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Heroes in Time and Space

jeffpk — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 02:07:54 CST

MupHeroes in Time and Space (HiTaS) is a continuing/episodic mixed genre game run using the Sidekick rules from Hero Games. Charactes from all over space and time join together to solve a crisis somewhere, somewhen.

Murphy's Inter-dimensional Bar and Grille

All HiTaS games begin at Murphy's Inter-dimensional Bar and Grille. Murphy's is a meeting place for heroes from all over time and space. No one is quite sure how it works or how you get invited but invitees see an innate ornate wooden door just appear in a wall near them. Stepping through the door brings you to the bar, which exists outside of time and space.

The bar itself is staffed by a mix of characters from all over reality. One regularly seen worker is Smokey, the grille cook, who is a dragon with a flair for short order hanburgers. Jonsey, who works the bar, is to all appearances a talking horse. (Exactly how he mainpulates the bottles with hooves is somewhat of a mystery, but mysteries are common place at Murphy's. The bottles appear to stick to his hooves-- some have suggested magnetic horse shoes.)

On the far side of the bar, the wall is dominated by a large pair of similarly innate double doors. Through these doors lies "the challenge." It could be anywhere and anywhen, but when the gong sounds, those who have accepted the day's challenge must proceed through the doors.

A large plasma screen over the bar displays the progress of the day's heroes (again nooenis quite sure how) and betting on their success or failure is common.

Those who accept the challenge are lent a wrist watch with a number of properties. The challenge always has a time limit and that time is counted down on the face of the watch. The watch also has a minor telepathic field that convinces those of the target time and place that the heroes look "normal" as well as providing translation of languages. Finally the watch has a recall button. Push the button and you return to the bar, but you are out of the challenge.

Player Preparation

Think of a character you'd like to play and tell the GM. Don't tell or discuss your idea with the other players. Part of the fun is the bizarre and unlikely mixes of characters and personality types that results!

The mood of HiTaS is "light adventure" (think Doctor Who) and the power level is "street heroes." (150 base points plus 50 disadvantage, for those who know Hero System.) In general characters that work well are most TV heroes (excluding outright super-heroes), pulp fiction heroes (eg Doc Savage, Buck Rogers, etc) bemused and confused fantasy heroes, and so on.

Very sullen and serious characters don't tend to work as well, except as comic relief. Very angsty or dead serious characters such as serial killers, WoD vampires and so on don't work well at all.

HERO itself is a D6 based game. Bring your full stack of D6s to the game.

Character Ideas

Just to get your creative jucies flowing, here are just a few of the many characters that might work well in a HiTaS game...

Sherlock Holmes
MacGuyver
Alexander Munday (lead character in "It takes a thief" )
James Bond
Sam Spade
Bullwinkle Moose
Batman
Doctor Who
Bill the Galactic Hero
The Stainless Steel Rat
Conan the Barbarian (no God killing though)
King Arthur (or any Knight really)
Robin Hood
The Tux
The Tick
"The Closer"
Any of the girls from "Catseye"
Any of the girls from Bubblegum Crisis (we might have to tone down the power armor a bit.)
Either of the Samurai from "Samurai Champloo"
Vash the Stampede (toned down a bit) (or "The Preacher")
Luke Skywalker (from the Original Star Wars)
C3PO
Princess Leia
Buck Rogers
Doc Savage
Buckaroo Bonzai
Bruce Lee (any of his characters)
Walker, Texas Ranger (or most other Chuck Norris characters)
The Drunken Master
Bruce Leroy ("The Last Dragon")
Edward Elric
Alphonse Elric
Winry Rockbell
Lisa from Robotech
Danger Mouse
Penfield
Count Duckula
Maxwell Smart
Agent 99

And many many more...

I suppose I should also give you an idea of characters that wouldn't fit... either because of power level or personality...

Superman (too powerful)
Lin Minmei from Robotech (too damn helpless and *way* too annoying)
WoD vampires (too angsty)
Anne Rice Vampires (too serious/too angsty)
Bugs Bunny (too powerful, actually. Hes the Superman of cartoon characters.)
Speed Racer (too limited, all his abilities are in his car)
The Jackal from "Day of the Jackal" (True assasins are boring. Most of their work is preparation.)
Q, M, Smiley (Never in the field)
The Narrator/Tyler Durdan from Fight club (Just too mentally ill)
Jack the Ripper (Psycho killers generally make lousy heroes)

TORG

jeffpk — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:44:36 CST

The Storm has a name.....

TORG:Roleplaying the Possability Wars is a unique roleplaygame that was published by the original West End Games (WEG) in 1992. In a game landscape quickly becoming dominated by a few well known game systems, TORG was amazingly original and a complete departure from WEG "d6" house system.

The setting of TORG, according to the rulebooks is the "near now", but a now that has been invaded not just by people from other ealities but by thsoe realities themselves. Various parts of the earth have been transformed into the realities of the invaders, each invasion led by a warlord of that ream called a "High Lord." The ultimate goal of the warlord pullign the strings is to absorb enough of reality into hismelf to become a god figure known as "the TORG."

Part of the genius of the creators of TORG was the realization that what is often called "pulp fiction" today-- mostly spy and detetctive stuff-- is just the tip of the iceberg. In their heyday the pulp paperbacks, called such becasue they were printed on cheap pulp-paper, spanned the gamut of adventure and romance fiction; from near super-heroes like Doc Savage to space adventurers like Perry Rodan and the works of ee doc smith, to pirates and beyond. The one thing all pulp had in common was bigger then life characters in bigger then life melodramas... it is this which TORG ultimately simulates and, in a cheesy way, is an awful lot of fun.

The Cosms of TORG

Each other reality, or "cosm" twists the rules slightly in order to give it the feel of the category of one or more pulp fiction types that it is derived from. These twists are called "world laws".

The Living Land which took over most of the middle of the US is very much the Edgar Rice Burroughs/HG Wells "lost World" with primitives, dinosaurmen and real dinosaurs. The world laws serve to make any journey through it into a survival adventure, messing up direction finding and causing supplies to go missing.
Aysle has replaced the British isles and Scandinavia. The British isles are now the realm of fantasy, fairies, dragons and magic. In Scandinavia, mythic vikings and trolls can be found and the world laws cause magical things to happen.
Nippon Tech has overrun Japan, turning into the dark, soulless mechanized future envisioned by many anime authors. The world laws of Nippon Tech favor a cold bureaucracy.
The Nile Empireis a combination of two kinds of pulp fiction. It is a world of street-level super heroes but also the world of the "mysteries of the pyramids." The world laws allow both super-technology and ancient Egyptian magic to flourish.
The Cyberpapacy is also a multiple source realm. Its history was that it was a world of intrigue much like in the three musketeers, but it collided with a cyberpunk cosm and, when the storm cleared, what was left has been called "the Spanish inquisition at the speed of light. A new bastardized 'christianity' that believs that cyberizing is the ultimate mortification of the flesh, the the Cyberpope is god's messenger on earth, and the heaven and hell exist within the Godnet... a sinister cyber realm that is somehow more then just virtual.
Orrorsh is a realm of horrors (move the h to the front and see what you get ;) ). It has overrun Malaysia and is the msot twisted, evil and dangerous of any of the cosms. The highlord of Orrorsh is the great string puller, the man behind the invasions, and the creature that would be a god. The orrorsh world laws put the heroes at a serious disadvantage and most TORG players cringe when they realize they have to go there.

These were the original Cosms the game began with. A few were added or changed as the game developed

System Innovations

As mentioned above TORG had many innovations in its mechanics. A few are detailed below:

The Axioms
Each Cosm was rated as to its level of development along 4 axis-- technological, spiritual, social and magical. These numbers were called the Axioms. In of itself a Cosm could not support any activity or item that was outside of its axioms. Violating the axioms fo a Cosm is referred to as causing a "Contradiction." Under normal conditions, anything brought into a Cosm that caused a contradiction would fail to work or even be converted into an analog appropriate to the setting. (For instance, a pistol and ammunition in the Living Land might be converted into a bow and arrows.) People in such a setting would revert socailly, forgetting everything above primitive tribal behavior.

Part of what makes PCs unique in the world of TORG is that they have the ability to resist this effect. However it is not absolute. Every time they cause a contradiction they risk "disconnection" from their home cosm which seriously impairs their abilities for a time.
The Value Chart
In many game systems, the link to physical reality is tenuous at best. TORG is unique in that the core of the entire action system is a single exponential scale that associates in game numbers, or "values" with physical things like meters or minutes, which are referred to as "measures". This scale is called the value chart and is a GMs best friend.

The difficulty for almost any action can be determined quickly by figuring out its primary measure and converting it through the value chart. If a player wants to lift a car, the GM just looks up the weight in kilograms as a ,measure, converts it to a value, and thats the number the player has to hit with a Strength roll.

This is a goddsend for an action oriented setting like TORG which encourages player creativity and original actions but also needs to be fast paced in their resolution.
The Bonus Roll
TORG dice rolls are a single D20 and result in a positive or negative "bonus number" to an action by interpreting them through another chart called the "bonus chart." The die roll however is open ended. In a one in 10 or one in 20 (depending on the situation) chance, the player gets to roll the die a second time and add it to the first. They have the same chance of getting ANOTHER roll, and so on. In unusual circumstances, and unpredictably, TORG heroes can pull off amazing feats.
Possibility Points
TORG heroes gain possibility points as their experience points during a game. At the end of the game, if they have enough left over, they can use them to improve their characters. However during the game possibility points are critical. By giving up a point, the player can do many things to alter the flow of gameplay to their advantage, including creating roll-agains on their bonus roll. The usual flow of a TORG game is that the early part of the game favors the charcters and rewards them with points, but the critical show down at the end is weighted against them and they must use those coveted points to pull success out from the jaws of defeat. The result is good clean melodrama with heroic actions saving the day.
The Drama Deck
This is often what people think of when they think of TORG mechanics. I purposefully left it for last so it wouldn't distract from the other unusual features of the game. The Drama Deck is a deck of cards that has multiple purposes in the game. It serves as the initiative decider for rounds of combat, as well as throwing other random changes into the combat situation keeping players awake and on their toes.

It also implements a system called the "critical skill" system. This effectively stretches time for critical tests of skill. When no one ichasing him, James Bond can open a lock practically by breathing on it... but when the bad guys are on his heels all of a suddenit takes a LOT longer and is a LOT more tense. This is a basic rule of pulp drama. TORG has a mechanism that simulates this sudden dramatic slowing of time and it too is done using the Drama Deck.

Finally, and what players care about most, they can earn cards through out the game that they keep in hand. These cards have various effects on the game play that are favorable to the players. This mechanic has a few effects. In order to get cards, players have to break out of simple "I hit/you hit" combat and be more creative in their actions. The cards themselves suggest solutions to problems the players might otherwise not have thought of or tried. Like possability points, players try to build up hands of really useful cards during the easier parts of the play and then throw them off at the end of the game to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The cards themselves have short descriptive names (eg 'seize the upper hand' ) if the GM requires it (I do) playing cards must be justified by a roleplay action that supports what the card says. This, more then anything I else I have ever seen, turns strategic thinking players into role players.

Games and Campaigns

The Lost Armory

The HERO System

jeffpk — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:43:22 CST

The HERO system is a very complete and general cross genre roleplay game system.

Although best known for its' super-hero settting, Champions, the HERO system actually has settings available for a wide varietyof genres including Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Space Opera and Pulp Fiction. Additionally, game masters may literally create any genre and style of game they wish using the system.

It takes a diametrically opposed poitn fo view on cross grenre from its cheif competitor, GURPS from Steve Jackson Games. GURPS approaches cross-genre gaming by having a very slims et of core rules and layering special rules ontop for each genre. HERO on the other hand has a very complete (and thick) set of rules that can model virtually any genre of game without additions or changes.

Unlike many games that define their rules in terms of the perception of the player, HERO defines rules in terms of game-system effects and then leaves the "look and feel" to be described according to the genre. Such "look and feel" is called the "special effect" in HERO terms. For instance, in AD&D an arrow and a magic missle spell use completely different rules. In HERO they would both be described as a "Ranged Killing Attack"with different special effects.

HERO adds in modifiers called "advantages" and "limitations" to vary the mechanics in minor ways. The magic missle might be created with the "requires gestures" and "requries incantation" power limitations to make it seem like a spell.

Sidekick

Sidekick is a stripped down version of the HERO system that is also published by HERO games and intended to ease entry of new players into HERO System based games. It uses all the same core rules of the full HERO System but slims down the options to appear significantly less daunting and complex.

System Resources

A good all around description of the HERO System can be found at wikipedia. TheHero Games company site has all sorts of resources including their own 3 page introduction to the system.

Games and Campaigns

Heroes in Time and Space
Dragon Dreams

Home

jeffpk — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:12:00 CST