064 - Super Hero RPG Thoughts

I was recently asked which Super Hero Role Playing Game (Tabletop, not online) I would consider the "Best". There was a conversation that followed, but then my brain wouldn't stop and now I have a good night of fever-dream sleep under my belt (we're all sick in our house, again), and I've decided that it all boils down to what kind of Super Hero you mean to be playing.

After all, Spider-Man is a completely different story than Green Lantern... and neither of them are anything like Sailor Moon or Wolverine.

Different systems are better for different types of heroes.

For instance, if you're in to THE AVENGERS, I suggest GURPS SUPERS. "GURPS" stands for "Generic Universal Role Playing System" and has versions for just about every genre out there. It's very generic and allows for you to bring in elements from pretty much any other GURPS system (Norse Mythology, High Tech, Spies, etc) with little or no effort. The downside of this is that there aren't really any "adventures" out there so you're on your own for a storyline.

If you want something more along the lines of THE JUSTICE LEAGUE, nothing can beat the CHAMPIONS HERO SYSTEM. "Champions" is a pretty easy-to-understand system that bases pretty much everything on percentages and points, which was quickly adapted from your standard Dungeon's & Dragons setting to a Super Hero setting. This is great for creating characters that are archetypal God-like beings.

For a more realistic, street-level crime fighting story that can dip into the fantastic like TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, SPIDER-MAN, BATMAN or DAREDEVIL, I suggest RIFTS. Their TMNT game system is full of mutants, spies, Ninja, and other IRL baddies that are fun to punch, shoot and stab for justice.

But the more I think about it, the system that would best capture today's super hero style would have to be BESM. Short for "Big Eyes Small Mouth", BESM is a super-simple Anime-based role playing game that would lend itself easily to recreating pretty much any type of Super Hero genre you care to create. No official super hero rules for this system, but WOW would it be easy!

065 - Hunters

As Molly and I were driving to the Doctor's Office today, she piped up out of nowhere and said "Ugh I *hate* hunters". I looked around a bit and saw that we had just passed a rolling stereotype, a jacked-up Chevy quarter-ton pickup truck painted in camouflage, with a rollbar and a gun rack and plentiful bumper stickers proclaiming that the driver would rather be shooting animals, helping The South rise again and/or supporting our troops because our colors don't run.

"Well why do you hate Hunters so much, Molly?" I asked this kind of expecting a diatribe about how she loves animals and meat is murder and all the things I *know* she's going to say eventually which will be when/why she becomes a vegetarian in her teen years. I was ready to go on the defensive, pointing out overpopulation and thinning the herd and other stuff like that. However...

"BECAUSE THEY'RE EATING ALL THE MEAT BEFORE I CAN!"

I was... confused? "Yeah, but isn't it also because they kill all the cute animals? Isn't THAT why you hate them?"

"No! See, the hunters just keep on hunting and killing and we're going to run out of animals to eat! They need to stop!"

"But honey... SOMEBODY has to kill the animals so you can eat them! Hunters kill the animals, then you can eat them."

"They need to STOP before the run out of animals for me to eat!"

066 - Last Man On Earth theory

If you don't watch the show "Last Man On Earth", then don't bother reading this post. But I have a theory...

...And I love trying to piece together the untold story behind the story that we're seeing on the screen :)

SO! The theory I have is in regards to "The Virus" that wiped out all but 9 people, a cow, a bull and a bunch of crickets, yet left the earth looking pretty danged clean and liveable.

For having killed off the entirety of meat-based life on earth, you'd think there would be dead bodies EVERYWHERE, right? Even up on the International Space Station, no leftover bodies.

Oh, there are *some* bodies... parking lots full of neatly lined-up body bags, a morgue full of skeletons... but nowhere NEAR as many bodies as you would expect to find in a major metropolitan area.

Also missing? CHAOS. In pretty much all of your apocalyptic fiction, you've got tons of chaos. Garbage men died so they can't collect the trash, drivers die in their cars causing massive amounts of abandoned cars clogging the highways, airplanes crashing everywhere because no one is there to run air traffic control. Fires, looting, bodies everywhere...

But in the Last Man On Earth apocalypse, there's none of that. Everything is clean and organized and ready to be used by The Last Man On Earth. How does that work?

So here's everything we know about The Virus so far:

• It happened gradually. Survivors watched their loved ones die, and a recorded video from the year 2019 shows the commentators at a Motocross Rally wearing surgical masks and talking about The Virus (very briefly).
  
• People who died of The Virus died in a horrific way, pooping and bleeding out of every "hole" for a while before they die.
• The Virus starts out an awful lot like a regular flu, with coughing and tiredness and weakness and nausea, and progresses to the point where you cough blood

SO! Given this information, here is how I think The Virus progresses:

STAGE 1: COLD & FLU. It starts just like any regular cold, probably transmitted in the same way.

STAGE 2: SEVERE FLU. Coughing so hard you cough up blood, extreme lethargy, weakness, vomiting.

STAGE 3: EBOLA. This is the part where you can't get out of bed, and you're constantly spewing various fluids from all your orifices. This is not fun.

STAGE 4: RECOVERY. This final stage is how the virus was able to spread so quickly and efficiently; people suddenly seem to just "get better". Not only are you BETTER, but you're also overcome with a compulsion to "Tidy Up". Almost as if possessed, the infected is driven to tie-up loose ends, take care of their affairs, make sure all their commitments are taken care of, and... done. Thanks to this, the whole virus is seen as just an extreme inconvenience. "Yeah, I'm at the Every Orifice stage, I'm going to need the next two weeks off sorry".

STAGE 5: DISINTEGRATION. Once everything is all taken care of, the infected person just goes home, lays down on their bed, and... disintegrates. They've kind of known that this was going to happen all through the Recovery Stage, it just didn't seem important... "Have to get all this stuff done before... y'know... I have to get it all done". No dust, no goo, no body, just... gone.
And THAT'S how the entire human race gets wiped from the face of the Earth without leaving a big mess. "But what about those parking lots full of body bags? What about the morgue full of skeletons?" Those are the bodies of people who died from non-Virus related deaths; just because there's an extinction-level plague going around doesn't mean that people stop getting dead other ways, you know! And those who are infected, they take real god care of those dead bodies - regular burials, take them to the morgue, of the Mortician is gone? Well then we'll just lay the bodies out here, nice and orderly, right in the parking lot where somebody can take care of it later.

I can only assume that The Virus originated in a lab, where they were trying to make a less-jittery version of 5-Hour Energy or an over-the-counter Adderall.