Mutant for Hire

Re: Liefeld's Titans I'm really trying to figure out how someone who is as crappy an artist as Liefeld is could get in the door of Marvel or DC in the first place. I'm sure there were dozens of artists far more talented submitting their work.

Re: WWYCD: Anti- 'Authority' Technomancer wouldn't go in a head on battle. He would instead look at the internal power structure of the enemy and determine which folks need to be taken out in order for everything to fall apart on the enemy side, and would try to rally as many paranormals as he could in order to hit the enemy at their most vulnerable point.

Yes, we have an actual webcomic strip where two players are having a rather adversarial Champions session here I'd love to see the writeup of that power...

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers What I'm refering to are relative income levels between the rich and the poor. Right now we have CEOs being paid up to hundreds of times what their base workers are being paid. In medieval times and previous to that, the relative income levels were to the best of my knowledge not nearly as ridiculous (I used to have the numbers, but right now I can't track them down). Other issues involve include how much money is actually flowing around. In older feudal periods, lords did not collect money from the people on the land, but goods and days of service instead, and for that matter feudal lords themselves often paid their masters in days of service as well on the battlefield. Peasants could and did barter among themselves. It wasn't until the late feudal period that you started to see rent being taken in the form of money up and down the feudal ladder, with a whole list of consequences due to that.

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers Also something very important to bear in mind is that what constitutes "rich" or "filthy rich" varies over time. Extremes in wealth were a lot less extreme in previous eras. It wasn't until the development of modern capitalism that you had the real pooling of wealth. You really need to sit down and define what "filthy rich" means in this context, and incidentally, that more or less presupposes that there's a lot of trade going on and a lot of money circulating.

Re: Liefeld's Titans Looking at the pics is giving me 90's flashbacks. The pain, the pain, make it go away please... Anyone have any decent artwork to wash this out of my brain?

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers Well, from "Medieval Demographics Made Easy":

Re: The Coming of Deth Sturm! In that case, you definitely gotta do D'ĕth Blüd now. There've been enough naked girls on the catsuit thread (strategic parts properly covered) that you should be able to do her now.

Re: The Coming of Deth Sturm!

Re: The Coming of Deth Sturm! Her picture wouldn't be legal to post, but I'm fairly confident the rest of her would be.

Re: The Coming of Deth Sturm! You forgot "Psych Lim: Overconfidence". So when are we going to see his female counterpart?

Re: Alternate CU Timeline Concept Not sure yet. This is just a prototype idea. For one thing, the Final Battle unleashes a temporal storm. I would say that time travel from either side to the other isn't going to be safe or reliable for all but the most powerful beings. As for the Overlord and the Resistance, their technology isn't exactly the most reliable at the best of times, even travelling within their own period. The agents that get sent back into the modern CU are the ones lucky enough to make it, and one of the things they have to do is figure out when and where they happen to be, which may be nowhere near their destination. I'm not sure how alternate timelines fit into this either. There is a real possibility passing through the storm could scramble which timeline you're on, which adds to the confusion involved. In the Galactic Champions era, temporal research is strictly controlled, and the Earth is used as a classic example of why it is dangerous and the consequences of unrestricted use of time travel.

One of the things about the Champions Universe that annoys me is the "everything depends on magic" business, and how the whole existance of superheroes is magically forgotten after the magic goes away, even those whose powers depend on either alien technology that shouldn't be dependent on magic at all and the highly trained superheroes who rely on a gadget pool of items that frankly shouldn't be depending on magic either. As a result, I've been trying to tinker with the Champions Universe timeline working on the assumption that in fact the magic doesn't go away after the magical showdown that happens down the road. Of course, once one tosses that out, there's a thousand year gap between the modern day Champions Universe and the time of Galactic Champions. Needless to say, it's a very good idea to try to fill in this period of time. While one could just reuse Alien Wars and the Terran Empire, to me they don't seem to be the best choices involved. Both of them were designed as fairly straight SF universes, and to me they don't really mesh well with superheroes. I just have a hard time seeing the Champions dumped into either period of time for some reason. They just wouldn't fit in all that well thematically. So I'm going with a much radically different timeline which roughly fills in the gap between the modern CU and the time of Galactic Champions. I will admit that this timeline is mostly dark. Galactic Champions can best be described as the bright light after a long period of darkness for mankind. On the other hand, dystopian futures have been a fairly heavy staple of comic books for a very long time, and if the world is dark, it means that those who carry the light will shine more brightly after a fashion. There's also the fact that I need to stall technological development on Earth, or at least slow it down, for about a thousand years, and that's with all the supertech that is coming out in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. My timeline can be broken down into four periods of undetermined length. The numbers are one of the things I'm trying to work on, and suggestions there would be appreciated. I'm quite open to ideas on fleshing this out and meshing it in with the existing Champions Universe, and there are those who are far more expert on it than I am. Era 1: Breakdown and Meltdown Essentially, I steal shamelessly from DC's Kingdom Come series (the original one). The idea is that the number of superpowered beings and the amount of supertech in the world goes steadily up, and the clashes between superpowered and superarmed individuals and organizations keeps steadily rising. The damage from these battles, physical and psychological, is taking its toll on civilization. The newer generation of superheroes and supervillains are much more prone to killing and even the older organizations are starting to view this as a war with no quarter asked, none given. There are some superheroes and organizations that realize the world is heading steadily towards a cliff, but they're too few and there's little that they can do to stem the tide. The few time travellers who are willing to talk about the future say that there's more or less going to be a superpowered meltdown that will devistate the world, and are working towards, and urging the best and the brightest of the time to start working on hidden enclaves that will survive the devistation and rebuild civilization in the future. Eventually, there's some conflict that goes out of control and triggers off an all out war between the superpowers and even nations, settling scores for the last time, use nuclear weapons in the conflict. Only the sacrifice by the best of the superheroes contains the damage involved and keeps the world from becoming totally uninhabitable. Era 2: A Savage Wasteland This is the "Gamma World HERO" segment. The Earth is a post-apocalyptic world. Life is not dead, but most of the indiginous wildlife has mutated beyond recognition, in some cases to sapiency. Nomadic tribes wander the world, looking for food and water and trying to avoid the environmental hazards, not all of which are mundane ones. During the final war, time travellers from various factions in the future struggled to shape the pivotal event of the meltdown, sabotaging some enclaves to see that they and their ideologies didn't survive, while others struggled to preserve those same enclaves for their own reasons. In fact time travellers had been steadily arriving and warring in the months and weeks up to the final meltdown and were actually a contributing factor to it. The flux of all those temporal manipulations created a nasty temporal storm that nearly destroyed the Earth until it was shattered into thousands of pieces. Most of them died quickly but some have lasted. As a result, there are temporal storms of various sizes, from minor dust devils to major storms, and there are places where standing temporal flaws have arisen. It wasn't just time that got messed up, magic got messed up as well. There were massive loads of magic that were unleashed during the final chaos and there are storms of raw magic, and places where the magical energies of the site are high and usually twisted in some way. These are useful sources of power, but they're also dangerous as well. Then there are the mutated animals, plants and other things around. Life is hard and fairly cheap. There are enclaves but most of them were unprepared for the chaos of the Final Battle and the forces it unleashed. Or they were but were sabotaged by time travellers who didn't want that enclave surviving. Or they had mechanical malfunctions later, or they had some sort of internal personel crisis that ended up destroying the enclave from within. Most of the enclaves set up, few nations or organizations didn't know that armageddon was going to happen, didn't last for very long. A few, however did, and one in particular. Superheroes travelling to the future sometimes get dumped here if they're unprepared for the temporal storm that disrupts the timestream at the time of the Final Battle. Fortunately, there are paranormals who like to live near temporal flaws who have the power to send errant timetravellers into the future (it's one of the ways they deal with attackers, just dump them a few centuries down the road and let the future sort it out). Given what they are dumped into, in some ways a quick death would be preferable. Era 3: Age of the Overlord One enclave was ruled by a mysterious entity called the Overlord. No one knows who he is save that he lives in technological armor and never comes out of it. Some think he's Doctor D, but as others pointed out, if he was Doctor D, he would call himself that. What is known is that he was a technological genius, perhaps not on the order of Doctor D but close enough, and certainly he was as hard and as ruthless and as ambitious as Doctor D. His enclave went around and found all of the other enclaves, looting the ones that had failed for all useful technology and supplies. As for the ones still going, having grown used to attacks from more conventional hazards, they were unprepared for the sophisticated and technological attacks by the Overlord's Enclave. He captured their people and expanded his own enclave, in time building the first of the great Domes, arcologies with their own life support system disconnected from the outside world. The Overlord began a plan of massive population growth and expansion. To his credit, he cleaned up some of the problems of the Earth. The bad news is that he only focused on cleaning those up that threatened his Domes, mainly the ones involving wild magic and temporal damage. His policy on the often twisted and mutated life outside of the Domes was sterlization, though of course sentients could get a certain amount of use before they were destroyed, being used to mine the old cities for useful technology or at least raw materials. It would have been bad enough if he had just planned to sterilize the old mutated life before restoring the old biosphere using gene banks that had been recovered from numerous enclaves, containing millions of species. But no, and in fact the factories of the Dome were quite indiscriminate in spewing out chemical and radioactive waste byproducts, making the outside world worse on a mundane level. The Overlord wanted humanity dependent on the Domes for survival, where the life support systems slipped in tranquilizing gasses to the masses and his spy cameras were everywhere. Magic is outlawed. The Overlord uses magicians with nasty control collars to clean up magical storms and clear up the worst of the magically damaged areas but otherwise that's it. Paranormals are rounded up as they are found and are either used by the Overlord's forces, kept on very tight leashes and regularly brainwashed, or they are sent to the laboratories to be experimented on. In general, the Overlord prefers technology, with hidden safeguards built into them. Despite this, or rather because of this, a Resistance springs up. It's composed of outlaw magicians, rogue paranormals, renegade technicians and a number of other people who think the Overlord must be stopped, inside and outside of the Domes. The Resistance has strong contacts with the residents outside of the Domes who know that the Overlord is eventually going to exterminate them all, and it has a lot of inside agents inside of the Domes, though they constantly live in fear of the secret police (as does everyone else). Both the Overlord and the Resistance have Timeflaws to play with, and increasingly sophisticated technology and in the case of the Resistance, paranormals to play with them. Both of them know that in the future the Overlord is overthrown. The Resistance and the Overlord fight their battles not only in the present, but also in the past, primarily in the late twentieth century and early twenty first. The Overlord trying to set things up so that his present position will be made too strong so that the future where he falls fades away, and the Resistance trying to prevent that and doing everything they can to ensure that the Overlord won't do that. Neither side has very reliable time travel. Any time travellers from the modern day CU who end up in this time will be encouraged to stay, unless there are records of their participation in the Final Battle, or the days just before it. At worst, the Resistance will send them ahead into the future, where they understand that time travel has improved enough to be able to return the heroes to their own time with more accuracy and reliability. But the Resistance is always desperate for help and frankly they don't see much point in wasting superheroes on the Final Battle, something set and done in their own past. As should be guessed, eventually the Resistance with some luck and daring, manage to sabotage the systems that keep the masses drugged while at the same time crippling key computer nodes in the security systems that monitor the masses and control the automated weapon systems in the Domes. Attacks from pretty much all of the nomadic tribes outside of the Domes hit the security forces overstrained with keeping down rioting subjects. The Resistance gathers up its most powerful people and equipment and makes a strike on the Overlord's Citadel. It's a terrible battle and most of the attackers die, but in the end there's a massive explosion and in the crater, a few half-melted pieces of the Overlord's armor (but no body...). With news of the death of the Overlord, the rest of his apparatus collapses. Era 4: Exodus and Restoration The lack of a body makes the ruling council rather nervous. While there's no sign of the Overlord, his shadow looms over all of them. They decide to ensure that even if the Overlord returned, he would never be able to conquer the human race the way he has before. And so they go to one of the projects that the Overlord had been working on, the one involving space. The Overlord had plans to become ruler of the galaxy someday, but one step at a time. He had collected the remains of all the starships that had been lost during the Final Battle (some coming to help, others trying to run and not making it). His scientists managed to put together a crude but effective FTL drive and built some simple interstellar probes. Using star maps salaveged from alien computers as well as more conventional starmaps, the Overlord managed to send probes throughout the sector of space, examining various worlds for their potential, and working out how to maintain as tight a control over an interstellar empire as he did over his current empire. It was the last point that was keeping him stuck on Earth for the moment. The ruling council had fewer concerns about maintaining a tight grip on the people. In fact they had the opposite. They immediately turned the industrial capacity of the Domes towards the construction of colony ships, sending them to all the worlds known as well as sending ships beyond the maps that they had. The idea was to scatter the human race as far and as wide as possible so that even if the Overlord turned out to be alive, he wouldn't be able to grab the entire human race again. Not everyone left. Plenty remained and finally the poisoned Earth was being cleansed and the biosphere restored. The last of the temporal and mystical damage was fixed. Some of the old Domes were converted into biodomes to restore the older more toxic conditions as nature preserves for some of the older wildlife that couldn't survive in a cleansed Earth, or would prove dangerous to the rest of the biosphere. Some were loaded into colony ships to settle on worlds where the natural environment wasn't too far off what the blasted Earth used to be. So by the thirty first century, Earth has been restored to its old grace and beauty. As for the battle where magic went away, and the event that brought it back, my own feeling is that the Archmage bound away a lot of old powers, the bindings for which were undone in the thirty first century. Magic has steadily existed in all of the times in between, but certain great powers were bound during that period that would have otherwise threatened the Earth (and other worlds). And we now have a set of times, where dumping superheroes doesn't quite jar with the local environment. First there's the post apocalyptic environment where there's all sorts of strange beasts and races and other hazards. Then there is the dystopian future where there's a brave resistance movement struggling against an evil world dictator, and where both sides have paranormals and supertech. Comments would be welcome.

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging You're missing my point. The point is that Earth got a lot of alien tech which wouldn't have shut down due to the magic levels dropping, and yet for some reason it mysteriously did and all of the aliens on Earth went home for reasons unexplained. I could easily do a cross-dimensional adventure instead, and there are plenty of things to fill in the gap which build on the modern day CU and don't suddenly pretend the past never existed.

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging The problem is that the return of magic was less than a century ago, and you have interstellar empires that have been using the same technology for centuries. That's what I'm talking about here. The question is, if no one knows they're connected why have them connected at all? What possible benefit is there to having AW and TE in the same timeline as the CU? If it's having some alien races around, they can just be copied over across sourcebooks.

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging My fundamental complaint about the CU is the fact that it tries to be all things to all people, at different points in the timeline. The fact is that during the late twentieth century and early twenty first, Earth was having all sorts of alien contact and alien technology was ending up on Earth, much of which had been built by aliens before the great "whoops" that unleashed magic in the CU. Technology which should have continued to work just fine, along with alien powers after the big crunch. And for that matter, despite magic fading, why would all of those alien races suddenly lose interest in Earth? In my opinion, the CU timeline is badly designed. It is a deliberate attempt to splice two different genres together into a single timeline. It gets points for originality, but it loses points for internal consistancy. What point is there in having the universe of Alien Wars and Terran Empire in the CU universe if they have to jump through so many hoops and they deliberately downplay superheroic stuff in the SF universe anyway? Yes, they can borrow alien races, but the thing is that the typical alien race in a superheroic universe is designed differently than one in a SF universe anyway. In my opinion, it would have been better to create two distinct timelines, one of which was a superheroic universe and the other one was a hard SF universe. And if we ever reboot the CU to a sixth edition, I hope that DOJ goes and does that. You have a simple and straightforward SF universe in one timeline, with psionic powers added for flavor. Modern times with hidden psychics with unreliable powers to cyberpunk where the psionics are out of the closet through Alien Wars to the Terran Empire. In the other timeline, you have the wild and wacky Champions Universe, which doesn't suddenly lose all of its costumed heroes, or at the very least, it doesn't suddenly forget that superpowers ever existed or all the other little consequences of Earth having all this commerce with other worlds and other dimensions. Admittedly, there is a thousand year gap to fill, but it's pretty easy to come up with something that's interesting for campaign settings and thanks to time travel, can have impacts on the modern CU.

Re: What Champions Books Would You Like Published in the Future? Time Travel Champions Time travel crops up a lot in Marvel and DC comics (sometimes too much so), so why not a book covering time travel in the CU, including more of the major players and of course what happens when one of your characters invents a time machine.

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging Let's not go overboard here. I seriously doubt that most PRIMUS, SAT and UNTIL agents would have access to this database except on a need to know basis, and I tend to think on average they're a bit better screened than to do that. More likely would a repeat of the RL experience of the Valerie Plame incident, where a secret ID would be leaked to do damage to someone, or someone close to the secret ID in question. But getting back to the original concept of the superhero database getting hacked, there are a number of superpowered thieves and cyberkinetics who could overcome some very extraordinary defenses, especially if they were backed by supertech, and there are agencies that would gladly spend a lot of money for that sort of data, so I don't consider it that fanciful.

Re: teen champions question Then there were the early New Mutants (let's not think about what the title degenerated to *sigh*)

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging The main problem these days is that there would be a ton of people, starting with the Federal government on down who would want to know who the overpowered vigilante in spandex really is. They'd start taking high resolution photographs and then using computer processing to digitally peel back the mask and work out what they look like underneath. I agree for the casual person on the street, sure, that isn't going to be an issue, but against the government, that's a whole different story. Especially as the government knows that if a certain class of paranormal threat shows up, Captain Stupendous is going to show up. Expect one high flying helicopter overhead with a telescopic camera tracking his progress after the battle (assuming they're a flyer, people on car/foot if CS doesn't fly). Even better for them if the villain draws blood so they can get a sample.

Re: Champions Universe Plot Hole Plugging My main issue is that none of the magicians or the scientists out there have figured out the development of supertech is dependent on magical forces, or for that matter, superpowers in general. My own feeling is that there would be at least one or two people who would make the connection.

This presumes a modern day campaign. Your character gets on the Internet and does a Google under their name. They find a number of fan sites with most... interesting fan art involving a good deal amount of skin and often in company, not to mention fan fiction, some of which presumes a different sexual orientation than your character has. How does your character react and what do they do?

Re: THE ULTIMATE METAMORPH -- What Do *You* Want To See? We need a detailed section on the "Mystique" style metamorph. Exactly what set of powers and skills would it take to do a convincing impersonation of another person, down to personality and body language, and some hard and fast rules on what happens if a player character tries to pull this. Incidentally, some thought about how a telepath with either full or a specialized version of Telepathy can be used to boost this ability. There are a bunch of security systems that are used to identify people. What levels of shapeshifting can fool what layers of systems? We also need a detailed section on the "Warlock" like metamorph, one who can actually transform their internal structure (admittedly, it's little more than sticking on VPP, but handling the pool shifts, etc.).

Re: Comics are getting too steamy... I've seen parodies of the X-Men called that. It's a fairly obvious joke.