Rook

Re: Goofy Villains

As was mentioned above, Corporal Punishment and his sidekick Whipping Boy, masochistic villians who are just in it to take a beating. Also Shocking Pink, a villainess whose grand schemes revolve around turning major landmarks pink.

Re: "Focus Man"

You know, this might be more fun if you didn't identify the item but let others guess.

Re: Super Names

Patient Zero

The term refers to the first person to be infected with a disease that later becomes an epidemic (c.f., Ground Zero).

Version two...

Our resident gunbunny with the copyrighted tagline...

When the judge and jury fail, it's time for... the Executioner.

Here are a couple of new ones from our new game.

Stiletto, the martial artist in bladed high heels.

So, using our own characters... what if your super hero(s) had "Joined the dark side"? What would have happened to do it, and what would they be like?

This one was waaay too easy. I'm currently playing as a PC a character who is an NPC villain in my own campaign. The idea was to go back to a point before he "went bad" and have him take a different path. So I know exactly what he would have been like.

My character is a disembodied shadow with abilities that have little to do with the question at hand. He believes he has been sent by a higher power to lead "his people" (all other shadows, whom he believes to be alive) from the darkness to the light - to save them in the messianic sense.

In accordance with his current philosophy, this means helping human beings (who he calls companions) since it is through a "training period" of subservience to humans that his people learn the lessons needed to make their journey into the afterlife. He thinks of human beings essentially as nothing more than cocoons. Of course, to protect his fellow shadows, he must protect their humans. Not very heroic from a human standpoint, but at least he's on the right side.

The character as a villain is mostly the same but he believes that human beings have enslaved their shadows and that his mission is to free them. As a villain, he leads a large cult dedicated to this purpose. The decisive moment came when he confronted and killed his human half (an innocent child) to be sure that he would never again be enslaved to him.

In my current game I play a character whose actions are dictated by strongly held religious beliefs. He is a living shadow and has some very strange beliefs that I'm slowly dropping hints about. I would say more but other members of my group post here and I'd prefer not to spoil the surprise.

In the past I've had a character who was a disciple of a paranormal claiming to be Christ (he was later revealed to be a fraud).

Here are a few not on the list.

Alter Ego

Big Iron

Blood Red

Captain Crunch

Chanteuse

Corporal Punishment and Whipping Boy

Dark Horse

Dreadlock

Genome

Grindstone

Human Vegetable, the

Id

Jack Hammer (Jackhammer is listed)

Knossos

Midnight Son (Midnight Sun is listed)

Miss Fit

Mister Twisted

Navarone

Oblique

Perdition

Pirouette

Prankster, the

Primal Scream

Psybolt

Queen Conch

Shocking Pink

Snowman, the

Spade

Sprocket

Sturm and Drang (Sturm is already listed)

Torso, the

and...

Rusty the Wonder Pup

Originally posted by lemming

I'm running a game without point caps and have the PCs balanced more by feel than anything scientific.

This is the way I tend to handle things as well. What I do is have players describe in detail what their powers can and can't do and then just assign a number of dice to them.

I use a fictional name only for the city in which the campaign is set. My campaigns have been set in a fictional city called Olympus. It is situated on the east coast somewhere south of Washington (it replaces Norfolk, VA in my campaign world, though I never really say this).

If you want to rename several real cities, I would recommend looking up city nicknames and basing their new names on these, if possible. This is how DC came up with Gotham City (and possibly others).

Originally posted by Blue

I had a friend who was a *great* call of cthulhu GM. After discussing what game we'd play next several players challenged him to run a D&D game. So he did! First one we'd played in years.

 

The idea is that because he hates low level characters he'd morph us up to a medium-low level (like 3rd? 4th?) before putting us into the "real world". We went through a sort of training camp for adventurers.

 

So we are put in a no-win situation as part of the training...

I used to do the same thing when running a Cthulhu-influenced D&D game years ago. The campaign started out as a regular D&D game but during one session the players faced an unnamed horror they had no chance of defeating. At first, they mistook the thing for a mountain. They put up a fight and later tried to run, but all were eventually slaughtered.

As the players were packing up and leaving, the group's cleric woke up screaming.

I had several dream sequences that they played through from time to time during the course of the campaign. Each one revealed a little more about what they would eventually face "for real." Each dream ended with every PC dead. The situations were unwinnable, but with no real lasting effect on their characters, the players accepted them. (Except while playing through the first, naturally.)

The worst I can remember was the first convention I attended. I had signed up for a day-long game - a mistake - and the GM did not have pregenerated characters. When it was time to break for lunch, some people were still working on their characters. Needless to say, I decided not to return for the afternoon session.

Another low point was an Ars Magica game I played in. It would probably have been best if I had had the sense to not play, because the GM and I were not a good fit. I'm the kind of player who likes to make things up hoping that the GM will run with it, but the GM liked everything scripted to the letter and relentlessly railroaded us to the point that I felt that I couldn't affect the outcome of events in any meaningful way. It all came to a head when the GM felt that my character needed to be gotten rid of for the good of his campaign. Our characters were granted an audience with the king (I can't remember why) and in his presence when the following exchange occurred (I remember most of it word for word):

Me: A thought balloon appears above my head, "The king is a goblin-sympathizer!"

GM: You say that?!?

Me: No. I said "a thought balloon appears." I was thinking it.

GM: Well if you thought it, you probably said it.

Me: No. I thought it.

GM: Well, you probably muttered it under your breath.

Me: Who's playing my character here, you or me? I said I thought it.

GM: Okay... You notice an amulet around his neck. He's read your mind!

End of character. And end of my involvement in the campaign. It still makes me laugh, though.

I primarily use Fireworks. I use PhotoImpact for some effects and some photo fonts from Hemera Photo-Objects.

The last member of our group settled on a name for her character, so here's the graphic for our gangbusting water elementalist...

Re: Avantguard team logo

Originally posted by Wildcat

BTW: Rook Love that logo for the brick... how did you get the breaking glass effect?

Thanks. It uses a photo font from Hemera Photo-Objects.

The living shadow...

The mentalist...

The empathic healer...

The adamantine sorceress...

The brick...

The stage magician turned superhero...

Here are some from the game I'm currently playing in. Feel free to use these if you want.

The team logo...

We have a superhero costume thread going, but how about one for graphics and logos?

These are taken directly from my own NPCs, but you're welcome to use them.

Earth Force: Grindstone

Titan: Since he seems pretty generic, rather than powered armor, how about telekintic "phantom limbs" to replace those he's lost? Name: The Torso.