I ran my first superhero RPG (V&V) sometime in early
1982. By the end of that year, supers took up approximately 90% of my gaming, a
trend that would continue for the next twenty years. Most of this was Champions, but I’m not here to talk
about rules today. This time around, I wanted to talk about some of the more
memorable characters I’ve encountered over the years. I may also mention a few
of my own PCs I’ve had fun with.
Your Radioactive
Pal
My very first Champions
character was Spectrum. He was kind
of, sort of, a Wildfire knockoff, in that he was a guy stuck in a containment
suit who flew around and blasted stuff. Unlike Wildfire, he wasn’t trapped in
an energy state. No, Spectrum was just highly radioactive. Poisonously so.
Hence the containment suit, which was bright yellow, with black highlights and
a prominently displayed radiation warning symbol on the right chest.
Thing is, Spectrum wasn’t particularly angst-ridden. In
fact, he was downright friendly and good natured, a very dedicated hero. Over
the years, I played him in multiple campaigns, and he generally ended up in
some sort of team leadership role. Eventually, I kind of outgrew him, but I
still have a lovely Denis Loubet pencil sketch of him on the wall.
The Psychic Punk
Fury was created by one of my friends from high school.
He was a very powerful psionic, whose origin was pretty much lifted from
Stephen King’s Firestarter. He was
also totally played by Billy Idol. Fury refused to adopt a secret identity, but
would happily wipe the memory of it from the minds of people who learned it by
accident. One of his more interesting features was that as he burned Endurance,
he would go temporarily blind. Despite their differences, he and Spectrum were
buds. Throughout more than a few early campaigns, the team of Spectrum and Fury formed the core of whatever team they were on (we often recycled characters back then).
Voltron
Yeah, I’m not kidding. That’s what his player named him.
And honestly, he’s only here because he’s connected to a fairly entertaining
story. My first supers game was V&V, and I ran a game for a couple of
months. Voltron was my best friend’s V&V character. He had Invisibility and
a Lightning Bolt and that’s about all I can tell you about him. When I discovered Champions a few months later, I dropped V&V like a piece of
gold kryptonite. My friend didn’t approve and his passive-aggressive
“conversion” of Voltron to a new system remains the only 100 point Champions character I’ve ever seen (he
refused to take any Disadvantages, because the V&V version didn’t have any.
(In his defense, he came around shortly thereafter, and
became a hardcore Champions player
for many years.)
The Prodigal and
Naga
These two were a cute idea. Basically, they were adult
versions of Jonny Quest and Hadji, as superheroes. The Prodigal was a
super-science gadgeteer, Naga was a full-on psychic, and they were accompanied
by BANDIT XI, a cybernetic bulldog. Like I said, it was a cute idea. I think
the campaign died like many back then, due to too many ideas, but they were a lot of fun.
Sage
This guy. God, I couldn’t stand him. A friend who fancied
himself a writer decided he wanted to join our game. He had the brilliant idea
of playing a guy with superpowers who wasn’t particularly interested in being a
superhero. For one thing, he was in his sixties and he’d only had his powers
(an array of psionic abilities) for a few months. For another, his natural
reaction when confronted with a supervillain was to try to tell the guy off or
(maybe) chuck a rock at him. In short, Sage was the perfect example of how NOT
to make a PC for a supers game. And yet, he was kind of endearing. Memorable,
if nothing else. To the player’s credit, he did better with subsequent
characters.
Clifton Edge
Clifton was the first of many characters I would
encounter from one of my more…imaginative players. As these things go, Cliff
was downright normal, being a cyborg of the Six Million Dollar Man stripe. The
oddity was in his origin. You see, Mr. Edge was a millionaire high-tech
inventor. He’d developed a set of cybernetic prostheses, but THE GOVERNMENT
wouldn’t let him test them on a volunteer. Undeterred, he crashed his race car,
causing himself life-threatening injury and had his doctors secretly graft the
cybernetics on his broken body.
Given that this same player would later provide us with
Cap’n Stretchy, Captain Wombat, SHABOOM (see below) and Danger Man (ditto),
Cliff was downright mundane by comparison.
SHABOOM
Oh boy. And here I thought Clifton Edge was out there.
SHABOOM took it to another level. Have you ever seen the Firesign Theater movie
“J-Men Forever”? It’s a collection of re-dubbed and re-edited Republic Serials.
As 70s stoner humor goes, it’s pretty OK. Anyway, one of the serials subjected
to this treatment was “The Adventures of Captain Marvel,” which turned the
titular hero into “The Caped Maniac,” powered by the magic word SHABOOM.
(SHABOOM stands for Sneaky, Hateful, Arrogant, Bigoted,
Obnoxious, another O for doubly Obnoxious, and Mean.)
Steve (the player) decided this was a perfectly
acceptable starting point for a character, and thus SHABOOM was born. Meek
Willy Watson, who operated an adult bookstore, only had to speak the magic word
to transform. He played him for obnoxious laughs, though he did have a
semblance of motivation to do good (mostly so people would leave him alone).
And, while we’re on the subject of Steve…
Danger Man
Steve liked cartoons. A lot. He was into anime before
anyone else I knew, but he didn’t really discriminate. If it was animated, he
was into it. This included the classic British kid’s show “Danger Mouse.”
Danger Man was his tribute to the show. Basically, his superpower was being
both indestructible and unflappable (though, clearly, he’d been injured at
least once, why else where an eyepatch?). He had defenses for weeks, with
Damage Reduction and Regeneration, and a Recovery in the mid-double digits. In
short, even if you dropped a bomb on him, he’d shake it off, get up and keep
going. Or, as we occasionally did, have
him hold a bomb and drop him on a villain lair, without a parachute. Good times.
Black Dragon
He’s another of mine, and honestly, kind of a “white
savior” trope in the style of Iron Fist. Basically an American kid who fell in
with a kung fu cult in Hong Kong under control of the Dragon Master from the
Champions Universe. See, in the CU, we have Dragon Master and Green Dragon, so
I decided to connect them and make up dragons for the other colors. Black
Dragon was the lone good guy. Yeah, I know how it looks now, but he was fun to
play and the Dragon Legion showed up in a bunch of my games.
Hero-Man
So this is where the guy who played Sage made good. I was
running a game set on a variant of DC’s Earth-2, where most of the JSA got
killed off in something called The Degaton War, back in the 70s. Thought the
heroic legacy was still basically intact. Anyway, my friend, realizing that
Sage was a terrible PC for a supers game, relented and came up with a character
completely devoted to heroism. The creation of a ten-year-old paraplegic
genius, Hero-Man was a superpowered android as well as a father figure for his
creator. Powers-wise, he was basically a low-rent Superman. Appearance-wise,
well, if you put him in a Superman costume and no one noticed his hair was
black (instead of the greying of Earth-2 Supes), he was pretty much a dead
ringer (a fact he once exploited as the payoff to a long-running plot gag that
yielded an 18d6 Presence Attack). I later resurrected the concept as Hyperion,
who I’ll talk about in a bit.
Photograph
My wife’s first Champions
character. Photograph was sort of a cross between Natasha Romanova and Danielle
Moonstar: a super-spy who could extract someone’s worst fear and project it as
an illusion. She looked like Death from the “Sandman” comics and talked like
Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny.” She was a lot of fun in the right setting.
Beamer (the Boy
with EMR)
OK, he’s mostly memorable (maybe entirely), because he
was created and played by Aaron Allston during my brief stint GMing Champions for a group that included him.
He was a blast to have at the table. Beamer was a kid who could do all sorts of
tricks with his body’s electromagnetic field. The rest is kind of blurry, since
we only played a few times.
Dark Rider
So, I moved to the Houston area and had to come up with
an entirely new gaming group. I answered an ad at a game store and ended up
with Dark Rider’s player. When I met him, I was so desperate to get a game
going, I probably would have said yes to Charles Manson. As it was, this guy
was no psychotic killer, but he was two tons of problem player in a half-ton
truck and Dark Rider, the manifestation of all of it. The character was a grim
loner type, who wore all black biker leathers and a full-face helmet. He was a
powerful psionic. Like, world-beater powerful, something I hadn’t paid enough
attention to when I was doing character approvals, because I really wanted to
get a game going.
Thing is, the reason why he was so freaking powerful on a
starting character budget was that the player had some very idiosyncratic
interpretations of the character creation rules. Where the rule for the costs
of powers states that you always round ½ points in the favor of the player, it
makes a rather explicit exception for buying characteristics. DR’s player didn’t see things this way, and
he gave himself DEEP discounts on his characteristics via the Power of Rounding.
In the first adventure I ran, Dark Rider defeated the
menace from twenty miles away without leaving the office chair he was sitting
in, by dint of powerful Mind Scan and Ego Attacks. It was brutal, it was not in
the least bit exciting or interesting, and the other players basically sat
there and watched (yes, the one good thing that came with him was a group of
players looking for a GM). It was at this point I took a good look at his
character sheet and noticed his creative accounting. I asked him to fix it and
made sure to add a dollop of Ego Defense to any villain I wanted to keep around
for more than a turn. Eventually, he
chafed under my insistence on playing by the rules and left, but by that point
his guys had become my guys, so I call it a win.
Witchfire
My wife’s second character, Rainn Randall, heir to a
magical ring that bestowed the energies of elemental fire upon her (her
grandmother had been Sea-Witch in WWII). She brought an interesting perspective
shift to her team (The Alamo Defenders), being a practicing pagan, a pacifist,
and the only woman on the team. She had a notoriously successful team up with
La Belle Fantom, a New Orleans-based NPC heroine that showed the boys up
something fierce.
Force
Another character from the Alamo Defenders game, this was
that player’s first RPG character. Force was a fairly mild-mannered guy with
strong telekinetic abilities. In that campaign, he was notable for romancing La
Belle Fantom, and having a monumental throwdown with a villain named Force over
rights to the name. Years later, he was revived in Justin Davis’ “Fair City”
campaign, where he started off much the same, then took a turn to the cocky,
arrogant, and recklessly violent. Evil, even. Turned out, he’d been kidnapped
by his counterpart from the Evil Universe. Only the GM and player knew this at
the time; the rest of us had to figure it out via roleplaying clues. It took
about six months to fall out and it was AMAZING.
Charon
Oh, man, Charon. This was in a campaign I was actually
playing instead of running, so I got to see this stuff from that side of the
screen. Charon claimed to be the figure from Greek myth. Claimed. Thing was, he
was basically a happy-go-lucky, vaguely Mediterranean brick. Nothing about him
said “Boatman of the Dead.” He talked like one of the “Wild and Crazy Guys”
from that old SNL sketch. He was, frankly, kind of a joke.
Then, about six or seven sessions into the campaign, he
got captured by Arnim Zola (yeah, really). He was very well-secured, his
strength completely nullified. At that point, his player looked at the GM and
said, “It’s time to drop the mask.” He
then proceeded to describe, in horrible detail, exactly how the flesh melted
away from Charon’s body, revealing a bloody skeletal visage. The skeletal form was a horrifying engine of
destruction, and it broke Zola’s captivity with ease (also the dude’s mind). It
was exactly the sort of unforgettable moment that makes me love gaming so much.
The Mighty
Man-Frog
Another player I met through an ad at a game store, this
one turned out great. His first character in one of my games was The Mighty
Man-Frog, an amphibious take on the Silver-Age Batman. Seriously, he had an array of frog-themed
gadgets, vehicles, an underwater lair, and was notably deadpan. Pretty sure he
even smoked a pipe. My one regret is I never got to saddle him with a sidekick
named “Toadie, the Toad Wonder.”
Slapstick, The
Crime Fightin’ Clown
Another character from Force’s creator. This one was for
“Meridian by Moonlight,” my attempt at a Dark-Deco animated style game. Slapstick was basically a guy with good
fighting skills and clown gadgets (pies, joy buzzers, etc.) who was sworn to
take down The Mob. Why not?
Troubadour
Probably my favorite personal character, I created him
for the “Fair City” campaign. His full story goes on for quite some length, and
is detailed here,
but suffice to say, I’m quite fond of the old “Warrior, Poet, Lover”, and he
deserves a mention.
Hyperion (HYPER-10N)
I’ll finish up with an odd one. A character I made for a
convention game, based on an old PC from one of my campaigns, but played in
such a memorable fashion that I have to note it. Oh, also, the player was my
son.
Hyperion was a re-hash of Hero-Man for an ICONS
game I was running. I needed a brick, and I always liked the conceit of the
hero who was secretly a robot. I even listed that as one of his
Complications. My son was playing in
this game and it was his first convention session playing with adults, so I included him with my boy in mind, in that he was 1) powerful, 2) easy to play.
Little did I guess how he’d grasp the subtleties of the rules as quickly as he
did.
Here's the situation: the heroes were basically fighting a
Cthulhu analog as he rose from the briny deep. They were beaten down, out of options,
and (more importantly) out of Determination, the currency ICONS runs on. They
were talking among themselves, trying to figure out what to do when the boy
said, “Wait. I know how to beat him. I’m going to fly as fast as I can and slam into
it with everything I’ve got. It can’t kill me…because I’M SECRETLY A ROBOT!” This
admission earned him a point of Determination, which he used to perform a stunt
combining his ranks in Strength with his Flight speed. I ruled that he would
suffer half the damage he caused, almost certainly tearing off his outer
covering. He hit, the Elder Horror went down, and his secret was exposed.
Also, he got quoted in the next edition of the rules.
Thanks, Steve!
So anyway, that’s that. Nearly 3000 words of
remembrance and appreciation, all from memory. I thought about looking through
some old campaign logs, but I figured if I couldn’t actually remember them, then
it wasn’t worth it. Here’s to making new
ones.
