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I'd probably go with The Wizard's Amulet (free download from Necromancer Games), it's a decent one-session adventure with hooks for more if desired. You might want to mess with the motivations and relationships among the NPCs a bit to make them more meaningful to your group, but it runs fine as-is.

Whatever. The "IMHO" means it's my opinion. I'm not particularly interested in debating the issue, just noted it for the purpose of showing where I'm coming from. Feel free to dismiss anything I said if you believe my opinion has no merit.

Well, it seems to me Mutants and Masterminds is far enough from d20 that the difference between M&M and some other point-based rules systems is much smaller than the difference between M&M and D&D. That would make your loyalty, IMHO, more a matter of branding than game mechanics (not that...

In my D&D worlds, I don't worry about it. D&D doesn't lend itself very well to simulating real world effects, so I play to the system's strengths. I do sometimes run campaigns that pay a lot more attention simulating real world physics/economics/history/whatever, but I don't use D&D to run them...

I'm not sure that's a reasonable number unless you have some specific reason for the slave trade to hit those sorts of numbers. According to this Wikipedia article, the trade in African slaves is averaged around 6000 people a year from the 10th to 19th centuries. At its peak it was as high as...

If I were interested in a coherent explanation for the ascent to godhood via killing things and taking their stuff, I'd probably go the Highlander route and say there's some kind of life force that accumulates as you kill things. Birthright is an example of a setting that did this fairly...

A novel in somewhat the same vein is "The Years of Rice and Salt", which examines what the history of the world might have been like if the Black Death had been 99% fatal in Europe, instead of "only" 33% or so. I don't know whether Zhu Di's fleet really did reach the Americas, but it's not...

Frankly, I'm amazed your group even approached it as a puzzle. Pretty much every group I've played in or DMed would've tried things the violent way first, unless the elementals were clearly far more powerful than the group. Individual characters might have wanted to try and figure it out, but...

I kinda like Greg Bear's construction (from Darwin's Radio), homo sapiens novae. I think the superhero RPG Aberrant used a similar name, with "Nova" being the common term. In a sci-fi campaign I ran many years ago, a fair amount of warfare was conducted using genetically engineered non-native...

He just does standard close-up magic, you can hire a magician out of the yellow pages in any decent-sized city who'll do similar tricks. The street magic thing is a pretty neat schtick, though.

It's not from the BBC - a poster over on rpg.net did it. It's a nice hoax, and makes a good template if you want to fake up a BBC web story for a campaign.

As a DM: the way I handle evil items is the party gets some amount of credit with the local temple if they either turn them over to the temple for destruction or somebody the temple trusts (such as the party's paladin) swears they destroyed the item. Selling a known evil item is usually an evil...

The new version of Mage is coming out in a few months, might be best to wait for that if anyone's interested in Mage. If nothing else, the rules system should be cleaner (judging by the Vampire and Werewolf examples). I think previews have started to appear on White Wolf's site.

Well, the main rule of building a conspiracy theory is to fit data to the desired result. If the Kirkcaldy angle doesn't work for you, then you can go back to another track, such as Adam Smith and those influenced by him. A later economic theorist who was influenced by (and often at odds with)...

So I looked up Kirkcaldy in Fife on Wikipedia; that's the town where both Adam Smith and Sandford Fleming were born. It turns out it's a little ways from Loch Ness (about a third of the way across the country), but no need to worry about that. Other relatively famous people from Kirkcaldy...

Other monsters/weird critters/etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cryptids The various other lake monsters could also be aboleths. Maybe the humanoid critters (Sasquatch and cousins) are actually sitings of grimlocks, and that means mind flayers can't be far behind. Maybe there's a...

Loch Ness is actually in Scotland, not Ireland. It's connected to both the North and Irish seas by the Caledonian Canal, so all Nessie would really need to do in order to get out is get enough of the staff associated with the canal under control and make her escape one dark night. OTOH, maybe...

The number of lawyers focusing on intellectual property law probably represents evidence against that opinion. Lawyers make very little money arguing over clearly written laws.

Yeah, that's one of my preferred models, too. Another one I like is from the TV series "Seven Days", where the time machine could only go back one week. Then technology differences aren't really an issue, and I can focus on all the causality/paradox weirdness that makes time travel a fun topic...

Actually putting lots of points into skills is generally the third or fourth best option for high skill scores in M&M, with the first three being attributes, super-attributes, and feats. It seems to me that Nick Fury and the Black Widow should both work fine with some super-attributes, and it's...