Champions Classics

[Christopher R Taylor]

OK I have started to convert old adventures printed in previous magazines etc.  They just need a bit of updating to modern tech and culture, a bit of converting to 6th edition, some bits of added info, and illustrations.  They don't take long to do, the art will be the slow part, but the conversions are pretty simple.  I plan on releasing these as "Champions Classics" for cheap if it all works out.  We get a few dozen of these things out on the internet and no GM has an excuse for not having anything to run!

[Christopher R Taylor]

The Mechanon Gambit was a pretty simple conversion, just a few details to update the times.  What Rough Beast didn't take a lot of rebuild either, other than Genocide being extinct at this point.  The rebuild of Terror in the Treasures is a bit more work; the villain group is made up of some of the most powerful villains in the Champions Universe.  Slug, Black Paladin, and Ripper on the same team, against an average team of heroes?  Still working on how to keep it close to the original adventure but with a reasonable power level of enemies.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I've gotten five of these done so far, and there are some terrific little adventures out there in the magazines to run.  Some big names writing them too such as Scott Bennie, George MacDonald, etc.  Aaron Allston himself was the editor of the magazine, and he has his contributions as well.  They take a bit of effort to update in some cases: stuff that used to make sense doesn't so much.  I have updated things like messages delivered by drop or hand into a DM on a burner phone, and some of the villains need a bit of work to shift into 6th edition.

 

Its fun stuff, the only real delay to getting these out will be art, of course.  I can repurpose a bunch of it from the adventures in the magazine (colored, of course) but a lot I'll have to work up myself.  If I can get enough of these little 10-15 page adventures out, maybe I'll compile them into books of like a dozen adventures each.

 

And, of course, these make the Champions Rises project easier.

Edited May 14 by Christopher R Taylor

[Lord Fyre]

One problem I'm running into with converting older material is that WWII was 80+ years ago.  This becomes an obstacle with characters such as Flare, Sparkplug/Poinsettia, Dr Destroyer, etc. and adventures such as Wings of the Valkyrie.

 

In our current world, is there a good substitute for Ex-patriot Nazis?  

[Stanley Teriaca]

15 minutes ago, Lord Fyre said:

One problem I'm running into with converting older material is that WWII was 80+ years ago.  This becomes an obstacle with characters such as Flare, Sparkplug/Poinsettia, Dr Destroyer, etc. and adventures such as Wings of the Valkyrie.

 

In our current world, is there a good substitute for Ex-patriot Nazis?  

No. But there is a call for descendants of Ex-patriot Nazis and the people who believe in what they believe in.

[Rich McGee]

One that's likely going to cause even more trouble than century-old Nazi villains is  Aaron Allston's "School Holiday" from Space Gamer #51 (readily available in online archives as well as the SJG store).  In 1982 a scenario where a supervillain team and their platoon of SMG-toting mercs take an entire high school hostage was seen as a suitable opportunity for heroics that downplayed the possibility of a massacre by simply ignoring it.  In 2024, with decades of mass shootings in schools behind us in real life, it's incredibly insensitive and the police response and merc escape plans (essentially "drive away in armored vans") are wildly implausible.

 

No idea how you could make this palatable to a modern audience, but perhaps there are elements that could be salvaged and used for something less naive.  If nothing else the school map is pretty handy (I've used in many times over the years, and not just in HERO/Champions) and the villains (while rather crudely constructed by modern standards) could be interesting enough if updated - and it seems a shame to let that Denis Loubet art of them go to waste.

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, Lord Fyre said:

One problem I'm running into with converting older material is that WWII was 80+ years ago.  This becomes an obstacle with characters such as Flare, Sparkplug/Poinsettia, Dr Destroyer, etc. and adventures such as Wings of the Valkyrie.

 

In our current world, is there a good substitute for Ex-patriot Nazis?  

 

Do you mean, in our current real world, or in a supers world? In the latter case you can have various options, and the published Champions Universe highlights several.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

No idea how you could make this palatable to a modern audience, but perhaps there are elements that could be salvaged and used for something less naive.  If nothing else the school map is pretty handy (I've used in many times over the years, and not just in HERO/Champions) and the villains (while rather crudely constructed by modern standards) could be interesting enough if updated - and it seems a shame to let that Denis Loubet art of them go to waste.

 

I will tackle that if I ever get there, but I think it might be possible to approach it with a more therapeutic attitude: this allows people to face the awful situation and trash the bad guys while saving the students.  After all, a lot of the reason comic books exist and we play stuff like Champions is to do what we cannot in real life, to find justice where we see injustice, and to go through scenarios that we hate in life and find a positive solution.

 

Its touchy, because for some people the trauma is so awful that even thinking about the events is painful and traumatic, so there is a real need to be sensitive and thoughtful, but to me this is the point of superheroes: doing what we cannot in this world.  We love superheroes because when we look at the world and wish there was a hero that could solve these problems... they exist in this comics and in this game.  And we get to play them.

[Rich McGee]

17 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I will tackle that if I ever get there, but I think it might be possible to approach it with a more therapeutic attitude: this allows people to face the awful situation and trash the bad guys while saving the students. 

That was certainly the intent of the scenario all along, but the 1982 version largely ignored the possibility of things going majorly wrong and a massacre happening, which felt a little naive even back then.  There might be some advantages to the changed world of 2024 if you modernized things though.

 

It's now much more plausible that the mercs and the less murderous villains (Scanner and Flare, really) will ultimately balk at killing hostages because they've got to realize they probably won't live to see trial if that happens.  The mercs that aren't in sight of a villain are probably considering the mounting police presence (a lot of whom are going to be equipped with paramilitary gear) and wondering if they should just make a break now, or even surrender.  An assault by heroes might trigger either response, reducing the pressure they put on the heroes in the 1982 scenario where the police are less of threat to them.  The police are a much more plausible threat in 2024 than the 1982 versions (which lacked even basic body armor and carried only pistols and shotguns), which will further help the heroes even if they just provide a visible and audible distraction. 

 

Three of the villains are real threats to the hostages if they aren't kept busy once they're alerted.  Denier is "a wanton killer" and killing a whole group to get his revenge plays to his psych disad, Sliver is an enthusiastic killer, and Briareus is both a puppet of Denier and a berserker.  But the other two might just bail out in the face of the heroes, or even intervene to help prevent a mass killing if they think they can't get away and maybe get a lighter sentence than way.

 

I'll agree that the situation could be therapeutically cathartic and an actual slaughter is less likely now than it would have been in 1982, but it's still a very sensitive situation to use in a game.  There are multiple generations of children and parents who've grown up with the reality that kids are not safe in school, and some of them are gamers.  If you do decide to adapt it more or less straight the best I can say is I wish you luck, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort or risk of negative publicity. 

 

Which pains me, because it's not only Aaron Allston's work, it probably had the biggest exposure of any Champions adventure outside of stuff published by HERO/ICE, period.  Space Gamer's circulation was near its peak back then, probably outshone only by Dragon and maybe White Dwarf.  That meant something in an era when gaming magazines were still a major news source for the hobby, rather than having been rendered largely extinct by the internet as it is now.  I've known a lot of Champions players over the years who played School Holiday, and a fair number whose first exposure to Hero Games was through that scenario.

 

But man, short of depicting a terrorist assault of the Twin Towers I can't think of a subject that could age much worse.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Well if its in Space Gamer, its out of my hands anyway: they would have the copyright (SPI, if I remember correctly?).  All the Hero stuff in their magazines except a very few exceptions belongs to Hero Games.  ICE has some of the content on copyright, if they even exist any more.  I loved their worldbuilding etc but they were terrible at creating adventures.  It was just settings and people without any real story.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Working on Death from the Skies, from Adventurer's Club 11.  I had to dig up a ton of info on Mars because the final mission is there (spoilers!).  What is the average daytime temperature?  How far can you jump on Mars (about 2.5 times as far)?  What's the atmosphere made up of (mostly C02)?  How far away is Mars and how long does it take to get there at lightspeed (16 minutes).  How fast do you fall on Mars?  Research is always fun to do when writing, it leads you to new ideas.

 

I did write something I am not 100% certain of but I believe is accurate.  The atmosphere is very thin on Mars, which results in much less air pressure to affect fallers, I believe that means that your terminal velocity will be higher, since there's less wind resistance.  But I'm not absolutely sure about that.  I know that the lesser gravity will mean that you accelerate more slowly, and thus can fall longer distances more safely.

[Christopher R Taylor]

OK this is kind of cool.  In the intro for The Raid on Fort Knox, they mention a "drone tank" used in war games with the superheroes, which is outrageously high tech for the 1980s when it was written, just out of sci fi.

 

Except... the army actually has one now:

 

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/news/tank-3.html

 

Mind you it won't want to unleash that Bushmaster chain gun on superheroes, but there's an optional MCCM non-lethal pack it can carry that would work great in a mock battle with superheroes.

Edited Tuesday at 12:33 AM by Christopher R Taylor

[Lord Liaden]

I'm disappointed that after waiting six decades, we finally have flying cars, but I still can't buy one.

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

There is a real embarrassment of riches here in terms of adventures.  I've gone through all the magazines, and Champions Presents/Challenges for Champions, and now I'm digging through all 4th edition and older supplements and books for adventures, and depending on the legal status of Haymaker articles, there's more than 60 to convert to this project!  If I bust these down to 12-adventure books as planned, that's 5 whole books plus the individual adventures.  Any GM that wants ideas for their Champions campaign will have years of content.  I might even throw a few of my own old adventures run in campaigns in the past.

[Sketchpad]

4 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I might even throw a few of my own old adventures run in campaigns in the past.

 

But they wouldn't really fit with the Champions Complete asthetic, would they?

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

But they wouldn't really fit with the Champions Complete asthetic, would they?

 

Yeah true, they would not be true Classic adventures lost in time, you're right

Edited Tuesday at 12:43 AM by Christopher R Taylor

[Christopher R Taylor]

Update: The Haymaker content is owned by the writers, and I have no contact with most of them, so I am going to put those aside and not rebiuld them.  A shame, there's 17 and some real gems in them.  I might work with Bob Greenwade if I can get hold of him, to do the Invasion of the Gweenies adventure.  I'd rig it so he got all the profits, I just want it available.

[Christopher R Taylor]

OK here's a quick mockup of the cover to one of the adventures, Battlezone.  In theory that's the basic template for how they'll all look, probably with some tweaking

 

https://postimg.cc/qtx5WDyv

[Stanley Teriaca]

It looks nice.

[HeroGM]

Ben Dunn always looks nice

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah I am really enjoying getting to know who these artists are better.  He always delivers.  Where I can, I mean to use the covers to the magazines that had the adventure, several of them are for the adventure.  Its a bit of work in GIMP to eliminate the text but not as bad as I feared.

[Sketchpad]

A few suggestions and questions...

 

Qs: Do you have the rights to use the cover? Is it part of the Hero image stuff for Hall of Champions? 

 

Ss: The upper left hand corner bugs my eye. I realize that it's supposed to emulate a comic cover, but it's too much block. Maybe list the contributors at the bottom in a nice bold font? Have the Hero logo at the top and the KA one under it? Instead of using a drop shadow on Battlezone, maybe make bold container lines with a color logo inside? I would also avoid using the comic lettering font at the top and use something bolder... maybe Impact?

[Stanley Teriaca]

If you really want to emulate a comic book, it needs an issue number. It doesn't have to be #1 or anything like that, a random number would be nice.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah the image cropped off the top, I'd fix it but that's just a mock up anyway.

 

As I understand it, Hero Games already owns all the content in Adventurer's Club including the art, so I can reuse it for Hero products.  I'll monkey around with the info block a bit and see if I can make it more interesting.