Michael Hopcroft

I'm planning to go to the event at Guardian Games here in Portland.

No idea what I'm going to do, though. Most of the people there will be playing card games and boardgames. I don't know that there will be much roleplaying there, although this might be an opportunity to pick up some RPG stuff.

Ouch! Obviously feel free to adjust to suit your game, but yes, it's intended to be 1D6 per metre, after (and not including) the first. Falling onto soft surfaces lessens the damage. I'd definitely consider Hero Pointing my Athletics test.

Ken probably wrote it not long after a trip to the emergency room/casualty...

I work in medical records. Falling flat on your face onto concrete after being tripped up hurts -- even if your head is only going from upright to banging against the sidewalk. It gets worse the older you get.

Hope your characters have decent bone density. As you get older, your bones start to deteriorate and falls get more dangerous.

You could find a lot of stuff for martial-arts-inspited supers in Rumiko Takahashi's popular manga Ranma 1/2. It features a group of martial artists powerful enough to be superheroes, but who spend all their time fighting each other over various romantic and personal rivalries. This comes up because Ryoga, one of the protagonist's chief rivals (I wouldn't call Ranma a hero per se, although he will reluctantly do heroic things when circumstances call for it), is extremely strong and uses na "bamboo" umbrella that must weigh at least a hundred pounds -- one-handed. He later learns techniques that let him break down stone walls and similar obstacles by hitting them in just the right place.

Were they to ever set aside their differences and work together, they would be a formidable team.

Your mention of Benton Quest reminds me of the '90s sequel series The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, in which Jonny and Hadji are almost grown up. Jonny has the skills of a solid all-round adventurer (taking after his father's best friend rather than his father), while Hadji has somehow picked up certain mystic talents (not full-out magic spells or psionics, but he has done things like calm down raging bulls and thus unintentionally ruining a bull-riding competition Jonny had entered). During that series we learn more about Race's past as a secret agent (his highly-skilled daughter Jessie has joined the group, and her mother shows up occasionally) and find that nascent virtual realities are very dangerous places. Benton's old nemesis Dr. Tzin still shows up occasionally (as do his equally-troublesome daughters).

I've noticed that the skill levels in many of these writeups seem a bit low from the perspective of someone who hasn't played this game in a while. Barring modifiers, Riff Raff misses with his .45 almost half the time. His bargain and command rolls also seems low for someone who is capable of holding together a diverse gang of criminal specialists (each with their own agendas).

Maybe there's just something I don't grok about the way skills work in this context.

In Thundarr, though, the human villagers are largely unarmed while the wizards' troops are equipped with a mixture of primitive and high-tech gear. That's why they depend so much on the heroic barbarian and his fabulous sun sword.

Do the villagers think "We're no match for wizards anyway, so we're not even going to try to defend ourselves"?

Kurosawa may have pioneered the unarmed farming village needing outside help trope in Seven Samurai, but he subverted it as well by making his villagers much less helpless than they wanted their "protectors" to believe. They had a large cache of weapons and armor, for example, stolen from previous visitors that they didn't bother to learn to use themselves. Easier to get some skilled, desperate and expendable strangers to do the job for them. In the end the samurai ended up turning the peasants into an army of sorts -- not a very good army, but an army nonetheless. And the villagers' response after four or five of the samurai had died for them? "Thanks. Now go away."

The thing that amazes me about Thundarr's world is not the presence of wizards and mutants but that recognizable 20th century artifacts are liberally sticking out of the ground wherever you go like so many chocolate chunks in a bowl of ice cream -- 2,000 years after the cataclysm.* You'd think that with that much relatively intact gear the humans would be further along in their quest to rebuild civilization.

Or they could be wrapped up in a war of all-against-all, to the point that they no longer care about anything other than themselves and whatever petty ambitions they have.

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0322.html

Different game, of course, but you get the idea.

Actually, you could probably see some of these in Glorantha as Chaos hybrids. Ducksnakes are probably kill-on-sight....

There's one way I trie to measure stats in a new supers game, and that's by trying to build a "platonic" Superman. A character built around his three "core" powers: Faster than a Speeding Bullet, More Powerful than a Locomotive, and Able to Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound.

How fast is a bullet?

How much strength do you need to pull as much as a locomotive pulls at the speeds it pulls them at?

How tall is the tallest building and what do you need to clear it?

Everything else that got tacked on later doesn't enter into it.

By the way, what is happening in Europe while all this is going on in England? Is this magic/technology being used to fight the Thirty Years' War as well? Are any monarchs or generals in Europe trying to integrate both approaches into their force, creating truly unstoppable death machines? Is anyone looking across the Channel and thinking of using England's chaos to their own advantage, in such a way that England's independence itself is threatened?

I wonder if magic could be involved in making something akin to Greek Fire -- a sticky, inflammable substance that you can catapult onto enemy ships or siege-works, either already alight or set alight afterwards, the flames from which are almost impossible to extinguish by any means short of total immersion. Of course, for a ship to be completely underwater was an even bigger problem than for a ship to be engulfed in flames! It would also be virtually impossible to extinguish a person who'd been hit as well (at least without magic).

Apparently in the real world the secret to making Greek Fire is lost to time (assuming Greek Fire ever really existed, of course). Those targeted by it must have thought something arcane was involved in the stuff that was burning their fleets.

Ahem. John Carter, Flash Gordon, and Thundarr the Barbarian are waiting for you in the alley out back of the castle, er, I mean space station.

Thats what Death Stars are for.

I wonder whether the "rogue planet" that made the catastrophic fly-by of the Earth (and brought about Thundarr's nightmarish world) was actually a planet, or whether it was actually something like a Death Star instead. Which changes it from an act of capricious nature to one of utter malice -- or perhaps an act intended for some purpose that might not even have had anything to do with the fate of Homo Sapiens.

I also wonder whether anyone was "dropped off", which would explain the presence of things as alien as Moks on the shattered Earth.

But it fits the mating patterns of many real solitary animals. They live alone most of the time but desperately hunt each other down when the hormones kick in. Spectacular combats with potential rivals are followed by sometimes bizarre rituals. After mating, the male and female separate (or the male is driven off, or is killed and eaten by the female). The female bears her young and cares for them for a time before chasing them away once her body is ready to reproduce again.

In the case of dragons, would it be reasonable to think that these combats can take many, many forms? Is the dragon trying to kill off his rival, or would driving him off so that he can breed with someone else be a suitable option?

Or perhaps "solitary" dragons mate for life but live apart except when it comes time to breed. Then they reunite and stay together until just before the eggs hatch, after which the father goes back to his own lair (possibly taking some of the young with him so he can raise them).

There would not be a lot of adult dragons running around in any event. It's possible to have only a hundred or two hundred individuals in the entire world and still be a genetically viable species. It's possible that out of a hundred baby dragons born only five live to be adults. Once they get there, though, they're going to be around for hundreds of years.

One odd observation is whether Michael Moorcock ever wrote anything in his Eternal Champion series that could be remotely described as sci-fi. I haven't read very much of his writing (I find him uncomfortably grim) but having spacefarers as pawns in the Order-Chaos battle could be interesting -- especially if they don't know it until something potentially catastrophic happens.

What would Elemental Chaos (or, for that matter, Elemental Order) do to or with high technology?

It's called Ram Man, but looks like a Broo to me. At 4-5 inches tall, he's huge compared to the usual 25mm or 28mm gaming minis -- but he'd make a nice boss monster.

FYI, all you Glorantha fans.

If it were a Broo it would be the worst-smelling action figure in human history.

Agreed.

To take a slightly different tack (and make the idea of dragon-slaying more likely in games), consider the idea of a dragon race that pursues a low-Q reproductive strategy. This is very much not in the spirit of either Gloranthan dragons (who don't have a "reproductive strategy" in the sense that mundane creatures understand it) or Tolkien's dragons (who were originally an effort in embodying malignant spirits by Morgoth), but certainly would fit into normal fantasy tropes. An adult dragon lays a huge clutch of eggs and then abandons it somewhat before they hatch. All of them hatch around the same time and turn into a veritable plague of dragonlings. They'd spread out pretty fast to sate their hunger. Anybody in the area would very quickly be in the market for aspiring dragon-hunters, who might need only be able to kill a worm 3 to 4 meters long.

I don't know that I want to think too hard about dragon mating season in your example. Given that dragons are so solitary, the nearest potential mate could be hundreds of miles away. Imagine rutting dragons criss-crossing the world in search of partners in a driven frenzy. Surely everyone would know something was going on. This would also probably be a rare event -- once every century or so -- so how prepared humans would be for this (and for the release of the hatchlings into the world six months to two years later) is uncertain.

Whether characters who end up facing dragons should expect any chance of survival is much more a story consideration. The dragons Tolkien wrote about were much more like natural disasters than monsters: they consumed armies and laid wrack to cities, and to stop one demanded the capabilities of a hero (often a doomed hero). If that's the portrayal your game takes, random mercenaries should hardly expect to win in a fair fight. But then, who says dragons need to be fought in set-piece fashion? :-)

Dragons are also, generally speaking, too smart to fight fair. IIRC Smaug didn't exactly "fight fair" when he took over the Misty Mountain. A dragon who is both a living WMD AND a tactical and strategic genius is a force to be reckoned with.

You would have to be a fanatic to take one on and the stuff legends are made of to win. If you do it for the fame, or the glory, or for the promise of a great reward, you can be described in one word -- Lunch.

However generally if my players get attacked by dragons in either game, we end up writing out new ones.

Dragons go after your players? Remind me not to game with you before a work day.

(I know what you meant, mind you, but it was the sort of opening only a saint could resist.)

I wonder if players who expect their characters to be facing dragons sooner or later are disappointed when they do and find themselves hopelessly outmatched.

If you have Netflix in the US, you really should see a British mystery series called Campion. It was from the mid-eighties and was the first major post-Doctor Who role for Peter Davison. The first episode, "Look to the Lady", is utter brilliance.

There are several reasons to watch it. Albert Campion is a wonderful PC concept -- a "gentleman adventurer" by his own description, who is one of the wittiest characters this side of -- well, the Doctor. ("This is a gun. And as soon as I've read the instruction leaflet I won't hesitate to use it.") His butler is a streetwise ex-convict ("He used to be one of the top burglars in the trade, but he couldn't make the weight anymore.") And he is pitted against a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to get their hands on an ancient chalice, which would disinherit a noble family if they get it.

I haven't done the writeup, but if you want a good look at a supervillain style from that period check out The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, a thriller made in Germany in 1932 just before the Nazis came to power (they banned it before it could see release in Germany, and its director -- the legendary Fritz Lang -- soon fled the country never to return). Doctor Mabuse was one of the greatest villains of the early cinema and has inspired many that followed. He himself barely appears in Testament, but his influence and example are wide-ranging and, even with the Doctor himself locked up, virtually omniscient. He would be a major challenge for would-be pulp-era superheroes, not least because he is virtually unreachable. And how do you catch a criminal who is already incarcerated?

So ... would you rather get an Indian, an East Indian, or a West Indian when you call tech support?

(Note: Option One is unlikely since most call center jobs have been outsourced these days.)

As long as they have a sound grasp of English and the knowledge to solve my problem (and the patience to deal with me), I don't care. The only related concern I have to that is when the person's accent is so thick that they're hard to comprehend. It makes me wonder if they can comprehend what I say.

That would be nice. I like both games a lot, but they are about as close to polar opposites as you can get and still both the TRPGs.

Aren't there a bunch already? Anyone born in the Americas is by definition a native American.

We'd hope 500+ years of living and dying, building and striving here would make us natives. At some point, common sense would dictate that the term "Indians" would be sufficiently descriptive since even members of the assorted "Native American/First Nations" tribes use it themselves. That's coming from an inhabitant of Indian Territory aka Native America aka Oklahoma. Around here, "real" Indians prefer business suits to buckskins and probably have a master's degree in computer science, medicine, or law (paid for by all those tribal casinos).

The term "Indian" owes its origin to the mind-blowing geographical mistake that led Columbus to the Americas in the first place. He believed the circumference of the Earth was about two thousand miles less than it actually is (probably due to misinterpreting the measurements). The Portuguese refused to back his project because they knew better, while the newly-unified kingdom of Spain was engaged in a massive religious purge that swept up many intellectuals.

When he found San Salvador, Columbus thought he had been vindicated. He thought he had really reached the Indes by sailing west, as opposed to the Easterly route the Portuguese took. So he naturally decided the people he found there were "Indians". Of course, he was nowhere near India, and was pretty darn lucky there was a continent in the way to prevent him and his crew from dying of starvation when the supplies ran out. But the name stuck throughout Europe even after it was proven conclusively that the Americas were not part of East Asia after all.

By the way, Columbus also bore a letter addressed to the "Great Khan". When Marco Polo had been in China two hundred years earlier the fabulous empire was ruled by one of the descendents of Genghis Khan, who was installed by the invasion of the Mongols. Since very little news of Asia ever reached Europe, Columbus and his backers probably assumed that there would still be a Great Khan to negotiate with in China. Turned out that by 1492 the Mongol conquerors were long gone and the current rulers of China were not all that interested in deals with the Europeans. But Columbus never found out and his letter was never delivered.

Of course, adding to the confusion is that there are also "Indians" from South Asia (the new head of Microsoft is an Indian immigrant), and that the term "West Indians" is used to describe people from the Caribbean who are for the most part of African descent (Jamaica, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands and Haiti have large proportions of their population who are descended from Africans imported to the islands as slaves much the way they were imported to the American South).

And I finally get to read the Boar-Kin stats. I might do a bit more fiddling around, but they make a pretty good starting point.

I have read many Golden Age Batman stories via DC Archives and it seems to me folks who claim Frank Miller "returned Batman to his roots" must not have read any actual stories from yesteryear. He was never the a-hole they like to portray him as these days.

The comment I was about to make is a spoiler for the ending of The Lego Movie, so I censored myself.