SKJAM!

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Josephine Korngeld was a vigilante witch, using her spells to punish wicked men by transforming them into innocent little girls. At first, she only did this to the worst of the worst (who weren't already being punished by the legal system), but as time went by, her threshold of what made a man "wicked" dropped considerably, until she started transforming men for just making sexist comments in public. This abuse of her powers was karmically repaid when she attempted to transform a Mafia don who'd gotten himself DEMON connections and powerful protective charms. The spell bounced back at Josephine. Now, most of her mystic power is taken up trying to suppress the transformation. But whenever Jennifer is overstressed or exposed to the full moon, she becomes the Were-Man, a hairy brute who reflects her negative stereotypes of the male human, and possesses great strength. New Team: The Intolerant: Six members. This team only worked together once. A couple of powerful energy being aliens decided to have an experiment to determine whether hate or love was the more powerful emotion. Each alien put together a team to represent that emotion, and the Intolerant are all somehow related to hate. (They hate something or person or group, or have hate-based powers, or just have hateful personalities.) While the Intolerant were individually more powerful than the heroes of the Love team, their negative emotions caused them to have poor teamwork, usually conflicting with each other over the slightest things, while the Love team could at least stand each other. After losing, the Intolerant vowed never to work together again, but since the whole event was recorded and leaked to the internet, no one will let them forget it. Who are these six?

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Tk'oolrin is the ship's communications officer he/she/it (depending on the point in its reproductive cycle it's in this week) is a living Universal Translator, able to grow the organs necessary to understand and "speak" any sentient being's language. Tk'oolrin is also pretty good on the cultural side, but has a tendency towards mood swings whenever the "cycle" is about to change. New group: The Winter Wardens: Four heroes who only operate in cold weather, switching hemispheres on the equinox dates. Naturally, they have winter-related powers or themes.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Ra-One, a Diwali film for the whole family. An Indian film with large parts in London. Base storyline: Dweebish video game developer tries to reconnect with his eyerolling son by creating the ultimate undefeatable villain for his next game, the titular Ra-One. (Connected in story to the demonic figure Ravaan.) However, a rogue AI and some virtual reality technobabble later, Ra-One escapes into the real world, determined to kill his archnemesis "Lucifer" (the kid's screen name.) Fortunately, there is a hero in the game too, G-One (sounds like "life" in Tamil.) It's an uneasy blend of Disney live-action comedy and action/horror, with some pure Bollywood moments (everybody dance!) Enjoyable but ultimately not a great film. I think I was the only non-Indian-descended person in the theater.

Re: Fill My Champions Universe Junior League Team Roster For Me Long-lost *grand*daughter, but okay.

Re: Fill My Champions Universe Junior League Team Roster For Me Elegant Fist: Sally Vo, granddaughter of Furious Fist by way of one of his early flings--he never knew about his daughter until after Sally was born, but since Sally has a natural gift for the martial arts, he's acknowledged her as part of his family and trainee in his school of kung fu. She's a highly-trained normal, but has been working on focusing her internal energies for use in superhuman martial maneuvers.

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Jamie Gunn is Blue Ribbon, a tall and well-muscled lad who wears stompy boots and a kilt in his clan's plaid...and nothing else visible. Good thing he's bullet-resistant! As for why he's called Blue Ribbon, "And ye have tae ask, ye'll naiver ken."

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! The White Zero is secretly Vinnie Lodge, a sanitation engineer for the Campaign City Waste Disposal Department. Exposure to an alien artifact (a black rectangle) that someone had carelessly tossed in the trash gave him near super-human reflexes and endurance as well as an ability to connect to the Cosmic All and gain useful knowledge...sometimes. Unfortunately, it didn't give him a good sense of costume design, and the press dubbed him White Zero after the pale circle on his chest.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Genie is the Harem member who actually dresses like most people's idea of a harem girl. Her birth name is unknown, though her appearance is vaguely Middle-Eastern. She's very quiet, and seems to be a low-level reality warper, able to make temporary changes in people, objects and the environment within approximately two meters of herself. She almost never acts in combat unless given specific directions or Henry is in direct danger of being injured.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! I'm going to say "normal" breeds only, with unicorns and pegasi being mutations. (A "power" that can be simulated by wearing a helmet is indeed a bit lame.) They do have access to their homeworld's technology (which is at Champions Earth level despite the "no opposable thumb" thing.)

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! "Actually, Zen Scorpion wasn't all that bad a name. It's just that with Zen Team retiring all those years ago, it didn't have the resonance once I got out of prison. "Advances in technology made it possible to alter the look of my armor, and enhance its protective qualities even further. Plus, I no longer rely on only scorpion venom, but can make any sort of poison I desire with my onboard synthesizer. (I do, however, stick to ones I've made myself immune to. I'm not stupid.) I'm used to reinventing myself, so becoming Deathsting was right up my alley. I didn't do half badly with my consultant, but I understand some of the others want to kill him, and it's no skin off my nose." New team: 6 members. Background: On a parallel Earth, apes did not evolve, and the primary sentient races are variations on equines. Some horses have superpowers that they use for good or ill, and these six are definitely bad horses. But their limitations made them less successful than they liked on their homeworld, so they've hopped the dimensional express to Champions Earth to try their luck. Beware the One-Trick Ponies! Details: Each of the horses has *one* superpower, which is fairly limited. For example, not general super-strength, but "super strength, only to lift things." Thus, they rely heavily on trained teamwork to pull off their crimes. (All horse breeds are okay, not just actual ponies.)

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Melinda Cackleberry grew up in a dreary suburb of Manchester, with two loving but deadly dull parents and depressingly normal neighbors. What she craved was to be special and magical, to get the notice that there had been some dreadful mistake and she was off to wizard school or turning into a werewolf (the sexy kind) or the scion of a god. No such luck. Well, then, Melinda decided that she'd have to make her own specialness, just as soon as she got off to university. She was very disappointed to learn that her college was just as normal as her home life, and that the Witches' Society she joined up with was just a eco-friendly religious group with feminist overtones. So she turned to independent research. It took a while, but eventually she had the bad luck to actually find a way to get real magical power. All it would cost her was being someone else....So Melinda became the Bad Witch{/B]. Melinda looks like the old fashioned stereotype of the wicked witch, black robes, pointed hat, hooked nose with warts, scraggly hair and misshapen teeth. She has a shrieking, cackling tone to her voice. Melinda has a fair selection of hexes, curses, maledictions and poisons she can inflict on others, but she is unable to produce any "positive" results for others. Her usual transportation is a broom, but Bad Witch can use any similarly-shaped object to fly with. Her black cat familiar is called Gobbleguts, and may or may not be capable of eating a human whole. Bad Witch is repelled by all things holy, though she claims this is merely a psychological problem she will eventually learn to control. eta: whoops, somehow missed an entire page!

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Statuesque blonde Greta Tyvarsdottir wears something very close to, but not quite, a Playboy Bunny costume in her heroic identity as Thunder Rabbit. this leads many people who don't know her personally to think that she's an exhibitionist, or doing this to get laid. In reality, the reason she's a superhero at all is so that she can use her ki-enhanced martial arts ability to maim people semi-legally. She especially likes using her "Thunder Kick" to break criminals' ribcages.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? "Sword of Sherwood Forest" with Richard Greene as Robin Hood (reprising his role from the TV series) and Peter Cushing as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Amusingly, at one point the Sheriff offers a Merry Man the choice of a free pardon if he betrays the outlaws' location, or being crossbow shot. (He also brings up the outlaw's wife and child.) When the Merry Man breaks and gives the information, the Sheriff has him killed anyway, then issues a postmortem pardon. (At least he didn't blow up a whole planet that time.)

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! The Pog-Meister Remember pogs? No? Well, that isn't exactly a surprise. They came and went in a year or two. But while they were hot, Mark Mance was a master of the games that used pogs. Being a petty criminal as well, Mark came up with the idea of becoming a pog-themed supervillain. He commissioned a gadgeteer to create a variety of specialized combat pogs, and robbed a bank to pay the genius off. Unfortunately for him, Mark was arrested after he made the payment, but before he took delivery of the costume and weapons. He just recently got out of prison, and since his only asset was his never-used gimmicks, he bowed to the inevitable and became the Pog-Meister. His only consolation is that he's not, as far as he's concerned, the lamest member of the team.

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! The Resistance was kind of desperate for members, so perhaps they were a bit hasty in taking on "Sarkon." She claimed to be a human raised by a rogue copy of Mechanon to become the peak of human physical development, able to smash through metal plating with her bare hands. This may or may not have been true, but once in the group Sarkon has been mostly useful. Except for that slight problem she has distinguishing allied machines from enemy ones in the thick of combat. They don't call her the Robot Ripper for nothing. Firefox just hopes he can keep her pointed in the right direction. New team: The Young Radicals. Six heroes, members of the counterculture of the late 1960s and themed around that. They broke up in the 1970s due to drugs, the draft and personal issues, but for a few bright shining years, the Young Radicals were the hope of the Baby Boomer generation.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Hmm, you're aware that a brother and sister pair are automatically fraternal twins, not identical twins, right? Terra Incognita has the mystic ability to banish people and things to other dimensions temporarily; usually an hour though if she pushes it she can force them away for up to twenty-four Earth hours. The dimensions accessed are random so far as she knows, but are always one the victim has never been to before. Terra also has a small variety of non-combat travel-related spell. Her past is a bit of a mystery even to her--she may originally come from the Undiscovered Country from whose bourn no traveler returns....

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Winchester and Colchester Sandive, Split and Merge used their powers for insider trading and other white-collar crimes until their mutant status was exposed and people finally connected the dots. Now they've turned to supervillainy. Split has the ability to create duplicates of himself , up to ten at a time, though the more he creates, the shorter the time they can last. Merge is able to take Split's duplicates into his own body, making him stronger, faster and more durable, as well as being able to share the duplicate's memories.

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Corey Malden had a rough early life, growing up in poverty with overbearing parents who verbally abused him for the slightest offense. When he discovered his mutant powers, Corey ran away from home and tried to become a supervillain. But some other jerkwad was robbing the bank in front of him! Corey donned the mask he'd intended to do his own robbery in and smacked Ogre around some. There was a round of applause as he defeated the infamous brick; and Corey found that he liked it. He liked it even better when the local superteam sponsored him for a superschool, where he learned to use his powers over wind and cold much more efficiently. Now he's Windchill, and don't you forget it! Windchill has ego issues and does not react at all well to criticism.

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Storm Giant, birth name Tintinabul, is from an alternate universe where what we call giants are called "humans." At a mere thirty meters tall, Tintinabul was considered a midget and one day attached a dimensional "icebreaker" to the prow of his cloud castleship. It brought him to Champions Earth, where his great size and weather control powers were much appreciated. His castleship, Dunranin, is currently parked near Rochester, Minnesota as their Metahuman Medical Research center is a prime target for villains that the League of Giants North are primed to battle. Dunranin is able to accomodate giants of up to sixty meters in height comfortably. To the untrained eye, it looks like a huge cloud. New team: The Untouchables. Five members, all of whom have some sort of power or ability that can be represented by "Desolid." Their primary mission is fighting organized crime and are known for their high ethical standards.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Oberon Shadwell is Overshadow, who has the ability to steal other people's size and mass and add it to his own. In other words, as he gets bigger and stronger, the target gets smaller and weaker. He specializes in fighting much smaller opponents, but is quite capable of holding his own against other giants.

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Johan Weiss, the Aryan (see Allies) was never a supervillain as such. But his social and political views ensured that he would be treated as one, despite his many heroic deeds. So it's not too surprising that Johan eventually called it quits. If the world didn't want him, the Aryan would find somewhere that did. After a short press conference announcing his retirement, no one has ever seen the Aryan again. This did not sit well with the South American Nazi cabal that had created the Aryan (disappointed though they were by the final product.) They'd counted on Johan snapping the other way and becoming a world-conquering supervillain as they'd originally planned. Good thing they had, um, genetic samples. The Nazi cabal prevailed upon the villainess Poinsettia to be the mother. The cabal hoped to correct the "errors" they'd made in educating the Aryan, but did not realize they'd been infiltrated by an agent of the Brazilian government. She was able to wangle herself into being chosen as young Karl Weiss' nanny. Nana managed to slowly subvert the brainwashing the cabal was putting Karl through by introducing him to other points of view and new information. Plus by this time the Internet had come into play, and young Karl quickly learned how to spoof the old men's monitoring. The moment he saw an opening, Karl bolted from the Nazi cabal's control and headed to the United States of America, where he became a hero under the codename Ritter. Ritter is a physically perfect specimen of Aryan manhood, with the ability to learn any skill much faster than normal humans. Due to his upbringing, he's mostly got combat skills. In his spare time, Karl searches for clues to the location of the father he's never known.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Shadowjack's surgical assistant and bill collector is Nurse No. She appears to be a preadolescent girl with curiously muted emotional responses. Nurse No is no better than competent at nursing tasks (think recent nursing school graduate) but is brilliant at firearms and thrown weapons combat. She's actually a cyborg with near superhuman reflexes and much stronger than she looks. Thus she can and will use guns far larger than she appears to be able to lift. While Nurse No is skilled enough to disarm or cripple, and usually does that, she will kill without hesitation if she deems it necessary. No one knows her true background, but it's assumed Shadowjack either created her or fixed Nurse No after she was abandoned by a previous owner. (Merging Pinoko of "Blackjack" and Herietta of "Gunslinger Girls.")

Re: Champions Universe Groups In Japan. The lack of cash remark suggests that you won't be investing in research materials on actual Japan either, which worries me.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Mack Agnew was known as the Nattering Nabob when he did the costumed villain thing. While the ability to induce any "negative" emotion by simply talking to the target had its uses, it just wasn't master criminal material. He's somewhat happier with the Nixon gang.

Re: Therietical "Champions of the Rising Son", what would you want to see? Zen Team! Huzzah! While not entirely based on manga/anime, I'd certainly expect Japanese supertypes to be influenced by them in the same way that US supers in the Champions universe are clearly influenced by American superhero comics. I too would be disappointed if the Japanese heroes were just American-style superheroes with odd names for flavor. Another approach that might be useful is to look at the issues that came up in Japan in various recent decades, and base the supers of that era on those concerns and happenings. For example, in the Fifties and Sixties, Japanese supers probably actively avoided being seen as chummy with the government or military because everyone remembered what happened in the recent past.