Our Campaign's 25th Anniversary

Tech · November 17, 2006

I don't know why it didn't occur to me when the 25th Anniversary Special Editions of Champions popped up and was talked about. Pesky real life - heh. However, I am glad to be able to say that my group's campaign has reached it's 25th anniversary and is still going strong. Wow, it's hard to believe that!

The original and first hero group has changed eight times now. Groups have come and gone, and some of those heroes from those lost hero groups have joined other groups. Heroes have come and gone. Villains have come and gone and in some cases come back again. There was originally just me, my twin brother and a friend GM'ing each other in solo and dual hero games until we dared to show Champions to our other friends and older brother, and as the saying goes, 'They were never the same'. Since then, our friends have have four children and three of them have joined our campaign - don't worry, the youngest is already interested in making up a hero once she's old enough and has even created some heroes by using heromachine2.

We've all learned the do's and don'ts of GM'ing, what makes a good game fun and a terrible game lousy. We've done our fair sure of games we wish we'd done better.. and continue to run into that here and there. We also earned that long-lasting friendship to enables us to go along with the GM when we hear 'You're surrounded and taken captive' or something like that because it moves the story along into something really interesting that the players will be talking about for days or weeks later.

Over the course of one or two years, we run an episode or two of possibly campaign-altering results should the heroes fail. This year alone, we did three! We often run episodes where events in heroes personal lives are affected by what's going on as heroes or vice-versa.

What is likely our most favorite type of Champions episode? Episodes where heroes face heroes in a fight or heroes from different teams fight side by side. These are the ones where you get to see the different team styles in action. Incredible fun!

We've also had those new players who tried Champions once and twice, then never came back and we were glad for some of those. Therefore, we welcome you to our 'Hero Flops of the Worst Kind!'

- Our first infamous Amoeba Man hero is a joke now - O thank you that the power Duplication didn't exist at the time of Amoeba Man's creation! How'd he make his first showing up? He was a taxicab driver with a passenger in the back. He sees a bank robbery through a huge glass window and what's he do? He drives the cab through the bank window, changes/splurps into a man-sized amoeba and levitates/splurp-floats at the villains hitting a villain with an Ego attack. Ummmmmm.....

- Oh, let's not forget Photogen - the original concept was that the guy had every single Enhanced Sense there was dealing with sight: he'd take a picture from his eyes and pull the picture from his stomach. :eek: That never took but my older brother managed to change the concept into something palatable.

- Mr. Pain. Yes, a hero (if you can call him one) with a 50 Strength. He loved to do haymakers on everyone. I recently dug him up, recreated him and made him a villain. 'Mr. Pain found he enjoyed inflicting pain so much he became a villain. Yeah, that works.'

- Moriah (made by the same guy who made Mr. Pain). He used wind-powers and thought himself to be a Sheik prince (but wasn't). He kept telling every heroine he met to join his harem (which he didn't have). He thought he was the best looking guy around (which he wasn't). And every.. single.. time he attacked, the player would sing out in a terrible singing voice 'They call the wind Moriah!' So many times heroes and villains would tell him to shut up! He fortunately only lasted 3 or 4 games.

We have, of course, heroes which become our favorites and those favorites can change from time to time. Some of our favorites heroes, which were in a team were retired. We as players thought 'Let's retired them. We don't have anywhere else to go with these characters. I have 100 experience I haven't used yet.' Less than one year later, the team in it's entirety came out of retirement and reclaimed their place in our campaign history.

One of our groups, The Protectors, was composed of.. shall we say unusual characters. It wasn't planned that way but that's the way they turned out - all of them. They killed so many villains and monsters. For example, we killed off Mumm-ra from The Thundercats series. We got rid of Lord Dread from 'Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future' series. They ran up against the weirdos and monsters that we wouldn't throw at any other group and made the world safe by making sure no one would ever run into them again. The group was permanently retired when everyone either got cured, went home, got married or whatever.

So many old memories to talk stories about and many more new stories are being added. I could go on and on but I won't.. unless you start asking questions or want to hear more. On Friday tomorrow, we have another game. Still, this campaign would not have come around unless HeroGames had published the very first Champions book, which I pulled out an hour ago to look at again.

stmichaeldet · November 19, 2006