Welcome back to my current conversion experiment, wherein I attempt to push HERO 5th Edition, Revised's limits using one of the strangest settings I could think of: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

One of the most defining elements of the Jojo's setting is the presence of Stand Users and their bizarre powers.  Stands are anthropomorphic psionic projections of the Stand User, and enable the Stand User to perform anything from odd tricks to impossible manipulations of reality.

That being said, let's get down to business and work out a HERO build for a Stand and see if the system can take it:

Concept:

This being Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, let's go and focus on a basic Stand.  For the purposes of this example I'll come up with a custom Stand User not found in the comic that can serve as a Villain in a HERO campaign.

Depeche Mode is a cruel, selfish man whose ambitions have risen considerably ever since he developed his stand, Personal Jesus.  Once a simple thief and murderer, Depeche Mode has found that Personal Jesus tends to be a much more attractive tool as Stands do not have fingerprints nor genetic material to serve as evidence.

Personal Jesus itself manifests as a bizzare robotic pastiche of a person in a roman catholic priest's vestment, with 2 telephone lineman's belts crossed at the waist, and boots with lineman's spikes.  His clothing is patterened with numbers and symbols found in a standard telephone keypad.

Depeche Mode prefers to avoid combat, preferring to use Personal Jesus' abilities from the shadows instead, coercing individuals to commit suicide if he can catch them unawares.  To Stand Users, Personal Jesus does so by reaching into any part of a victim's head and flipping it open as if messing with a phone box.  Personal Jesus then reaches inside the open head and pulls out a telephone receiver.  Once connected this way Personal Jesus can either choose to listen to his targets thoughts and memories, or choose to leave a specific command by speaking into the receiver.  Once this is completed, Personal Jesus returns the handset and closes the person's head, leaving no sign of physical harm.  This happens without the person being aware of anything.

Now that I've gone on and prattled about the character, let's pop open a copy of HERO Designer (the best way to make characters) and see how we can emulate these powers:

Build:

Cost Name Power
5 Stretching 1"
60 Personal Jesus: Multipower, 60-point reserve
3u 1) Flurry of Blows: Energy Blast 6d6, Area Of Effect (One Hex; +1/2), Selective (+1/4) (52 Active Points); No Range (-1/2)
6u 2) Killing Strike: Killing Attack - Hand-To-Hand 4d6 (4 1/2d6 w/STR) (60 Active Points)
3u 3) Interposed Block: Force Field (15 PD/15 ED) (30 Active Points)
4u 4) Reach out and Touch Faith: Mind Control 12d6 (Human class of minds) (60 Active Points); No Range (-1/2)
4u 5) Party Line: Telepathy 12d6 (Human class of minds) (60 Active Points); No Range (-1/2)
3u 6) Long-Distance: Teleportation 12", No Relative Velocity, Position Shift, MegaScale (1" = 1 km; +1/4), Can Be Scaled Down 1" = 1km (+1/4) (58 Active Points); Restricted Path (Requires a working Phone Line; -1)
Powers Cost: 88

Okay, now that I've dumped how the build looks like in HERO-speak, let's go over each of the powers and how they're built:

• Stretching - I added a stretching power basically to emulate the fact that Personal Jesus can manifest up to 2 meters (1" hex in HERO terms) away and manipulate or attack objects at that distance.
• Multipower - This is a little trickier.  A Multipower is a Power Framework, essentially a cost-saving mechanic in HERO where a build could be cheaper since all the powers listed underneath it essentially share the same pool of points.  The downside is that only one  of the listed powers can be active at any given time.
• Energy Blast - Rather than rely on a standard hand to hand attack, I opted to define Personal Jesus' basic attack as a flurry of blows that essentially fills an entire 2m area full of fists... not entirely unlike the video below.
• Killing Attack - Given that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is a rather deadly setting, there's certainly nothing holding back from giving Personal Jesus an attack that's meant to kill things, as opposed to just knocking them out.
• Force Field - In a desperate attempt to shield Depeche Mode, Personal Jesus manifests just in front of him, arms crossed to take on the brunt of the damage.  Mechanically it acts as a force field.
• Mind Control - This variant of mind control requires the user to be right next to the target, and Special Effects wise, is defined as Personal Jesus opening the person's head to take out a handset and giving it instructions.
• Telepathy - Same Special Effect with the handset, with the same restrictions of having no range, except that Personal Jesus only listens to the information rather than giving orders.
• Teleportation - One of my favorite powers for Depeche Mode and Personal Jesus, as long as Personal Jesus can touch a working phone line, he can drag Depeche Mode with him and teleport himself, manifesting in any telephone within 12 kilometers of his starting destination.  Great for making escapes, or unexpected visits.

Hmm... not too shabby for a first attempt at making a basic Stand, though I wish I had the artistic talent to actually draw Depeche Mode and Personal Jesus.  Tomorrow we'll look at some examples from the manga itself and see if we can emulate the truly weird things from there.

That being said, check out this video of the Stardust Crusaders arc, where the Protagonist Jotaro Kujo goes up against a Stand using Vampire whose Stand ability is to stop time (I'm not making this up), Dio Brando.

Yes, it's autumn...and you know what that means.

• Below, a recipe for this weekend's brew, hopefully ready for the holidays:

Schedule (adapted from an online source, the details of which were lost long ago):

1. Mash with 21 quarts of water (1.75 qts per pound) at 102 ºF to achieve 99 ºF dough-in rest. Rest for 30 minutes.

2. Heat mash by infusion to 122 ºF protein rest. Rest for 20 minutes.

3. Heat mash to 145 ºF for the saccharification rest. Rest for 60 minutes.

4. Sparge to 6.5 gallons in kettle.

5. Boil; after a vigorous boil begins and hot break flashes up, start a 60 minute boil timer.

6. Add 1.00 oz. of hops at 30 minutes.

7. Add 1.00 oz. of hops at 10 minutes.

8. Add 2 teaspoons Irish moss at 10 minutes.

9. Check and record original gravity.

10. Cool using a whirlpool to collect hops and break material.

11. Clean and sanitize two primary fermenters. Pitch the yeast culture.

12. Rack cooled wort into primaries and cap with a blow-off tube.

13. Rack onto raisins in secondary fermenter after 14 or so days.

14. Bottle after 14 days in secondary.

15. Bottle condition for at least one month--and longer is better.

• I also found a cider/beer recipe on biergotter.org, which I've modified quite a bit:

(5 gallon, all-grain)

• 8 lbs Grains:
  • 5 lbs Maris Otter
  • 2 lbs Simpsons Crystal 60 ºL
  • 1 lb Weyermann Caramel Wheat, 45.5 ºL
• 18 lbs of chopped apples (Autumn Gold, Johnagold, Honeycrisp, others)
  • Chopped into 1/8ths
  • Added to primary, not juiced
  • Using 1 teaspoon pectin enzyme to reduce haze, per biergotter.org
• 2 oz hops (I may reduce this amount further):
  • 3/4 oz Cascade (bittering)
  • 1/4 oz Cascade (flavor)
  • 1/4 oz Willamette (flavor)
  • 3/4 oz Willamette (aroma)
• Wyeast 2565 Kolsch Yeast

Considering that I've recently purchased like 30 lbs. of apples from a local orchard, I might just try this recipe out too. Updates are forthcoming.

Ladies and Gentlemen, today, I decide to break my brain.

Deliberately.

I've decided to take a moment out of the usual messing about with rpg theory, and see if there's a means to actually translate the world of the quirky (and surprisingly popular) Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.  With that in mind, we'll be taking a look at the baseline material, and see if it's actually possible to mangle HERO 5th Edition revised enough to make it possible.

Source Material:

Before we can actually go further into the discussion of this experiment without becoming familiar with the source material.  Best place to start off would be through the series' Wikipedia Entry & TVtropes Entry Given the immense nature of the series (spanning from the victorian age, to pulp, 80's, early 90's and finally to an alternate timeline), it becomes necessary to reduce the scale of the game to a single time period, or related time periods.

For the purpose of the experiment, we'll be taking off from the Stardust Crusaders, Diamond is Unbreakable, Golden Wind and Stone Ocean story arcs as the primary inspirations.  The player characters should all be Stand Users, humans who have managed to unlock a remarkable psychic power known as a Stand, which manifests itself in a (usually) humanoid form that can only be seen by other Stand Users.

According to the series, Stands obey certain laws, with certain exceptions:

• Rule #1 - A Stand shares whatever damage it takes to the User, and vice versa.  Stands are powerful, but if they are hurt, then the User takes an equal measure of punishment.
• Rule #2 - A Stand has a limited range from it's User, and it's range is usually inversely proportional to the Stand's strength.  The most powerful Stands in the series seem to have a range of about 2 meters from their Users at best.
• Rule #3 - Stands have a measure of intelligence.  All stands are capable of thought, but a few are able to take independent action, and are even capable of planning and speech.
• Rule #4 - Not all stands are created equal.  Some of the Stands in the series have some very obscure uses that require more than a little creativity and lateral thinking on the part of the User to use properly.
• Rule #5 - Only Stand Users can perceive other Stands.  Normal people don't perceive the actual stand, but are perfectly aware of the effects.
• Rule #6 - Only Stands can harm other stands.  People, even Stand Users cannot touch nor harm Stands.  However this doesn't necessarily mean that Stands themselves are intangible, Stands may be contained, or trapped.
• Rule #7 - In a convenient lampshading of the Shounen Fighting Anime/Manga genre, Stand Users are destined to meet each other, seemingly swept up by fate and circumstance to either join each other or fight.

As you can see, despite it's manga trappings, it's actually fairly reminiscent of the superhero genre, with the possible exception that there are no secret identities, as the super-powered half is the Stand itself.  In theory, this should be relatively easy to do in HERO, but over the week(s?) I'll be going through each of my attempts to emulate this series in the best possible light, sticking to the series' hallmarks as best as I can, and topping it off finally with a character.

Ruleset:

While in theory any Generic RPG ruleset could emulate Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, I decided to stick to HERO first, given their character design philosophy of separating mechanical builds from their special effects.  Therefore an arrow, a bullet, and a lightning bolt are all essentially the Energy Blast power with different advantages and disadvantages tacked on to define their behavior.

Given the sheer mind-boggling variance of the Stand abilities, HERO seemed to be the only real choice.

Next Steps:

The Prototype Stands:  I'll be fiddling with some HERO specs tomorrow, starting off with a baseline build for the different types of stands that the series has had so far.  The fun / messy part of HERO is that there's a lot of different ways to achieve the same effect, and I'll be making various builds in order to weight the pros and cons of each approach.

4-1/2 lbs of amber malt extract, 1-1/2 oz of cascade hops, and 1/2 oz of Willamette hops for aroma.  Nice and simple.

While brewing, we also partook of batch 12, "The Good Life" ale as we have named it.  It was also based off of an English bitter, but I didn't use the English Fuggles or Goldings, substituting Hallertauer and Willamette instead.    Can't make beer without drinking beer.  That's my philosophy.

Once done the initial gravity turned out at around 1.032.  Should be well under 4% alcohol by the time it's done (my guess would be around 3%.)  Brewing with all extracts is sure easier than grains.

Pitched the yeast a few hours ago, and should be ready to bottle by next weekend.    Just put a bottle of batch 13 in the fridge, "Wild Thing" as we're calling it.  The next beer to be brewed will be an IPA.  Looking forward to it.

Illyria is a setting where magic, fantasy and technology exist side by side. Magitech. Portals and Magical skyships, espers and engineers, summoners, and gunknights. Illyria is an unforgiving monarchy where the blood of dragons promote a person’s identity and social status. But still heroes arise in the name of the Queen, or in the name of the Country. Never both.

Please check out the full document HERE (PDF 1.6mb)

*No more information on how the texture changing works can be provided at the moment, as the whole file uploading and texture editing process is still not complete.

[Starcell XF-1 page] [Discuss on the Forum]

The amber I made didn't work out. You can probably see that in the growling of my face.

Oh, it's drinkable. I can't say it's a failure, but so far it has not met expectations.

The nose on this beer is nice and sweet; UK Golding hops serving me well here, the boiling of hops that I'd used in a dry-hopping process working out just fine. The beer isn't bitter, but it does have some body to it.

Once again, however, it's just not carbonated. Now I'd bottled this beer before finding out about the trick of re-introducing yeast to the beer so hopefully this problem will be eliminated in the future. Beer ought to be carbonated (at least a bit) and I don't feel like waiting another three weeks or more for the stuff to behave. However, if all goes well, this will be the last time I have to deal with this problem, so huzza!

What's more troubling is that there are strange black particles at the bottom of my glass.  Tiny black ashes. It's like there were burnt malts that were allowed to stay in the beer, somehow. Or who friggin' knows what went wrong there.

There really is only one proper response to this kind of situation; open up another beer, and find out if it has the same issues.
~you'll have to imagine me getting a beer at this point~

So, now that I've had the next beer, I can say that this doesn't seem to be a pattern. This beer is clearer, and while there are particulates at the bottom of it, I don't think they are the same kind. The previous one probably came near the end of the carboy, where more yeast and other particulates can make it into the beer.

I'm still drinking flat beer, though. Sigh.

Test Run of Boss Controlling Codes, with Master Hand. Credit goes to "Y.S." for creating the codes, and "Phantom Wings" for porting them to NTSC-US.

Jose: Master Hand          Juan: Captain Falcon

***VIDEO NOTE***
If you thought controlling Bosses was impossible, think again. Although you can't really BE the boss outside Boss Battles, you can actually issue commands, instead of the CPU always telling them what to do. Pressing the start button for any boss will automatically result in a self-destruct. More Boss Control coming soon!

Two of the greatest FPS games from the 90's collide in an all out war!  Only one will be victorious, while the other must find a new home... or perish!  Choose your race, choose your path, choose your destiny!  Aliens versus Quake... it's comming... whether you like it or not, believe it or not!

YES! And it's just that! Look at these bad boys... 

Aren't they beautiful? Direct from SABCO Industries, these little gems arrived last week. And consequently we have plunged ourselves further into this financial black hole of brewing. I believe the adage goes, "Give a man a beer, waste a day. Teach a man to brew, waste a lifetime..." With that said, I believe we're well on our way to reaching that goal.

As far as function, these will greatly improve the ease and efficiency with which we ferment. No more carboys, no more transferring, easier yeast harvesting, no more airlock explosions causing crusty, brownish yeast shrapnel on the ceiling.

To say the least I'm ecstatic, and can't wait to see awesome results from the new equipment. Come by the house/brewery Sunday and get your picture taken with them!

I started into the hobby when my wife got me a Mr. Beer home brewing kit for Christmas last year. She also got a refill kit with three more recipes. My first batch was a pale ale. It turned out really good. The second batch I brewed was a wheat beer. I did a lot of things wrong and it didn't turn out so well, but it was still drinkable. The third batch was an Oktoberfest I think. I added some blueberries to the batch and it turned out horribly. I ended up dumping all of it out.

That was it for 6 months until about two weeks ago when I purchased my first 5 gallon equipment kit. I also got a Hefe Weizen recipe kit. I brewed it up about 10 days ago and that is where this blog is going to start.

Feel free to leave comments, tips, or just general feedback. I'm just here to learn and have a good time. So here we go. Cheers!

Yup. Sunday morning proved rough for a second week in a row (hence the reason for Sundays post being posted today). They say misery loves company so Sunday, to accompany me was Jamie, who was curled up in the fetal position next to me, and Rob who wasn't feeling so good either. I tried to nurse them back with Revive Vitamin Water...it was Brutal.

Anyway, I manned-up and rousted the two so we could start brewing our Indie Pale Ale, an American style pale. We originally brewed this recipe as an IPA, but numerous reviews and updated style guidelines convinced us to simply decrease some hoppiness and call it an American Pale.

Brewing proved easy and relaxed with a sixty minute mash and boil. We expect a crisp, light, biscuity brew with floral hop notes in the finish.

Also, by this weekend our Six Wheat Under Belgian Wit should be ready for consumption.

The First Brew: Some Facts

• Kit and Style: NB Cream Ale Extract Kit
• Ingredients: Look them up yourself, it's the kit on the Northern Brewer website. Yeast was Wyeast Labs something or other (the liquid one recommended in the kit.) Again, I was not a very diligent note taker.
• Boil: Partial
• Method: We used the instructions included in the kit. We should have checked the NB forums and read some literature beforehand. Most homebrewers on the NB forums will tell you to "throw the instructions out and come here."  We have since done so and our latest brew is looking up.
• Original Gravity: 1.042
• Final Gravity: 1.014
• Time (Primary Fermentation:) 3 weeks
• Time (Bottle Conditioning:) 2 weeks
• ABV: 3.64%
• Taste: Not undrinkable.
• Accompanying Game: TF2

Now for the Sweet Pictures:

Photographer: My lovely wife Laura.  She demanded credit, which I grudgingly supply.  They are decent photos.

My talk got on my brewing/gaming buddy Wowy's nerves, and he has (not-so-subtly) forced me to finally start typing stuff and posting pictures.

So, welcome to all you non-readers out there. [UGUF] Brewing proudly presents our poorly designed cookie-cutter brewing and gaming blog.

I'm not going to go much further into the explanation of "why brewing and gaming?" (Not sure how to grammatically construct that last sentence.) The fact is, we like to game. We like to brew beer. Consumption of said brewed beer goes well with consumption of said gaming.

Things will be tweaked on and off as we "discover our blogging selves" in the next...uh...era. This may become a straight up [UGUF] blog for all I know. The fact is that we're better gamers than brewers. (Maybe not "better," but more well versed in the hobby and all its shenanigans.) We just started brewing not two months ago or so. We have two brews under our belt, one consumed whilst playing Team Fortress 2 and the other ready to be kegged. If brewing adventures are posted, take the knowledge that we are brewnoobs into account. (Brewbs? Broobs? ) Don't use us for any sort of expert knowledge.

In true [UGUF] style, this new venture can be summed up in one phrase: "This blog is bullshit."

Stag