Rich McGee

Did Home Alone teach you nothing?  Those little monsters are dangerous, they come in packs, and these days half of them are armed better than your henchmen.

It being the last weekend of the year I dipped in to cable for the inevitable Twilight Zone marathon.  Managed to last one whole episode before the six commercial breaks in a half hour sent me back my advertising-free podcast roster.  For someone who grew up in the pre-cable days I've become extremely intolerant of ads as I've grown older, which you would think would be more of a young folks thing.

Independent of whether you are trying to build a horror-type atmosphere or not, if you're a GM, it behooves you to give the players relevant in-game information at something more than millibaud rates, while utterly stonewalling their attempts to pry it out of you.  The pastime is supposed to be a participatory story telling, not the GM's own oral still life with flies the GM gets to pull the wings off of at their leisure.

And all from Crimefighters, the RPG printed into Dragon #47.  Good stuff, and one of the earliest examples of a rules light RPG (albeit still rather complex compared to modern examples).
 
 

Back in high school and early university, we played a lot of three games - Champions, D&D and Call of Cthulhu.
 
One observation that came from those days was that character creation was inversely proportional to lethality.  A Champions character was a lot of work to create, but the system made them very tough to kill, rather than KO.  D&D was quicker, and character death was also a more significant possibility.  Cal of Cthulhu? Characters had to be quick to create as you'd be making a lot of them.  As I recall, it was the original Shadows of Yog-Sothoth that opened with the comment that the characters should be fairly experienced - no more than half should be brand-new.

Damn
Tom Smothers, Comedian, Musician and Scourge of CBS Censors, Dies at 86

Val's father is a physicist, astronaut, and private pilot and she's already soloing in her own Cessna 172S Skyhawk.  The aircraft registration number on her flight bag is her Cessna's (N9988K).

But even Constantine eventually found that what MCU Mordo said was true: "The bill always comes due."

Although there’s no guitarist named Josephine “Josie” McCoy, there is a Valerie Brown.  Like the one on Josie and the Pussycats, she’s African-American and highly intelligent.  However, she’s not a musician.  She’s a Stage Crew member, an amateur astronomer who has been to Space Camp, and an AP Physics student who wants to become an astronaut.  Valerie always runs the lighting, sound and video systems during big productions.

Huh.  The Visitant must have been unusually hungry that night, it usually leaves more than just the skin. 
 
Probably had more of an appetite when it was still fairly young.
 
 
 
 

The Mermaid Stories.

 During the Hurricane of October, 1897 witnesses reported  seeing a swimmer in the high surf near what would become Beach Boulevard. The swimmer dragged another figure ashore, and pulled them up beyond the surf lie and in the lee side of a brick beach cottage. Then the swimmer dove back into the surf. The witnesses then approached the seated figure. He was Dominick Mariani, a fisherman and crabber, who's boat had broken up in the heavy seas generated by the Hurricane. What he had been doing out there he would not say, and most fishermen, seeing the signs in the skies, beached their craft, and Stayed home for the week.  The Hurricane lasted 60 hours and pushed the water 8 feet about the high tide line at Norfolk. His friends joked about him getting rescued by a mermaid. Sightings of a female swimmer with Raven hair were reported by other boaters, often her waving to the passing boats, but her identity was never determined.  All sightings ceased after  October of 1903 when another tremendous Hurricane hit the Central Coast of Virginia. These stories were the source of the Coelho Mermaid Mascot, drawn by  Charles Dana Gibson, and used on the fish and crab cans of Coelho Foods, until a redesign in the late 1950's, whereupon they gained their current cartoon Mermaid Mascot, and Commercial spokes person.
 
The Bavinetsky Murders.
 
Lady Irina Bavinetskaya was a notable Medium, and Mystic, playing her trade from the salon's and halls of the rich and famous all up and down the Atlantic coast.  For a modest fee, she would schedule and conduct seances, and had a reputation for being quite accurate. regardless of what the  reader might think of "spiritual matters, there were some frightening irregularities in her last séance. 
 
The Sandringham-Alard family had purchased one of the islands just off the coast, that General Cameron turned into one of the defensive star forts during the Civil War, and in the center of it, built Sandringham Castle, a mediaeval fantasy castle of red brick stone and concrete that they used as their manor.  Staffed with servants, and a small number of Sailors for the various water craft they kept to travel to the mainland, or transport goods to the great house, the  Sandringham-Alards seemed to have it all. However Cynthia Sandringham-Allard was distraught as she had received word that her college aged Son, Michael had vanished in a hike in Germany's Black forest. She engaged the services of Madame Bavinetsky so as to determine the fate of Michael. With a guest list drawn up, including a few of Michael's local friends, the séance was scheduled for October 17th, 1898.  After dinner, and once the servants had cleared the table, and locked the doors, the ritual started. Servants reported strange voices, shouts, and other odd noises coming from the locked roo, until around 10:30 AM, when there was a collective scream, followed by a profound silence. The Servants unlocked the doors, and found Madam Bavinetsky unconscious and unable to be roused. However all the guests dead. their bones, organ, and blood removed, leaving a slightly browned, dry, skin hide, intact and still within their clothes, with every button and hook in place.  The police were called, and arrived hours later, but they were unable to rouse Madame Bavinetsky, who remained in a coma for 21 month, before passing away. Michael re-appeared in Europe just before Christmas, and took a Deutch-Amerika liner back to the U.S.  Inheriting the Sandringham-Alard fortune, he still sold the island and house to the U.S. Army's Coastal Artillery command in 1912.  This would not be the last time that such gruesome ends would strike someone in or around Coastal City.
 

 

Lauren is from one of the 4E books of normals.  Michelle is, I think, Sailor Neptune's first name in one of the English Sailor Moon dubs.

Internal combustion unicycles were A-Okay, though. 
We certainly do in real life, although the mandatory "only exists in your own mind" limitation does reduce its utility quite a bit.  Still a lot of folks who've clearly sunk way too many points in theirs, though.

Jeff Dee!!

I can't help but feel a special build that costs based on the size of the other dimension is unnecessary.
 
Unless, of course, you pay for every dimension based on it's size.  If you don't, then you are really screwing over the guy who wants a really deep pocket when his teammate pays less to acess an entire universe.
 
You do still get to define your personal,universe in 6e, don't you?  Why does it cost extra to make it smaller than a universe?
 
As far as how to avoid being trapped, that has been covered well enough.
 
As to why you would build it in such a way as to possibly be trapped inside....  Well, EDM useable as Attack has a long and storied history as one of them most banned builds of all time for a reason: all the hilarious stories that come from GM's not catching it the first time around. 
 
I can think of several reasons to build it this way:
 
it won't be a quick-and-dirty "gimme a gun!" In the middle of a combat.
 
It will never be "the perfect hiding place" where one character places the sack on a wagon full of grain sacks and everyone leaps inside and waits an hour before jumping out.
 
It can create some interesting story tension: " he needs medical attention, but we have to be in River's End by sunrise!  Take him into the bag, you two, and I will acquire the softest steed to ride through the night!" Says the mysterious and shifty character your buddy Mike is playing.....
 
And on and on, up to and including that comic someone posted a while back where the party was using a bag of devouring as a portable guillotine....
 
 

Hey!  Ah-Toe demanded perfection in travel!  If they were on three or more wheels, they were from that goofy splinter cult!
 
 

Someone who values the storage space and is not deeply analyzing the benefits and drawbacks from the perspective of a paranoid murderhobo?
 
Why would anyone design a metal contraption powered by flammable substances spewing out noxious fumes so that they can travel at great speeds and potentially end their lives should there be a malfunction, inclement weather or a slight driver error (whether by the person driving this one or someone driving a different one)?  Historians and archaeologists believe that this reflected the devout religion of Ah-Toe, a deity of speed who demanded such sacrifices from his faithful.

I'd also contend that percentile skill systems are just plain more intuitive for most folks, especially non- or new-gamers.  They then go on to spoil that a bit with a full range of poly dice for damage and a few other functions, but everyone groks what a 75% chance means where reading the odds on a 3d6 roll is a less universal skill.  That factors in to the ease of summarizing, of course.
It's on the cusp if being actually good even in its current (badly-edited) state, and someone experienced with Hero (or any point-buy supers system) that wanted to put in the work could probably make it shine.  I'd certainly put it ahead of GURPS Supers or the Silver Age Sentinels/Absolute Power BESM-engine games in that regard, which I can also see unrealized potential in.
 
Well, maybe not Absolute Power.  All these years and they somehow made a worse version of SAS.
I think you might mean the Sidekick book, but there's some overlap with the Resource Kit as well.  They're both very slim, and in the store for single-digit prices.
 
I bought the slim BRP book many times over, but only because it was bundled with every boxed RPG Chaosium released for years and I bought pretty much all of them.  Yes, even Ringworld and Elfquest.  Heck, I still have a Madcoil miniature from the EQ figure range that came out for the game. 
 
I really should pick up the new BRP.  I know I like the system, and while I had the "yellow cover" interim version it was lost in a flood years ago so it's not like I'd be duplicating something I have on the shelves.

BRP has one advantage over Hero. The rules can be summarized briefly.

The Worlds of Wonder version had the core rules in 16 pages, plus another 16 each for Magic World, Superworld and Future World. While each of the latter three beg expansion (and Superworld was expanded), having such a concise format is obviously a benefit when it comes to learning how to play it.

At times I've considered using Superworld as the basis for a fully point based version of it.

Cora likes classical music.

Like I said, Miniguns work well!

I also found that Miniguns work well at removing their heads as well.

Wow, it was 2nd, wasn't it?  SW didn't drop till 1983 and Hero 3rd was 1984.  Now I feel old.  Would've sworn it was 3rd, or very early 4th when I played SW.

Wow, it was 2nd, wasn't it?  SW didn't drop till 1983 and Hero 3rd was 1984.  Now I feel old.  Would've sworn it was 3rd, or very early 4th when I played SW.