If you want more details, I'd be happy to throw a bunch out, but here are at least some general ideas to use as jumping off points:
Nightmares, fire, a hunter, the devil, wrath of God, taxes, death, barbarians (or reavers or anything similar), a curse, a big angry bird, a hitman, a vendetta, a corrupt government, a heat-seeking missile, an insect swarm, a virus, a pack of wolves, an erupting volcano, a collapsing bridge, a terminator (or any robot menace), nuclear fallout, a black hole, mind control, and my personal favorite, a T-Rex. Go to Comment

I really like the idea of rampaging dragons just because that's what they do. A force of nature much like a tornado.

I have some confusion about how things work. You say that the queen digs a lair to lay her eggs and often dies during the mating, but then you say that the Queen travels to the most enticing territory to mate and will afterwards use that territory to dig a lair to lay eggs. So does the queen mate first or dig a lair for her eggs first? And if she mates first and dies, does that mean that the young will be born above ground instead of in a lair giving them an easier time with rampaging as young? And what is the second shell of rock?

Aside from unanswered questions, I really like the idea. The dragons don't attack the city as much as they just clumsily crash through it while courting. Go to Comment

Huh. I never knew that. What a fun factoid. Go to Comment

I kinda wish I would have had this to read before my first post. I almost got my face chewed off, and it was quite the shock.

It would help me assimilate this sub if there were a few headers.

This has given me an idea for an improvement to the citadel. I'll think about it for a bit and post something on the forum. Go to Comment

The beast would have a massive source of food: humans. As grizzly as it sounds, huddled masses of the poor would probably be the first targets. An average human or three is probably a decent meal for a chimera. As for housing, the snake DNA would suggest burrowing a tunnel to sleep in (or possibly sleeping in water). The other genetic instincts would probably concur with tunnels. If allowed to live on instinct alone, the chimera would likely live in caves or tunnels (sewers perhaps), be fiercely territorial, and form large nests that could house dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of chimera as the local food source (population) allowed. Go to Comment

I love the rampant exponential growth. The chimera has lots of potential. I mentioned most of my thoughts in my reply above. In my humble opinion, the chimera might be better suited to be setting-independent. The futuristic "rich vs. poor" and "dying planet" settings seem like they could be completely independent of the chimera. But that said, breeding a hideous monster to protect rich people is pretty sweet.

Lastly, I would give armor plating to the brood mother (the original chimera) and maybe some other cybernetic enhancements. This would make her nearly unstoppable while her offspring are still able to be killed. In my mind, rich people with big labs breeding big monsters would have big fail-safes in place. Armor plating, mounted lasers, muscle augmentations, "adamantium" claws, or any face-palm worthy B-movie monster ridiculousness would make the compound-destroying rampage more believable. In addition, it would make for an epic boss fight. Go to Comment

Useful stuff. I've always hated the inn encounter to get people together. I'm a cleric, what am I doing at an inn? I'm an angry sorcerer, I cast darkness and just safely leave the stupid brawl. I'm a barbarian, I'm gonna smash in everybody's faces indiscriminately until I'm either passed out from exhausted or ale or until I'm knocked out.

There's always a better way, but there is still something wonderfully esthetic about starting a game with a good old throw down. Go to Comment

4. The Tournament:
A challenge is issued by a well-known lord to any who wish to attend. A grand tournament will be held, and the winner will receive a worthy prize.

The idea here is that everyone has a reason for traveling to this big town for a tournament. They can complete in melee, archery, or mage dueling. Non-combative types will be attracted to the surge of people and market goods (aka. cheaper stuff). Each contestant will have to compete in a single or double elimination type tournament against standard fare peasants, hunters, workers, a few militia, and a few off-duty city guards. It is explained that the fight is only to incapacitate or land a certain number of blows on your opponent, not to kill. Each victory should come with a small compensation, and the players will likely have to fight each other at some point. At least one of the contestants should be a disguised antagonist (covertly or obviously, your choice). I used a red-eyed figured in black armor who wielded a spiked chain and whose touch would cause burns. This figure later turned out to be a skeletal spellsword. The victor should get something worth the effort. I had a powerful seer tell the victor his future.

At the very end, you should crash the party. I had dragons drop thousands of bones onto the city and then had a necromancer animate all of them as skeletons to attack the city. This was all a distraction for the black night to kidnap someone important and run off into a sewer. While all of the others are distracted, duty calls the players to save the victim or fight the evil together. Afterwards, you can have someone hire them as a team or give them a good carrot to chase. Be careful that you don't challenge them too much to start with because many of the players will have exhausted their spells and abilities already from the tournament.

This method of getting the party together gives the players the option conversing and getting to know each other at will, and most of them will already be familiar with the roles of the others from the tournament. Players can also choose to remain mysterious while still having a good reason to stay with the party. Go to Comment

When I watch a Godzilla movie with space monsters, they always manage to float effortlessly in whichever direction they want to. That is pretty much what I had in mind. I like leaving it to fantasy, but in the spirit of catering to all styles of play, I propose this:

The Qualm has a radioactive heart that constantly generates heat. The Qualm need only "leak" some of its heat or atmosphere in the opposite direction to propel it forward. As far as sunlight, this is actually for an increase in radiation and heat. When taken out of sunlight, it has to work twice as hard to heat itself. Go to Comment

Good point. Go to Comment

This is exactly what I was thinking. Godzilla and friends could fight their way through the massive canopy to the surface and then to the heart. Alternatively, Godzilla and friends could be endangered by the Qualm and humans must travel to the Qualm's surface, brave the perils, and detonate the heart to save Godzilla. Go to Comment

I am beginning to regret introducing physics. Technically, with no resistance it could eventually reach near the speed of light by only releasing one atom at a time. That said, I had no intention of making a monster that made intense logical sense. This is a monster for Godzilla to fight, and in line with common kaiju rational, it really doesn't need much explanation other than a space plant grown out of nuclear waste. Psionic might make more sense as you said below.

I rather like to think of the Qualm as having no apparent means of locomotion. It's just a massive ball of plant life that speeds through space in whatever direction has the closest resources.

With your comments and olontur's, I'm considering revising this Qualm into a less scientific being. Go to Comment

Update: Added a big feature to the Qualm that now allows it to fire blasts of radiation or slowly release radiation like a rocket through large glowing pods. Added a Travel section. Removed specific temperatures to contribute to the fantasy feel rather than science. Added a little to the Appearance. Added quite a bit of clarification to the Qualm's cold weakness. Go to Comment

Thanks! I was actually thinking something along the lines of Godzilla and friends fighting the canopy while the Earth Defense Force was fighting to the core.

I wanted a name that was simple and foreboding. At first, I thought of a Pip & Flinx evil entity called the Vom, and I just kinda went through a bunch on monosyllabic names till the Qualm came and stuck. Go to Comment

Ahhh. Cheesy horror at it's best! Glad to see that I can just pick this up and tell my players that they are stuck in the middle of it all. I especially like the redshirts reference and the ability to use them as meatshields.

The only thing that is really missing is that the cheerleader gets captured and dragged away alive into the queen's lair prompting a dramatic and improbable rescue attempt complete with an hour-long improvised gearing up scene.

Giving the PCs a bit of useful knowledge at the beginning can help the players distinguish themselves from NPCs of equal caliber. For example, maybe the awkward scientist knows that spiders are flammable or that they can be distracted by distant vibrations (throw something over there). Maybe the Jock was a quarterback and can stun big spiders for a second or two by hitting them in the face with a football. Cheesy is acceptable. Go to Comment

Very nice! As scras said, masterful role reversal going on. I'd love to see some cursed "denizens" of the surface. Go to Comment

Fun idea indeed, but there are lots of questions in my head. Are the wasps magical? Why does it take 2 stings (magic would make sense)? Can the stingers/poison be used as/on weapons (changeling darts)? What happens if a pregnant woman is stung? Can the wasps sting each other for mating (it would be kinda cool if all wasps were male and they had to sting each other for mating rights)?

Can I throw out a possibility? What if the wasps have a type of DNA mutagen poison. This poison causes pain throughout the entire body, but enough poison overcomes your natural resistances and mutates your DNA, consuming your excess fatty tissues to fuel rapid transformation. That would be super painful! The poison would need a paralytic to paralyze someone for hours, or perhaps enough poison would render you incapacitated as your entire body is overwhelmed by the mutation. Enough poison and you would simply die from pain or fall apart as the mutation gets too aggressive.

It's not perfect, but it's something. Magic would be easier to explain. Go to Comment

Cool idea! Someone has to build all those lairs. The downside is that my heroes would just hunt down and beat the Hammer until he gave them the location, layout, and defenses of the villain's lair. Either that or they would just "borrow" one of those Thunder class diggers and just plow into the enemy's base.

Another fun idea: I could see the Hammer having escape vehicles on every block in town. You see him in public and he jumps into a phone booth that blasts off into the sky or the sidewalk drops out from under him and slides back into place without him there.

One last fun idea is that the Hammer died years ago and his empire is perpetuated by his drones. You think you're hiring the Hammer, but you never actually meet him. Only when you find the Hammer's true lair and find his corpse resting gracefully upon a throne in his command center do you realize that he had been dead all along. Go to Comment

I'm relying heavily on ill-defined ultra-high frequency turbulence to repel electrons that are magnetically inbound before they have a chance to overcome the vaccuum and create an arc. So much fun stuff came to mind, but I cut it short for 100 words. In actuality, the ultra-high frequency turbulence would cause an anti-gravity effect in all directions which would push the device away from any surface including the ground. Only by bolting something to the device (from within the safety of an anti-static chamber) could you actually keep the device from floating away from you whenever you got too close.

The down-side of the device is obviously that it spits out gamma radiation. Each device would have a specific capacity. Or only be able to diffuse a specific charge without risking excess electrons/ions making it to the vaccuum and creating an arc/mega-explosion. Let's say that a single device can safely diffuse up to a gigajoule (about twice the energy of an average bolt of lightning) of energy per second safely (without damage to the device). Any charge greater than 1 gigajoule will risk electrons arcing to the core causing small explosions of photons which (often) result in the device beginning to melt down and becoming increasingly unstable. Any charge greater than 2 gagajoules (about the energy of a huge bolt of lightning) or prolonged absorption of > 1 gigajoule will result in a meltdown of the supermagnet and/or the vaccuum shielding. Either result will end in a catastrophic explosion.

Greater amounts of energy can be diffused through connecting two or more mobile grounds together.

Also, the bomb aspect. Yes, 1 oz of antimatter would create a massive boom! I'm not too physics-minded, so to put it in perspective, 1 oz of antimatter is enough to fuel a rocket on a one-way trip from the ground to the moon.

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Airship Grounding

Any large airship has the problem of static electricity buildup which can't be discharged until the ship lands. Over time, the static electricity will lessen the amount of electricity that is fed to devices, computers, life-support etc. Attaching a mobile ground to an uninhabited part of the ship instantly resolves the problem.

Example: It takes 120V to power your computer. If there is a 10V electrostatic buildup on the ship's ground, you would only be able to create a current of 110V. If there is a 30V electrostatic buildup, you'd only get 90V which would cause any 120V system to fail. Electrostatic buildup is the devil.

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