I HAVE THE POWER!!!!!!

Not actually a blog post about MotU. Sorry. Talking about the Immortal Rules, the I of BECMI.

I've only gotten a few pages into the book. I've been pretty busy converting my classes from face to face to online. That, and Netflix. But I did get through the first few pages.

So I kind of knew this already, from my previous perusing of my PDF version, and from what others had told me about it. When your PC achieves immortality, their XP total is converted to Power Points at a rate of 1PP per 10k XP. So starting immortals have a few hundred PP, depending on their class/level when they achieved immortality.

When you convert your character, and play as an immortal, these PP are EVERYTHING. They're still the "xp" you collect, or rather XP you continue to collect is converted to PP. But you can also earn them in other ways, by advancing your personal goals and the goals of your Sphere.

PP are your hit points, as well. The only way to truly destroy an immortal is to reduce them to 0 PP.

PP are your spell points. You can cast any spell, and create plenty of other powers, by temporary expenditure of PP. These come back in time.

They are also character build points. You can improve your character, construct your own Outer Plane, create artifacts, and make other permanent changes/improvements through permanent expenditure of PP. In fact, the "advancement table" looks fairly easy to achieve, until you read the rules about needing minimum stats in certain ability scores to advance, which require these permanent expenditures of PP.

So while I have looked at the sections on using ability scores as % chance to perform "godly" tasks (which is pretty loosey-goosey story gamey, or at least it appears to be in the Players Book), and the section on the new saving throws, the main take-away so far is that Power is the metric of the immortals, and it's what drives the game.

Cool. And I'm gonna wait until I get through everything, but I've got an inkling that these PP based character mechanics might possibly work for a Supers game or maybe something like the Ambers in Zelazny's books. Yeah, there's Amber Diceless for Zelazny, but I don't have it and have never seen it.

Immortals

Back in February I got some of my late cousin's old gaming stuff. This includes his copies of the Mentzer Immortals rule books.

I think I mentioned previously that I have the PDF. In fact, I've had it for a very long time. I bought it online from Paizo back when they were publishing Dragon magazine and selling the old TSR catalog online. It was a different time.

But even though I've had the PDF for what, nearly 15 years? I was in Japan when I bought it and I've been in Korea for 12 now. So at least 13 years. But even though I've had it that long, I've never given it a deep reading.

Now I've got the physical books. I'm gonna start reading them this evening. I don't know that I'll do a "cover to cover" style series of posts, but expect lots of posts about it in the coming days/weeks.

"Do you want to live forever?" Immortality in the Game

I've never used the Immortal Rules that Frank Mentzer created.  Heck, it's only recently that I even had a look at them on .pdf, and I've never read them all the way through.

I doubt I ever will.

But recently, in his review of JB's BX Companion (sold out, by the way, congrats JB!), James Maliszewski mentioned in passing that he doesn't like the idea of quests for immortality in his games.  I believe he said it doesn't fit the source literature he prefers.

I enjoy the same S&S stuff James does, but I also had a lot of my early gaming inspired by mythology of various sorts.  And there, the idea of the quest for immortality stretches back as far as Gilgamesh.

Not to mention Hercules being granted immortality as the fruits of his labors, Qin Shi Huang Di (first emperor of historical China in the 3rd century BC) and plenty of Taoists searching for it, Egyptians mummifying their pharaohs, Norsemen trying to die heroic deaths so they could live on as einherjar at least until Ragnarok, and the twisted immortality sought by some vampires. 

Not to say that Chevsky is wrong--it's purely subjective whether this sort of thing should belong in your game or not--but I think there's plenty of inspiration from real world sources that it should be an option.

Besides, what the heck else is there worth doing at levels above 30?