Basic Hand-held Kirbytech Weapon Generator + Random Techroom Feature

Roll 3d10

1 megaplasmic (heat damage?)
2 gravitonic (increases or decreases mass of target?)
3 tachyon (time effects?)
4 neutronic
5 negadimensional (teleportation effects?)
6 antimatter
7 negasonic (sonic damage?)
8 ionic
9 protonic
10 photon (blinds target?)

1 disruption
2 dispersion (splits target in two?)
3 inhibitor (shuts off/reduces powers/abilities?)
4 neutralizer
5 distortion
6 inversion
7 displacement
8 destructor
9 disintegration
10 annihilation (most powerful weapon?)

1 pistol
2 rifle
3 ray
4 beam
5 mine
6 disc
7 glove
8 grenade
9 gun
10 blaster

All weapons just do energy damage unless the name of the weapon suggests something else. Range (if applicable) is proportional to number shown in 1st d10 roll, damage is proportional to 2nd d10 roll.

In superhero games, weapons have barely any ammo and will run out shortly after the villains drop them.


Random Techroom Feature
d12
1 Water line
2 Door controls
3 Electrical/power conduit
4 Plasma conduit
5 Remote viewer/window to other room
6 Computer terminal
7 Lights
8 Power conduit for other room
9 Ventilation shaft
10 Controls for nearest device in this room or elsewhere
11 Radioactive waste conduit
12 Roll again but feature is huge/major--i.e. a big fat water pipe, conduits for all power in area, etc.

Secret Wars Marathon

Ahh, has there ever been a comic finer than Secret Wars? Ok, so yeah, there has. Many times.

But I will maintain that there has never been a finer idea for a comic than Secret Wars. In the Speak, Memory-esque words of its creator:

"Fans, especially young fans often suggested to me 'one big story with all the heroes and all the villains in it', so I proposed that. It flew."

That, my friends, is what democracy is all about. Any political system which results in The Lizard playing pattycake with Klaw, Mad Master of sound, is clearly the finest on All Possible Infinite Earths. Aaaanyway...

Relevant point for this particular here blog is that Secret Wars was indeed popular and so got very efficiently turned into an adventure by TSR in short order and this adventure is actually kind of good. (If you don't believe me, you can take a look at it and nearly everything else ever created officially or otherwise for the old Marvel FASERIP system here.)


It's actually not surprising that Secret Wars survived the transition from comic to adventure intact since the plot pretty much could've been one of those framing paragraphs you see in ads for con wargames "A spastastically powerful and poorly dressed god has teleported a ton of A-list villains and heroes to a planet full of random trouble and forced them to do battle. There are some bases for each side to hide out in and, also, Galactus." Or, as finer minds than mine might put it: : "ON THE PLANET ARE VILLAINS, FIGHT!"

The adventure, like the FASERIP system itself, is elegant as fuck: an opening exposition spiel (roughly the same one the heroes from a disembodied voice in the comic), a map of part of the planet (a hexmap, even) and maps of some bases, a timeline of what the villains will do if left unmolested, and a handful of random possible other events to be rolled at regular intervals...and reams of superhuman stats--natch.

Now I could probably write a whole blog entry about how this is a great Archetypal Old School Adventure Format that should be in every publisher's arsenal right next to the Site-Based Adventure and that it could readily be used for any kind of war story or megacrossover emulator and that if you just substitute, say, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy for battleworld you've got a whole factional-warfare-plus-sandbox railroad-free campaign right there but that's not where I'm going with this today.

Where I'm going is: we're definitely playing this. I have never ever ever run anything where people play characters other than ones they themselves have created, but the monopoly-with-squatters-effect possibilities of seeing McCormick play The Mighty Thor is just too fucking good to pass up.

The emails have gone out, and it's on the calendar. So far The Thing, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Nightcrawler, Rogue, and Storm have all written back and I'm waiting for a handful more.

I have scheduled it several months in advance, to be sure everyone has the entire weekend clear. Another nice thing about scheduling it for late spring is: I have several months to think of how to make it more fucked up and complicated.

So: suggestions?

Have you read this comic?* Have you played this module? (Big Fella, Barking Alien and Delta I am looking at you.)

Things I am currently considering:

-Adding random tables for found Kirbytech and room features (convenient water pipes, electrical lines, etc.) (maybe could be repurposed for Gigacrawler, too.)
-Fucking with the Hulk at intervals, Peter David style.
-Making Kang do some stupid time-warp tricks.
-Having my Mac do Ultron's voice for me.
-Giving battleworld slightly more personality.
-Going nuts with the over-the-top karma-awards for hamming-it-up a-la whoever you're playing. Like if you're the Thing and manage to say "Whatta revoltin' development", hey, 5 Karma points there, young sportsman!
-Along the same lines, since "... only FOURTEEN sentences of dialogue in the entirety of the Secret Wars series ended with a period. Every other sentence ended with either a question mark or an exclamation point!!"...Karma points will be subtracted for every time a PC says something in character that is NOT confused or excited!!!??!!
-Adding MODOK

And, hey, if it all goes well, I may run it at a con.







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*If not, you should. It is divine nectar from the comic book gods.

Saturday Night, Bruised Ribs, Gameblogging

-Read Dread yesterday, the horror RPG where you use Jenga blocks instead of dice. Looks good for a one-shot. Others have also commented on how you might use the Jenga mechanic for Cthulhu or other games.

What I'm wondering is: would it be worth it to build the system out so it has a little more crunch? Possibility: like build a skill system where if you're good at something it requires you to pull one block off the tower to do it, but if you're bad it requires like 5 pulls. Ability scores generated with a d6 and low is good...or do you just end up with characters that are detailed for no reason since at least one is going to die by the end of the night anyway?

(For the uninitiated, knocking over the tower means you die, so more pulls=more danger.)

-Has anyone ever made a setting based on 2112?

I lie awake, staring out at the bleakness of Megadon. City and sky become one, merging
Into a single plane, a vast sea of unbroken grey. The Twin Moons, just two pale orbs as
They trace their way across the steely sky.

If not, why not? Get on that shit. I would play a cleric of Syrinx.

Oh wait, looks like some Randroid kinda did...

-sigh- Yes, I know, without Ayn Rand we wouldn't have Rush. And without Andy Warhol we wouldn't have the Velvet Underground. But then the question is would I trade Rush away if we could have the economy back? I should probably move on before Alan Greenspan gets dragged into this and I really get angry. Isn't this blog supposed to be about D&D?

-Yesterday Mandy ran another game. We fought a thought eater which is an ethereal skeleton platypus. We ran away from it because it was immune to all of our weapons and spells and was trying to eat our brains. She cackled. Now she is in our room where strangers are paying her to masturbate and I am on the couch in the living room writing about it.

-Marvel's Fantastic Four Supplement has this, if you're having one of those too-lazy-to-generate-your-own-spaceport days...


-Looking at Mayfair's old DC Heroes supplements... Ladies and gentlemen, I now present the least useful diagram in the history of role-playing games, (click to enlarge into full hideousness):

And it's not small, either. It's like most of a page.

No I did not just whip that up in MacPaint in 8 seconds. This is actually in the game. Someone at Mayfair just whipped this up in MacPaint in 8 seconds.

Then they invoiced someone for it.

Then someone paid this person.

Question for any Mayfair employees who may be reading: how many of the people involved in this process were high, and on what? What is the drug that makes you crave boring diagrams? Dudes, avoid the (Elliot R) Brown Acid.*

Or was it a dare?

And does that make it any better?

I mean, it doesn't even have scale indicated, so assuming someone didn't know what a wand was, you'd still..oh fuck it, I have so many better things to do.

-That was so lame I have to find an unimaginably awesome picture just to balance it out...ok...

Why is the Juggernaut of Khorne standing on a stage painted to blend in with a Hawkwind lightshow? Because that was the most awesome of all possible places for it to be standing.






*Speaking of whom....I went over to Elliot R Brown's page and found this...it's a spreadsheet the DC editors used to keep track of a Batman crossover, interesting maybe sort of...

Results Of Our Extensive Market Research

Click to enlarge.

The Girls' Answers To the Hot Guy Quiz

So here' what the girls said when asked to rate the sex appeal of guys on my hard drive...
Arnim Zola got no love. As is right and proper: he is a mad geneticist and a Nazi and he has a TV with his face on it where his stomach should be.
The Kraken scored very high and remained in the running pretty much the whole time.
...as did Blix The Goblin. Why? I have seriously no idea. Mandy seems to subscribe to the (dubious but beneficial to me) Big Nose Theory, but that doesn't really explain all of it. My guess is that both Viv and Mandy were assuming Blix was bigger than them, but I think if he was, like, 4 feet, they'd change their mind because Goblin Crawling Up You is somehow much worse I think.
The Mod Gorilla Boss, sad to say, scored poorly. Although Mandy did say Galactus wearing the Mod Boss' suit would be a nice package.
This Makoto Kobayashi Robot scored astoundingly well. Perhaps because it looks like 5 or 6 sex toys welded together.
Insane Kid Cosplaying As Cobra Commander scored high as well, though he came late in the game. The deranged antigleam in his eye definitely counted in his favor with the panel. I believe the goblin, robot, or Kraken defeated him eventually.
Galactus. The ladies loved Galactus. Why? "He eats planets!" Power is a big deal. Apparently feeding Class 3000 power levels into the Kissinger Equation results in numbers high enough to overcome a purple costume, having giant tuning fork things coming out of your head, and multiple genocide.
Steve Martin, the only actual human male offered up for review, was rejected with startling ferocity.
The snake thing scored well, but was quickly buried in the ratings since it came up in the same round as Galactus and...
The Silt Shark from Dark Sun...This was the bone of contention. While both agreed that the shark was sexy (even after I pointed out that it would inevitably be covered in sand) Mandy was unwilling to go as far as to say sexier than Galactus but Viv maintained the thing was you'd be able to say you got fucked by a shark.

Which, judging from the expression on his face for most of last night, would put you in a very small club with John McCain as its charter member.




_______

P.S. Gigacrawler still appreciates your attention.

This Kept The Girls Busy For An Hour Last Night, Give Or Take

Creepy wizard

2 attacks per round

2 spells (unlimited uses):

-Save or target sticks to everything they touch (even through shoes or gloves). Unknown to anybody, stickiness is permanent but it can be dissolved by some common substance, depending on kind of wizard. (Mine was undead, so I figured it'd be dissolved by holy water.) 50 foot range.
-Automatically switch places with target. Line of sight range.

Hit Dice: Average party member X 2

Hot Guys?

So I asked Mandy and Viv...

...to go through all the pictures of guys on my hard drive and rank them in terms of sex appeal. Their decisions were surprisingly unanimous. Here are a few of the contestants. Some of these guys ranked very high, some ranked very low, and one of them was a bone of contention between the panellists. See if you can guess how everyone ranked--and why...
Arnim Zola
Kraken
Blix The Goblin
The Mod Gorilla Boss
Some Makoto Kobayashi Robot
Insane Kid Cosplaying As Cobra Commander
Galactus. He is saying "Jim Smash" because I was too lazy to edit the picture I grabbed. This phrase was not considered an element of his appeal or lack thereof by the panel.
Steve Martin
A snake thing
A Silt Shark from Dark Sun