Rich McGee

I was going to gush about the figurine myself, Arthur beat me to it. 

Hmm... I've never been comfortable with a plot that depends on players making really good rolls.

Mystic "echoes" of the Janus Key being used? How about Fortean events? As the Key's wielder warps reality, unintended alterations also happen. Back in the day, PCs would have needed to read the Weekly World News for sightings of Elvis (or Batboy), rains of toads, images of Jesus appearing in tortillas, and the like. Nowadays I assume there are websites for this stuff.
 
Oh, hey. Let's work more with Tortilla Jesus. There are lots of lines going hither and thither in the taco, and okay, a person with a vivid imagination could imagine some of them as forming a vaguely human outline. But someone who makes a really good Deduction roll (or applies computer analysis) finds the lines form a map. The tortilla isn't showing Jesus, it's showing the roads and rivers around Eveleth, Minnesota. What's significant about Eveleth, Minnesota? Well, the PCs don't know until they go there. But it's a breadcrumb along the trail to the Janus Key. Or at least on the trail to something the Janus Key wants done.
 
Maybe the PCs encounter other people who are follow their own similarly obscure investigative trails. Maybe they're just nuts, engaging in a more abstract form of pareidolia; maybe it's connected to the Janus Key; or maybe the world genuinely is far stranger than the PCs imagined.
 
Dean Shomshak

"Naughty boy, I've never Kipled before!"

And how do you feel about Glock Roach here? 
 

 
The trench coat makes him a potential pulp character, especially since the sculpting on the guns could let them double as practically any automatic you'd see waved around on the cover of Black Mask or Thrilling Detective. 
 
 

I might be if I knew what it was. 😁

Fraknoi's materials are pretty solid for astronomy education stuff, but some of those items will be geared toward young audiences, and sci-fi from the early '60s now seems pretty archaic, I'll agree.

We were SUPPOSED to fight a Big Bad last night.
 
I say "supposed to" as 2 weeks ago (real time) we arrived in a little village under a curse.  For eighteen years, the townsfolk can't leave the village/cross a certain border, else a monstrous wolf creature will hunt them down -- and if anyone successfully escapes out of the forest, said wolf will kill 3 villagers per escapee.  So, the village is now made up of more elderly folk who would not be able to cross the border in time (GM Hubby: "No, you don't have enough room to just put them all in your cart" *sighs*).  2 of the PCs earlier met a ghost who had been killed by said wolf creature and would like to be put to his final rest.  Plus, this town might have a lead about some ruins the Explorers are supposed to be looking for in the form of the very odd statue in the middle of town that's older than the village itself. 
 
Leads!  Plot hooks!  Advancement galore, right?!
 
Jack of all trades PC instead wants to hear all the life stories of these villagers!  And set traps for small game to help gather food.  Nevermind the fact the villagers have been doing this for nearly 20 years themselves.  Noble PC wants to bunk up and read the Stupid Book (aka the Book that's more important than the 3 murdered NPCs).  Nevermind the fact that the page that has Info has been sliced out already -- and she knows this.  I at least convince her to take rubbings of the inscription of the statue.  Bodyguard PC wants to set up defenses around the town.  Again, Nevermind the fact the villagers have been doing this for nearly 20 years themselves.  I search the residence where the ghost stayed before his final hunt, find a locket left behind, then ask what if anything the villagers know about this dead man -- who tell me which direction he headed off to way back when.
 
Hubby's frustration is seething.  I decide to go in said direction in order to find clues and Bodyguard PC deigns to come with me.  Other 2 PCs insist upon staying, so we can only really blaze a trail for a while rather than set up for The Fight (because the hubby wants us all there).
 
Last night!  Noble, Bodyguard and me are ready to head back into this bog!  Jack of all trades AGAIN wants to STAY IN TOWN to listen to all the villager stories, all the while not so subtly goading Hubby GM into activating his Hubris in order to go with the rest of us.
 
And then insists on bringing the Stupid Book with him.  Even AFTER GM has point blank said "There's nothing useful in it -- What you need is in the missing page Scoundrel NPC took."
 
Going through this crummy bog, Jack loses the Stupid Book in the mud after a poor roll and it falls out.  It takes him a while to realize this.  Meanwhile, the rest of us find an interesting dead tree that's the final resting place of the ghost and--
 
Jack INSISTS on wandering off to FIND the Stupid Book.  Nevermind the muck and bugs and wet and ick! He throws all his drama dice into FINDING THE BOOK.  OK, the rest of us are at the tree, find the dead guy's remains, GM begins to have the ghost speak--
 
Only to be cut off by the Noble PC who is complaining about how she doesn't understand her knacks and skillsets and how useless they seem to be and--
 
I am FEELING the tension in my husband.  And it's in me too by now as my PC is trying to hear the ghost's advice on how to hopefully kill the wolf monster and has been tasked in returning the locket to his lost love and--
 
More OOC comments and irrelevant questions and Jack channeling Arnold from Predator with all the damn mud.  The Stupid Book is now caked and saturated by the mud, rendering it practically unreadable.  (And afterwards, I warn hubby that the rest of the PCs would probably look forward to returning this destroyed book to the guy they don't like regardless of the consequences/throw all the shiny math rocks they can into mitigating any potential reputation damage.  He says there's no way that's gonna happen).  By now it's 20 minutes to our closing time, so I suggest we at least set up some fires to help see in the dark and to at least try to set up some assemblance of an attack plan before logging off for the night?

It takes all 20 minutes to agree on where to put the fires.
 
Hubby is mentally checking out at this point.  He's promising to at least deal with my backstory in the coming weeks, but he's just giving the rest of the group the barest minimum. 😕

From the astronomy education mailing list I'm on.  Haven't looked in that link, but the guy who sent this out is a significant name in the astro ed racket.

Don't tempt me with a good time. I made a few of the characters for Champions back in the day. Hmm... wonder what happened to them.

Interesting.  What's next, another sequel to Freedom Force? 

As to that fist western cover, the body in the street "probly got hiself shot inna back. Pistols are lousy weapons at ranges above 10 meters.

Interesting.  What's next, another sequel to Freedom Force? 

Dev statement about related stuff:
 
 
https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/47640-welcome-home-an-open-letter-from-homecoming/

If your ground movement can still legitimately be called "running" you're doing better than I am.  I prefer to think of it as a "determined stride" at this point, but "lumbering advance" might be more accurate.
 
Still swimming well, although the breast stroke wreaks havoc on my knees if I do more than a few laps.  Rather stick to the crawl or backstroke.
No reason not to at least try in an emergency, though.  What's the worst that could happen, your tombstone reads "He died flapping" or something? 

Ah. LL you must be referencing the "Lancelot"  era of the myth, which appears in the twelfth century by French writers adding romance and love and other such "garbage"  to the legend. The origional legend has it's roots in Wales not England, and deals not with the stopping of the Saxons, but rather the repulsing of the Britons who were being pushed west by the arrival of the Saxons. 

Well, my last campaign was one with all natural powers so this or a similar construct was common.
 
Regeneration (1 BODY per 6 Hours) (6 Active Points); Limited Power- No strenuous activity while healing Power loses about half of its effectiveness (-1) 3 Real points.
 
Most supers with this would be good to go from most battles in a day or two, one week max for really serious injuries.

Right, if it could go either way, give it to the player character.  If they probably wouldn't make it, let them just barely pull it off, gripping to the edge of the building with their fingernails.  Use a DEX or appropriate roll to get up safely.  This is HERO games, not chump games like real life where you'll probably fail and die.

If your ground movement can still legitimately be called "running" you're doing better than I am.  I prefer to think of it as a "determined stride" at this point, but "lumbering advance" might be more accurate.
 
Still swimming well, although the breast stroke wreaks havoc on my knees if I do more than a few laps.  Rather stick to the crawl or backstroke.
No reason not to at least try in an emergency, though.  What's the worst that could happen, your tombstone reads "He died flapping" or something? 

Correct. I have plenty of my own stuff hanging on my walls.

Ah, yes, I've seen other "force field" constructs like that. In this case I believe it's primarily a construct/notation convenience. A bunch of Defenses are being thrown together as a package, and the writer (I assume Steve Long) wanted PD/ED to be Resistant, so it was simpler to make all of them Resistant. Not that he necessarily expected the fact that the other Defenses are Resistant to come into play. Since the FF is presumably for a NPC, cost wasn't a significant consideration.

My family history on the paternal side of things tends to agree.  Although we still can't quite figure out how our twig of the tree went from starting out in Norway to living in 1950s California and then squatting in a ICBM launch silo in Plattsburgh NY during the Cuban missile crisis.   Some gaps in the record, to put it mildly.
 
I don't think I'd ever do a properly historical European game, but if I were forced to set something there maybe Italy or Germany during the Black Plague would do.  Just run it as a post-Apocalypse campaign, with depopulated settlements to scavenge, paranoid survivors to deal with one way or another, constant threat of disease, and of course plenty of religious mania - not all of the pro-Christian variety.  Not normally a fan of PA stories, but doing it with actual medieval equipment would be a change of pace from the usual kitbashed modern-day junk with a scattering of firearms as trump cards.

Scandinavian Scotland was still pretty wild.

And this is what reading through the lore can be so much fun:

[[SIDEBAR]]
DRACULA?
Mircea Dracula is the older brother of  the vampire Vladislas Dracula and half-brother of Radu Dracula. All three were born in the 1400s and are effectively immortal, possessing either mystic or vampiric powers, or both. Mircea is the heroic one of the trio, with Vladislas the King of the Vampires (and the basis for Vlad Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula), while Radu dwells in a pocket-universe where he engages in hedonistic pleasures.
[[END SIDEBAR]]