Yeah. I enjoyed RED, because a) it was a bit of campy fun and they milked the fact that their action hero was a pensioner. It's pretty hard to take it straight though. These guys (or their agents) need to accept that their action-star days are over. That's OK. Bruce Willis and (especially) Tommy Lee Jones can do way more than that: the guy has a face just made for character roles. As for recent movies, I just saw Studio Ghibli's Up on Poppy Hill (beautifully made, sweet, but a bit predictable) and Cloud Atlas (which I liked very much, but then I've read the book, so had no problem with the plot). It could have done without the happy ending coda they tacked on, though. cheers, Mark

There's a few fantasy novels that might help here: The Dragon Waiting by M John Ford is set about the right era, and even has fantasy elements which would fit well with your ideas (just swap the word "vampire" for "Sidhe" . The Damiano's lute trilogy would also fit, and the Phoenix and the Mirror (if you can find a copy) is set earlier, but is full of great ideas for such a setting. You could also just pick up any of the many historical novels about the Medici, or just grab a history book covering the same period. cheers, Mark

It might be worth checking out the old feng shui roleplaying game. In that, various factions were fighting a secret war for control of certain places with stronh Feng Shui - which gave the owners access to mystical power. Strip away the time travel stuff, and it'd actually be pretty easy to file the serial numbers off the factions, change their special effects where needed and use a lot of the ideas from there. Cheers, Mark

Well the first thing that springs to mind is that people are going to react to this, and pretty dramatically. Those interested in magic would probably see fae places as valuable resources: there might even be conflict over controlling them or access to them. A mage's tower built on or near a fae gate would make that mage significantly more powerful. At the same time, it might make him into something else if he stays there. I can see that those who are wary of the fae (and that would be many, many people) might want to try and "cleanse" the area or at least control access to it. I can easily see local crusades like those we saw across Europe in the Middle Ages springing up. cheers, Mark

This is a very Hero-centric approach, though. Our D20 GM likes Hero system. When she plays, she likes the ability to tweak her character, and the flexibility the system offers her. She would never buy or run Hero system though: when she is GM'ing, she wants everything down in black and white. I've met a fair number of GM's like that: they want to pick the product up and use it, pretty much as is, and they are reluctant to make major changes, even if some aspects make them uncomfortable. cheers, Mark

It's also because MMORPG characters are typically ridiculously durable: they fall off high cliffs, take a dozen swordstrikes to the face, get hit by an explosion and fly 30 metres ... and get up and run back into the fray. From my experience that's where the "Toon" moniker came from. Initially it was used derisively (at least when I encountered it) but now it just seems to mean "PC" or Character. cheers, Mark

One option that we've used extensively is just to build a signature attack. For example: +1/2d6 HKA, AF (15 active points), requires weapons of opportunity (-1/2), requires two hands (-1/4). 9 real points. Since I didn't add in STR, min, real weapon, etc, this gives him a 1+1d6 HKA that he can use to attack with between 1-5 times, at full OCV, as a half move, as long as he has two weapons. He can also attack multiple foes at once, albeit at a penalty This power is suitable for a knife fighter, or duelist using light weapons, The character could really mess up lightly-armoured foes, but will struggle against anything with tough defences. For 4 more real points, he can lift the base attack to 1d6 HKA (22 real/13 active) which means at 15 STR, he's getting a 2d6 AF HKA. Now're you're talking damage equivalent to a barbarian with a couple of big axes - but special effects are up to you: it could as easily be just a really, really skilled guy with knives. This is a pretty expensive talent, for a fantasy character, especially since I didn't add reduced END. On the flip side, the high END cost means it's not a game-breaker, even at 2d6, because the character will run out of END pretty swiftly. That makes it a special move the PC can bust out from time to time, cheers, Mark

Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Here's a scene from a recent game: Maximayhem the cleric turning a bunch of animated skeletons back into their component bones cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently?

Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities Actually for most of his life, he was positively giddy about the future: he only turned sour in his old age, when he came to the conclusion that history was not running in the direction he had hoped. It's said he wanted the epitaph on his grave to read "I told you so. You damned fools." cheers, Mark

Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

Re: The Chain Sword/Sword Whip It's a very specific genre cheers, Mark

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Last night I tried something I've been wanting to do for a while: Bacon cake! Well, kind of. It's actually a classic french recipe from Robuchon, and unlike some of his recipes, it's dead-simple. So you can try this at home Heat the oven to 425 (for our US readers ) or 220 Celsius While teh oven is heating, select your baking pan: cast iron is best if you have it. Brush oil or melted butter (best) around the bottom and sides of your pan. Now lay in a layer of bacon, so that the ends meet and overlap slightly in the middle, and the sides overlap. You don't want to be able to actually see the pan. Let the ends of the bacon drape out and over the sides of the pan. Peel and thinly slice some potatoes, then, starting with the potatoes, alternate three layers of potatoes with three layers of cheese (the recipe calls for Gruyere, but anything tasty that will melt and is not too salty will do). Grind black pepper over the top, then pull the bacon up and over toward the center, but not completely covering it. You want to leave a bit of a vent hole there so that the bacon can shrink back while it bakes. Bake uncovered for about an hour. Check it after about 30-40 minutes: if the top bacon appears to be completely cooked (it should be crispy!), place a loose sheet of foil on top to keep it from overcooking while the rest of the dish finishes. It's done, of course, when a knife piercing the center meets no resistance. Immediately upon removing from the oven, pour off any excess grease (there'll be a decent amount!) then allow the cake to cool for about 10 minutes to insure it releases from the pan easily. Invert onto a serving platter, and what you get is a cake of crispy bacon, filled with a soft, cheesy, potatoey centre. Tres excellent! It's also good when reheated the following day Cheers, Mark

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Actually, pickled jalapenos are not that hot - a few slices in a big greasy burger like that would give it a bit of zing. After all people eat jalapeno poppers, which are a whole jalapeno filled with cheese (in fact, we have a bunch of boxes of them in the freezer ) cheers, Mark

Re: Low-point characters, intelligence doesn't benefit knowledges? As for the point total, we have played games starting at 75, 50 and even 25 points. The GM needs to adjust challenges accordingly, but there is generally no problem. It's just different. As for "normal" people being 100-150 points .... well, I guess everyone has their own take on normal Generally I think of 150 points as Heroic, action movie hero level. Certainly, at 75 points, you can build a tough guy who can kick the **** out of a bunch of actual normals, without too much difficulty, but he likely won't also be a skilled surgeon/spy. cheers, Mark

Re: Swords and Sorcery Setting My own feeling is that the defining feature is sword and sorcery is how disputes are settled: if the heroes pretty much always react to problems with a piece of pointed metal or heavy wood, then you're looking at sword and sorcery. If some of them are just as likely (or more likely) to use magic, then you're looking at high fantasy. For me, the axis from gritty fantasy to epic fantasy actually deals with the scope of the story. Morality and length aren't a genre-defining featured by themselves, to my mind. So LotR is epic fantasy: the whole story is about doing in a world-threatening evil demi-god, after all, and the sweeping away of whole races. It's borderline S&S /High Fantasy - there's magic all right and one of the major protagonists is another demigod, but otherwise, political discussions are entirely carried out with good ol' fashioned fire and steel. In contrast, Fahrd and the Grey Mouser is classic S&S. Sure, the Mouser dabbles in sorcery, but it's never been anything but a source of trouble - and features in very few stories. When he has a philosophical disagreement with someone/thing, the standard rebuttal is carried out with a longish piece of sharpened steel. The fact that the two heroes have wizardly mentors and face a variety of fantastic foes (including Death), is not that important - it's sword and sorcery, after all, and for me, it's the actions of the heroes that define the genre. Sheela and Ningauble are doubtless powerful wizards (or demons), but they exist mostly as Deus ex Machinae: they don't do much except send our heroes off on quests and then gamble on their survival. Despite all the magic, I'd also call it gritty fantasy: yes, our Heroes try to steal the mask of Death himself, but they do so for personal gain, not for any high purpose, and in Death's house what do they do? Fight with swords, of course! By that definition, Elric (all of the Eternal Champion stories, really) are Epic High Fantasy. Yes, Elric makes much chop-chop, but he's doing it with an intelligent demon sword that kills gods, and exists in all times and across dimensions . He also intersperses swordwork with demon-summoning, dragon-awakening and the use of a wide variety of arcane devices. Corum is the same: going about with the bits of dead gods grafted onto his body, summoning the dead to kill his foes, and ending barbarian invasions not with cunning strategy and a bloodstained blade, but by summoning a flying city bristling with death-rays. Both of them are forced into adventures by fate and disaster, not a need for pocket-money. Conan might fight the occasional supernatural monster (OK, actually quite a lot of supernatural monsters) and even includes a wizard or two in his adventuring parties from time to time, but in his world, magic is for NPCs, and usually leads to a dodgy end. Heroes tread the jewelled thrones of the earth under their sandals armed with a sword, not a wand. These things are more than details: they lead to a very different style of story, and very different types of plotlines. By that definition, something like Game of Thrones is Epic Sword and Sorcery. The story is all about kings and the fate of kingdoms, so it's epic enough. And there's wizards, and giants and undead and dragons, an all. But in the end, every single protagonist (including the dead one!) except for Dænerys (some of the time) ends up settling scores with a rope, or poison, or sword or crossbow. Magic plays a big role, but it's a background role: something that happens around or to, protagonists, not something they do. For me that defines sword and sorcery. And again, by that definition, Cugel the Clever is a high fantasy character, despite the fact that his motivations are usually money, lust and revenge. Nifft the Lean, though existing in a similar world, and having similar motivations, to me at least is a S&S character. Both of them face fantastic foes, but unlike Cugel, with his assortment of dangerous magical gadgets and his lust for other people's magical powers, Nifft relies on his wits, nimble fingers and sword. This isn't just academic hair-splitting ... I think understanding the distinction is important for gaming, too. What's true of protagonists in books is also true of PCs. I've seen several GMs try to run a sword and sorcery style game (and have tried to do it myself, sometimes successfully). It "works" as S&S when the players have little or no access to magic, but while it might be a great game in terms of fun, it seems to lose that S&S style as soon as access to magic becomes routine. It doesn't even have to be very powerful magic to have that effect. Thieves' World is an excellent example: I've played in two campaigns set there, using different rules sets and we had us a rip-roaring good time. I think it's a great setting. But since PCs could be magic-users, it never really felt like Sword and Sorcery - instead it felt like (and played like) gritty high fantasy. We were, of course, thieves and lowlives (Robin Hood rather than Al Capone, but still) not mighty heroes. The plots tended to revolve around heists, loot and revenge, not the clash of good and evil. But swords were usually the weapon of last resort, to be drawn only when cunning sorcery had failed us. It was no more swords and sorcery than your typical dungeon crawl is. And it's interesting to note that the fiction of Thieves' World, despite being hailed as a swords and sorcery setting, followed exactly the same arc as our games: when it started it was all about low lives and hidden blades, but it swiftly became all about the magic users and divine powers. And the first series of novels ended the same way as many RPG games: once you get to the point where main characters are going toe to toe with the gods, it's time to end the campaign and start again. cheers, Mark

Re: Combat Armor that requires having a skill. Yeah - IIRC, a laser rifle does 5d6, in Traveller, which would turn your average grunt into roast with one hit. But if you are wearing decent quality combat armour, it means 5 shots out of 6 will just bounce off with no effect. It's important to remember that Hero is slightly different: the ability to leak some STUN through means there is a middle ground between "Significant Injury" and "No Effect", but where you set that boundary will have a major effect. I ran a WH40K game a while back and set powered armour at 9, and Terminator armour at 12 - but many of the weapons were just ridiculously lethal, so even 12 DEF gave you only so-so protection at the military hardware end of things. This was 40K, so a a game setting of "Some of you will certainly die" seemed appropriate. That's not always the case, so it sounds like you have a good grasp where you want things to be. cheers, Mark

Re: Need help with first Fantasy toon

Re: Combat Armor that requires having a skill. Following up on Lucius' comment about weapon proficiency, I'd strongly recommend against whacking a -1/2 (requires skill roll) limitation on the armour. There's two reasons. 1. If you treat it like a proficiency (ie: either you have it or you don't) it gives you a pretty big cost break for a little investment (Fam: Combat armour 1 pt) 2. If you treat it like a power that requires a skill roll (and that's what the -1/2 penalty is costed on) your players will hate you. Why? Because with RSR, you make a skill roll every time you want to use the power. And at the default -1/2 level, that skill roll is reduced by 1 for every 5 active points in the power - which means a significant penalty on your skill roll every time someone stabs you with a cutlass! So then you end up with the opposite problem to #1 above - everybody will be spending lots of points on the skill to make sure their armour works properly! So here's how I'd build it: Combat Armor: (resistant protection 10 rPD/rED*), Hardened (+1/4), ( (37 Active Points); Focus OIF (-1/4) Normal Mass (-1), Real Armor (-1/4): real cost 15 points. You could, if you like toss in custom limitation: independant (-2) for a real cost of 8, but unless you are requiring players to pay points for gear, that's largely irrelevant. I'd also add: Radio perception and transmit and Life support in vacuum, which add 12 points, for a total active cost of 49 and real cost of 20. *You want ED, or the first laser weapon they encounter is going to burn holes right through them I would not add extra time for "armour putting-on". Real armour covers that, and in reality, is not that likely to come into play all that often. As noted, a focus has to be easy to remove, and getting someone out of Combat armour is probably not that easy, but if you assume that it has externally accessible locks to release it, you could open it up, and maybe release a piece or two - and in most cases, that would negate its benefits, which is good enough for me. Just as with weapons or vehicles, I's simply say that combat armour requires a proficiency to operate. If you have the proficiency, fine: there are no penalties. If you don't you take the normal -3 on skill rolls, OCV, etc. As far as costing it, I'd say 1 point for Fam:Vaccsuits, 1 point for Fam:Combat armour, 1 point for Fam: powered armour or 2 points for the group Fam:Sealed suits and armour, which covers all of them. That's cheap enough that I wouldn't add a limitation to the armour. As for zero-G movement, that's a skill in itself: you need to make a roll whether you are in a vaccsuit, combat armour or your skivvies. Just a couple of last points: depending on how you scale your weapon damage, in a heroic setting 10 DEF is a lot. It'll routinely bounce all the BOD from a 2d6 killing attack and on average almost all the BOD from 3d6 attack. Add to that the fact that the person inside gets to add their PD/ED vs STUN, and it will take a powerful hit to take someone down. Now that's actually true to the source material: the last Traveller game we played, everybody in the final fight had combat armour and laser rifles. It took forever because the armour bounced almost all of the damage. But in both cases, it will mean that a guy in combat armour can just walk through large mounts of ordinary gunfire. Secondly, I wouldn't worry too much about requiring skills and proficiencies: in Hero system, you have lot more points to play with when it comes to skills than you did in Traveller, so acquiring proficiencies is actually trivial. cheers, Mark