Mission: Zodiac

Here's my second Planar HERO document, this one detailing the various traits of the planes. This document is much more mechanical in focus, so if anybody versed in HERO sees any glaring errors, that would be good to know. Also, if those planar-savvy bloods among us see any planar traits I've missed or misrepresented, that'd be great to hear about, too.

( Planar Traits )

Current Location: cipher HQ, Elysium
Current Mood: creative

Here's my main document for Planar HERO - how player characters are expected to be built. I'm especially interested in what neliobelmont has to say about it, as he's my main HERO comrade, but if anybody else sees anything particularly grievous I would appreciate hearing about it. I have a document for planar effects, too, but I'll post it tomorrow or something. If I come up with no serious errors I'll send it your way, bastlynn, and we can get it up on PW.

( Planar HERO )

Current Location: valhalla
Current Mood: creative

A fire-dominant plane is filled with flames, lava, and superheated toxic gases. Characters on a fire-dominant plane suffer 1d6 killing damage (fire vs. ED) every segment.

Current Location: kicking everyone's ass all the time
Current Mood: creative
Current Music: The Ting-Tings - Great DJ

I'm actually working on Planar HERO right now, but I had a neat idea for a Modern Age bit of tech and thought I would put it down here, as my Modern Age notes haven't really gotten to devices yet.

Letter gnomes. They're little humanoid mechanigolems that run around between cities, delivering mail.

Current Location: m:Z inc.
Current Mood: creative

So, yeah. A couple weeks ago I finished up my basic guidelines for Planar HERO. Here they are now.

( 1: The basics )

( 2: Factions )

Current Location: cipher HQ, Elysium
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Dragonforce - Through the Fire and Flames

I've been pondering something with regards to Planar HERO for the past few months, and haven't entirely settled upon a decision yet. It's with regard to the beings DiceFreaks calls 'cosmic entities' - creatures like the archfiends. The question is whether or not I should give them stats. I mean, D&D doesn't (shouldn't) stat them at their true power levels because D&D can barely handle 25th-level mortal characters. But I'm confident that HERO is infinitely scalable. Thing is, though, a balor is 1200 points. I'd probably want Demogorgon to be somewhere around 2000. A 2000 point character is ridiculously powerful - 'standard' Planar HERO PCs are expected to start as 200 point characters. Demogorgon would have literally ten times as many points - and I'm sure that leads to him being considerably more than ten times as powerful. And that's how it should be - Demogorgon is serious business. He's like the Reavers from Firefly: He'll rape you to death, eat your flesh, and wear your skin as clothing. And if you're really, really lucky - it'll be in that order. When an archfiend shows up, people die. Worlds die, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Unless, of course, you've decided to tell your players to make 2000 point characters because they're going to save the entire Material Plane from the General of fucking Gehenna.

So my summary is: HERO could probably handle beings of such power, but who would use them? How many times have you used Demogorgon, or Mephistopheles, or Helekanalaith in a game, at full power, and had your players engage in combat? I guess what I want is an opinion. Do you think Planar HERO should stat out cosmic entities, or leave them as essentially undefeatable masters of the planes?

Current Music: Noir - Ghetto Lee Lewis - Corsican Trance Disco Ninjas Anime Remix

I've been thinking a bit about magic in Planar HERO. While I don't want to restrict any players to a specific style or methodology in their magic, there are planar traits that tend to complicate the lives of magic-users. It feels, to me, mildly anti-HERO to just smack arbitrary environmental limits on a character's powers, and yet these planar traits are important to me. Thus, I came up with a solution. If the special effects of your magic dictate it to be relevant, I present some Limitations for spells.
Elemental (-1/4): The power uses an elemental force to deliver its effect. This means that some characters will resist the effect more, and some will have increased effect from it. Elemental spells are notoriously difficult to cast on opposing Inner Planes, although there might be a small bonus on the matching plane. Multi-elemental spells I envision as being very simple, but I don't feel like explaining it now. Suffice it to say that I don't believe it to be necessary to ever take Elemental on the same power more than once.
Requires Astral/Ethereal (-1/2): The power requires a connection to either the Astral or Ethereal Plane. If the character is on a plane not connected to the required plane, it cannot be used.

Also, I've been thinking about elementals. While it seems perfectly logical to me that, say, a fire elemental is completely immune to a fire-based attack, HERO (rightfully) does not have any kind of absolute defence. As a small patch, which I consider only applicable to elementals, I offer the following:
Desolidification, Persistent (+1/2), Inherent (+1/4). 0 END (+1/2), Only to Protect Against (Element) (-1); AP: 90; RP: 45
What this does is make the elemental completely immune to any attacks with the appropriate Elemental limitation. A power with Affects Desolidified will not affect the elemental. As a setting rule/GM handwaive, the Desolidification does not interfere with the elemental's ability to interact with the world - it is, in fact, only desolid with regards to an elemental attack.

Furthermore, I've been considering martial arts in the planes. I think, for greatest simplicity, I'll just use martial arts styles from Ultimate Martial Artist. I consider it a Good Thing (TM) for warrior-characters to have a martial arts style, although it's not entirely required. On a similar vein, I would encourage characters who use normal weapons (or cool magical weapons based on normal weapons) to buy the normal weapon as detailed in UMA or the HERO core book.

Now... I think I have some characters to go revise, with some of these things in mind.

Current Music: Gregorian - The Dark Side - The Four Horsemen

The other day I posted my description of the ultroloth on the Wizards boards, and it occured to me that giving them a big two-handed sword to lay into enemies with was kind of silly. So I changed that. Used the points to power up its characteristics a little, and give it a different use-in-melee power.

Current Music: DarkCecil13 - Final Fantasy IV - Leap into the Darkness OC Remix

I made a slight update to the Planar HERO edition of Janus Aran, who is not yet Ringwalker. Most notably, I thought up something more to include in my Master File of Planar HERO Guidelines (tm). It's about factions.

Basically, there are two parts to faction membership: belief and, well, membership. Belief should shape the powers you buy for your character - see Janus' Cipher Intuition for an example of belief becoming mechanics. Membership, I figured, should be represented by a perk. I figure a namer should just have the membership perk (it's three points). Maybe a couple other abilities, based on faction. Higher-ups get more benefits - in Janus' case, I gave him a couple contacts. Sometime in the future I'll come up with a more detailed list of suggestions for what I think might be appropriate in-game faction membership perks.

Oh, and since I'm such an inspired cutter tonight, you get a second Yugoloth Supremacy lyric this post. This one would be from Heart of Darkness.
"Father/Mother carve us deeply"

As a note, whenever I conjure up new lyrics, I'll be updating my reference post. This is the only time I'll be making such an announcement, which is really just to let you know that said post will be an up-to-date repository of YS lyrics. In case anybody cares.

Current Music: Yugoloth Supremacy - Reforging Souls

Much as I might prefer, Planescape isn't just about the exemplar races. It also has its share of mortals, and that's what I have for you today: six Planar HERO characters.
( Cerivan of Ignus )

( Eril )

( Janus Aran )

( Mal'haken, Who Dances with Sandstorms )

( Nasim Kiyanfar )

( Xirlorxial, the Empty Maiden )

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Sublime - 40 oz. to Freedom - Date Rape

I added some descriptions to my HERO writeups of the ultroloth, balor, and pit fiend.

Here's a highlight from the ultroloth's description: "If it has time, it will vivisect a fallen opponent, telepathically narrating the process to the opponent's allies."

Current Music: Yugoloth Supremacy - Heart of Darkness

May. 12th, 2006 08:25 pm I blame shiguma, for not being here to entertain me

So I've finished the pit fiend, and I think that's all I'm going to do today. It's now been updated with flavour text.
( Pit Fiend )

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Afro Celt Sound System - Volume 3: Further in Time - Shadowm

As I was writing the balor, I thought of a way to make the ultroloth's teleportation powers more efficient. So I did. It's still 1200, but now it's less points in powers and more in characteristics. Oh, yeah, and I added flavour text to the ( finished balor )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Yugoloth Supremacy - Malediction

I got the ultroloth down to 1200 points, and that's where it's going to stay. So, I'm now officially redefining high-end non-unique exemplar to be 1200 points.
Another game decision I've made:
Characters larger or smaller than human-sized shall use Inherent Growth or Shrinking to represent that. This goes directly against what HERO 5E says we should do, but I don't care, because I like it better that way.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: djpretzel - The Revenge of Shinobi - Consent (Make Me Dance)

Oh, I thought of a couple more things for Planar HERO, revolving around skills. First, I'm assuming literacy is free (which doesn't mean you have to take it with all your languages). Second, racial language (like Infernal or Ignan) trumps Planar Trade for native language. Although, I assume most characters will be pretty fluent in Planar Trade. Third, everyman skills:
Acting
Climbing
Concealment
Conversation
KS: Some kind of planar knowledge, tied to home plane
Navigation: Appropriate to home plane (Usually Dimensional and Land)
Paramedics
Persuasion
Stealth

Also, I figure we'll be using rules for Weapon Familiarity.

The revised ultroloth will be coming soon. I'm working on it right now.

Current Music: Yugoloth Supremacy - Fields of Apathy

I think the ultroloth I made was too powerful. I'm considering how strong I want to be the top-level nonunique exemplar to be, and I'm strongly leaning towards 1000 points.

In other news, I've made a number of assumptions regarding Planar HERO, and I think these assumptions basically encapsulate the setting rules.
1. PCs are 200 point characters (100 base, 100 disad).
2. Nonexemplar characters should use NCM, though they get the 20 points for it. I'm considering the idea of buying 2-3 points in a characteristic as a power, to represent 'racial bonus', and thus get around the NCM restrictions.
3. I've abandoned my idea of an 'equipment pool'. Instead, characters will just buy equipment with their points, and represent them being equipment with Focus (and, when appropriate, Real Weapon/Armour). This streamlines characters, I think, and gets us away from the D&D paradigm of 'treasure as the goal'. Also, it allows, say, a master swordsman to use ONE BLOODY SWORD his entire game career, rather than falling into the encouragement (and almost necessity) of constantly replacing your weapon with a better one found in the dungeon. Think: how many D&D characters have a named signature weapon that they have a good rapport with? Compare: how many awesome literary characters do?
4. I don't believe in point maxima. If you want to spend 150 of your 200 points on a single power, that's your problem.
5. Alignment is represented by Psychological Limitations. Each component of an alignment (law/chaos and good/evil) are represented by their own psych lim. Neutral doesn't have one, unless you're really neutral (which is okay, too).
6. I assume hit locations and knockback will be used.
7. Most importantly, I ditched the inane idea I had of making planar races into package deals. I realised that Planescape characters are all about being wacky and unique - your race is just another excuse to do that. I don't want to say like D&D that because you're a tiefling, you can make darkness. I'd prefer it be like 'I'm a tiefer, and since my grandfather was a balor I can shoot fire from my eyes'.

That will be all. I'll notify you when I've toned down my ultroloth.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Afro Celt Sound System - Volume 3: Further in Time - Further

So, I was feeling particularly inspired today and wrote up an ultroloth in HERO. He's been reduced to 1200 points and had flavour text added. In any case, ( here it is )

Current Music: Yugoloth Supremacy - Fucking the Baatezu