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Champions of the North


grandmastergm

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Hello everyone,

 

I plan on running a 6e Champions game over at U-Con this year.  I'm presently working on it- as it adapts characters from the 5e book Champions of the North.  The PCs will be playing official Canadian superheroes who are tasked with saving their country from the combined forces of Baron Nihil and Tilingkoot, who have joined forces to dimensionally merge the Great White North with Nihil's dimension.

 

Player Characters (Star-Force)

Argosy- a mentalist from the Maritime Provinces

The Constable- a martial brick from British Columbia

Justiciar- a cyborg from Northern Canada

Prism Girl- a duplicating energy projector from Ontario

Dust Devil- a speedster-brick from the Prairies

Chateleine- a mage from Quebec (actually a member of another super-team, but her teammates have vanished)

 

Villains

Tilingkoot

Tilingkoot's minions (Loupe Garou/Adlet, Wendigo, other "lost" or evil spirits)

Baron Nihil

Baron Nihil's minions (the Knights of Saguenay)

 

Encounter Locations

Downtown Toronto

Ungava Peninsula

Parliament Hill, Ottawa

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i always loved to imagine picture in Canada. But I was never able to get the book...

 

so, how can we help ?

 

Actually, you could write Champions of France. That would rule.

 

Or, at least, provide us with some characters that would impress all us idiotic Anglophones.

 

Personally, I would love to write Champions Down Under (the Champions sourcebook for Australia, but I can't do it). My attention span doesn't last that long.

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Actually, there was another superhero RPG (Golden Heroes/Squadron UK) that had a brief and to the point supplement called Superfrance.

 

It was, naturally, written by someone French. It was only about 16 pages, about half of which was how to run scenarios in France that didn't commit major stupidities. The other half involved characters.

 

A few years ago I started writing a bit of an essay about Champions in Australia. My outline was directly stolen from Superfrance. Unfortunately, while Superfrance relied on the idea that as far as stupid Anglophones went, France was basically Paris, Australia has the problem that we basically consist of a bunch of weird places far apart from each other, where nobody actually lives.

 

Awkward.

 

Alas, Superfrance is no longer available. Squadron UK, the second edition of Golden Heroes, was shut down by Games Workshop, who published the commercial version of Golden Heroes and thus had legal rights to it.

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Personally I envision my native France as a dark and gloomy place for superheroes.

 

It's all cultural I guess, as most of francophone people doesn't have the cultural biais to believe in a superheroic savior. They would more likely enjoy watching such a person fail or die...

 

Anyway, I think the Micros comics book, in the eighties , is a good sample of what could be done with french superheroes. I.E, a government that control supers on his lands by using blackmail, threat, corruption, etc...

 

that would be the Champions of France book I could write. Not the kind of stuff most people would enjoy to play with, imho.

 

Opale, now expatriated

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On an earlier incarnation of the Hero Games website, Scott Bennie put up a free PDF of outtakes from his Champions Of The North manuscript which were cut due to space considerations. A lot of it deals with people and things mentioned but not statted in the published COTN. There may be something there you can use for your game.

COTNOuttakes.pdf

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I had a serious crack at an official government French super team (les Supérieurs) for use in a campaign I ran based out of the Channel Isles. (Apologies in advance for any grammar mistakes):

 

Colonel Guerre (Leader; tough special forces type and brilliant tactician)

Le Fauve (Werewolf fashionista and muscle)

Lumière (Light power blaster; he's a self centred pop star as well)

Mystère (Dr Strange style sorceress)

 

They never actually got played as the campaign only lasted a few sessions - I just needed some French heroes in case. In my 20 year update Colonel Guerre has since been killed in action and replaced by his daughter Marie; Mystère is a little older (slow ageing but not immortal); Le Fauve is immortal, and  Lumière is dealing (poorly) with being an ageing pop star.

 

Never much had any desire to make Australian supers. It's such an American genre, and my Australia is actually very small town. Tasmania Man would likely spend his time on patrol looking for bored youths about to commit arson...

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The COTN outtakes attached above includes a French Canadian superhero team, Les Esprits Guardiens, based in Quebec, with full backgrounds and 5E character sheets for all four members.

 

Champions Universe p. 49 describes the official government superhero team of France, made up of Tricolor, who can duplicate into three persons embodying the French national motto; Volt, an electricity-manipulating superheroine; the Musketeer, a swashbuckling costumed acrobat and weaponmaster; Valere Noyer, a super-soldier, possibly the result of a government program; and Siffleur (“Whistler”), a speedster. The team’s official designation is “the Sixteenth Bureau,” but its members prefer to call themselves “the Vanguard.” CU p. 79 also describes several solo French heroes, some of whom are written up in Champions Worldwide.

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Never much had any desire to make Australian supers. It's such an American genre, and my Australia is actually very small town. Tasmania Man would likely spend his time on patrol looking for bored youths about to commit arson...

 

I was in Brisbane when I started playing, so the decent sized city thing existed.

 

I also read Southern Squadron and other Cyclone Comics material back in the 80s. Quite competently done Australian supers.

 

But perhaps more importantly, Queensland in the 80s was ruled by the infamously corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government and their tame police force. It wasn't hard to imagine putting on a mask back then.

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Never much had any desire to make Australian supers. It's such an American genre, and my Australia is actually very small town. Tasmania Man would likely spend his time on patrol looking for bored youths about to commit arson...

 

Tasmania, the land of cannibal bushrangers?

 

It's the Midsomer of the South!

 

Who cares about the tedious reality?

 

And that's only if the heroes are interested in mundane crime... Captain Tasmania is just as likely to be part of a team that fights supervillains across the whole southern hemisphere and beyond.

 

An aside: I wonder what superbeings would be active in Nouvelle-Calédonie?

 

Vanuatu would have been a natural refuge for superbeings before independence. The Anglo-French condominium was wonderfully inefficient. It's still likely to be "a sunny place for shady people".

 

Incidentally, that expression was originally applied to the Côte d'Azur (French Riviera).

 

I remember that a few years ago, one of our German posters explained that he found it hard to imagine superheroes operating in Germany. That's Germany - Hamburg, Berlin, weird old castles, mysterious Cold War sites and goodness knows what else.

 

I think there might be a pattern here: people can only see their own homes in a mundane light. It's easier to locate the fantastic (superbeings in this case) "elsewhere".

 

To drag this post back towards the original point of the thread, supplements like Champions of the North aren't really designed for Canadian players, but are intended to help players from elsewhere set games/scenarios there. But of course they should be written by locals, to minimize the stupid.

 

And that runs into the problem of bringing fantasy into your backyard. A writer needs to be able to do that.

 

I'll admit that I can't really do it in Australia either.

 

Maybe someone should write Champions of Kansas, the book that would make us understand the expression: 'Toto, I've a feeling we're in Kansas again. Deep, deep Kansas.'

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You know, that last statement, although completely understandable, is kind of ironic. Kansas is the location of Smallville, Superman's home town. In the Smallville television series the town was "weirdness central," full of kryptonite mutates and Kryptonian artifacts. The series also set Metropolis in Kansas. In the Champions Universe, the small town of Haynesville, Kansas was where the first American superhero, Captain Patriot, manifested in 1938. A secret government project to study and try to create superhumans was set up near Haynesville, and is still operating there today.

 

I remember our German colleague (Roter Baron IIRC) commenting that German superheroes just seemed inappropriate to him, because Germany had no tradition of superhero comics -- they were an American phenomenon. At the time I replied that that was in our real world. In the CU superhumans are an international phenomenon, and have been for generations. As the recent 6E Golden Age Champions highlights, German superheroes were a very high-profile part of the war effort during WW II, for both military and propaganda purposes. In the Marvel and DC worlds Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Japan, all saw a great deal of superhuman action during the war and subsequently, which had to have a societal impact.

 

I think changing the "not in my back yard" mentality for a modern non-American gamer wanting to play supers set in their home country, involves accepting that a superhero world, although it may resemble our own in many ways, is not the same world. There are very fundamental differences that make common and acceptable, things which would be extraordinary or impossible in reality.

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Nope. I want the Kingdom of Champions treatment -- geography, history, culture, politics, economy, folklore, the works. I'm using a foreign country for my games, I want one book that will give me the flavor and texture of that country from a gaming perspective, emphasizing what would be most useful for gamers to know. I don't have time to do the proper research, I'd rather contribute to paying for someone else to do it for me.

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+1 on Cyclone Comics, assault :) My copies are still around in storage somewhere.

 

Oh, Aussie supers would work, I guess. Most of the bigger cities would do fine as settings.

 

But Tassie... not so much, despite our sometimes colourful heritage. You don't see any US supers based on the Donner Party business, do you? Still...

 

Hydroelectric, with the powers of electricity and water?

 

Tasmanian Tiger; super stealth powers (okay, I'll admit to actually making this for City of Heroes. But I'm not proud)

 

Chain Gang; convict themed super thugs.

 

Black Jack; avenging spirit of the Oyster Bay tribe.

 

Two Head?

 

I'll stop now.

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I was going to post something like this as a separate thread.

 

Here are some Australian supervillains with "True Crime" origins.

 

Toecutter. Has a HKA, naturally.

Standover. Growth.

 

The Kangaroo Gang. International thieves with generally non-combat powers. Male and female members. Given that the other characters here are male, probably mostly female.

 

Blue Dynamo. An undercover police officer assigned to infiltrate and identify a superhero team.

 

Toecutter and Standover are probably based in Melbourne or Sydney. Perhaps one in each?

 

The Kangaroo Gang operate internationally. Maybe based in Sydney.

 

Blue Dynamo could be based in Brisbane, although his inspiration is some decades old by now. Still, bent cops are everywhere.

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