If I were to get back the rights to IST and begin setting up a PDF second edition, what would people like to see added/removed/changed?
-- Bob
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There is no spork.
At risk of doubling the messages. Oh well
If you get the rights to the book you might not get the rights to the art in the book. (I don't know how SJGames does it on their end) So you might want to replace the artwork at that point. Asking around to see if people want to contribute art to the book might now be a bad idea.
Shawn Earl
Well, the elephant in the room is going to be whether or not there's going to be a mirror event similar to 9-11 and subsequent events.
Skitz
why does the supers book mirror this reality?
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Take Your Candle, Go Light Your World.
Good question. The roots of 9-11 appear to lie in the US presence in Saudi Arabia (home to Mecca, the holy city of Islam) post-Gulf War One. In the IST world, that war ran very, very differently. One of the differences is that there is no residual US presence in the Middle East from it -- which takes away al-Qaeda's number one issue. Al-Qaeda may still form and attack, though, if they take similar offense against the IST embassies in Islamic countries. It's something to think about. However, assuming I use my expanded timeline from my website, with the threat of a Chinese-backed WWIII looming, MidEast tensions may seem like small potatoes.
-- Bob
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There's no wrong way to eat a Rhesus.
IST doesn't have to mirror our reality unless Bob so wills it to. But since it's a major change here, we would want to know _if_ something like that did happen.
As to the roots of Al Qeada, they're not so much in the first gulf war, tho that's a contributing factor, but they're also in the Afganistan situation: where we backed guerilla forces (including this young punk from Saudi Arabi with the familiar initials ObL) then basically turned our back on them when the Soviets fled.
Skitz
Argh. I can't remember if Afghanistan ran differently in the IST world, and I don't have my copy handy at the moment.
-- Bob
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There's no wrong way to eat a Rhesus.
hrm i think it should be included... with some minor tweaking to allow the incident to still take place.. o.o
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Take Your Candle, Go Light Your World.
If something happens on 9/11, it's going to be something different, if only because I don't want to slavishly follow the "real world" when the timelines have diverged so much in the previous 20 years.
And John, yes, al-Qaeda's roots go back farther than GW1, but the core issues that prompted the 9/11 attack, according to the best sources I've read, all revolve around the US presence in Saudi Arabia (and the mideast in general, but mainly the "infidels on holy ground" thing).
-- Bob
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There's no wrong way to eat a Rhesus.
Hi Bob I really don't have preference. If I do another Buchannan America campaign I'll just work out my own historical details anyway.
If I were running that same campaign over again I would have started with Dayton.
In the backstory I wrote there was plenty of action mainly with the state militias and DMI supers against the IST.
Just think SLAP rounds, and LAWs and rifle grenades for the zoots.
In my campaign Bin Laden was using the PRC and they were using him.
the main conflict was between the US and EU with the UN as the EU's client state. The issue was Europe's determination to control how America is governed.
They failed of course.
Of course I forgot to mention what happened on 9-01-00.
Then of course there was the PRC invasion of the same day.
After that there was the fairly young PRC colonel of artillery, and midlevel super. He thought he could lead China to greatness.
In looking at an equivalent event the IST world is a little more robust in terms of bad things happening to nice nice people and the mechanisms available - from suitcase nukes to super powers allow for a lot of leeway.
A concentrated attack by opposed supers to multiple infrastructure points; targetting IST operatives or the public at large.
I'll give it some more thought.
Shayne
When you're talking 'changes', do you mean background or timeline?
(Missed this one before.)
If it helps, the GM in my superhero campaign (he's got something like a dozen superteams at different points, some of them actively played, others not) had 9/11 become different: he looked at the flight path and realized that both the NYC planes went right over two major superhero team bases, and there was no way the heroes wouldn't react...
...especially after the American Dream contacted them to tell them a CIA precognitive foresaw the attack. They were ready.
There's a five-hundred-meter-long gouge in a farm in Pennsylvania, too, where the Philadelphia superteam Freedomstrike managed to, against all odds, force a plane that was about to crash and explode to turn enough to scrape its belly along the ground.
The problem with the IST world is that there's known, reasonably reliable precogs. Of course, one of the best known of those, X, did commit suicide after not foreseeing an event... thus the comment about 'reasonably reliable'.
The IST world has walkertanks in Vietnam, working AIs, and reliable working fusion. That's already a major tech variance from mainline, and that's just the publically known. Who knows what the government black labs might have in them?
Plus the alien influences - is Meeranar cuisine growing in popularity? They're big cats - does PETA hate them for their predatory instincts? Have any other alien races overly contacted Earth? Or even covertly, so that only goverments know? Or worse, only groups with similar agendas? Imagine an alien race of theocrats secretly backing what we'd consider a bunch of radical religious lunatics - Islamists or Evangelical types, either way, doesn't matter.
Some of this may go far beyond what you were thinking about, Bob. I'm just sort of letting the brain run.
Brazil has decided you're cute.Brazil has decided you're cute.
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Hi Bob I really don't have preference. If I do another Buchannan America campaign I'll just work out my own historical details anyway.
Hey, crazyjoe -- sorry to take so long to get back to you but welcome to the forums!
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the main conflict was between the US and EU with the UN as the EU's client state. The issue was Europe's determination to control how America is governed.
Interesting plot angle... not something I'd likely use myself, but I wouldn't write things that would count it out -- I'd rather leave things vague and unformed enough that individual GMs could plug something like that in.
-- Bob
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It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
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A concentrated attack by opposed supers to multiple infrastructure points; targetting IST operatives or the public at large.
I suspect that the IST and the UN would be the primary targets, Shayne, as they more closely match the Islamic extremist bugaboo images. Not to mention that they have a more obvious/widespread presence in the middle east, which combined with the traditional religious conservative view that anyone else's supers are demonic in origin (even if the Mecca team is, by deference to Islamic law, solely composed of Muslim supers) means they'd be perceived more intensely as "infidels on holy ground".
-- Bob
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It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
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When you're talking 'changes', do you mean background or timeline?
Changes from the real world's history, in the period not yet formally documented. It's also possible (tho not likely) that I might revise the 1990s timeline now that I have a little more hindsight available to me.
I certainly don't want 9/11 to happen exactly as it did IRL. A) that's still a sensitive issue to some people, B) it provides too much built-in player knowledge, and C) as you and others note, there's enough other things different that this, too, ought to be perturbed into a different course.
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The problem with the IST world is that there's known, reasonably reliable precogs.
And there's The Wall, right in the middle of 2000. The long range precogs aren't going to get anything, at least before the middle of 2000. (And just to play Devil's Advocate here, who's to say the Bad Guys don't have antipsis or some other variety of super shielding their plans all the way up to moment of execution?)
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Some of this may go far beyond what you were thinking about, Bob. I'm just sort of letting the brain run.
No problem at all, Geoff. Some of those questions are certainly things I haven't thought about at all, and
should. PETA vs. the Meeranar, oh, jeeze, that's rich. Drive the poor wackos even more so; I can just see hours and hours of confused policy-discussion, trying to decide if because they're big cats they're thus allowed to eat meat, or if the fact that they're sentient beings trumps the fact that they're furry children of mother nature... I can see some serious institutional schizophrenia forming there...
-- Bob
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It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
One of the world skews that I have added to my own campaign is that many of the classic hate groups have changed their focus to rotten, stinking, unclean aliens embracing humanity as a whole (if grudgingly) to focus their gall on the newcomers.
Foremost among these is a mutant, redneck teleporter who managed to steal several suits of impressive power armour (Mr. Klantastic), and has set out with his gay brother (Mississippi Burning), butch sister (Mrs. Thang) and her vaguely Teutonic husband (Invisible Fuehrer) as The Klantastic Four.
Another group in the background (they started out in an unfinished Thibor Story) are a PETA type enforcement group. They were trying to assassinate the Queen of England after the publicized event of her wringing a Pheasants neck during a hunt.
Shayne
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(And just to play Devil's Advocate here, who's to say the Bad Guys don't have antipsis or some other variety of super shielding their plans all the way up to moment of execution?)
You seemed to indicate that some of the sects were less-than-friendly to metas, although in the intervening time that may have changed. Based on that, the idea of the radical fundamentalists not having meta support came in. Of course, they could be using technology...
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PETA vs. the Meeranar, oh, jeeze, that's rich. Drive the poor wackos even more so; I can just see hours and hours of confused policy-discussion, trying to decide if because they're big cats they're thus allowed to eat meat, or if the fact that they're sentient beings trumps the fact that they're furry children of mother nature... I can see some serious institutional schizophrenia forming there...
You're so welcome.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
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You seemed to indicate that some of the sects were less-than-friendly to metas,
Some, but not all. And yes, given how long ago IST was written, some of that may well have changed.
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You're so welcome.
Well, then, thank you!
-- Bob
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It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
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Another group in the background (they started out in an unfinished Thibor Story) are a PETA type enforcement group. They were trying to assassinate the Queen of England after the publicized event of her wringing a Pheasants neck during a hunt.
See, you say this, but there are some serious wackos in the Animal Liberation Front (yes, it exists, and yes, they're seriously damaged people). I wouldn't be surprised if there's some folks in the UK that are a crate of assault rifles away from trying to do that very thing.Ebony the Black Dragon
Senior Editor, Living Room Games
http://www.lrgames.com
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com
"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."
Good Morning,
Yep. That's why I wrote it. In a world where super powers exist, you are going to get a demographic skew towards fringe groups by meta humans - especially those whose powers/political stances align them certain ways.
I will see if I can dig up the fragments.
Shayne
Observation re: Al'Quaeda's anti-psi.
They wouldn't necessarily need to have metahumans with anti-psi powers if they had access to anti-psi technology -- which should be widely available on the black market, particularly from organizations like TRADE (from SuperScum.)
Chris Davies.
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They wouldn't necessarily need to have metahumans with anti-psi powers if they had access to anti-psi technology -- which should be widely available on the black market, particularly from organizations like TRADE (from SuperScum.)
Hell, I would think that the anti-Western sentiments of the general populace of some Middle Eastern nations would make it difficult for general mind scans. How do you find the terrorist in a crowd of people who all hate you?Ebony the Black Dragon
Senior Editor, Living Room Games
http://www.lrgames.com
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com
"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."
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I will see if I can dig up the fragments.
I'd be interested in seeing them, if you do.
-- Bob
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It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
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They wouldn't necessarily need to have metahumans with anti-psi powers if they had access to anti-psi technology
Excellent point!
-- Bob
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It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."