Blackaeronaut - there is an issue with your biomod. It's not actually a balance issue. The best in-world approximation I can come up with is as follows.
Cool Stuff:
- The arm is Really Quite Tough, possibly to the point of being effectively armored, and possibly somewhat sronger than normal.
- The arm has a sort of limited short-range, three-use-then-rest-awhile speed drive that sends it flying at the enemy and drags the rest of your body along for the ride. Requires that you Call Out Your Attacks.
Significant disadvantages:
- Your arm is Really Quite Ugly
- (probable) there are low levels of ongoing damage that don't ever quite heal. Using the speed drive will make them worse over time.
Random Side Effect:
- The speed drive is quirky, and constantly bleeds off a bit of motive power in a way that causes a constant strong breeze to be blowing by your head and neck. (I really couldn't figure any good way to include random scarves in the effect without an actual breeze.)
This would be fine, given some good writing to back it up, except... it's pretty clearly a weapon. I can't think of any way to run what you're suggesting without it being a weapon - and last I'd seen, we weren't allowing biomods that were explicitly weaponized. If you can think of a way to have this thing without it being either primarily a weapon or ridiculously overpowered, I'd love to hear it.
For the transformation abilities - I'm not at all sure what you mean here, unless you're talking about the upgrades he gets over the course of the series, in which case you're running pretty heavily into the "you only get one" part of the rule.
It might also be worth putting in a few mundane quirks to give your character a few more interesting attributes to hang storybits off of.

I'm looking for a fic I read a while back. One of the first scenes, if not the first scene, was Harry getting into a shootout with some Order members who were stunning and obliviating Petunia and a social worker who had just shown up. I think I remember the social worker driving a grey Rolls Royce. Later on in the fic, she tells Harry that next time he encounters Voldie, to get help, and then "don't worry about putting him on the Isle of Wight, you put him in the morgue". I can't remember where I read this fic, but it might have been either Portkey or Schnoogle. Thanks for the help!
-WFalling out of aeroplanes and hiding out in holes
Waiting for the sunset to come, people going home
Jump out from behind them and shoot them in the head
Now everybody dancing the dance of the deadFalling out of aeroplanes and hiding out in holes

Waiting for the sunset to come, people going home

Jump out from behind them and shoot them in the head

Now everybody dancing the dance of the dead

Quote:

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* Has been seeking a nickle-iron asteroid to turn into an asteroid habitat for the purposes of setting up a living area and boarding school/college, because there will be another generation of Fen and they'll need to be educated.

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I recently discovered the Buffy-Inuyasha crossover A Slayer of Nightmares. The early-to-middle chapters of this offer a look at a post-Chosen world with multiple slayers headed by the Scoobies. Many fics are set in such a world, but few look at this from the point of view of non-human or partly-human people just trying to make their way in the world without making trouble.
The slayers are police for the supernatural world, and they are greatly needed. However, they are secret police. There are no trials, no due process, and the sentence they hand out is almost always death. They are not acountable to anyone but themselves. Under such circumstances, would not all those demons, half-demons, and magic practitioners come to fear the Scoobies? Not as criminals fear the police, but as any population fears an untouchable death-squad given authority over them?
This is a difficult subject to deal with in a story, as the Buffy-verse doesn't offer any obvious and practial ways to make the situation better, but I would be interested in seeing more fics take a shot at it.
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad.  In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.

In an attempt to avoid derailing the rules thread any more than is absolutely necessary:
Mid-thread, I said:

Quote:

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Everybody's forgotten this - hell, I've forgotten it most of the time - but the central precept isn't that the Mundanes aren't using handwavium at all because it's dangerous and scary, they're not using handwavium for the purposes the fen are using it for because, frankly, they can think of better shit to do with handwavium than colonize space while pretending to be Klingons and space heroes and all that. They're building Utopia on their terms: nice, peaceful, prosperous and maybe a bit dull, while the fen are building Utopia on their terms: free, wooly, full of excitement, adventure and really wild things.

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Quote:

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This seems to be hard to reconcile with all the stuff that makes it sound like it's considered actively dangerous in most nations. I suppose it might just be being used for certain applications, but the question is which and how much?

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Is there a Space Station Three?
And, if so, does its crew find fresh fruit appearing spontaneously when they're not looking?

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

I have noticed a fair number of folks breaking the local laws of physics recently, and I figured there ought to be a reference page to lay out clearly what people Can and Cannot Do, for what is reasonable and not reasonable. Primarily this is intended as a reference for character generation. The following Are True, and have been accepted as such for Quite Some Time. Grrr....
- Rule #1: You may not show the Handwavium a picture of your desired genre vehicle and have it build one for you. Not at all, not even a little, not under any circumstances. It don't work like that.
- Rule #2: expansion to Rule #1: the handwavium does not, in fact, build *anything*. It does not reshape *anything*. The way handwavium works is that you take an existing hardtech device, slap some handwavium on it, and the function of the device changes. If the item is broken, cracked, or flawed, those breaks *may* be fixed (though this tends to have a somewhat higher quirk cost.) There are some rare strains of the stuff that have interesting psuedochemical effects. Those can change chemical structure, but pretty much leave shape alone. Otherwise, what you get out is a goopier version of what you put in, with perhaps some interesting coloration. Short form - if you want a handwaved device - *any* handwaved device, then you have to *start with a device*.
- Rule #3: You cannot blow up handwavium for Great Justice. Handwavium cannot be caused to explode, and adding handwavium to an explosive thing won't do anything except reduce intensity. Handwavium is not fond of things going boom.
- Rule #4: Copilot of Rule #3: The handwavium does not like to be weaponized. It is not easy to weaponize. If you handwave something with the intent of making it a weapon, you will fail. Nothing that you build will turn out to be a weapon randomly. The only way to get a handwaved weapon is to take an existing handwavium device designed for peaceful purposes and use it in ways nature never intended.
- Rule #5: Force on force, handwavium against hardtech, the handwavium will win almost every time. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between, and will cause a great many people to suddenly become concerned. This includes things like piercing handwavium-reinforced hulls.
- Rule #6: Biomods: You get one, you get only one, and after you get it, you can't get rid of it, barring major reconstructive surgery - and sometimes not even then.
- Rule #7: Biomods always have at least some advantages. They also always have at least some disadvantages. From an objective standpoint, these things should be reasonably balanced. The character reaction, obviously, will vary dramatically depending on how cool the benefits are and how annoying the drawbacks from the character's perspective.
- Rule #8: Handwavium is like Cat. It does not go where you tell it to go. It goes where it wants to go. If you are trying to get A Cool Thing, then you will get A Cool Thing. If you are trying to get A Specific Cool Thing? You will get A Cool Thing. There are caveats to this. It is possible to influence the handwavium, to give it a direction, by dint of lots and lots of care and effort. Symbolic power also helps, in large quantities. Read "Surfing with the Alien" for a good example of "Lots of care and effort." Also, the more "normal" your need, the easier it is to get the handwavium to give you something that will serve. Just about anyone can get a functional speed drive. Each of them will have their own quirks and strangenesses, but with a bit of time and effort, some sort of an appropriate egine structure, and handwavium in appropriate types and quantities, anyone can get one. If you need an AI, then slapping some handwavium into a computer will often get you one, given time. It won't give you any control over what the personality of the AI *is*, mind. If it's some Cool Thing that no one else has, though, like a tractor beam - well, if you've got one, its because you lucked into it by mistake. This applies to biomods as well, except that there is no such thing as a generic biomod. Biomods are *always* a crapshoot.
Rule #9: Biomods are physical alterations. If you can't explain it with ordinary physics, you can't do it with a biomod. These are strange physical alterations, not superpowers (not that there aren't folks *trying*, mind.)
Rule #10: Handwavium conserves mass. It also conserves energy. There's some strange sort of energy (perhaps associated with the gravitic control?) out there that some handwavium can tap as power generation, but we aren't technically breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
Rule #11: If you have some handwavium, you can turn it into more handwavium, but you have to feed it something. The something will vary depending on the handwavium in question. It does not grow catastrophically either - the fastest it grows should be about doubling in size every day (for a benchmark) and that's if you feed it a whole lot and it's one of the fast versions.
Rule #12: The handwavium will have quirks, and the quirks will not be yours to declare. Everything handwvium has quirks. If you handwave your toaster, it will develop quirks. If you handwave you sister, she will develop quirks. If you handwave your car, you *know* it will develop quirks. The more Cool Stuff you have, and the Cooler the Stuff is, the more Quirk it will have. Quirks are by their nature bizarre and often annoying. If an effect is a net positive, then it's not a quirk, it's a feature. If an effect is just a little oddity, then it's technically a quirk, but it's really not worth much at all in terms of balancing out Cool Stuff.
Rule #13: Handwaved things get handwaved seperately. Painting your vehicle is great - it'll give it structural integrity and a functional atmospheric seal. It will turn it into a spaceframe, and generally the only quirks will be visual. That is *all* it will do. If you want handwaved items inside, apply the goop yourself. If you want a handwaved engine, then handwave it. Particularly Strong handwavium fumes over a period of time *may* be enough to biomod someone, but that's about it, and that only because the lungs are so efficient at absorbing the stuff.
Rule #14: The Bigger they Are, the Slower they Crawl. Small ships are speedy. Large ships are not. Being faster than other ships of your weight class is a Cool Thing, and should be treated as such (including quirks).
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This is not a thread for discussing particulars of who is and is not within the laws. That goes on elsewhere. This is a thread for discussing what the laws *are*, and is intended as a reference. If you disagree with any of the things I have posted above, then feel free to argue the point, but this is my best interpretation. Also, I know that this is not nearly all of the rules. Please do chime in with the ones I'm missing that we have agreed on, and feel free to propose additional rules for discussion. Do distinguish between them, though.

I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I missed The Guacamole Incident. I missed what the Professor did to Paris. I was already planning at the time when I heard about the 'wavium.
See, most of the fen would go off one of their favorite stories, SF stuff, anime series. I knew that. I had to go somewhere else for mine, somewhere that would work. Thankfully, I had it already. I thought some hard SF would work best.
The crew compartment was easiest. I had a friend who had an old farm, and someone had already redone the silo twenty years ago into living quarters. He was trying to get rid of the land, but the silo was a sticking point, and I told him I could get rid of it.
All I had to do was clean it up to make it mine. Bookshelves, sleeping areas, kitchen, and two bowl-shaped chairs at a screen on the top, right under the roof of the silo. The other half of the top floor was a bunch of old obsolete computers, stacked, with an old Cisco router connecting them all. All treated with the 'wavium. Then I painted the inside with it, laid the complete printouts of the webcomic around, and went to sleep.
I woke up the next day with the oddest feeling. I could feel something, some kind of thought, just outside my reach. An immense intellect, outside mine, just touchable. I didn't know what it was, but it knew me and was pleased to know me. (My current theory is that it's the collective unconcious of every fen who's used or been changed by Handwavium, bent towards the general make-a-better-world urges. But I can't tell, and It has It's own motives.) And then a man's voice spoke, gentle but with a sense of tremendous power. I recognized it. Of course it would pattern the voice after Jet Li.
"Qin Shihuangdi online, Captain. Nanotechnological probes have completely construction; vector systems are online; cadence lance is online. Shall we prepare to depart?"
"Hold on, Qin," I said, and headed towards the... where was the ladder? Just a hole.... oh, wait. I stepped into it, and the vector system lifted me to control, where I settled into the control couch.
I knew this was a big risk. New Jersey, between 9/11 and the idiots who decided to cause that crap in Grover's Mill, had been one of the first states to ban Handwavium technology completely. And here I was, upstate, using it ANYWAY. And sure enough, the troopers had noticed.
"They are demanding shutdown of all systems, and your surrender. I am assuming that you wish to refuse and depart."
"Indeed. Prepare for liftoff. We can do this with minimal damage, correct?"
"Of course. Vector systems online. Raising ship."
And there we went, into the wild black yonder, without even rattling the ground.
Qin linked into the FenNets once we got above the radiosphere, and immediately we got started catching up. With the vector technology, and what the 'wave had done to me, we were in a pretty good position. Qin and I agreed, with Its advice, to go into the business of protection - escorting smaller ships, mining ships, people like that.
And thus came the call to Port Phobos (our homeport - really, after all, it had to be), and to the SOS-dan con.
And yes, I did park in orbit, activate the link, and walk across to the airlock rather than wait for a parking space. Qin's body wouldn't have fit in there anyway, and it's always fun striding through vacuum and waving at people as you go.
It wants them to look, and think, and ponder, and remember that even in Fenspace, there's still room for Miracles of Science.Brazil has decided you're cute.Brazil has decided you're cute.

[EDIT: Once more, with feeling....]
The 'wavium came into my possession much like any controlled substance ever did, by chance and circumstance and without me looking for it. A friend had some, was going to make a flying car, and was feeling generous. He gifted me a small amount, which I tossed in a Tupperware and stuck in the fridge. About a week later, I noticed that the Tupperware seal had popped. The small amount of wavium was larger than it had been, to the point of almost overflowing the bowl. I couldnt tell what it had fed on, and to this day, I havent a clue. I poured it into a larger container and moved it to the living room, where I could keep an eye on it. I felt that I was going to use it, eventually; I just didn't know how.
Frankly, I felt that some of the fen were going off half-cocked. Watching the news and the security theater that the American government was cooking up over handwavium just made me shake my head, and talking to the fen that were planning to take off for the Great Beyond sounded like reinventing the wheel 600 times over. There seemed so much that could be done with it here on Earth that everyone seemed hellbent on ignoring. I knew that the government was considering the stuff (theyd be stupid not to), so I bided my time and waited to see what happened. And then the Professor went off his nut in Paris, and the Really Real World slammed the lid. The 'wavium in my house suddenly became a lot more dangerous to own. I wasn't about to get rid of it, though; there were too many traps in simply turning it over, and flushing it down the toilet would have done God knows what to the local sewer systems.
So it sat, patiently, in my living room, sandwiched in the corner between my pile of comics and my DVDs. Occasionally, the pile would overbalance and fall on top of the container. One particular avalanche knocked the lid off, and some of the comics ended up partially inside. I have to admit it was entrancing, watching the ink slide off the pages and pool in a rainbow pattern like an oil slick on the pavement during a rainstorm, before disappearing into the goo. I spent some time and money buying extra comics, dropping them into the goo, and seeing what happened. It took some of them, and others it just rendered into a soggy mess. The goo grew, and I transferred it to another bucket. After a point, I stopped feeding it, simply because it was getting too big to manage.
And then, one day, I saw an old bus sitting in a junkyard. It wasn't too old, maybe 30 years or so, and in the flat-nosed style that Greyhound had made so well known. It still ran (poorly), and it was decked out for personal residence; I think it had been somebody's tour bus, once upon a time, since it had a second floor. When I saw it, I didn't think much of it, but sitting next to it was an old Ford truck, with a camper shell. Which, by itself wasn't that remarkable, and I didn't think anything of it until I got home and saw the 'wavium.
Archimedes was sitting the bathtub when he had his moment. I, at least, had my pants on.
The bus wasn't cheap, but it wasn't that expensive either. I bought it and managed to get it home. The guys thought I was crazy, but they were all for it, if it meant I would share the glory of a flying bus. None of them really liked their jobs anyway. We reupholstered the seats that we didn't tear out, added some equipment from an old RV, did our best to fix the bathroom and the kitchenette, jammed in a wi-fi and router and an extra generator next to the bathroom, and installed a satellite radio system. One of the guys went to work with the carpentry tools and rigged up a cabinet for storing computers, which we put where we tore out the seats on the second level. It kept the towers protected and gave us an anchor point for keyboards and monitors. He also managed to throw together a set of bunks, modifying the original sleeping quarters to fit eight in bunks. In the back of the top level, behind the computer cabinets, we hung a sliding door, making a small room, which we put down a padded mat and making a makeshift dojo about eight feet on a side. We replaced the tires, tuned the engine, and fixed the windows. We slapped some paint on the outside, and tried to add something approximating the mural. Not a bad job, in the end, but it was a kitbash. In the end, it took about six months of saving and eating a lot of mac and cheese and sharing cars, but we had a working bus. It was time to finish the project.
We drove the bus out to my family's land in the middle of nowhere for the final steps. I was worried about the 'wavium, but since work had started on the car, I had started feeding it again. It had grown to fill the bucket that I had kept it in and then more, forcing me to move it to more than one container. I tossed my copy of the book in last, along with as many of the fanzines that I could find. We coated the outside with a layer, covered the tires and undercarriage, and sprayed it over the engine. We even poured it into the crankcase, radiator, and gas tank. After that, we went to work on the inside. Everything was coated in the stuff. We painted, rinsed, sprayed, and bathed the entirety of the bus and all its contents.
I can honestly I didnt know what to expect from the boxy, black vehicle after we had finished and crashed out for the night. The stampeding yellow mustangs along the side seemed brighter, more developed. Where Gary had slapped on a set of fins ("To dissipate the heat!" he had jokingly insisted), the seams seemed smoother, the welds cleaner. Maybe it was the morning light, but the entire bus seemed more impressive, more heroic. But the biggest surprises were inside.
Wendy was the most noticeable. She'd slipped inside during the night, after we'd gone to sleep. I suspect she'd been hoping for the transgender the hormones were slow and she certainly couldn't afford the surgery, and psychologically Warren had been Wendy for a number of years now. She looked good, positively jubilant. We didn't find out about the ratgirl part of it until later.
As for the bus, it looked much more impressive than I had hoped. The second level was as I had hoped, with the bank of computers, televisions, and other communications equipment smoothly integrated. The satellite radio was already on, and one of the computers was tuned to a streaming radio station, while a second one was rapidly pulling music off three p2p sites at the same time. The small set of bunks still took up the back half of the lower compartment, and the 'wavium had taken the rough fabrication that wed started with and reinforced it.
Looking at the driver's seat made it clear that moving the bus was going to be difficult. I had no idea how I was going to get it off the ground. As I sat in the driver's chair, confessing that my inability to fly the thing without crashing, J. said, in a good-natured, mocking tone, "Nice going, Blackstone. Only you would create a vehicle without any idea of how to run it."
My retort died on my lips as we heard the Voice. "Hey, now. Don't be mean. We don't have to be mean."
The laptop mounted next to the dashboard flickered to life, and we saw his face. He didn't look exactly like Peter Weller, but we could see the resemblance. He smiled, and said, "Howdy, partners. You ready to get this show on the road?"
When Buckaroo Banzai asks a question like that, there's only one answer. We had the bus packed in six minute flat, and in 10, the bus lifted off the ground under my nervous control (with Buckaroo's tutelage), and we headed for orbit.
That was 18 months ago. Weve still got a little bit of the wavium; it responds well to rock n roll and comics. I fed it a copy of Campbells Hero of a 1000 Faces at one point, and it turned the color of mother of pearl and eventually expanded to four times its volume. Im wondering what would happen if we fed it a copy of Hamiltons Mythology or any of Dents stories. Part of me is still a little scared of it.
We grabbed the old Ford truck as quick as we could, and found us a turbine engine that nobody was using. We're still working on the overthruster, but Buckaroo's a patient teacher. It seems that he's managed to download everything from a number of archives, including the Library of Congress and a number of BitTorrent sites that specialize in music. Not legal, I know, but he just made copies, and he didn't touch anything else. Or so he says. I believe him. For now, though, the Jet Car has a nice docking clamp up top, behind the sensor bubble, and it makes for a pretty decent shuttle. As for the bus, only one name was appropriate. You should have heard the first Pulpers we hailed when we identified ourselves as World Watch One.
We got the blazers last month. We even got Earl Mac Rauch's blessing, after he and Mr. Richter had a conversation with Buckaroo over the go phone. Buckaroo keeps us in shape. There's not a lot to do in space between destinations, and he has a good sense of what we need to do to make our minds sharper and our bodies fitter. His room has become our gymnasium; everyone spends at least an hour a day in there. Buckaroo doesnt get mad, if we dont do it, but he does get disappointed, and World Watch Ones performance seems to hinge on our continuing desire to better ourselves and the world. We lost Gary to that; he didnt want to keep it up. Buckaroo was okay with it; we dropped him off at his place with a go phone. He said hed let us know if he changed his mind.
Buckaroo has a lot of fans. Quiet fans that prefer to live on the Earth, helping the planet and her children in ways that have little to do with outer space. Fans that didnt know they were fans until we starting spreading the word. Gary found a way he could still be part of the team. He got the old World Watch One forums expanded, organized, and began discussions how to help seriously people. He and Mrs. Johnson got the Institute up and running. Our global network helps itself solve problems. The Banzai Institute was there for the California earthquake in September and for the evacuation during the Mumbai floods. And were in the Fenspace as well. We spend a lot of time near Earth, occasionally dropping down to the planet to provide help. I can't say the Boskonians are real, since we haven't seen any yet, but we're helping people help themselves and protecting them from the petty evils of the System, both Mundane and Fen.
We're not the Cavaliers, not yet at least. We will be soon, or so Buckaroo assures us. We're the crew of World Watch One, better known as the Blue Blazer Irregulars. We help, because we can. And as the Boss says, "No matter where you go, there you are."
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."

Min just Hit 48. ARGH! I'm SOOOOO close.
Can I interest anyone in a get Minuet to 49 party for the next few nights?
:-) Cheers! -Cindy