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Re: Classic Comic Book Characters I think this thread really proves that you only need 250 points. I'm the same. All the "standard" powered heroes are 250, "world class" are 350 and "Uber-Super" are 500. Most characters start at 200 though. That's a left-over from 1st ed. I think.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign I'm thinking the laws would be as they are now and that Costumed Crimefighters of the past have always been personae non grata to the authorities. I think there would be some turning a blind eye, but some cops would be uber-psycho about locking these underwear freaks up and throwing away the key. Again, I'm going to emphasis the code vs killing aspect of the heroic characters so I'm thinking they'd probably avoid weapons unless they were more gadgety or they were willing to face the music if the cops ever caught them. It'd be interesting to play out the loss of a secret ID and have everyone who knew the character react to the news. I don't think I've ever actually played that out in an RPG before.

Re: Best Battle The best battle had to be early on in my Fantasy Hero career. I was GMing a session and a city guardsman character noticed he was being followed by a shady character and gave chase. He cornered him in a barn and took a lantern up into the lofts to confront him. The spy surprised the guard, knocking him over with a pitchfork handle. The lantern fell into the straw below and ignited. Then there was a frantic halberd versus pitchfork battle in the rafters of a burning building... it was quite dramatic and still one of the most memorable battles I've ever run. The other players were not involved, but they loved it.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign Troy, nice to see you on the boards! Twilight Guardian was the only Pilot Season comic I bought and the only one I'd vote for. Excellent work. I really like the "real world" feel of it. If you could post her stats that'd be excellent. I really loved Common Grounds as well. Very much in the vein of my Champions campaign of 20+ years. David

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign I'm thinking to downplay the gunplay on the heroic end of things. I'm going to insist that the players buy a code versus killing. Lots of fisticuffs and improvised weapons I think. My American Law knowledge is based on old episodes of L.A. Law and Night Court. I took Constitutional Law, but that was for the Canadian Constitution.

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Woo.. there's some really nice work on here. I'm getting back into some fantasy work. Here's a goblin I did for a fantasy book a couple years ago. The setting was based on my FH setting and I even used my fantasy hero map.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign woo.. thanks.. repped.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign That must be so confusing...

Re: What makes a hero? Angelina Jolie as Wonder Woman's mom? COME ON! (Arrested Development Reference, sorry...) That Florence Nightengale.. sheesh.. I think that heroism is a personal decision based on individual choices and sacrifice while altruism is based more on societal and cultural influences.

Some interesting ideas here re. what a hero is or isn't... http://heroworkshop.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/new-zimbardo-research-a-survey/ It's all about the difference between heroism and altruism. I used to fire up this debate when I taught grade 9 English many years ago.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign Doc A. Those are some good plot points to bring up. It kind of evokes the old Wildcards books for me for some reason, but without the superpowers. I imagine a sort of guardian angels group would be a real thorn in the side of costumes heroes. I think myth-making is the important reason for wearing a costume. I know wearing a disguise is a criminal offense in Canada (Disguise with intent). Is it the same in the US or is it state by state? It would sort of crimp the style of costumed crime-fighting. Canadian weapons offences would also crimp the style of hockey stick wielding vigilantes: "Weapons offences Restricted and Prohibited Weapons – Restricted weapons are mainly various handguns and rifles, but prohibited weapons also include switchblade knives, spiked wristbands, blowguns, mini-handguns, brass knuckles and other things such as Mace, teargas, pepper spray, nunchaku sticks and other devices used in martial arts, dart guns, stun guns, electric probes, and crossbows, among other weapons, including a vast array of firearms. Mere possession in your home, car, or on your person of these weapons is sufficient to be prosecuted under the Criminal Code. Carrying or being in possession of a weapon, or an imitation weapon, "for a purpose dangerous to the public peace or for the purpose of committing an offence" is an offence under the Criminal Code ("weapons dangerous"). A "weapon" is broadly defined in the Code so as to include many objects which are not designed as weapons such as kitchen knives, a hockey stick, punk rock fashion accessories or pieces of pavement. This open-ended definition is extremely important for activists engaged in direct action, particularly those prepared to defend themselves against police violence, to understand. Similarly, an assault using something that is not necessarily a weapon will be charged as Assault with a weapon (a Hybrid offences which carries high penalties – s. 267)." So Punk Rock characters who chuck hunks of pavement are in big trouble.

Re: Superman Begins and Darker Superhero Stories Oh man, all this WW slagging. Truth is, I ran a few superhero campaigns using WW as well as an Arthurian in modern age trilogy I'm very proud of and I even ran an original Space Opera game and wrote my own mecha rules for WW before I started actually writing for GOO. When I started getting the GOO books I switched things over to that system. I hated WW's campaign setting, but some fool with lots of time on his hands put a mutant (a la xmen) site up for WW rules. It was jolly good fun. When Fifth Ed. Hero came out I jumped at the chance to switch things over. So I still have fond WW memories, though I don't know if I'd run the system again. Botches anyone? I love Bauhaus....

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign I think I was inspired by the Real Life Superhero phenomenon. http://www.superheroeslives.com/indexreallife.htm There has been a real move towards this in comics recently too.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign Yeah, it has to be original, but the Watchmen advice was actually pretty good. After all, it was just a rehash of already existing characters, Moore just mixed things up. I was thinking no powers, nothing. No magic, no psionics, no crazy technology. Just guys who go to the army surplus store and make costumes and go out and fight crime. Criminals respond by doing the same and a sort of Four Colour Universe thing happens where codes and mythologies develop. There was a comic Image put out a few months ago called Twilight Guardian. http://www.thetwilightguardian.blogspot.com/ I really liked the feel of it and wondered if I could pull that off with a team comic of heroes with no powers. Right now, it's sort of shelved as a graphic novel. That pitch took a more kid friendly turn as I'm sure this idea would be fairly dark and violent.

Re: Non Powered Superhero Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superheroes_and_villains_without_superpowers

I'm working on a pitch for a graphic novel and was wondering if anyone has run a campaign that was relatively four colour, but none of the costumed characters had any superpowers or totally crazy technology. I don't mean Dark Champions with guns and shooty time, I mean guys in tights jumping rooftop to rooftop, duking it out and keeping it real. Sort of like Green Hornet and Kato, Classic Batman and Some of the Master Of Kung Fu series from the 70s and 80s (without all that Marvel Universe nonsense). Any ideas or experiences to share?

Re: US Government's reaction to superhumans I've actually talked to some fairly senior Canadian civil servants about this last summer when I was researching a graphic novel I'm still working on. They loved the question and actually gave thoughtful responses.

Re: US Government's reaction to superhumans In my campaign the US has forcibly registered supers since the Reagan era and has shipped Supers off to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, breaking the UN rules of the post second world war tribunal. Powered supers have fled to Canada and Mexico or have gone totally underground and are hunted by government forces like fugitives. In Canada Supers have been registered since the 1930s and carefully monitored and investigated. Most are pretty much left alone and thanks to underfunding in the 1970s and 1980s many have slipped through the cracks and are ignored to this day. The bureaucracy has been streamlined in the 1990s and seems to be working the best it ever has. What this means for supers is that there is a database out there on each and every Canadian super and agents are actively monitoring their activities, calling them in for interviews and updating their files. Underground supers are actively investigated by official supers and reigned in by hook or by crook. There was even a government program (a 1990s campaign ANGST) designed to groom super powered teens for active government service. I really had ignored the US in my campaign in the 80s so I had to back up and explain why there are so few American supers in my campaign's adventures and popular culture. One was that America's main super team was killed in a Chernobyl/Three Mile Island nuclear terrorism act in the late 1980s. That sort of kept things quiet. I am currently running two campaigns in the US. The supers have to keep things on the down-low or deal with the authorities in some way.

Re: Classic Comic Book Characters Sweet merciful crap, Riddler is brilliant. I admire your ability to get what you need in 250 points. I think 250 is all you need really. I insist on starting characters in my campaigns are 250 for grown up experienced heroes and 200 for green or teen.

Re: Superman Begins and Darker Superhero Stories When I bought my first B&W cover copy of Champions I had a schism in my role playing group. The first real game I created a consistent campaign for was Gamma World, which is dark to be sure. I was constantly tweaking the rules, even trying to run it as a superhero game (with the mutations), but it just wasn't right. Half of my gaming group really had a hard time jumping on the superhero bandwagon. (1981) They felt it was too corny. I hadn't really read many superhero comics since the early 70s so I picked a few up. I was very excited about running Champions, but I had been sort of out of the comic book loop. I started to buy up back issues of X-men and Teen Titans and enjoyed them immensely, but found real meat in Daredevil at the time (Frank Miller's run). All of this made an impact on the kind of universe I wanted to create. I remember reading in Champions 2 in the great Campaigning Champions article and getting a sense that this was a sort of old fashioned idea of the superhero, but that was fine with me. I tried to pull in the darker, more complex personality-driven stories that were out at the time into a four colour universe. My first campaign adventures were actually about the fall of a Silver Age supergroup and the players were there to be the 'next generation' of supers. I never really thought about it as abstractly, of course, but it seemed like a good place to start. It's funny that some of you have also gone more four-colour as real comics have been getting darker. I just don't know if I could run a very dark campaign, however my players would disagree. I ran an adventure last week where everyone in a sanitarium was killed by an insane ghost. That's H.P. Lovecraft dark. But in the same adventure, one hero (a disorderly orderly in his secret ID) fell off the porch into the bushes, ran like a coward (and it's a good thing he did), dropped his keys down the sewer during a rainstorm and generally turned what could have been a really dark and scary adventure into Abbot and Costello meet the Monster. Even my players won't let me darken things.

Warner Brothers is pumping the Dark Knight money into the next Superman Project called Superman: Man of Steel. http://io9.com/5040723/warner-brothers-takes-the-time-to-make-a-superman-that-wont-suck It's interesting that there seems to be a real desire to darken big blue. I've noticed my Champions campaign has kind of gone in the opposite direction, taking more of a cue from the Justice League Unlimited series than The Watchmen. What about your campaigns? Have you felt a need to give em darkness and grit things up?

Re: Theme song for characters This would be easy to do with itunes. I like this idea. The songs would have to have an instant impact. I use Garage Band on a Mac and use the jingles. I started using them in my classroom as a way of answering student questions. They just got used to it. It's a media studies class after all.

Re: Eastern Canadian History/Geography Resources? Woo.. I did an Atlantic Coast Vikings in the New World campaign back in the early 80s. One of the best resources I found was information about L'Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland. http://www.wordplay.com/tourism/viking.html http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/norse.html First European Settlements List http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/ushistory/firsteuropeansettlements.htm I was in Quebec City this summer for the 400th anniversary. It's a really wonderful city. I even got to practice my francais Note that Stadacona was a native settlement of 500 Iroquois before Cartier stumbled across it in 1535 looking for India. Most of his French sailors died from scurvy, hunger and the cold winter and when spring came in 1536 they kidnapped Stadacona's chief and some of his followers and dragged him back to France. When Cartier returned in 1541 there was an ill-fated attempt at French settlement, but in 1543 the survivors returned to France. When Champlain returned to Quebec in 1608, Stadacona was gone. The people who lived in Stadacona were Iroquois and the people who lived where Quebec City is now were nomadic Algonquin (different cultural and language groups who fought each other). The natives that the Vikings would have interacted with in 1000 AD were known as Skraelings to the Vikings. Skraeling is a Viking "diss" roughly meaning "Wretches" or scared or scruffy one. The root word is Skral meaning "thin or scrawny", lacking in cultural sense. I'm sure the Vikings were relatively wretched looking to the natives. The aboriginal group that the vikings probably interacted with were most likely Beothuk. This group was mostly wiped out by the Mi'kmaq who were paid by the French to kill them off (so it has been said). The "last Beothuk" apparently died in British captiviy in 1829, but many Beothuk had fled to live with Mi'kmaq and even Innu to the north. The distinct cultural group was assimilated by 1900. So the Beothuk is fairly mysterious. I think Shanawdithit (the last beothuk) did some drawings and writing about her life, but I can't remember everything about that. I hope that helps. P.S. I wrote a short story in high school and sent it in to a competition about Vikings in North America hunting down a killer stone giant with the help of a Beothuk Shaman. It was returned with some fairly disparaging remarks.

Re: Gothic Fantasy Hero Well, I conferred with the players and got some character input. It looks like there will be: -a former novice trained in medical skills who is maintaining a secret library of books from the abandoned monastery. She's one of the few literate people on the island. Lost her family in the plague ship incident. -a Celtic Warrior, Highlander Fusilier. Tired of hiding on the island. -a Smuggler, probably a crewmember of one of the smuggling ships. -a Merchant, most likely someone who has traded with the smugglers. These characters will be the ones going out to find out what happened to the officially sanctioned supply barge sent out to the mainland to gather firewood, water and food for the island in preparation for winter.

Re: Songs that inspire(d) you to make a Champions Character This sounds like a character Dwight Shrute from the office would make up. Was this player a beet farmer/ Battlestar Galactica fan?