Markdoc

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Brit.s and curry go way back - and in fact, British army rations in WW2 did include some with curry! Here's a bloke complaining about it and describing what they got to eat in Burma. cheers, Mark

Re: Zero Information

Re: DnD 3.5 to HERO 5e Conversion Gnome: "I'm a monster! Rarrr!" Says it all, really. cheers, Mark

Re: Nanotechnology I suspect the cost and appearance might put them off. Nanofluids have unusual light scattering properties - they're opaque and sort of off-white, more or less regardless of what they're made out of (despite the name, they are not actually fluids at all, but suspensions of small vesicles, - they are so small that the electric surface charge holds them together, at the same time as it allows them to move freely in suspension). I am curious though - what would they taste of? I suspect they'd have no taste at all, which might be a bit off-putting - even water has a taste. cheers, Mark

Re: Nanotechnology

Re: Clockwork and Chivalry in HERO: rule development stuff The simplest way - or at least the way I would approach this - is to make your skill roll a very hard roll (-1 per 5 active points) and define your focus, by the size of the power in it. That's the hero way, after all. A 1 point focus holds 5 active points (-1 on the roll) and lets you summon a 25 point elemental. A 300 point elemental would require a 60 point focus, which is a whopping -12 on your skill roll. That means people could summon small elemental reasonably easily, but only an expert would be able to make a foci that could be used to summon a powerful one. However, an alchemist with access to an excellent lab, who opts to take extra time over the creation of a focus, could manage that. You could also - as I understand the system - use a large foci for summoning multiple small elementals - can you use multiple small ones for summoning a large one? Also, what do you see as the base time for the skill? An hour? A day? Finally, I'd drop side effect on top of that - the destruction of the material used in the focus would probably be appropriate, but a badly failed roll might give you a focus that is flawed ... which only shows up during the casting using it. To give it that oldey-timey alchemical feel, I'd probably adapt something like this to encourage would be alchemists to potter about calculating the appropriate hours for making stuff. To avoid characters who pour masses of points into the focus-making skill and nothing else, I'd be inclined to require multiple different skills. 1. To make the focus 2. To summon the elemental 3. To bind the elemental 4. etc. In other words, the focus s required to do magic, but if Joshua the Cartwright finds a massive focus, that isn't going to make him a master magician: he still needs to know how to summon an elemental, which elemental to call, and how to talk to it, instruct it, etc. A coven, on the other hand might have multiple members, who excell in one aspect or the other. cheers, Mark

Re: Nanotechnology

Re: Need a Map What you probably want is Trelleborg. Here's a map: http://www.planetware.com/map/trelleborg-viking-camp-c-1-000-b-c-map-dk-trel.htm And here's a series of reconstructions. http://www.virtuhall.com/images/virtuel/martel/trelleborg-1.htm cheers, Mark

Re: Ancient city by the sea rises again Cool! cheers, Mark

Re: Dating Dracula D'oh! cheers, Mark

Re: Dating Dracula There are a few specific references. Van Helsing, that ultra-modern man of science, quotes a number of published authors - American psychologist William James, who was writing in the 1870's. Mina Harker - modern woman that she is! - refers to César Lombroso and Max Nordau (yes, that Max Nordau!) who were both writing in the 1880's. On the other hand, I doubt many readers would pick up on that! Technology presets more difficulties. Harker sends and receives telegrams while on his way to Dracula's castle. Van Helsing is also contacted by telegraph. That places the novel after the introduction of public telegraph systems in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which means probably post 1870'ish (though if they had some special arrangement with the railways, maybe only post 1850'ish) - and when they are chasing Dracula, they are monitoring the progress of his ship by telegraph reports, all the way to Varna (in Bulgaria), which certainly fits better with a post-1870 date (though the first telegraph line to Varna was laid by the British during the crimean war, so mid 1850's. I dunno how far it reached though). At any rate none of this could be earlier than 1851, though, because prior to that there were no trans-channel telegraph cables. Additionally, some of the characters travel by steamship, again suggesting a post-1870 date, for commercial steamship routes other than trans-atlantic were pretty thin on the ground, prior to that. In addition, poor Harker misses his phonograph - invented in 1877. Geography also provides some hints. There's also Harker's stop in Budapest (the city got that name in 1873) and the comment that Varna is in Bulgaria (which acquired it in 1878) The clincher though, is that on the way back to Transylvania, the main characters travel on the Orient express, whose first run was in 1883. Put together, the specific references all point strongly to a date in the late 1880's. It depends how uber-geeky you want to be: a few readers will pick up on this, but by far the vast majority won't. You could cover your tracks by indicating that Stoker picked up an older tale and set it in his own time. There's a better way, though - post-Dracula Mina Harker as protagonist has already been done in recent comics and film. Why not use Lucy from Carmilla instead? Her story is not only earlier - fitting better with your period - but very similar in many ways to Mina Harker's. cheers, Mark

Re: House rule: a new form of figured CHA?

Re: Creature: Grandfather-of-all-the-Reptiles

Re: Herbs 'Nuff said: Cheers, Mark

Re: A days journey Yeah. Except that you are not doing it double time, carrying 90 pounds of gear. Try that and see if you can hold 3 MPH for 10 hours. We already know the answer. You can't. Really fit guys with years of experience die trying to hold that kind of pace for very long. The Roman legions were probably the world's fastest marchers and they believed it was impossible. I'm sorry, "I walk to my friend's place" is not really a convincing argument. April this year, I did 23 km through mountains and ruins under the hot middle eastern sun in one day. I was actually in good enough shape to hit the mountains again the next day for another 12 km. Pretty good going, eh? I was carrying two water bottles, some sunscreen, a camera and a hat. Load me up with a week's food, my armour, a spear, a shield, a sword, my bedroll or a heavy cloak and a couple of day's water (Hint: in 300 BC you couldn't stop at the local 7-11 and order "water and snacks for 40,000 - to go". An army that couldn't carry it's own food and water disintegrated fast.) Now try it. I'd be lucky to have made it 5 km before collapsing. Add to that you are suggesting marching until 10 pm (when it's dark - and your speed goes right down: you try marching over rough ground in the pitch dark) and you are moving out of "Oh my god that's tough" to "That's f***in' impossible") I don't know a single military historian who believes that account: everything I have read about the Diadochi wars has the historians arguing about "How could Diodorus have gotten it so wrong?" Nobody argues that he got it right. As for believing the accounts, do you also believe that the elite unit of Eumenes' army - the best fighters in the whole middle east at the time - was made up of 70 year old men? Seriously? cheers, Mark

Re: A days journey I'm pretty dubious myself. As you note, Diodurus is pretty flexible with his numbers and he was writing more than 250 years after the events he describes. Here's what he wrote: "Therefore Antigonus set out with all his forces from Cappadocia and pushed on toward Pisidia, where Alcetas and his army were staying. Making a forced march that strained the endurance of his men to the utmost, he traversed two thousand five hundred stades in seven days and the same number of nights, reaching Cretopolis, as it is called." (a Stade is about 620 feet, so that that's about 300 miles). Although he states that Antigonus took all his forces he also states that he left a part of his forces to besiege Nora. Plutarch, writing around the same time, discusses the siege of Nora, but doesn't mention this famous march at all, saying simply that Antigonus "drew off his army" though to be fair, he's not a very reliable historian either Cornelius Nepos likewise makes no mention of the forced march: pretty odd, if true, since it would be one of the greatest feats in military history. All in all, I'd put the 44 miles a day march in the same category as the claim that the phalanx of the silver of the Silver shields contained no men under sixty years of age and few less than 70 - they must have been pretty spritely old gentlemen considering they are claimed to have killed 5000 enemy pikemen in a day without suffering a single casualty! Edit: less sarcastically, you have to be really careful taking the writers of antiquity seriously, when it comes to specific numbers. Their tales are full things like this - a 70-year soldiers killing thousands without any loses, marches across deserts in record-beating time (Scipo's march from Mt Ebro, for example - if it was true his men would have doing near 50 miles a day), the fact that Chinese live on average 300 years, etc. These sort of tales always turn up with the "historian" is describing events that happened far away and/or hundreds of years ago. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Watched Thirst last night. It's a Korean vampire movie, directed by Park Chan-wook (Director of the awesome- but sensitive - splatterfest that is the "Vengeance" trilogy). It's the first (and probably only) vampire movie to be loosely based on the writings of french writer Emile Zola Basically, it's about a well-loved priest who via a medical experiment becomes a vampire. He is forced to grapple with his conscience, and his suddenly increased desires of the flesh - for blood of course, but also for his childhood friend's wife ... You can probably guess it doesn't end well. Also? No sparkling. It's pretty cool, but not as cool as Lady Vengeance. It was only when we got out that my wife said she was expecting a wacky comedy like Mr Vampire! cheers, Mark

Re: how much BODY damage is typically accrued? Yeah, to echo what is stated here, Hero system damage - especially at the Heroic level - is designed to be highly variable. In a D20 style game, you can't kill a relatively experienced adventurer with a single hit (even on a critical) unless you have built a funky feat tree: which means opponents more at the PCs level, not minions. So PCs can count on a battle of attrition. In Hero, it is possible to ramp up the damage much more quickly. In my games - I ran the 16th C samurai game noted above - most fights resulted in a few BOD being taken by the PCs. But even that mounts up: if a character collects 6 BOD in the course of a fight, that might reflect three good hits by minion level opponents, or one decent hit from minor boss level opponent - but either way, you're not going to heal it up by resting overnight and it's going to require substantial healing if you take that sort of damage on a regular basis. So there are several ways to approach this. #1. Space your fights out. In the 16th C samurai game, it was rare for the players to face multiple fights in a short period of time: when it did happen it meant that they were at "serious threat level". It doesn't slow the game down any if you say "After the action of the last few days, you are able to rest up at the castle. A month later a messenger comes ...." On the other hand that sort of thing doesn't lend itself to prolonged dungeon-crawling. #2 Balance your threats. If your players are mostly fighting minions with weapons in the 1d6+1 to 1 1/2 d6 range and they have decent armour (6-8 DEF) they are not going to take a lot of BOD - you can whittle them down, with lots of minions or just scratch them with a few. You can keep the threat level up, since it is possible that they will be knocked unconscious and unconscious foes can get stabbed through gaps in their amour - suddenly 1d6+1 is a serious threat, so players can't completely ignore these low level threats. There are also other options - dogpiling PCs, using alternative attacks, etc when you want to serve up more threats, without hauling out the big scary monsters. My rule of thumb where lots of magical defences are not available is that 1 1/2d6 is about the top of the scale for minion level monsters, 2-3d6 is for serious threats, over 3d6 is for when you want to maim people. Of course damage is not the only marker - you also need to look at relative CV. Minions typically have a CV 3 points lower - on average than PCs. Serious threats can be from 2 less to 2 more average CV than PCs and scary monsters usually have higher CVs. The balance of CV affects outcome - a monster with a high OCV, low DCV will possibly hurt one or two PCs, but won't last long unless it really has good defences. A monster with high DCV and low OCV will be a real annoyance, but not a real threat. There are so many options that it is hard to get a single fast rule - my suggestion is to start small and work your way up, so that you get a feel for what works and what doesn't, without killing a lot of PCs. #3 Rebalance healing in your game. You can always change the rules. In my current game I have allowed healers to buy regeneration, usable on others (which is recommended against in the rules) but balanced it by requiring a side effect: the healer takes the damage. That has exactly the effect I want - the healer can heal a large amount of damage in one go, if they need to, but is limited in how much total healing they can offer. It also makes healing a big deal. On the other hand, since healers can augment their own rate of healing, it means that two days rest is enough for the party to get back on it's feet even after a bloody fight: they just can't count on being able to heal their way through multiple fights in a short period of time. Again, as a GM, that gives me good control of the tempo of the game: as long as the healers are OK, a single lucky shot that does a lot of damage is not an adventurer-ender. On the other hand, if I want to challenge the PCs, I can throw foes at them until their "healing reserve" is soaked up, knowing that it will take time to recharge. There are a number of ways you can alter the balance of healing if you want to power it up: just bear in mind that unlike D20 healers, Hero system characters can use their power at-will unless limited. cheers, Mark

Re: Help me refine NoNameYet Everyone has their opinion, but personally I prefer VPPs to EC (not that we have the EC option in 6E, anyway ) VPPs are good for simulating a broad category of powers or even a single type of power with a lot of applications. cheers, Mark

Re: A days journey Actually wagons move slower than people on foot or horseback - that is why the 15 miles an hour for large armies estimated by so many journals is lower than the speed of the legions who typically carried everything themselves or on mules, and far less than the speed of the lightest forces. They are also limited entirely to travel by road, which means they have to form up in long lines.

Re: A days journey It should be pointed out that Pheidippides was a myth - ie: there's no evidence that he ever existed. Plutarch cobbled the story of the sparta-athens-marathon-athens run together out of other stories nearly 600 years after the event supposedly happened. If you look at the list you have given you have multiple people at multiple period of history, suggesting that an army travels 15 miles a day on roads - mixed in with some legendary force marches where some participants literally died from exhaustion. I really doubt the latter is a good indicator of how fast people usually travel. And have a look at those numbers - the famous forced march of the British light infantry to Talavera - which you note is considered something an endurance record - covered 67 kilometres in 26 hours - for an average speed of less than 3 kilometres an hour. Heres' what one of the oficers who were there wrote: "'Our men suffered dreadfully on the route, chiefly from excessive fatigue and the heat of the weather. The brain fever soon commenced, making fearful ravages in our ranks, and many dropped by the roadside and died.'" Seriously. Fit, well trained veterans of hundreds of marches falling down and dying from trying to maintain a speed of less than 2 MPH, or just over 2.5 KPH. So suggesting double normal pace on road - 5 km an hour - puts your suggestion for a standard day's travel right up there with legendary marches of history. C'mon - we know what the standard pace for soldiers or warriors is: about 2.5 mph or about 4 kph in decent going. That speed is consistent across history for 2000 years. Bad going can halve that or more, and good going can pick it up by maybe 25%. Forced marches typically mean moving at that speed slower - but going for more hours at a stretch. cheers, Mark

Re: "Raise Dead" / "Resurrection": for those of you that DO, how do you handle...

Re: Zeppelins Well shucks, for pulp, Zeppelins 4 times the size of the Hindenberg with a lifting capacity of about 30 tons (you face diminsihing returns with regard to size - as it gets bigger, you need to make the frame stronger) are technically possible. And while 30 tons might not let you airlift a modern battalion, it will let you add steam-powered catapults and a landing deck for a couple of fighters, while still having barracks for a platoon of rocket-troopers and a decent saloon and restaurant! cheers, Mark

Re: Traveling in your typical modern day sewer: what rolls for illness? Heh. My very first real job was working for the sewage treatment plant - and taking samples from sewer lines was major part of what I did. It was actually a pretty cool job, and there's the build-your-own-coffee-machine-out-of-lab-parts story .... Anyhoo, here's my suggestions. Real life. Your chances of contracting something by breathing in sewer air are pretty much the same as breathing in countryside air ie: less than your risk on the street. What's in the water and sludge comes out of people's colons and urethras, and it's not going to do you much, if any, damage if you breathe it in. If you do, your immune system will eat those suckas for breakfast (literally: it's not gonna waste protein and lipids). Your biggest breathing risk is asphyxiation - specifically from methane. Sewer workers use rebreathers or oxy on deep sewer lines for that reason, not infection. As an aside, sewers do not smell as bad as you'd think - human waste only gets really stinky as it dries out - and sewers tend to be wet. Most sewers don't smell any worse than an elderly public toilet and sometimes better. Your significant risks are: 1. exposure of sewer waste to open wounds (not that great, in real life, but not insignificant: the most likely outcome is short term, but rather nasty fever). If you are really unlucky, gangrene or tetanus 2. Exposure of mucosal surfaces to liquid. This includes mouth, nose and eyes, which is why sewer workers often wear goggles. The most common outcome of this is getting the runs and/or mild fever but there's a wide range of possibilities, most of 'em nasty. Eye infections from getting splashed in the face are the nastiest as even a minor inflammation is going to be painful and might cost you your sight, if you are really, really unlucky. In-game. I like to make sewers nastier in-game than they are in real life because players are happy to have their PC wade neck deep in s*** whereas in real life, people don't do that. You can make 'em behave more appropriately by forcing them to make rolls. In general I would never bother to force a roll for "being in the sewer" but CON rolls for falling in, getting splashed or having open wounds (happens frequently on adventures ) are reasonable. A failed CON roll by itself will have no immediate effect, but in the next few days the player will get fever (reduced END, INT, REC and/or DEX) or the runs (character suddenly caught short with possible humourous roleplaying effects: no game mechanics aside from maybe a small minus to DEX - real life tells us it is possible to engage on a full-on fire fight while suffering from explosive diarrhea). A badly failed roll (-5) might give the PC a severe infection - in the eyes (blinding), in an open wound a deep tissue infection (which I treat per the disabling rules, depending on where the wound is). A badly failed roll combined with stupidity - getting wounded fighting waste deep in sewerage - might even give you gangrene or tetanus - which means bringing the disabling rules into play followed by death in a few days if not treated. cheers, Mark

Re: A days journey Yup. It's interesting: the standard roman legion march speed was 2.5 MPH. The modern US infantry march speed is - you guessed it - 2.5 MPH. cheers, Mark