Weekly Book Recommendations (April 26)

Coming as a surprise to no one, I finished rereading Batman '66 this week! 

Batman 66 Vol 5 by Jeff Parker and others: This ones a strange beast because it focuses on integrating all the villains that don't appear in the TV show but do appear in the comics. That changes the tone a bit, but it's worth it for watching the Adam West Batman completely take the piss out of the Bane character/inevitable story arc. 

Batman '66 Meets the Man from UNCLE by Jeff Parker and David Hahn: This is really the coda of Parker's work on the series, closing up some loose ends. It's clear Parker loves the UNCLE franchise as much as he loves the '66 Batman, and the story almost works beginning to end. That's a feat because these 6 issues crossovers get very ragged with the Batman '66 style of ever issue having a midpoint break things look bleak moment to capture the 2-part TV show. 

Batman '66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel by Ian Edginton and Matthew Dow Smith: This was a reeeeeal close call on whether to put this as a recommendation, and it's kinda here for completeness reasons. I wanted this to be so much better, and it would have been if it were a lot shorter. Still, it's the Avengers and Batman, so it's got a baseline charm, I suspect it would have been a notch higher if Parker had been more involved.

Batman '66 Meets the Green Hornet by Kevin Smith, Ralph Garman, Ty Templeton: OK, this is just fun. The fact that our protagonists are constantly turning on each other makes the extra length of a 6 issue series work, and the plans of the teamed-up General Gumm and Joker legit work in the goofy obsessed comic book villain sense. Plus the artwork is vibrant and bast paced. Big thumbs up. 

New Salem: Renaissance - New Magic Table

I know, unusual day for a V&V post, but I hadn't been able to finish the Magic table for yesterday's post, so here it is. 

Now corrected to show all the numbers!

You'll see a lot of similarities with the Psionics chart, in part because I want to hew to the similar origins in the 2E rules. But at the same time, there were a lot of changes. Magic Spells is added, obviously, and Psionics removed. But I also added a lot of new powers.

Some things, like Illusions, Invisibility, Weather Control, and Non-Corporealness, were obvious small-chance powers for magic for being classical magical abilities.

Death Touch and Revivification are also magic powers more than they are almost anything else, and both advertise themselves for getting redefined as death and life related powers. 

I hemmed and hawed about Telepathy, Teleportation, and Telekinesis because they are so classically Psionic, but kept them on because lots of magical heroes have some version of them. 

Absorption, Dimensional Travel, Transformation, and Transmutation were added not just because they can feel Magic-y, but also because they are so very open ended in their design. You can do lots with these in ways that don't make the character feel like everyone else with that power. 

I could have added a lot more, or created more special powers that perfectly fit the setting, but these work for me. Next week I will do some of that, creating new text for Cosmic Awareness, Death Touch, and Revivification that makes them more innately useful and comic-booky.

Weekly Cooking Report April 25: Swordfish Steaks with Lemon Parsley Sauce

Starting to get warm enough to use the grill, so we're looking at some simple grilling this weeks with swordfish. For those of you out there who feel more gender-comfortable with directly applying fire to meat for cooking, this is a way to do it that isn't parts of a beef critter as a way to mix things up. 

Ideally you will add other components to this...

As always, this is as simple as I can make it for you. Swordfish has a distinct flavor that isn't too fishy, and the lemon parsley sauce accentuates that. shopping wise you need 

• 2 1-pound swordfish steaks, about 1.5" thick. Cut each in half to make 4 eight ounce steaks
• Some vegetable oil for the grate.
• 2 tbs of olive oil for the steaks 
• ANOTHER ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil for the sauce 
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves
• 1 ½ tablespoons juice from 1 lemon
• Some salt and pepper 

to round out the meal also grab 

• Some French bread or sourdough
• A bag salad, ideally with one of those little vinaigrette packets in it. 

Remember, the goal is to make you look good with minimal effort; the fish will do that, you can slack on the veggie. 

Get your grill started, hotted up, and cleaned. You have directions for how to do that somewhere. That will likely take 15 minutes. I'm assuming a gas grill you are keeping at high. If you have a charcoal grill, I don't, so you're on your own. 

While that is happening brush the fish with the olive oil and season with salt and pepper, a pinch or so on each side of each steak. 

The whisk the other 1/4 cup of olive oil with the lemon juice, parsley, and a little more salt and pepper (say. 1/4 tsp of each), taste test, add more salt and pepper to taste. Set that aside. 

Pour out the bag salad into a bowl, add the dressing and any fixings; Slice up the bread and cover it with foil or a small clean towel. Set both on table. 

Wipe down the hot grate with the vegetable oil and grill the fish with the cover on. Flip them at about the 4 minute mark so there are good grill lines on each side. Turn the grill heat to medium cook for another 3 minutes, flip, and give it another minute covered. Check the center, see if the fish is still translucent. If it is, give it another couple minutes before removing to plates. 

Spoon the sauce onto the swordfish and serve immediately to a grateful family. Welcome to grilling season!

New Salem: Renaissance - New Psionics Tables

Continuing on last week's discussion on the Villains & Vigilantes (available at finer on-line game stores everywhere) power generation tables, and how we can modify them. Here's the expanded Psionics table, separated out from the Magic/Psionics table to give more options for people aiming at being mentalists from the jump. 

All the powers other than Magic Spells and Flight from the original table are on here with 7% chances (except for Cosmic Awareness which was boosted from 1% to 4%), with another 12 powers added that to me, at least, feel like Psionics based powers. You will note that I have added "Companion" to the "Pet" power, just because I like expanding the concept of the power in the players mind. 

Some of these, like Animal/Plant Control, Heightened Senses, Emotion Control, Illusions, Mind Control, and Teleportation, are easy adds. Yes, there are all ways that these powers can be non-psionic in nature, but they are also all powers that are readily equated to psionics. OK maybe not Plant Control, but given the open ended nature of V&V 2E's power design it's better to just list the power and not try to limit them at the jump. Teleportation was the one I struggled with most as adding this at 4% or 1%, but remembering the Tomorrow People I went with the 4%

Keeping that in mind, I added six more powers at 1% - Absorption, Devitalization Ray, Dimensional Travel, Flame Power, Force Field, and Paralysis Ray - that I felt hit the general psionics profile but aren't as often seen in that space. Absorption could always be used to duplicate or steal mental energy, memories, psionic powers, and so on; Devitalization Ray and Paralysis Ray are some form of stunning attack; Flame Powers is Pyrokinesis, and if the 'human torch' equivalent of the power doesn't fit the players conception we can trust them to not pick that one; and Force Field is easily an offshoot of telekinesis. 

I admit Dimensional Travel is a stretch, but none of the other powers in the game quite fit my psionics profile; It might have been better to drop it and increase Fame Powers a 2% chance. Or move Cosmic Awareness back to a 1% chance, dropped Dimensional Travel, and increased Flame Powers, Force Field Devitalization Ray and Paralysis Ray to 2%, leaving Absorption at 1%. While this is all noodling around the edges, it does make Psionics feel like it's own thing, and specific for my campaign world (albeit highly generic). 

I was hoping to get Magic done today too, but that;s for another day.

Henchmen and Hirelings in Under the Giant's Shadow

Sunday was the first session of Under the Giants Shadow where the human PCs made use of the "human dungeoneering" power: they hired and brought along henchmen. 

Each of the races in my B/X variant has a racial power that is useful for adventuring - Dwarves have Cavesense (follow trail back* + usual dwarf underground detects). Elves have Elfsight (improved detect secret doors and illusions). Halflings have keen ears (improved hearing at doors/resisting surprise). Humans have Naturally Social, which means not only do they NOT have any reaction penalties for other races (as all the others do), they get to reroll one Henchmen action each round. I felt this was a good balance of a dungeon delve special ability. It's taken over a year for the people with human PCs to make use of it. 

Now, part of this is because the players have been super-secretive about their venturing under the Giant's Shadow to loot one of the destroyed cities there. They suspect that once what they are doing becomes public they will face pressure to stop OR their success will generate competition. In this they are not wrong, but it has made it very difficult for them to get help. (It's also forcing them to make a commercial trading business to hide where their money is coming from; they now own a mule farm... which means by extension they own donkeys and horses and it all gets complicated.)

But another part of it is the psychology against Henchmen that's rooted in post Hickman Revolution play. As the guy playing one of the Dwarves who has been playing since the 1E days said, "Every time I hire a henchmen to do something for me it feels like I'm denying myself the chance for my character to do a cool thing and handing it to this NPC." 

When I was a kid playing B/X and AD&D we never used henchmen; from 1981-1984 it seemed like too much work to have to run the additional characters, and we didn't have a lot of structure to those games. Post 1984 when I started playing with someone who was already running for sweeping plot arcs (and then we did some Dragonlance, and we were all theater kids into our character psychology), having henchmen as back up characters, or anything that smacked of decentralized power, just wasn't comme il faut. 

Since Under the Giants Shadow is specifically leaning into the Exploration and Shenanigans pillars of D&D and not as deeply on the Role Playing and Combat pillars I wanted explore how they would work in play. Making it the human special power would help, I thought. Hopefully after this the players will start to see their value. Unfortunately the three human PCs have Charisma scores of 7, 8, and 10, limiting how many Henchmen they can have in play and how loyal they are. 

The UtGS rules are built for x in 6 chance, so monster armor classes are None (8), Leather (11), Chain (14), Plate (17) or Adamant (20), which are 4-in-6, 3-in-6, 2-in-6, 1-in-6, and 0 in 6 chances. So Henchmen attacks can be handled with a single die roll - d4 if they are not a combat oriented Henchman, d6 of they are - and the damage of their attack equals the die roll. Does this mean every time they do hit someone in plate armor they do 6 damage? Yes, but its also super simple so there you go. 

Finally, Magic-Users can skip the rules for finding and hiring normal henchmen all together and summon and bind creatures to work for them. This process that takes as much time and resources as trying to get conventional henchmen, but their summoned creatures can be incredibly dangerous for everyone. These creatures roll d8 or even d10 in combat, letting them tear through even Adamant armor for potentially massive damage, but they also have an (unknown to the Magic User) maximum number of times they can roll higher than a 6 before the binding snaps and the summoned creature turns on you and your allies.

The Magic-User player thought long and hard about this, but ultimately she opted against it for now. Instead they traded a magic item with inconvenient-for-them side effect to a horseclan leader who wouldn't be bothered by it to get a trio of his men to assist in cleaning out part of the dungeon. Each of the human PCs had a fighter type henchmen with them, and it made the "4 PCs vs 1 Acolyte + 12 Berserkers" fight something they could (and did) win. The 3 human PC players got into having the bonus d6 attack rolls from the Henchmen, and being able to reroll the miss from their one Henchman each should they occur. Never mind the Henchmen soaking up attacks from the berserkers - a huge advantage. 

Is this something they're likely to do again? Time will tell, but as a test this worked great.