Captain Liberty

Raven's quote

Well, since she has been hanging around with the more refined Goshawk, she might say something like that.

But she is still a street kid. Using the A-bomb as a metaphor is a bit beyond her normal way of speaking. The more direct quote I used is probably still more likely to be heard from her lips...

Steel Raven

And, while I am at it, here's the writeup on Steel Raven, Black Raven with a refit after an unfortunate encounter with a PC with a mad on.

Another vampire immortal

This discussion of Lung Hung has inspired me to pass along an article I did for Rogues Gallery on the occasion of its 50th issue, a tribute to its founder, Aaron Allston.

In a later issue, Aaron pointed out that Kirigi was actually a real Marvel Universe character, which is why he never bothered doing a writeup. Since the Perrinverse currently includes elements of all the comic book universes, that fits in just fine.

Captain Social Justice

Captain Liberty's actual origin involved him being convinced not to become a radical Communist agent (in the 60s) by another of my heroes.

So while Cap might not be a villain out for filthy lucre and the degradation of society, he could certainly become an antagonist to a number of heroes as he takes justice in his own hands, attacks the symbols of capitalist oppression, redistributes the wealth, etc.

As it is, Captain Liberty is more of a Libertarian these days...

Black harlequin

Originally posted by JohnOSpencer

I'm not fond of the third adventure, but then again, Black Harlequinn is not my favorite villian.

 

John Spencer

I use an universe in which most of the comic book characters exist or have existed (all those HeroClix figures sure come in handy). So for this adventure, I intend to use Harley Quinn, with a technology infusion from Interface.

Anyone have any ideas about making the scenarion uniquely Harley's? Aside from the addition of a couple of hyenas, that is.

Why are the slubs tougher?

Speaking as the person who started this thread (but who has nothing else to do with it), I would say that FBBoy and FBGirl were important to Interface because they had to survive long enough to fire every shot out of their guns. Of course, the timeline for their actions gives them NO time to do this, but I figure I can make allowances for that somewhere along the line.

Not that I give them much chance to survive long enough, anyway.

Also, I am using the Enemies Assemble Foxbat, so he's tougher, anyway.

Originally posted by JohnOSpencer

I just found a minor(but annoying) problem in the second adventure. Why in the heck are Foxbatboy and Foxbatgirl tougher than Foxbat? Foxbatboy has 36 STUN and 18/18 defenses, Foxbatgirl has 34 STUN and 18/18 Defenses, Foxbat has 30 STUN and 19/17 defenses. What gives? Sure he is a bit harder to hit, but please. It's kinda silly.

 

Other than that rant, I really almost the whole book. I'm not fond of the third adventure, but then again, Black Harlequinn is not my favorite villian.

 

John Spencer

further on vampire progeny

Hmm, I forgot that the idea was that the child had children. That is a bit more far-fetched (yeah, like any of this is likely) but I suppose the child could have survived in the womb long enough for the parent to revive and give birth to a normal child. I suppose it is even possible that the child might somehow ingest some altered DNA in the later days of the pregnancy, though I find that really unlikely.

But the child, assuming it was relatively normal, could still pass the vampire gene on to descendants.

sterile vampires

Something not completely clear before is that people with the vampire mutation are perfectly normal in every way until they become vampires by being killed and their bodies left alone for three days. When they wake up, they have all the vampire powers (and a hell of a thirst) and are sterile. So it is entirely possible for a family to produce potential vampire after potential vampire, but the actual vampires cannot reproduce.

The instance cited before of a child of Lei Mei (thanks to Bob Greenwade for the name) already going through the gestation process when she was staked out could well be possible. Essentially, both died and both became vampires.

Spd 25

Seems excessive to me, too.

Apparently it was the style down here in a couple of gaming groups to allow folks to exceed 12 speed. They got their first action at their DEX in a phase and then a second action at the bottom of the phase (adjusted for DEX when you had more than one 12+ character). The SPD 25 guy got yet another action on the excess phase (7, I suppose).

Glad I was never in a game with those characters...

Where is Lung Hung?

Could have sworn I've seen Bob'swriteup. Unfortunately, if it was sent to me in the time period I am thinking about, that was when I was on AOL, and all those files are lost (which is one reason I am not on AOL any more). Lemme look...

Aha, found a copy of the background Bob G. did in a copy of an email I saved. Unfortunately, no skills attached, but that's not really necessary.

It's attached.

Steve

The true sex of Lung Hung

Exactly right. Lung Hung is a woman. She didn't have any name besides Lung Hung when I wrote up the character, and Paul Moslander never had another name for her, either. Bob Greenwade came up with a very nice one.

Bob, didn't you put your Lung Hung writeup into RG? Do you not have that copy? I can look through mine if you like.

These mutant vampires become sterile when they turn into vampires (it balances the immortality of the character), by the way, so thre shouldn't be any children unless they're adopted.

Coming up are a couple of never professionally printed members, Lupus and Dreamer, and Steel Raven - what happened to Black Raven after a PC cut one of her wings off.

VOICE = Post-Nazi?

Not really. Graf von Grausom was a holdover Nazi superman project and Irredencia was fixed up by an Italian Fascist secret lab, but that's about it. Black Raven was a result of Hiroshima, but that's just a WWII connection.

VOICE's earliest incarnation was created back when I was a comic fan in the 60s. Lung Hung, on the other hand, is the creation of a friend of mine, Paul Moslander, who wrote a different series of stories in early fanzines of the 60s. Graf von Grausom's backstory, in fact, is a makeover of another series of his, called Der Obermann. Very creative person, Paul, and I have hopes that he will finally start writing for sale, now that he is retired.

Speed 12!

Yep, though I find that I'm something of a piker where Speed comes from. The group I play with here in Southern California (LH was developed with my playing group in NorCal) has in their history characters with SPD 25 (not many, but at least one)!

In our Northern California group, one of the marks of honor was how many of Lung Hung's phases one could stand up to him. Actually, a couple of characters had no particular problem, but there was one time when another GM was using the character and he popped out of a manhole, raced to the pickup truck my poor Spd 5 cowboy was driving, yanked him out of the truck, knocked him out, and moved on before the cowboy even had a phase!

LH certainly needs more skills. When dealing with a master villain of that type, we more or less assumed if he needed the skill he had it, why worry about points. But Bob Greenwade did a very nice writeup for Lung Hung that had a lot of skills. Perhaps he will share.

I've been asked to start a thread based around my old scenario, VOICE of Doom. The idea is to discuss current operations, what has happened in my old campaigns, what ideas others have had about the organization since the publication of the scenario, etc.

This is all done knowing that Hero Games still has all rights to the VOICE of Doom scenario and its inhabitants and anything put on this list could end up in a Hero product, even there there is no current intent to use VOICE in the 5th Edition Champions Universe.

I am going to start things off by posting Lung Hung as the Draconic one was used in our actual campaigns. The Master was toned down for the scenario pack.

This is a writeup from 1993, so it isn't up to 5th Edition specs.

One more villain

And let us not forget that Interface is in Champions Battlegrounds ...

Starting points

My most current campaign is one I am converting from a Silver Age Sentinels campaign set in my usual Champions universe. I dislike characters with lots of disads, so I am starting them at 300 points, plus 50 in Disads, plus 50 points in Experience, since that's about what their SAS characters had received (I have a different way of doing SAS experience).

At one time, though, I started people off with 0 points and allowed them to take 50 points in disads. I then took these normal characters and abducted them with UFOs who gave them 100 points of powers and 100 points of disads to go with the powers.

It made for a very interesting low-power campaign. One of the players just spent his 100 points on 10 points of Speed, so he had a "normal" who moved on every segment...

For those who would like to see a different take on a Champions universe, check out my website at http://www.perrinworlds.com, and look for the Perrinverse in the table of contents. My universe is very much 4th edition Champions, the DC and Marvel Universes as inspired by Aaron Allston, and elements of 5th Edition slowly creeping in.

urls now fixed

Thanks SCUBA, that fixed it.

non-working links

Yeah, they didn't work for me from this list. They work fine if I use them from the email that Dennis sent me.

Copy them and paste them into your browser and see how that works.

I saw in another thread that several people here still remember the Coriolis Effect scenario that was published by the original Hero Games about 20 years ago. Little frightening, isn't it?

In case you didn't know, the adventures of Doctor Arcane, the Black Enchantress, and others are published by the CE author, Dennis Mallonee. You can find old Doctor Arcane stories on his website.

Here's the urls directly from Dennis himself.

The Tales of the Arcane website is at http://arcane.heroicpub.com.

Donnah Hannah (Doctor Arcane's daughter) also makes regular guest appearances on the Flare website at http://flare.heroicpub.com.

The first issues of the new comic books are tentatively scheduled for release in the latter half of 2004. There are sneak previews available to registered users of the Heroic Publishing website: http://www.heroicpub.com.

I am even writing some of the stories coming up in the new comics (just as I wrote the old Marksman series for the same publisher) though I am not doing the Doctor Arcane stories.

Resource Pack

The Resource Pack IS the GM Screen, and a few other things like character sheets, the aforementioned maps, and so forth. The maps are nice, but the futuristic and medieval maps by their very nature are not always useful as superhero maps, though they do serve for some functions - and lor knows there are plenty of times that superheroes get caught in futuristic or medieval situations.

Still more money-makers

How about selling protection to the Organized Crime mobs? Be a shame if a superfight tore up that drug warehouse...

I was in a campaign like this for a couple of episodes. The GM thought it was a neat idea but ended up not really getting that excited about it. The Crime Boss running the operation had poisoned everyone. Only he had the antidote.

Last Response

Thank you, Keith. I thought the detail on those maps bespoke at least a wish to make them full size. Sorry it didn't happen.

The maps in Different Worlds were commissioned by the editor of Different Worlds. The only Hero Games connection was the use of the same artist who did the previous maps for Hero. I never said that Hero did those maps. I just wish Hero would DO similar maps.

The only problem I have with Interface, which I said was a MINOR disappointment (and every product has those) was that the book went out of its way to showcase established villains in the Champions Universe, then used a "name in the crowd" as the master villain. Doesn't make him a bad villain. In fact, I intend to use him pretty much as is.

I'd also like to reiterate that I found the book, for what it is, a very good example of a scenario book. I definitely will get use out of it.

So he was mentioned

I sit corrected. Interface was mentioned once, by name, with no information in both Millenium City and Champions Universe. Given that I have read both books a half dozen times each, at least, the mention is obviously not terribly prominent. It is also interesting that everyone else mentioned in the same paragraphs are well known. Perhaps Battlegrounds should have mentioned these previous mentions (or, more likely, Steve and Darren realized that they had a brand new supervillain coming up in Battlegrounds so they shoehorned the mentions of Interface into the other books to "pave the way.").

In any case, one mention in each book is hardly "throughout."

I believe the maps were published in Different Worlds magazine. Lamentably they were in a very popular issue so I never got a chance to glom onto them, even though I worked at Chaosium (DW's publisher) at the time.

The maps were done by the same artist who did the Rosie's Diner map, a longtime Hero hanger-on (I believe he was George MacDonald's roommate at one time) who died a tragically short time after the maps were made. His name is not coming to me at the moment.

I have one major disappointment with this book, but it's based on an unrealistic hope and I'll deal with the disappointment below.

In general, I think it is a very good basis for a mini-campaign and I intend to use it as such. Adapting it to my own universe is taking a little work, but the result will, I think, be worth it.

One lesser disappointment is the identity of the master villain. I think it might have been more effective if the master villain was one of the established villains of the universe.

After all, the whole book consists of interactions with many of the major players in the Champions Universe. It's a major buildup, and all of a sudden you are facing Interface, whom no one has ever heard of. Given that, I am not sure who would have been a good master villain in this situation. Perhaps Mechanon would be the most appropriate.

But this is a small disappointment.

The major disappointment to me was that I was hoping that the book would, in fact, consist of real battlegrounds. Playing-sized maps of the areas fought in, sort of like the maps supplied in the HeroClix Starter Sets. Those maps are very useful and I have used most of them in the last few months.

Many many years ago Hero had a set of hex maps of interesting locales, on the same scale as the street corner map still offered in the Champions GM Screen package. A new package of skyscrapers, hotels, warehouses, villains bases, banks, military bases, and the like would be very useful indeed and I hope someone picks up on this idea and does such a package. I suppose a generic Hero System Maps package would be all right, but I'd like a strictly Champions-oriented version, as I'm sure others would.

Another Take on the Champions

I don't use the Champions Universe as presented. I already had an investment in the Perrinverse (see my website, URL below) which is based both on the 4th Edition Champions Universe and the DC and Marvel Universes. And don't think I'm not making a lot of use of the HeroClix figures...

I've kept the Champions in New York and made them an amalgam of the current and 4th edition versions. I also changed Nighthawk to Knighthawk, but see my other posting. Right now, my stories are taking place in St. Louis, with the Gatekeepers, so the Champions are just a footnote. Their power level is fairly high, though, and they are effectively filling the Avengers slot, since the original Avengers (or at least the team at the time) were slaughtered back in the 80s. I really should use them, perhaps in my telling of the Champions Battlegrounds story (but see my other post).