Duke Bushido

Valid points, but I take the oppoaite tack:
 
Villains who have been captured and processed no longer have a Secret ID, at least not most of them.   It would be difficult to run the fingerprints of Plasmus, for example.  Characters whoe develop physical characteristics that cant be concealed- well, they aren't going to easily handle Secret IDs, either.  As an example, Rook (former player's character now an NPC in the youth group's universe) is a brick who, like many bricks, developed immense stature and musculature. She is eight feet tall and wider across the shoulders than most doors and is seventy-two years old.  She couldn't maintain a secret ID if she wanted to.
 
Still, those sort of chracters are a minority of characters (at least, those who aren't bricks, who seem to receive physical grotesquery at a disproportionately high rate).
 
But again: the majority of villains who get even a little bit through processing are never going to have a points-worthy secret ID without completely changing their villainous ID, and in forty-four years of Champions history, I don't believe I have stumbled across one of those in any official product.
 
Still,like LL, I have occasionally enjoyed letting the villain's  secret ID assist the PCs on a case- in one case, I had a villain's secret ID who became a regular go-to Contact with the PCs-- to the point of eliminating four of his alter-ego's competitors, celebrating each victory with the heroes, ingratiating himself into their lives until they finally figured him out (caught him rifling through some,of their files on other "competitors" and after trying to figure out what they had in common, the high-tech HERO recognized the architecture of some spyware left behind in their systems--
 
The players were genuinely surprised, and genuinely felt taken in, and they somehow managed to both be furious and hurt by it as well as love it as a plot twist that they had fallen to, hard.
 
They were _thrilled_ when they finally took him down: it was very personal for every one of them. 
 
unfortunately, it also cemented in their minds that they should never reveal their own secret IDs, even to each other (which was always a problem even before that camoaign, and this made it worse), so we have an entire battery of various Bat Signals in use....
 
 
eh...
 
win some; lose some, I suppose.

Yes, old school D&D, where characters' lives were nasty, brutish, and short. 
 
The way it should be. 

Valid points, but I take the oppoaite tack:
 
Villains who have been captured and processed no longer have a Secret ID, at least not most of them.   It would be difficult to run the fingerprints of Plasmus, for example.  Characters whoe develop physical characteristics that cant be concealed- well, they aren't going to easily handle Secret IDs, either.  As an example, Rook (former player's character now an NPC in the youth group's universe) is a brick who, like many bricks, developed immense stature and musculature. She is eight feet tall and wider across the shoulders than most doors and is seventy-two years old.  She couldn't maintain a secret ID if she wanted to.
 
Still, those sort of chracters are a minority of characters (at least, those who aren't bricks, who seem to receive physical grotesquery at a disproportionately high rate).
 
But again: the majority of villains who get even a little bit through processing are never going to have a points-worthy secret ID without completely changing their villainous ID, and in forty-four years of Champions history, I don't believe I have stumbled across one of those in any official product.
 
Still,like LL, I have occasionally enjoyed letting the villain's  secret ID assist the PCs on a case- in one case, I had a villain's secret ID who became a regular go-to Contact with the PCs-- to the point of eliminating four of his alter-ego's competitors, celebrating each victory with the heroes, ingratiating himself into their lives until they finally figured him out (caught him rifling through some,of their files on other "competitors" and after trying to figure out what they had in common, the high-tech HERO recognized the architecture of some spyware left behind in their systems--
 
The players were genuinely surprised, and genuinely felt taken in, and they somehow managed to both be furious and hurt by it as well as love it as a plot twist that they had fallen to, hard.
 
They were _thrilled_ when they finally took him down: it was very personal for every one of them. 
 
unfortunately, it also cemented in their minds that they should never reveal their own secret IDs, even to each other (which was always a problem even before that camoaign, and this made it worse), so we have an entire battery of various Bat Signals in use....
 
 
eh...
 
win some; lose some, I suppose.

Valid points, but I take the oppoaite tack:
 
Villains who have been captured and processed no longer have a Secret ID, at least not most of them.   It would be difficult to run the fingerprints of Plasmus, for example.  Characters whoe develop physical characteristics that cant be concealed- well, they aren't going to easily handle Secret IDs, either.  As an example, Rook (former player's character now an NPC in the youth group's universe) is a brick who, like many bricks, developed immense stature and musculature. She is eight feet tall and wider across the shoulders than most doors and is seventy-two years old.  She couldn't maintain a secret ID if she wanted to.
 
Still, those sort of chracters are a minority of characters (at least, those who aren't bricks, who seem to receive physical grotesquery at a disproportionately high rate).
 
But again: the majority of villains who get even a little bit through processing are never going to have a points-worthy secret ID without completely changing their villainous ID, and in forty-four years of Champions history, I don't believe I have stumbled across one of those in any official product.
 
Still,like LL, I have occasionally enjoyed letting the villain's  secret ID assist the PCs on a case- in one case, I had a villain's secret ID who became a regular go-to Contact with the PCs-- to the point of eliminating four of his alter-ego's competitors, celebrating each victory with the heroes, ingratiating himself into their lives until they finally figured him out (caught him rifling through some,of their files on other "competitors" and after trying to figure out what they had in common, the high-tech HERO recognized the architecture of some spyware left behind in their systems--
 
The players were genuinely surprised, and genuinely felt taken in, and they somehow managed to both be furious and hurt by it as well as love it as a plot twist that they had fallen to, hard.
 
They were _thrilled_ when they finally took him down: it was very personal for every one of them. 
 
unfortunately, it also cemented in their minds that they should never reveal their own secret IDs, even to each other (which was always a problem even before that camoaign, and this made it worse), so we have an entire battery of various Bat Signals in use....
 
 
eh...
 
win some; lose some, I suppose.

Oh, _thank you_!
 
For the first time _ever_, those wierd tiny skulls make sense!
 
 

Oh, _thank you_!
 
For the first time _ever_, those wierd tiny skulls make sense!
 
 

Try having parents who grew up during the Great Depression. You can't get sympathy for squat.

I remember years ago, I was helping another forumite who wanted to run a game artifact-hunting scenario inspired by The Maltese Falcon, brainstorm the Champions villains who would fit the role of the antagonists to the PCs. He wanted to use Cateran as the analogue to Brigid O'Shaughnessy. He also wanted an art expert villain as the Joel Cairo analogue, so I suggested Jos "Tartarus" Terhune. We rounded out the cast with Slun for Sidney Greenstreet's Gutman, and Pulsar as Gutman's overconfident gunsel Wilmer.

CLOWN as written are exactly those jerks we've all had run-ins with who, when called out on their jerkitude, deflect responsibility with "It was just a joke!" regardless of any harm it may have caused. 
 
As a wise man once said...
 
From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

This points up a problem I'm starting to have with suspension of disbelief around superheroes.  Why would someone with powers choose to use them to be annoying at best or just plain evil?  (Actually, the same people who IRL try to get away with "It was just a prank!" would probably be the ones who would, I dunno, accidentally cause widespread collateral damage and claim it was a joke.)
 
Let me emphasize that I love superheroes, love playing them, love the MCU movies and quite enjoyed the DC ones. 
 
I can still turn that part of my brain off, but afterwards, or in places like this thread, I have to remind myself: buy the premise, buy the bit, as Johnny Carson used to say. 
 
In the tragically short Champions game I ran for some friends in 2018 or so, I think I started failing to buy the premise.  And while my players had all seen and loved the MCU films, they didn't really want to play superheroes. 
 
Thread tax: one of my best friends, my first Champions GM, and the best GM I know, had a slight arms race tendency, and a bigger annoying villain tendency.  He'd been playing Champions longer and is generally smarter than me.  (I'm certainly not dumb, but he's got me beat by at least 20 IQ points.)  His villains were always tougher and more coordinated, and just when I was about to have them down (one on one games usually, or one on two with his brother sometimes), one of them would scoop up his teammates and teleport out.  On the few occasions they did make it to capture, they'd escape from custody sometime after. 
 
The most annoying one, though, was the Silver Paladin.  Dumb as a box of rocks, he thought the heroes were villains and vice versa.  His catch phrases were a singsong  "Hey hee hee HO HO!" and, to the heroes, "Halt, villain!" in the most annoyingly heroic voice you can think of.  (Anyone on the Mutants and Masterminds forums back in the early 2000's would probably recognize him; Geoff used to post there a lot.)
 
 

What you have here is a GM call.
 
This is the same problem you run into with Drain, suppress, and a few other things:
 
Mechanics and special effects in Champions / HERO are intentionally separated.  They are also used to define each other.
 
That makes sense: you can't use a word to define itself; you have to use other words.  These things (mechanics and SFX) are purposely split apart here, so there will never be a problem.
 
 
Right up until Drain: Flight can remove the ability to fly from everyone in the room.  You know:  _everyone_.  The guy with the natural alien ability to fly.  The guy with the rocket pack.  The guy with the wings.  The guy that rides the ley lines across ancient trails of mana.  The alien that fills his float bladders with hydrogen.
 
They _all_ lose their flight because the _mechanic_ says so.
 
So I now have the power to destroy rocket packs, empty alien float bladders, rip wings off of falcon men, etc.  
 
And now I have to pick a special effect.  Well, my character is an alien parasite that has the ability to psychicaly drain away the metabolic functions that result in  flight energy.   Therefore, my target cannot provide chemical or photovoltaic energy to the cells that power his alien flight ability-
 
I mean wings
I mean gas bladders
I mean telekinetic self-lifting
I mean gravity manip-
 
Uh, magic ley line- no; jetpacks!  Definitely a parastic ability to destroy the metabolic process by which you control your rocket boots and-  crap!  Glider capes, too!
 
Wait!  What edition is this?  Is this an edition where I can take out swinglines with this, too?  And traceless ninja movement?  And keep the Flash from running up walls?
 
 
 
Tradition here is to "solve" this sort of conversation by suggesting some different SFX that can be better-stretched over the problem.  In this case gravity control, massive telekinetic powers. "Freakin' _magic_, Dude--!"
 
Yeah, well....  I don't want gravity control or ancient wizardry.  I want to be an alien parasite.
 
 
And the rules say I can.  I can be an alien parasite, and I can have Drain: Flight, and it can work metabolically, even against rocket boots and Bat grappling cannons, because the rules say special effects do not matter, really, so long as everyone is sort of cool with it, and  it is detectable by some number of senses (I think 2 or 3, depending on edition).
 
I picked Drain to highlight this because this is where it tends to be the most obvious: the unregulated clash of SFX, I mean.
 
It is a well-known, under-discussed problem, and it is created specifically by "build anything you want."  If what you want is kind of mismatched.....  Well, them's the breaks!
 
I don't remember if it was Champs I or Champs II,  but there have been attempts to solve the problem since 2e.  One of those supplements addressed the problem by offering alternative forms of Adjustment powers, such as replacing "Drain: Energy Blast" with "Drain: Firepowers."  
 
Alas, there wasn't too terribly much interest at least not in the growing shadow of the almost-immediately-after released 3e, which I do not recall having _any_ such options or discussion, but I never played 3e.,,I have only read it a couple of times, and even my most recent memories are stored in a very old brain. 
 
I know it wasn't discussed in 4e, at least not the core rules, and not 4e's Western HERO (while a lot of folks used DI or JI or even Dark Champions as their template for Heroic games, we used 2e Champions and guidance from 4e Western HERO).  Possibly Fantasy HERO, where it wouod have been ideal for maybe eighty-million spells, but I have only read it a coyple of times, and I do not remember if it was in there.
 
In fact, I don't think it was addressed again until Steve brought out a variant of the idea as an optional rule for one of his editions.  I could very well be wrong (I own and have never read both of the 4e HERO System Almanacs, for example.  There are some things I haven't read- I hope to live long enough).
 
Which brings us back to the beginning: this is squarely into GM territory.
 
As others have pointed out, there is not mechanical interaction between the two powers you mention.
 
_however_, if you feel that the special effects _should_ cause an interaction of some sort, or if your player _wants_ (or even believes) there should be an interaction, then get together with that player, and ultimately the whole group, as you are potentially setting a precedent that can have long-lasting effects in your games now and going forward into other ones.
 
If you see an interaction--  for example: "I cast detect magic."
 
This character _is_ a magic.  I will definitely detect them with this spell.  I might not detect a character; I might just say "yep.  That illusion right there? Definitely magic."
 
If the character _is_ an illusion and someone casts "dispell illusion," what happens?  Does the character become invisible?  Become a single flicker of magical energy?  Take STUN damage?  Fall unconscious?  Suffer BODY damage?  Just disappear for a while?
 
Are you Dispelling the character's total points, or just their BODY score?
 
Yes, that is technically a function of Drain: BODY, but if you allowed a spell that targets a special effect (in this case, "Magic," then you and your players have to be prepared for this spell to affect anything with the SFX of "Magic."
 
 
Anyway, I am dictating this to my copilot, who is looking a bit annoyed, so I guess I am done for now.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

You still have to be careful running a character like that, to keep his appearances from getting too frequent, or too long, or too aggravating. I've sometimes seen the fun the GM was having leaving the fun the player was having behind.

Well, there is still some good to be said for Thanos, ans even for Doctor Destroyer, really.
 
They are not CLOWN.
 
 

I can only answer for me, and, given the lateness of the hour and all the drawbacks inherent to my mode of access to this site, I am reasonably certain that I can't do proper justice to the honest explanation I will try to make.
 
Foremost, however, I wish to acknowledge that the author did something I never did: he got a product officially licensed and published by HERO Games (sort of; there was the ICE thing) and during what most fans remeber as the Golden Era of Champions.  Well done, and my hat is off to you.
 
I also want to say that if you are the author, it is vitally important to me that you understand I am not mad or disrespectful at or of _you_.  Seriously: you have an official product to your name.  HERO authors is a pretty small group, and you managed to get into it.  I do not have any unkind thoughts _for you_.  If you thought othwise, I want to apologize here, publically:
 
I am sorry-  really, truly, _deeply_ sorry that you wrote CLOWN.  I strive every day to forgive you.  One day, I am sure I almost will.
 
So to start......
 
Well, they are clowns.  Honestly, what else do you want?  What else do you _need_?!  According to the American Pychological Society, more people are uncomfortable around clowns that there are people who fear dogs.  Let's make our main "villains" something that is going to immediately jade people into disliking the entire concept and having no interest in deeper pursuing the workings of these characters.
 
Second off, they aren't super-powered.  They can have gadgets and gizmos, but at the end of the day, they can't take even the slightest bit of "rough handling."
 
They aren't villains because they aren't generally engaging in any sort of plot to defraud, steal, damage, or harm anything or anyone other than whatever hero or group is this week's infatuation.  Careless fallout of slapstick gags can have accidental spill over into civilian casualties, or tie the heroes up so that they aren't available for some crisis or other, but they aren't likely to do more than immobilize a hero for a bit.
 
Nothing you can do about it, again, because they are just normals.
 
Let's see....  Irritating and vulnerable to accidental death....  So if I say "The Gilt Complex was the greatest Champions Adventure ever written!" I would-- quite rightfully-- get slapped so many times my grandkids would be born nauseous. Agreed?
 
So why is it okay to cover them in greasepaint and try it again?  We can say "oh but" this and "oh but" that, but at the end of the day, they are characters who are insanely easy to kill (believe me!  I _know_!) who have decided to dedicate their themselves to making you want to do that very thing.
 
Some of (maybe all; it never came up when I was exposed to them, and even though my collection includes that book, I have no interest in re-reading it for anything, ever; it is simply part of the collection) them are tech geniuses: like Tony Stark super-computer / "my tuxedo is a tank!" kind of genius inventors.
 
What do you do with this incredible talent?  Not make money.  Not fight crime.  Nope.  We are going to be bullies.  We are going to be bullies to people who who are doing their best to be _good people_, who are doing their best to help the helpless and answer the unwinnable challenge.
 
They aren't villains; they're just dicks.  Dicks!  How super-HERO genre is _that_?! And in the paradigm of the game, we are to treat them as villains and take them seriously and take the game seriously while dealing with opponents who are not serious, nor taking the game terribly seriously.  So Captain Justice and FireMan have King Konquer on the run after having just saved five hundred people from the sacrifice ritual meant to start a demonic takeover of the earth.  Good luck, Lads!
 
Bystander 1:  Oh, thank you for saving my son from that crazed psycho, FireMan!  If ever you need anything within my power....
 
Bystander 2:  he went that way, behind that waterfall!
 
Guy from CLOWN:  Imma draw a penis on your back and take pictures....
 
 
I used to believe with all my heart that Lex Luthor had the absolute stupidest motivation for becoming a villain of all time:
 
"He saved my life but it made me bald; the world must suffer!"  That is just unbelievably dumb.  (Yeah, I understand that there wasn't a lot of source material guidance back in the day, but _still_...)
 
And what does Lex do along the way?  Well he uses his incredible intellect to invent amazing things, build a megacorporations, gain fabulous wealth, travel to other planets and if my son is right, to become President of the US.  Now he hasn't given up on trying to kill Superman; he has simply accepted that it is impossible to a be one-dimensional one-trick pony and actually resemble anything like character, and certainly such a lack of character development would make for a lack if audience interest.
 
Our genius clowns build a car that-  well, it forces the "clowns are funny!  Hurr hurr hurr!" thing at you in an absolutely _painful_  cringefest of stereotypes and mechanized slapstick--  not even the good slapstick like the Stooges, but the "I am so embarrassed for you; maybe people won't remember that you actually tried this" slapstick of Dick Van Dyke (who then went on to try it over and over again anyway.  Same vibe from the CLOWN car).  It just crams it all down your throat:  look!  It's funny!  It's classically funny!, it's traditionally,clown-related funny!  Oh wow, this is funny!
 
It isn't funny.  It is predictable and stereotypical and embarrassing to watch unfold.  If you were a big fan of I Love Lucy, you might feel different.  I couldn't watch that, either, because of the overwhelming embarrasment I felt for the actors and writers for having to portray characters dumb enough to stumble helplessly into whatever easily-avoided antics were scheduled that week.  I have that same embarrassment for whoever  wrote CLOWN and _especially_ whoever came up the-- forgive me; I didnt name it!--  "Tee Hee" (get it?!  Get it?!  GET IT?  GET IT?!  "TEE HEE?!"  Tee-hee?!  Like a laugh?  Like when someone laughs?   Because it's funny?!  And they're clowns?!  Get it?!  Get it?!  Hunh?  HUNH?!)  The CLOWN car.  I give "the CLOWN car" as an expression a pass because this tiny micropun actually kind of works, and would probably be respectable if someone handn't spent seven Sundays poring through the thesaurus to justify T.E.E. H.E.E.   That is the same level of cringe for "Supreme Headquarters International Oh gives a crap, make it spell SHIELD!"
 
But it is thematic and funny, see?  Did you miss that?  Did you miss how hillarious the whole thing is?
 
It is like putting in your contact lenses with a ball peen hammer.
 
 
Even this car-  this crowning achievement of AI-  comes off as a hardcore ripoff of Scatman Caruthers' short lived Rickety Rocket.....
 
 
Anyway, we have guys capable of this level of genius and creativity, and who are given extensive and in some cases affluent backgrounds, and a range of talents and no small amount of intelligence--  potential Lex Luthors or Tony Starks or even straight up psychotic killers, and yet this is what they do:
 
Interrupt busy people and beg to be killed, finding buttons and pushing them.  Playing with emotions, icons, and dangerous situations, yet _somehow_, we are supposed to accept that this is supposed to embarrass _the heroes_:
 
Oh, Dude!  Oh, wow, Dude!  You totally had him!  You totally had the Masked Bomber and had almost saved the orphanage _and_ the children's hospital.  But then that clown came out of nowhere and pantsed you, forcing you to trip and drop the bomber, who ran to the detonator that your sidekick was trying to dismantle, and then he pressed the button, and then--  well, they are all dead now, and it is your fault because you weren't wearing clown-proof longjohns, and aren't you totally embarrased, because this is obviously all on you...
 
Oh no!  Clown is all about embarrassment, not what you described!
 
Shaving cream pie in the face?  Okay, great.  Why did it work?  Was the HERO not expecting it?  Why not?  Because he was running somewhere?  Chasing someone?  So the villain gets away because some geniuses with six-year-old intellects went out of their way to make it happen, but somehow this is an embarrassment to the heroes.... How?
 
Because it funny; hurr hurr hurr!
 
Absolutely nothing about CLOWN works with any other part of it.  Absolutely nothing about CLOWN is particularly sinister, or evil, or funny, of has any kind of actual point beyond being as annoying as possible, which can only continue to work because the GM has decided to press it-- tie your hands here, gag your voice there, and break impossible luck in their direction.
Clown can only work the exact same way that the Gilt Complex can only work: fudge the entirety of the universe to give these guys success that actually looks bad on the heroes but not the guys the public sees _actually causing the problem_.
 
It is the Gilt Complex with greasepaint, failed-yet-repeatedly-forced humor, characters who's 'thens' and 'nows' cannot be reconciled with anything short of repeated blows to the head, whose motivations don't hold water in a universe where characters have to feed themselves, and frankly, I think super-powered people beating them like concrete pinatas was ultimately far too kind, as it did in some way suggest this was worth reacting to at all.
 
Again-  i am sure I missed a lot, or failed to deliver in certain points, but doing this by phone doesn't lend well to formatting or re-scanning to see what has been covered and what hasn't.
 
 

Hadn't noticed the Trigger requirement before and have been building it without it. Hero Designer doesn't flag it, but I suppose that's beyond the scope of the program's checks. The issue of not being able to Aid more than was Drained was just assumed as part of the Linked.

Changing the targets of CLOWN's pranks from the PCs to socially-reprehensible people and groups would make them at least less unpalatable. IME many players would rather their characters be killed than humiliated.

A laudable idea, I think, but I feel it would be more prudent to create a whole new team.  Anyone exposed to "OG CLOWN" would still be choking on their own bile when they heard "CLOWN has struck again" on the evening news.
 
 

CLOWN.
 
Absolutely no contest.  No other annoyance, no other published or homebrewed villain has ever come close.  Even as an amateur etymologist, I am completely at a loss to find any words (that wont get me banned) to describe what a horrible, horrible, horrible idea CLOWN was in every possible way, or how unfathomably desperate ICE must have been for something to publish.  Never in the history of the written word-- and I am including fan fiction and furry porn here-  has anything so absolutely awful ever been put to paper.
 
CLOWN has ended not one, but two different campaigns under two different GMs for me.  I was a player in a then-six-year campaign.  The GM had bought CLOWN at some point, and had been itching to use them, and finally worked up just how to insert them into our game.
 
Keep in mind that we had gone through, if I remember correctly, about eight story arcs with this campaign-- we were all young and single,and gamed a four-hour session on Wednesday evenings and all day on Sunday.  It was an old-time comic book kind of game--  as you all know, I am not comic savy, but I believe it was what you call Golden Age: there was still a strong feel of the pulp era's two-fisted justice, heroic characters were good of heart, thought, and deed; villains were simply born to villains, and moral ambiguity was the most impossible of fiction.
 
We were the clear-cut good guys, glib with our one-liners, delivered as surely and consistently as our blows with every sock to the jaw, and in our off time we sponsored school events, electoral participation, fiscal frugality, and children's toothpaste.  The public loved us, the police thanked us for our help, and the President would call and tell us how swell we were.
 
And we- stalwart examples of ultimate goody twoshoes, all costumed and superpowered Jesi to a man-
 
were driven to brutally murder each and every member of CLOWN-  not even with rays of mystic energy from magic amulets or cosmic beams of radiation or even a merciful sniper's bullet, but with brute force- bare fists and bludgeons.
 
Their propensity for escape and the beyond irritating, hyper-stupidity of their very concept was so insanely irritating that we, the players, about the third time they made an appearance, made a pact, and the next time we captured them, rather than take them to jail and let them wreak,even more havoc, we tied them to poles and beat them like concrete pinatas until there was nothing left but a thick liquid on the floor of our secret cavern headquarters, then turned ourselves in for it.
 
Six year campaign, done.  Eight players, and to this day, none of us regret having done it, and that particular GM, so far as I ever heard, ever attempted to use CLOWN with us or any other group.  
 
Totally worth it.
 
Fast forward four years or so to a different game under a different GM:
 
There were six players, myself and one other from the group that murdered CLOWN.  This campaign had been in play for just over two years, playing six-hour sessions on Saturday mornings (while the GM's two little kids watched cartoons, finished homework, etc).
 
One day we raced to a crime scene to find CLOWN fleeing the scene in that obnoxiously-concieved car of theirs, dealing life-threatening mischief to bystanders even as they fled.
 
Five of us begged off and quit the game on the spot.  Apparently only her brother (the sixth player) had never been exposed to CLOWN before.
 
For my opinion?  Save Wings of the Valkyrie.  The worst thing in it was the emotional and ethical dilemma over the necessity of having to save Hitler.  That absolutely pales in comparison to having to endure the existence of CLOWN.  Only one HERO Games product has ever been pulled from shelves and banished from official preservation.  Unfortunately, it wasn't the best possible choice for such treatment.
 
 

Tried to edit to make this more comprehensive and the system objected to the whole thing.  🙂

I haven't introduced selfwilled intelligent magic weapons in any of my campaigns, largely because I and everyone else in my group are really averse to anything that even hints at being able to override a player's control over their characters.  And artifacts like that would almost certainly be contentious.
 
I was told of a campaign back during my wife's college days of two players, one of whom (the male) played an intelligent artifact sword, while the other (the female) played an intelligent artifact scabbard for that sword.  While no explicit scenarios were related to me, the comment was, "The humor inherent to the situation was if anything worse than you might imagine."

I've gotten way worse gifts than socks.

I reckon we should avoid a discussion of social justice here, the moderators might object.