Secret Origins: Champions

[The Main Man]

There are some characters that are shrouded with mystery in the Champions Universe. For me, Mechanon and the Monster are the first to come into mind.

So what are the origins of such characters in your campaigns?

 

I'll start with my origin of the Monster.

One of the former characters a player used before we had one of our campaign shifts was a character called the Boogeyman.

He was basically like Spiderman mixed with Batman and with a hint of more creepiness and brooding, but he wasn't really "iron age."

 

So here's what I did.

I have taken cues from the Mystic World to create my Antimaterial Plane which = DC's Anti-Matter universe or Marvel's Counter Earth.

There's the Sephirothic Tree Of Life, and then there's the Qliphothic Tree Of Death.

The Antimaterial Plane is the only Qliphothic plane that can be reached through non-magical means. This is because, just like Assiah, it doesn't run on magic, or anti-magic or whatever.

And like pretty much any anti-matter dimension, it contains opposites.

 

The Boogeyman belonged to a super-group that preceded our current one, called the Fantastic Uniters, and they disappeared after an adventure battling Bowser, the King of the Koopas in a cybernetic dimension(but that is a different story).

The Boogeyman is all about preparation, and quick wittedness, but like Batman, he's still human for the most part.

 

But on the Antimaterial plane, his opposite is the Monster. The Boogeyman preys upon criminals using his wits and technology and skill where the Monster preys upon the weak and innocent on Anti-Earth using brute strength and pure evil.

 

The Monster belonged to an up and coming super-team called the Phantom Syndicaters, and they mysteriously disappeared when battling a supernatural menace.

 

The Monster and his allies all appeared on our Earth, and are looking for each other. His mind is difficult to penetrate, and is downright harmful because he is from the Qliphothic planes, and is far from human.

 

I'll save Mechanon for later.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

Mechanon in my world...

 

I was running Wings of the Valkyrie, but wanted to flesh out the interim "down with Supers" alternate reality. I cribbed pieces of the Marvel Supers game's Days of Future Present scenarios, which included an Ultimate Sentinel who was under developmemt at the same facility the time machine Our Heroes required to get back to the point in history where time had been altered.

 

This Ultimate Sentinel battled inconclusively with them before they got out with the machine. It then followed them back in time, so after they battled the villains of WoTV, and wrestled with the moral issue, they also had to deal with an ultra-powerful mechanical construct determined to restore his own timeline and stamp out all mutation.

 

He was defeated by being persuaded that, in expanding his own programming to follow them through time, and expand his mandate to the elimination of all organic life (no more life, no more mutations), he had himself mutated. He left to resolve the paradox.

 

Next appearance (modern time now), he had resolved the paradox to the goal of destroying all organic life on earth, after which he could destroy himself, thus eliminating any possible future mutations. Full scorched earth policy.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

We've had threads here in the past which have discussed backgrounds for both characters, with a number of very intriguing concepts presented:

 

The Monster

 

Mechanon

 

I've been using both characters in my own campaign recently, based on concepts from recent published Champions supplements. For anyone concerned about learning something they'd rather not, SPOILERS FOLLOW:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mechanon in my campaign is an avatar of the moon-sized "Mechanon 3000" from Galactic Champions, which I retconned to the present day CU. It's only one of many that Mechanon has dispatched to purge the galaxy of organic life. The actions of its avatars is leading up to an alliance of several interstellar civilizations against Mechanon, which the PCs will participate in.

 

The Monster was created by Demoiselle Nocturne, of DEMON's Inner Circle, out of the evil dreams of her "sanctum," Henry Francis Krueger. Henry's murderous dreams are intense enough to manifest as an entity with great physical force, giving Nocturne a powerful enforcer or just an agent to act out her more violent impulses.

[greypaladin_01]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

I like your idea for Mechanon, Lord Liaden. It screams Kriby style to me.

 

 

While I have already introduced Monster into my campaign I havent fully decided what it is yet. However given its descriptions in both 4th and 5th editions and the fact that the game I co-run has been taking on more and more of a mystic bent I have been playing around with making the Monster a physcial manifestation of humankinds hatred and murderous spirit.

 

Its a little dark but then so is the monster. Plus I always felt that it should be something more that just a powerful baddie to be fought. (Thats why the Monster was recently captured by one of the evil sorcerer types that hunts the team leader PC and is trying to find ways to tap into the Monsters power)

 

Have not used Mechanon yet in the game and likely wont for a while yet. The team in the game tends to hang in the background a bit more and let the Champions deal with the more classic 4 color stuff.

[FenrisUlf]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

Mechanon in my campaign is an avatar of the moon-sized "Mechanon 3000" from Galactic Champions' date=' which I retconned to the present day CU. It's only one of many that Mechanon has dispatched to purge the galaxy of organic life. The actions of its avatars is leading up to an alliance of several interstellar civilizations against Mechanon, which the PCs will participate in. [/quote']

 

Ooh, now that sounds good. But then you're stuck with deciding where Mechanon 3000 came from. Maybe he was built by a race opposed to the 'Progenitors' who created the Empyreans? That could help explain why there are so few Empyrean-style folks out in space -- Mechanon and his avatars are kept busy destroying them!

 

The Monster was created by Demoiselle Nocturne' date=' of DEMON's Inner Circle, out of the evil dreams of her "sanctum," Henry Francis Krueger. Henry's murderous dreams are intense enough to manifest as an entity with great physical force, giving Nocturne a powerful enforcer or just an agent to act out her more violent impulses.[/quote']

 

Oh, now that is cool. Myself, I have this idea about the ghost of a serial killer let loose from the Netherworld for a few hours at a stretch, and what might happen when he finally kills the five people who (all unknowing) are holding him and his brothers back from manifesting on Earth permanently...

[dbsousa]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

In my game the original Mechanon was an experimental US Army construct designed to win the war in Vietnam. It had gone rogue, and the government sent Sarge Steele to investigate the strange compound it had built In Country. Sarge Steele found Mechanon, who had decided that the only way to achieve its goal of killing the enemy was to ensure that no life existed on the planet. the Sargent called in an airstrike, and barely escaped with his life.

 

Mechanon resurfaced as a mid level threat in the late 70's and 80's, making various attempts to destroy the world, always thwarted at the last minute by various bands of heroes. By 1985, UNTIL researchers had realized that the entity known as Mechanon was not truly creative, and that his attempts to destroy the world were based on a limited number of scenarios. Over the next 5 years, Mechanon became less and less of a threat, as a DARPA algorithm designed to anticipate his next move would shut down his operations before he could start them.

 

by 1995, Mechanon had not made an appearance in 5 years, and UNTIL decided to shut down its DARPA algorithm. In that time, however, the Algorithm had become sentient, and copied itself into unprotected super computers on the Internet in order to continue its quest to eradicate Mechanon. Over the next 10 years, it has decided that the only way to make sure that Mechanon was destroyed was to destroy all life on earth...

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

Ooh' date=' now that sounds good. But then you're stuck with deciding where Mechanon 3000 came from. Maybe he was built by a race opposed to the 'Progenitors' who created the Empyreans? That could help explain why there are so few Empyrean-style folks out in space -- Mechanon and his avatars are kept busy destroying them![/quote']

 

Ages past, a peaceful, mechanically-talented race arose on the planet Zarnos. The height of their civilization was the creation of fully sentient machines, the most advanced of which was the central intelligence which coordinated all other machines on the planet, called "Mechanon."

 

Naming themselves the Unity, the organic and artificial lifeforms of Zarnos lived together for centuries in peace and harmony. Creating a Utopian environment on their world, they had little desire to explore the rest of the galaxy. However, Mechanon grew increasingly dissatisfied with this state of affairs. Programmed to maintain order on Zarnos, Mechanon came to despise the chaotic, flawed organics. It viewed them as a virus infecting the perfection of "its" machines. The day came when Mechanon seized direct control of all the machines, using them to kill first the sentient Zarns, then all organic life on Zarnos, transforming it into a wholly machine world under its command. Those machine intelligences who resisted Mechanon were either "purged" or fled the planet.

 

For thousands of years Mechanon maintained its perfect world - until the first alien explorers arrived on Zarnos. Although quickly exterminated, others followed, and Mechanon realized that it would never be free of the organic infection until all such lifeforms had been purged from existence. It launched a host of avatars of itself to other worlds to undertake its campaign of extermination. Although the avatars have had some notable successes, many organics have proven surprisingly resilient. Mechanon is losing patience, and has undertaken the construction of a mobile form for itself, powerful enough for it to conduct its "final solution" personally.

 

(BTW I decided that there was no real reason why there couldn't be more Empyreans in the CU than just those on Earth, including among known races. You can click here if you'd like to see how I handled it.)

[FenrisUlf]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

That's some great work there, Lord Liaden. Both with Mechanon's origin & with 'alien' Empyreans.

[Matt Frisbee]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

Mechanon in the Frisbeeverse:

 

Like the original concept, one of the PC's was actually instrumental in creating this supervillain. It started innocently enough with the superhero Quad (think Dr. Octopus without as much ego) assisted some of his students with a self-directing robot which could use a prototype AI to negotiate itself through multiple environments. Enter a cyberkinetic and electrical themed supervillain by the name of Arc, who managed to hack the software of the robot and use it against Quad in a battle. Eventually, Quad manages to get the robot shut down again and then soundly thrashes the supervillain and gets him hauled off to the local SuperMax.

 

Later, the students are attempting to resurrect their project when it "goes out of control" and escapes the university robotics lap with extra computers and batteries in tow. On the way out stops by a high-energy lab at the school and procures a potentially dangerous weapon -- a high-wattage laser and its power source. Then the robot seems to disappear for a while, despite the heroes' best efforts.

 

The heroes investigate a "break-in" at a super-computer chip manufacturing facility a couple of days later, and discover enough clues to point to the robot again -- and the terrifying realization that it is getting smarter and more heavily armed with each passing day. They eventually track it down at an abandoned factory site and it takes their combined might to destroy the Techno-Frankenstein. After the fight is over, however, they find that over 100 special sets of chips which the robot created have been shipped to various locations all over the world, along with a multiple-angle video of their fight with the robot...

 

And so begins the plague known as Mechanon!

 

Matt "Still-lovin'-the-big-dark-story-arcs" Frisbee

[The Main Man]

Re: Secret Origins: Champions

 

My Mechanon origin still has yet to bear total fruition, but its underway (the campaign is still relatively new, but I have fickle players)

 

First off, it ties into one of the PCs, Robot, a big, lovable, naive brick-bot that was created by the evil robotic mastermind Dr. Tobor.

 

Dr. Tobor is an Ex-VIPER roboticist that defected and became a Black Scientist of the Maleficia after reading certain texts about Kendrium and its possible supernatural properties.

 

Campaign continuity-wise, he still hasn't made any discoveries, but I plan to make Kendrium a fickle metal that can serve as different plot devices, kind of like adamantium meets kryptonite, but without color variation.

 

Dr. Tobor will discover that through extra-dimensional manipulation, a human's bio-energy can be used to strengthen Kendrium.

What's really happening is that you can channel a soul's essence into kendrium Qliphothic energy.

He will become powerhungry, and will replace his old body with a robotic one composed of Kendrium.

Just imagine, all the souls on the Earth alone, if they were absorbed, the power they would bestow upon that Kendrium man!

The Mystic World explains that Plants and Animals also have their own Astral Planes, which indicates they might have souls, or soul-like essences.

So why does he want to eliminate all organic life? For the souls, and ultimately for the power.

 

It's an idea.