New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

[Comic]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Woot!

 

I like to have a build early on, as a stepping stone.. and because I tend to need a lot of revision before I get to where I'm going.

 

My first question is always, "How does the character fit the story?" Which needs no build at all.

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Woot!

 

 

My first question is always, "How does the character fit the story?" Which needs no build at all.

 

 

Ah, mine is "how does the story fit the character?"

[Sweeper]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Ah' date=' mine is "how does the story fit the character?" [/quote']

 

Well, being the GM, that's a given.

[Psybolt]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

I have a character build, but if you want me to, I'll hold on to NightStrike until after the 10th.

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

I have a character build' date=' but if you want me to, I'll hold on to NightStrike until after the 10th.[/quote']

 

You can post him if you like, but remember you will probably have to redo him once the guidelines are posted.

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

One more day guys. So any of you guys that mentioned that you might apply or have ideas please post or PM me and let me know before the end of tomorrow night.

 

After I get all of the concepts in I'll work out what group will make the best team/give me the best story ideas and then we will move on to the character creation process.

[Querysphinx]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

One more day guys. So any of you guys that mentioned that you might apply or have ideas please post or PM me and let me know before the end of tomorrow night.

 

After I get all of the concepts in I'll work out what group will make the best team/give me the best story ideas and then we will move on to the character creation process.

 

So, do you mind if I post a second idea in case my first does not make the team?

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Go for it.

[Querysphinx]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Olivia Lefevre:

 

 

Olivia is the only child of Charles Lefevre, one of the richest men in all of France, his ancestors had ridden the rising tide on industrialism, becoming wealthy in the shipbuilding and rail roads and speculation in oil. Then Charles married Greta Bismark, a paternal niece of Chancelor Bismark. The match was both financially gainful and romantically satisfying. The couple were very much in love, and perhaps this blinded them to the approaching storm of nationalism. Charles invested heavily in emerging German industries. Olivia was born.

 

And then all hell broke loose. The black hand assassinated Archduke Ferdinand. Alliances were activated. War was declared. The Lefevre properties in Germany were confiscated by the Kaiser’s government and much suspicion was cast upon the Lefevre name. Ashamed and humiliated, Charles joined up with the French army to redeem his family’s good name. When the French marched off to battle with their horribly under-equipped army, depending on élan to overcome machine guns, Charles went with them as the officer in charge of an artillery company.

 

Gretta fretted, but not too much. Nobody anywhere thought the war would last more than eight weeks. After all no European war in the last hundred years had lasted three months…

 

Weeks turned to months, and then to years. Olivia grew up within earshot of the guns and within sight of the long trails of wounded being shuttled away from the front. The shadows of zeppelins and biplanes frequently darkened the fields where she played.

 

By the time she was three, Olivia showed the traits of the prodigy she would someday become. She began speaking in complete sentences and experimenting with numbers. By the time she was five she was reading the paper and filling in the bits that the government had censored out. She also showed a very unladylike interest in mechanical things, taking apart a broken clock and putting it back together so that it worked.

 

Her mother, no intellectual giant, could not keep up with the rate at which Olivia was learning, so she concentrated instead on teaching her daughter to be curious and kind. She was delighted when Olivia took an interest in horses, and amazed when she sculpted a perfect likeness of one from potters clay. She hired tutors and teachers in every subject from algebra to zoology. Olivia devoured every subject as if she was starved for information.

 

And then came the terrible news. Charles had been killed, blown up in artillery duel. The letter said he died bravely, fighting against superior guns that outnumbered his many times over. The letter did not mention that a vindictive and spiteful superior General Montegue had left him unsupported on a flank.

 

Gretta and Olivia were crushed. Although she had only known her father from his infrequent trips home from the front, she deeply respected both his intelligence and his character.

 

Then the other shoe dropped.

 

A second cousin, Laramie Chevalier, showed up at the reading of the will and laid claim to all of Lefevre’s land and money on the pretext that the will designated the his heir to be “His firstborn son or otherwise his closest living relative.”

 

Gretta protested that she was Charles’s wife and therefore his closest living relative, but anti-German sentiment was running hot and the court found in Laramie’s favor. Gretta and Olivia were ejected from the estate. To add further insult to injury Gretta was stripped of her French citizenship and forced to seek asylum elsewhere. She could not go back to Germany so she fled to the one place she thought would surely take her, the U.S.A..

 

Unfortunately, the U.S.A. had little pity for disposed German heiresses. Gretta ended up working in a sweatshop eighteen hours a day trying to make ends meet. Unused to such toil, she was soon reduced to a shadow of her former self.

 

Olivia, meanwhile, found herself working as a sweeper in a cotton mill, the most tedious, exhausting dangerous work, but her fantastic mind would not be stilled. She quickly figured out the mechanisms of the machine, but when she offered up suggestions on how it might be improved, she received a slap across the face for her efforts. Little Girls were supposed to work, not talk.

 

When a fire burned down the sweat shop in which her mother worked killing a dozen workers who were chained inside, Olivia’s life seemed destined for a final plunge into Oblivion, but when her tears had cleared, and the burly thugs who called themselves repossessers had finished stripping her meager apartment of everything of even minor value, she found her sticking point. She was not going to starve, and she was not going to suffer and she was not going to be grist in the wheels of industry.

 

She walked away from her job at the mill and set about building herself a life. She found an out of luck thespian named Joseph and convinced him to be her front man. With Joseph’s help she sold plans for an improved mill to the mill owner for enough money to set herself and Joseph up with an apartment and a company name.

 

For ten years they worked, amassing a sizable fortune and a hundred patents all in “Dr. Joseph’s” name. Olivia wanted to complete her education, but no university of any scientific merit would accept a young woman as a candidate. Infuriated, she changed her name to Oliver and dressed as a young man. When she did, the Deans were so impressed with her intellect that they granted her a scholarship. She completed the coursework in record time, but she could not outrun the curiosity of her fellow students. One of them, Fredrick Lohman, discovered her cross-dressing and tried to blackmail her into helping him with his exams. When she refused, he became enraged and literally shoved her in front of a bus. With a crunch and squish, she lost her right arm.

 

While she was recuperating, she was ejected from the school for bringing it into disrepute.

 

Infuriated and disgusted, Olivia took some of her carefully horded wealth and set up her own laboratory and began inventing with a furious passion. It was during this period that she developed her two most significant inventions: Electroline, a super efficient battery gel, and analogic engines, analog learning machines with both clockwork and chemical components. Using these technologies (the secrets of which she carefully hordes) she constructed for herself a fully functional prosthetic arm.

 

It was about this time that she met Macon Dean, a wealthy businessman of a philanthropic disposition. He was trying to renovate some slums to make them more livable, but a business rival wanted the property for himself and sent an assassin named the Vulture to eliminate Macon. Olivia, attending one of Macon’s party in her capacity as Dr. Joseph’s lab assistant, prevented the assassination.

 

She has since made it her mission to hunt down the Vulture and his boss. To this end she has built herself a variety of useful gadgets, the most sophisticated of which she calls autonomous mannequins.

 

Also, the local police have taken to call in the brilliant Dr. Joseph as a consulting detective on some of their more baffling cases.

 

+++

 

Inspirations: Remington Steel. Sherlock Holmes. WWI

 

+++

 

For what it’s worth I still prefer Sihn’ba.

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Ok, there a few more characters to floating in (those of you that PM'd me please send in the finalized/flushed out concepts as soon as you can).

 

I'm going to start going over them and will probably have something worked out by the end of the weekend. At that time I'll let everyone know which characters have been picked and then we can start building them.

 

Thanks

[psychoticbarber]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Floop [unpronounceable], a Plutonian Mechanic and Marksman.

[Sweeper]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Floop [unpronounceable]' date='[/url'] a Plutonian Mechanic and Marksman.

 

So, a 'Mars needs Women' kind of scenario, nice. Though you might want to double-check the Area 51 angle. Don't think it existed as such in the 20s and 30s.

[Querysphinx]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

So' date=' a 'Mars needs Women' kind of scenario, nice. Though you might want to double-check the Area 51 angle. Don't think it existed as such in the 20s and 30s. [/quote']

 

That's what THEY want you to think. It's all part of the conspiracy.

[Sweeper]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

That's what THEY want you to think. It's all part of the conspiracy.

 

I was wondering who'd be the first S.A. to say that...

[psychoticbarber]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Though you might want to double-check the Area 51 angle. Don't think it existed as such in the 20s and 30s.

 

Such a fact is entirely and totally up to the GM in question .

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Sorry for the delay guys,

 

Things suddenly got crazy here at work on Friday, and when we got back yesterday nothing had changed. So it is going to be a busy week at work for me while we try and get everything back on track.

 

So... I am going to keep submissions open for another week, just because I doubt I'll have a chance to work on the game until next weekend anyways, so I might as well give any late comers a chance to submit (or if anyone wants to submit a second idea (or more)).

 

Again, sorry for the delay, but hopefully by next weekend everything will be back on track.

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

PS... I doubt Area 51 will be around in my game, but there is a damn good chance that Area 49 might be. Now what horrible or catastrophic event happened to Area 49 and why the government had to build a new Area 50 (and years later Area 51) to replace it... well that might make for a good adventure.

[Comic]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

See, it's Area 42 that's the interesting one.

[Querysphinx]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Because I just cant resist throwing out new ideas.

 

Skunk

 

 

 

Victorie Mephitis was very calm child. She never cried as a baby or threw a tantrum as a two year old. She did not shriek at the sight of spiders or jump back from snakes. Neither did she squeal with delight at the affections of a puppy or an unexpected birthday surprise. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, she just couldn’t seem to get worked up about any of these terrors and delights. For her life was listless.

 

Nor was Victorie a vigorous child, by the time she was twelve she looked to be ten years old and her development seemed to be slowing down.

 

Victorie’s poor mother, Marianne, always said the Victorie was so emotionally and physically stunted because her father, Piotr, was a selfish bastard who had kept all his passion for himself.

 

Not that Piotr was a bad man, he loved his wife and his daughter, but he was also a Grade-A, World-Class, Limited Edition, Mad Scientist. When he wasn’t terrorizing graduate students and faculty at the local university, he was down in his basement lab (five stories deep and still growing) conducting experiments that endangered all life on Earth at least once a week, usually on Thursday. Occasionally he would rise from the depths like a vampire from his crypt to play with his daughter and remind his wife why she had married him in the first place. *ahem—edit for PG audience—ahem*. Rarely did he seem to notice the passage of time between these visits.

 

It was not until the day that Victorie had wandered down into his lab (he’d left it unlocked…again) and nearly been killed by an exploding trans-electric-matrix-inducer of dubious parentage that Piotr noticed his daughter’s oddity. (Anyone who spends that much time staring into the blinding light of inspiration is bound to have a few retinal burns) For a mad scientist, quick reflexes are almost as important as a quick mind—You just never know when the powdered cesium is going to impact the water vapor—but Victorie seemed to have no fight or flight reflex. Something was wrong with her adrenal glands, or perhaps her hypothalamus.

 

“Well we can’t have that!” he exclaimed, and before you could say, “Transdimensional phase-induced macrovalence” five times really fast, he had her strapped face down to an operating table.

 

Victorie didn’t panic. She couldn’t. That was the whole problem.

 

Piotr was a brilliant man, but not terribly patient. He didn’t waste time pondering the best solution to the problem, when he could be busy implementing the first solution that came to hand.

 

Ah yes, there was the atrophied hypothalamus. Add a little stimulator to help it function. That should fix the problem, but anything worth doing is worth overdoing. There were her adrenal glands, and he had some adrenal tissu handy. It was from a skunk. Well, skunks are pretty fierce, right? They’re related to badgers after all. Lets just dip those in a normalizing solution and graft them on. And what about those other glands…

 

When Victorie woke up, she felt funny, tingly in the body and in the brain. She was still strapped to the table.

 

Panic slapped her in the face. Panic is a horrible emotion. Being hit with a tsunami of adrenalin for the very first time in your life at age almost-thirteen is ever worse. She snapped the leather restraints like they were made of tissue and bolted into a corner.

What’s happening to me? What are all these… things I’m feeling?

 

She heard footstep coming. A shadow descended the stairs. It was deep and dark and terrifying. She screamed and bolted, scrambling into an air vent and scrambling racing up several stories until she burst up through the first floor chimney.

 

The scent of the place hit her like nothing ever had before. It smelled like baking bread and bleach and just a hint of ozone. It smelled like home. Her frayed nerved calmed. She burst into the kitchen, wrapped her mother in a sooty embrace, and began to weep.

 

Ever since that day, Victorie has had emotions. Lots of them, strong ones. She’s in control of them, most of the time, except when she’s not… like that night Bobby Gordon wouldn’t leave Suzy Tallfellow alone and she’d punched his nose so hard it broke and his ribs and his jaw. Only the fact that nobody thought a girl could possibly hit that hard kept her out of trouble, but she couldn’t just stand by and watch.

 

He underdeveloped body kicked into high gear. She didn’t so much achieve puberty as exceed it, blossoming into a remarkable young woman who turned so many heads that she became a leading cause of whiplash in her high-school.

 

She’s learned to control her adrenaline surge…mostly There’s a muscle near the base of her skull and if she flexes it. Well it feels like being hit with liquid lightning. She gets strong, she gets fast, and she also gets really, really mean, as in pissed off, as in give me one good reason I shouldn’t rip out your spleen, monkey boy? Then of course there’s the problem with her body odor. A citrus bath once a day just about kills it, almost, unless she get angry and sets off her adrenaline. Then it’s “who ran over a skunk?” time.

 

“What? No, that’s not me. Check your shoes.”

 

Her father has cooked up an antidote that kills the smell instantly, but it also numbs her brain and kills her emotions for about an hour, an experience she loathe to repeat.

 

As she approached adulthood Victorie has come in closer and closer contact with the seamier side of the world and she doesn’t like it. She loathes bullies and the world is full of them, people who think they are entitled to take what they want from good honest folk just because they’re bigger and stronger.

 

Once she happened on a gang of thugs beating up an old man in an alley. He was late on his payments and he was going to pay with his kneecaps. Victorie’s rage boiled up and she went through the thugs like a hammer through a ripe melon. She left four battered and very smelly thugs tied to the lamp post for the police to find.

 

The next day the newspaper headlines read “SKUNKED!”

 

Unfortunately the thugs were released from jail the next day. “No evidence on which to detain them,” said the crooked judge.

 

She realized that the thugs would come looking for the person that attacked them, and that the city’s corruption ran very deep. Victorie had two choices. Fight or flight. That night she donned a black mask and a black wig with white stripes and stepped into the darkness. Skunks are hunters after all, and they’re not above eating a few cockroaches.

 

Powers:

 

Super Adrenaline: It's a big rush, but it makes her really cranky.

 

Enhanced Senses: Keen smell and hearing

 

Stink Bombs:

 

Recently Piotr has found a way to bleed off Victorie's scent glands to help keep the stink down.

 

“And why do I have scent glands, daddy?” she asked in exasperation.

 

He shrugged helplessly. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

 

Mixed in with the right sort of aerosol dispersant, her personal musk makes an extremely potent anti-personnel “Stink-Bombs” which can leave a man gasping and puking his guts out.

[Psybolt]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

I think I am gonna pull out of consideration with NightStrike. I am running a second campaign at Hero Central and probably won't have as much time to contribute effectively. Thanks for considering NightStrike.

[mallet]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

Sorry to hear that Psybolt. Good luck with the other games you are running.

 

For everyone else I hope to get time this weekend to finalize things and get a team selected.

[Sweeper]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

So, any projected date on when the game will start? Hank's itching to fly.

[jtelson]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

And Lord Seymour is ready, if called, to serve.

[Querysphinx]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

And Lord Seymour is ready' date=' if called, to serve. [/quote']

 

Likewise Olivia or Victorie

[Querysphinx]

Re: New Pulp Hero Game on Hero Central

 

CASSIOPEIA FALCO

 

Stop me before I post again!

 

Cassiopeia Falco, Cass for short, though her mother would never call her that, or let anyone else do so within ear shot, was out in the back woods by the crick with a mason jar collecting bugs for her science fair exhibit. Girls weren’t expected to enter the science fair. They were supposed to enter the baking contest, or the sewing contest. Girls entering the science competition were frowned-upon, which was below tolerated but above not-talked-about on the social scale of Mixon, South Carolina.

 

But Cass had read the rules and they didn’t quite come out and say ‘no girls allowed’ –that would be crass, Mama said—and Cass figured she’d been living in frowned-upon territory so long that she might as well homestead there. Let them frown all they want, just so long as she made them admit that she knew more about bugs that Horace Bigsby.

 

She was just selecting a fire beetle from the grasses when a strange white light hit her from above and her whole body went tingly. And then everything went dark.

 

+++

 

Cass felt a heavy muddy pressure on her eyelids, but she opened them anyway. It took a lot of effort to do so. Likewise it took some effort to focus her vision. Green light filtered slowly into her eyes, moving more slowly than light usually did, but it eventually resolved itself into a thick green liquid. She was floating beneath the surface of an emerald sea. Wouldn’t she drown?

 

Apparently not. In fact, she didn’t feel the need to breathe. She didn’t feel anything at all below her neck. What’s happening to me? Fear rose, but sluggishly as if it too were mired in muck. Why am I so tired? Even her thoughts seemed to come lethargically, like a clock… slowly… winding… down.

 

About the only thing growing in intensity was the a strange buzzing gurgle in her brain.

 

The slow undulating motion of the gravy like liquid slowly rolled her head over and she saw other shapes floating in the mix. Familiar shapes. Oh my Lord, is that my arm? She recognized her own right limb, complete with freckles and a scar from falling out of the tree. And there was her leg and… Is that my heart? It wasn’t beating. Her mouth worked in silent horror as she saw the sum of herself scattered about in the solution. She’d been disassembled. Taken apart like a watch.

 

The gurgling buzzing noise began to resolve itself into something comprehensible. Not words, precisely, but concepts. >Life sciences exam #$%^ Not &^$#^& to harm the subject!<

 

>Patience #$@%!*$ dissociation tank &^$#^ safe. *^$%^ test it’s @$#%^& functions.<

 

Cass was appalled. They—whatever they were—were treating her like… like a bug in a science experiment. No no no!

 

>Able ^%#$@! reassemble?<

 

> Affirmative &^$#% locate the species baseline?<

 

The voices were becoming clearer and more distinct.

 

>Here they are. The M coefficient is .05<

 

>That low? Are you sure?<

 

>That’s what the manual says.<

 

>That’s got to be too low. It could never survive with such a weak metabolism.”

 

Cass would have held her breath if she’d still been attached to her lungs in anything but a metaphorical sense. There were trying to put her back together, but it sounded like they’d never done it before. Help, help, I’m being reconstructed by amateurs!

 

>We’ll boost it up to .06.<

 

>Will it be able to handle the strain?<

 

>Yeah, we’ll just nudge the tensile flexibility a little?<

 

>And I suppose we could put in some symbiosis prot-organs in case we left anything out. It can grow what it needs own.<

 

>You’d think the exam board would automate the re-assembler.<

 

>Then it wouldn’t be science would it.<

 

There was a flash of green light.

 

+++

 

No one at all believed Cass’s story about being kidnapped by a beam of light and minced up into small pieces. Instead they chastised her for running away. And where had she been for these last three day.

 

“I told you there was this flash of light!”

 

“Young lady, you will never speak that lie anywhere ever again.”

 

After that Cass’s social status in Mixon South Carolina was somewhere between not-talked-about and not-admitted-to.

 

+++

 

Cass’s breath came in ragged heaves as she pounded up the mountain road with a burlap scarecrow slung over one shoulder, the howl of an overtaxed engine in hot pursuit.

 

Mama told me not to go to Georgia, she thought, casting a backwards glance at the car full of white-hooded figures laboring up the trail after her. But Cass couldn’t have stayed in Mixon her whole life. Chances were, she couldn’t stay anywhere. Ever since the incident with the light beam she’d been different. A woman who was stronger than any of the three men put together, and who could read newspaper from half a block away, and who could hear voles tunneling underground didn’t fit in well very many places, especially if she was uppity, and Cass was definitely uppity. Uppity, uppity and away… but that was a secret no one knew about.

 

Take tonight, for instance, everybody in this little town knew that Charlie Hendrix was no good. He was a black man without a master, so when that old lady turned up dead it had to be Charlie’s fault, even though there wasn’t a stamp-lick of evidence to show it. So a group of Klansmen showed up to Charlie’s shack with a rope woven from threads of sheer vendetta. The message seemed to be, how dare you think of yourself as human, you animal.

 

Cass had gotten there just in the nick of time, snatching Charlie from the noose and racing into the woods with him. She’d left him in a thicket with strict instructions to get the heck out of town. Then she’d picked up the straw dummy decoy she’d left there for that purpose and lit up the road with the Klansmen on her trail.

 

Gunfire rattled the night as the Studebaker gained on Cass. The maniacs couldn’t hit anything, bouncing up the road like they were, except maybe by accident, but accident’s did happen and Cass was pretty sure she wasn’t bullet proof.

 

Sweat poured down her back. She groped for endurance as she rounded a final corner to a chasm with a missing bridge. Almost there.

 

The Klan Kar roared at her heels, so close she could feel the heat of its engine. With on final effort Cass lengthened her stride. Two steps. One. Leap!

 

Cass leaped out into darkness a hundred feet deep. The Klan Kar squealed and fishtailed as the driver applied the brakes. Cass turned her attention inward, focusing on the strange inhuman knot of tissue in the small of her back. The organs grew warm and stretched. There was a noise like sheet being torn in half, and long hollow bones sprouted from her back, putting on feathers and the unfolded into an enormous pair of wings. She scooped the air and rolled upward, faster than any bird.

 

A thousand feet up, she turned to see the Klansmen trying to extricate themselves from their Studebaker even as it teetered on the edge of the chasm. She smiled and turned away. She only had about an hour until this pair of wings dissolved into dust, and then it would be several hours before she could conjure another pair, and she wanted to be well away from Georgia by then.