Jhamin

Unfortunately this is one of those "choose your poison" type questions.  Most games just assume how many hits they want it to take for a hero to go down and then bake it into the system without asking you.  This is why games like Pathfinder have "average damage by Challenge Rating" in the DM guide.  They know how many HP a hero should roughy have and go for it.  Hero lets you choose.  Which is great, but as you are seeing its weird when you have never had too before.

Do you have Fantasy Hero?  There is some discussion about stat levels on pages 109-111.

Basically, it's all relative.  As Bluesguy says, you want to decide
A) How much damage does a typical attack do? 
How many hits do I want my characters to be able to take before they go down? 

C) Figure out how much Stun you want everyone to have

D) Figure out how much damage should get through defenses by dividing the average campaign stun by how much how many hits you want it to take to drop people.  This will give you how much stun should get past defenses on each attack.  Because you already know how much damage is on average getting thrown around, you now know how much total def (personal PD+Armor/Spells/Etc) a character should have so the appropriate amount of damage gets through defenses.

From there, you set campaign levels. 

A couple of bits of advice:
1) Don't let the worst OCV/DCV be more than 2-3 points from the Best.  Hero rolls 3d6 for everything (which strongly favors lots of totals between 9 and 13) so a 3-4 point gap is a much bigger deal than in a system where you roll 1d20 for everything.  Guys with an OCV of 4 are going to have a *HARD* time hitting a DCV of 7
2) When you are starting out, don't let Speed scores get more than 1 point apart, 2 when you are more experienced.  A 3 speed character will get 2 fewer actions than a 5 speed character (obviously) but when actually playing it out it will *feel* like the 5 speed character is going all the time and the 3 speed one never gets too.  That doesn't feel good for a new player to a system.

3) In Hero, once you are past the defenses every extra die is pure damage.  (As in: If I have 10PD and you punch me for 4d6 & roll a 14, I take 4 stun.  If you punch for 5d6 and roll a 18, I now take 8 stun.  One more caused me to take twice as much damage.)  So when you are figuring out how much damage you want to throw around, keep the ranges fairly small at first.  In actual effectiveness, 8d6 will cause WAY more than 2x as much damage to get through than 4d6.  So initially, keep offenses in a fairly narrow range of damage dice and don't go nuts with weird stuff like AVLD until you have a better feel for the system.

This is only complicated until you have played a few fights.  Once you wrap your head around it it will go fairly quick.  And remember, Hero is mostly complicated when BUILDING characters.  Once you have everyone's character sheets the actual fights go a lot faster.

33 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Jaguar really ought to be portrayed as a well-dressed South American gentleman ready to do field work as a private detective, because he preferred not to be the cat.

Yeah, the more experienced version of the team written up in the 4th Ed Champions Universe mentions that he wasn't feeling good about his spot on the team as he felt like he was using the Cat way more than he liked and that all the skills he had worked so hard for and were so proud of didn't seem to come up often enough.

9 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Jaguar also had a different scheme. He was mostly black but I do recall a brown spotted version?

He was yellow and spotted on "Pyramid in the Sky", which is what Jaguars really should look like.

He was black furred on the 4th Ed Champions Universe and Brown furred on European Enemies (aka: That which must not be named), which I *think* are his only cover appearances.  He was by far the least depicted of the 4th edition Champions.

On 1/15/2021 at 5:23 PM, archer said:

So it's still possible that the Pegasus gates have a higher mass limit than the Milky Way gates.

I don't think we ever saw any evidence that there is *any* mass limit to the gates.  One of Carter's more infamous tricks was blowing up a Star by reducing it's mass and causing it to go SuperNova.  She did this by connecting a Gate that was falling into a star to another gate that was next too a Black hole.  The Black hole pulled enough mass through the wormhole to affect the interaction between a Star's mass and it's internal atomic reactions.  This was with Milky Way gates

They didn't go into the math, but I'm betting its more than x128 the mass of a human.  Mass limits are a Hero System thing and don't appear to have any correlation in the Stargate franchise.  As far as I can tell, if it can physically fit through a gate it will travel through the wormhole.

20 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

The version Liadin linked was my interpretation of what his armor ought to look like.

But that version almost never showed up in any of the color art.  I think Champions of the North goes with that, but it may be the only art that does.

On the cover of the Core Book (the Perez art with Seeker Fighting Dr. Destroyer), Defender's shoulders are red & his helmet is blue.  Which is the scheme they go with on Champions in 3D and Challenges for Champions.
Kingdom of Champions gave him a red helmet

Zodiac Conspiracy show him the White torso & shoulders like in the image above, but reversed the colors on his legs

Invaders from Below gave him a white helmet & gauntlets, a Red Torso, and blue legs and biceps

Allies also gave him a White Helmet, but with White Forearm guards and Blue Gauntlets

I'm gonna just assume that 4th edition Defender didn't have multiple suits, he had an assortment of Helmets, Torsos, Gauntlets, Boots, etc that were all some variant of Red/White/Blue which he put on at random and we were just lucky that the Boots normally matched.

19 hours ago, Spence said:

When Fuzon came out products were physical books and the internet was nothing near what we have today.  Social media was in its infancy and bulletin boards ruled.  But product was physical and the idea of getting timely errata was something for the future. 

 

Fuzon had been hyped by a few newsletters, gaming magazines and some people at a con.   So when I saw a copy at a store I bought it.  It was utter incoherent c*ap.  It kept referring to “dials” and “switches” but they were not to be found anywhere in the book.  Examples talking about things that did not appear anywhere.  So, I tossed into a box and was pretty angry about getting taken, it wasted a good amount of my free money at a time when I wasn’t making much.

The Hype part was important.  The art direction and tone of the New Millennium books was a big break from what came before, but it came at a time when Comics were seeing a lot of tonal shifts.  I didn't like it but I can't fault them for making those choices in the late 90s.

I think it was the gaming side of it that broke them.  Back in the day Fuzion was being marketed as a **replacement** for 4th edition.  No more Hero system, everything would be Fuzion from now on.  Folks were skeptical, but were willing to hear them out. 

Then we got the book and the sidebar for the powers section explicitly said that all it's powers were bought by using the Hero 4th edition rules and dividing point costs by five.  They had a list of powers and costs but if the power you wanted wasn't there the new edition of the rules said you should use Hero 4th to buy it.  This was like having Champions Complete refer you to the 5th Edition core book for Skills explanations.  There were also references to Mekton Z for vehicle rules and whatever other Plugins you needed but no sense of how they worked or when you should add them.  To really get all the rules you needed a bunch of books, many of which didn't exist yet.  This felt like a big step backward from Hero 4th, which was just as much a universal system in one book as 6th is.

When folks asked how this was a replacement for Hero but still required Hero to work the official response was that the "Powers Plugin" wasn't ready but would come out later, which was not what we had been promised before buying Fuzion.  There was a *lot* of backlash to C:NM in the online Hero communities of the era.  Folks decided to just stick to 4E, Fuzion fizzled, and one of the early promises Steve Long made when 5E was launching was that he was going to help us all pretend Fuzion had never happened.  A promise he kept.

Also, that promised "Powers Plugin?  Never did come out.

It always bothered me that Defender's color scheme was always red/white/blue but exactly which colors were on which parts of his armor was never consistent.  There is no rule that says he could never repaint his armor, but it bothered me. 

I *did* really like the color scheme of Red Fury, his evil universe doppelganger.  That Gold/Black/Red looked snazzy!

18 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I personally prefer Obsidian to Ironclad. For some reason the alien prince motivated by noblesse oblige feels more compelling to me than the alien ex-soldier/gladiator. I suspect Steve didn't want entire superstrong races like Obsidian's running around the Milky Way, gumming up the non-super sci-fi future settings he planned. For my own game I sort of blended the two characters, making Obsidian a mutant member of the royal family of Ironclad's people, the Dorvalans/Perseids.

 

Quantum's description as "the Lucy Van Pelt of the superhero set" won me over compared to Sapphire, aka Mutant Jennifer Lopez.

 

Nighthawk's origin seems rather odd. His change in personality and motivation was really extreme compared to the magnitude of what happened to him. I would suspect that VIPER attack of leaving him with undiagnosed brain damage. But it still makes a lot more sense than Seeker's.  😛 But Nighthawk doesn't seem like a good archetype example, having aspects of both Martial Artist and Gadgeteer archetypes.

 

Pity about Solitare, I enjoyed her "innocent in the world" personality. I wonder how it would have worked to just remove the PSI aspects of her powers during the transition to 5th?  I can understand why Steve woudl have decided that changed her to the point that replacing her with Witchcraft made more sense.

I agree on Obsidian.  His personality and background was just plain more compelling to me than Ironclad's.

I'm kind of 50/50 on Quantum.  Her personality was good and I *liked* that she was a hothead as well as explicitly a mutant and had to deal with all the comic tropes that includes.  Sapphire's musical career is a thing, but not unprecedented in comics.  I kind of wish it figured into her lore more, it is usually treated as something she does off-screen.  Her more experienced writeup mentions that she actually has lots of solo adventures while touring.  I wish we saw more of that.

Nighthawk seems a little too on-the-nose as "not-Batman" and as you mention has archetype issues.  Replacing him with Kinetik later makes a lot of sense.

I do understand why Nightwind seems to have been forgotten in the transition to Cryptic, he rarely was listed in the rosters even though he was official and his mystic Yengatao abilities are both expensive and take him away from being a "classic" martial artist.

6 hours ago, AlgaeNymph said:

However, where would a superhero deposit lots of conjured/transmuted cash?  Can't imagine anyplace overt since the Secret Service, which already doesn't like superhumans, would look askance at any (understandably) alleged counterfeiter.

They wouldn't be an alleged counterfeiter.  Most nation-states are pretty strict about who is allowed to *make* cash.  If someone conjured or duplicated or wished cash into existence, they would have made legal tender without permission, which is the definition of counterfeiting.

It is likely more legal to make precious metals or jewels and sell them as long as they are permanent.  If you sell someone a lump of gold that turns into cottage cheese at midnight, that's fraud but if it stays gold forever then you might be OK.

As it isn't possible to economically make precious metals now there aren't a lot of laws surrounding it, although making too much will threaten supply/demand.  In the real-world lab-grown diamonds are causing a lot of headaches for diamond merchants.  I suspect that with the level of super-law in the Champions Universe this likely is covered by statute but I don't think we have anything official about it.

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

You really shouldn't find any 5 or 6e write-ups for Crusader.  Sam died in the 90s (the 4e / Fuzion era).  It was part of a published adventure with a "Dark Champions" overtone, but at the moment it escapes me as to which one it was.  Anyway, he was mortally wounded, made it to his girlfriend's apartment, lived long enough to spill everything to her, and died.

He died in the narrative parts of "Underworld Enemies" for 4th edition.  It was an enemies book but in universe the various characters were supposed to be entries in Crusader's files.  There was an experienced Dark Champions version of Crusader along with Crusade the 90s anti-hero that killed him so he could replace him (which was treated as a BAD thing) and a 1 page adventure overview where the PCs get pulled into these events.  Thing of it is, that whole plot-line became "old cannon" with the release of 5th edition.

As Lord Liaden says, there is a different character going by the name "Crusader" in later books (I think New Millennium and 5th edition each had one).  I feel like later books felt free to take what they liked from pre-5th edition material but didn't feel bound too it, and would often ignore things if there were new ideas the later authors wanted to explore.

From what I can tell:
- 4th edition encompassed pretty much everything published up until that time, with some retcons and revisionism thrown in like a good comic book universe.  There was a fair amount of overlap and redundancy when multiple books re-invented the wheel.  (Like PRIMUS/SAT/UNTIL all being the skilled agents that the government sent to stop supercrime)

- 5th Edition was a moderately hard reboot of the Champions Universe.  We got a new Champions team and numerous characters published that has been fixtures of the Champions Universe in 1st-4th edition more or less vanished.  Those who remained were rebooted themselves, usually starting their careers much later.  On the upside, the 5/6ed universe(s) are pretty internally consistent, so you can have a lot of fun hooking plots onto various threads. 
          *Lots of characters that had full writups in older supplements were sort of in a "grey zone" unless they were mentioned in a 5th edition product.  In practice lots of folks used older books freely (I know I did) but lots of characters never officially made it forward.  The CyberKnights (for example) were a fixture in my games but never made it into the 5th/6thed universe

- 6th Edition was a "soft" reboot.  A lot of the 5th edition continuity remained, and you could generally rely on 5th edition lore being intact, but new re-writes of various characters often tweaked details.

23 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Personally, I prefer the version of Seeker from the Champions: New Millennium setting. A much more original concept and interesting background IMO.

I can respect that.

At the time New Millennium dropped I was rapidly souring on the hardcore 90s re-imaginings of classic heroes.  (Remember when Batman turned over the cowel to Azrael?)

When I read their Seeker's origin it felt like they decided to add some secret government projects and "ultimate assassin wearing straps & shoulderpads" to good old Seeker to make him more "hardcore" as was happening to several of my beloved marvel & dc comics characters at the time. 

I was never really able to look at that character on his own.  For me the contrast between 4e's happy swashbuckling Ninja in starched pants and his Liefieldesque "aloof and distant" replacement was a bridge too far.  the New Millenium version of the character got wrapped up in my distaste for the 90s antihero.  It probably isn't a fair judgement

I *was* a pretty big fan of "Team Defender" though....

Inspired by the recent conversations about in-universe fictional replacements, I got curious about how the in-universe "real" members of the Champions changed over time in the 5e/6e Champions Universe and started digging.  Im admittedly mixing two different editions here, but they are fairly compatible lore wise, with just a bit of weirdness around Nightwind.

Champions Complete (among other sources) indicates that Defender founded the Champions in 2001 and the team quickly became:

Defender

Sapphire

Nighthawk

IronClad

Witchcraft

AKA: The Classic Lineup

Millennium City mentions that they frequently team up with Doctor Silverback, Kinetik and Nightwind who consider them allies but are not members.

In 2006 Nighthawk faked his own death to work undercover without letting his team know his plans and came to blows with Defender when the truth came out.  He quit the team before they could vote on his expulsion.  He was replaced by Kinetik who the Champions had worked with numerous times before. "Champions Universe: News of the World" says the Champions also added Nightwind and he helps the Champions fight Mechanon on October 15th 2006 (Book of the Machine) , but Champions Complete (the most recent book by publishing date) has a mini-recap of the events of 2006 and writeups of the characters that doesn't mention him.  So maybe?

So in 2006 the Champions membership was:

Defender

Sapphire

IronClad

Witchcraft

Kinetik

Nightwind?

The Champions 2007 chapter from "Champions Universe: News of the World" lists the team membership as

Defender

Sapphire

IronClad

Witchcraft

Kinetik

Nightwind

This is pretty much the same as 2006 but I list it as it definitely included Nightwind where as there are some questions about his 2006 status.

Champions Universe 6E indicates that the Champions have a set of reserve members they can call when needed.  If we assume the publishing date is the date in-universe:

Champions 2010

Defender

Ironclad

Kinetik

Sapphire

Witchcraft

Champions 2010 Reserves:

Dr. Silverback

Nightwind

Ultratech

Blockhead

Crusader

The first two are described in "Millennium City".  Does anyone know if the last 3 are written up anywhere?

It is also stated that Nighthawk still sometimes helps the team, which implies that his former teammates have at least partially forgiven him.

The Champions Complete book lists the membership as of 2012 as the same as 2010 but makes no mention of their reserves.  As this is a quick overview of the team the reserves may or may not exist.

Defender

Sapphire

IronClad

Witchcraft

Kinetik

Galactic Champions recounts Mechanon's final battle with the Champions in the then futuristic 2014 and has a very different membership:

Defender

Kinetik

Ironclad

Tekno

Deuce

Witchcraft

I'm assuming that Deuce (with her shadow form) was the same Deuce mentioned in "Conquers, Killer, and Crooks" as part of PSI's Support team who was the same Deuce who got a writeup in 4E's "Mind Games".  I kind of like that she eventually got away from PSI and joined the side of the angels.

I'm not sure who Tekno is?  I briefly thought Teknique from Millennium City changed her name as that is where many of the new Champions come from, but Tekno is a He and we don't get any indication that Leah Reece has any ambitions for gender transition.  Did I miss a writeup somewhere?

At this point our info runs out.  The 5e/6e universe used to end shortly after 2020 when a battle with Tyranon uses up the magic that made powers possible.  We know that Kinetik and Witchcraft die in the Antartic battle with Tyranon and that all supertech and metahuman powers fade completely by 2022 but we don't know who was on the Champions roster at the end or what their final fates were.  Other than that Defenders family continued to produce the heroes their ages needed for at least 1000 more years.

This was what my memory and a bit of reading dug up.  Do we know of any other roster changes for THE HERO system superteam in the 5e/6e timeline?

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

With respect, I would dispute Seeker being an "original" concept. As an aggregate he's unique, but IMO he's an aggregate of cliches.

The Champions are all pretty much archetypes, which only allows them to be so original.  In Fourth edition they did double duty as an in-universe team and as example characters who were legal at the starting points and campaign recommendations for the era.  They each filled one of the classic hero archetypes and they each were 2 classic origins/character shticks mixed together.

Seeker - Martial Artist.  Super Training/Wisecracking Jokester

Obsidian - Brick, Alien/Noble Elite

Quantum - Flying Blaster, Mutant/Hard-edged Lose Canon

Jaguar - Combat & Skill Multiform, Detective/Hero who doesn't like his powers
Defender - IAF Power Armored, Rich Genius/Legacy Hero

Solitaire - Super Wizard, Mystic Upbringing/Innocent in a strange world

You could make a similar list with the modern Champions.  I'm not sure that IronClad is that much more "original" than Obsidian was, but he is a much better example of the modern way to build a brick.

I'm not saying that Seeker is an amazing creation.  I do Argue that he has a certain personality as a character that makes him stand out from the other example characters of his era.  Good or Bad.
I mean when was the last time anyone asked a question about Jaguar?

2 hours ago, greypaladin_01 said:

Seeker just gets no love.... he doesn't even get a name anymore.   Kinda shame... he was product of the times, but was always one I liked as a kid back in the 4E days.   Plus as mentioned before Watchers of the Dragon went a LONG way to softening some of the goofy hard edges while keeping the spirit there.

I am on your side with this one.  He was ridiculous, but he was a comic book superhero in a pretty silver age setting.  Lots of them were over the top in lots of ways.  His bright colors and bare chest never bothered me.  The version of Defender he shared a team with painted his armor Red White and Blue.

I loved that it was mentioned that when he needed to work things out for a while he rode with The Outcasts, the nomadic mutant biker outcasts from "The Mutant File".  It was such a random thing that I could so easily see being a plot arc in a comic of the era.

14 minutes ago, greypaladin_01 said:

The specific mention you are looking for was 5e Millennium City book.  Media & Entertainment section / Superworld & Other Magazines... page 39, second paragraph.

Dude!
 

You are a Hero Lore Legend!

Having just read the bit, Lord Liaden may have had trouble finding this because it never actually names Seeker.  The way the character is described it's clearly Seeker, they just never call him that.

To more directly answer the original question, I would imagine that several of the various Champions Universe organizations do this for a fee.

Viper would almost certainly exchange duffel bags of money for bank deposits.  They have a large number of legitimate businesses and hundreds of shell companies

Argent explicitly sells it's services to various underworld figures, I would imagine that money laundering would be among them.

People have made jokes about Nigerian Princes, but the CU has several extremely shady fictional countries with outright criminal rulers.  I can easily imagine them partially funding themselves via underground international currency exchanges.

After that there is the non-powered mafia and underworld figures. 

I imagine most tech-savvy criminals are into bitcoin

I'm sure all of these operations would demand a service fee, but that is the cost of working outside the law.

35 minutes ago, archer said:

("Structuring" is it's own crime now, which is something which infuriates me. Doing something which is legal is still perfectly fine. But if you do something which is perfectly legal three times, that's now a crime.)

Eh, I had someone break into my savings account and spend several days doing bank transfers offshore.  Just below the limits.  The credit union caught it on the 4th day.

Breaking into my bank account was a crime, actually transferring the money was a crime (each time) and I'm fine if Structuring the transfers to give them a few more days of transfers is a crime in and of itself.  Some things are used for illegal things 90% of the time and should be illegal.

1 hour ago, Ninja-Bear said:

I believe the biggest issue with Seeker was his background. Him being an Australian Ninja. And it wasn’t *Ahem* logical. Back in the day, I had a bigger problem with his 25 STR and a little with Ultrasonic Hearing. And the Sais being called Triple Irons! 

He was always a bit outlandish, but I always thought he was fun in a Rocket Racer/Vibe/Dazzler/"way too topical hero" kind of way.  Ninjas were cool, Crocodile Dundee was popular, why not combine them?

Love him or hate him, He is a *ton* more memorable than some of the other 4th edition Champions like Jaguar or Quantum.

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Much of the fun comes from the teen part, and how you interweave it with the super-adventure part. Cars, afterschool jobs, dates for school dances, and other "mundane" things become weird and wonderful -- and can be just as important to ultimate success as any battle.

This is really what I'm finding. 

- The romantic brinkmanship surrounding who is whose buddy during the class field trip was at least as big a deal as the discovery that Nosferatu Red & his Comrades of the Night had taken over the hotel.  (Nosferatu Red was last out of his coffin in 1937)

- When the kids escaped from The Fashionable One's Moon Arena (with some help from Zpartykys who felt like he should help out Junior) and returned to earth, Jane Doe's biggest concern was all the stuff her robot duplicate had been posting as her on social media

- Junior having his first kiss while keeping his secret identity intact during an attack on the boardwalk by Leviathan & Admiral Cascadia's troops.

- Wrangling dates & getting formal outfits in time for Homecoming, only to have all the students who dropped out of Ravenswood to attend VonDrotte Academy crash the party.  Drama ensued, especially when Bustarius confronted the girl who broke up with him to transfer schools.

- Nocturne II's ongoing frenemy rivalry with Reflex

- The fact that Jane Doe's old girl posse Livia, Jade and Rebecca are more actively malevolent than many of the supervillains they actually run into. (Mista Finsta and The GOAT are just kinda jerks, these girls are out for high-school blood now that Jane Doe is spending more time with Reflex than them)

22 minutes ago, steriaca said:

There useless to me, but it comes with HDC.

Thats good to know about your needs.  I still want them. 

RJD59 bought them on this site & didn't get them.  I bought them on this site & didn't get them.  We are both hoping someone speak to that.

54 minutes ago, steriaca said:

Print on demand is only available on Drive Through RPG, as far as I know.

I'm fine with the POD implications of buying this here.  I was hoping for the HDC files

2 hours ago, rjd59 said:

I've just purchased this and downloaded the pdf. However I see nothing for downloading the standups or the hdc files. Did I miss something? BTW, bought it thru here, not RPGnow.

I'm seeing the same thing

5 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

BTW Jhamin, Brother Bone isn't in Arcane Adversaries. Dean Shomshak included him in the earlier incarnation of the Devil's Advocates for Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies. BB, Granny Hex, Maze, and Apollyon all got dropped, but some new characters took their places.

You are of course correct.  It's easy to get confused by the shifting membership of a team as it changes across books.  I like to pretend that the lineups shift in-universe much the same way (Say) the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants has a classic lineup but the actual membership changes over time.

Brother Bone makes more sense as a solo villain IMHO (Likely with lots of undead minions)  I never understood how The Demonologist would keep peace between him and anyone he didn't agree with.  Of course the same coule be said about lots of teams.

4 hours ago, DShomshak said:

The Doctor of the Dead isn't just a villain I created for Arcane Adversaries.

For what it is worth (and we are drifting really off topic here ), I really enjoyed Arcane Adversaries.  There was a lot of good stuff in there & several of the villains got a lot of use in my games.

- Brother Bone launched an inquisition against the totally-not-Monaco fictional nation one of my PCs hailed from.  Brother Bone had a few points when he talked about the hedonism it had fallen into.

- The Devils Advocates almost stole the "curse" of Lycanthropy from a PC when he returned from his confrontation with Brother Bone.

- Hell Rider was an ongoing antagonist seeking vengeance against a large corporation that a PC was intertwined with.  He deserved vengeance, but the PC couldn't let him take it out on everyone as he was doing.
       * Once the original Hell Rider's vengeance was satisfied, the mysterious stranger passed the powers to a campaign NPC that felt the PCs has wronged his father (who was secretly a villain they rightly defeated)
- Mother Gothel is one of my favorites.  So much that she has escaped Hero system and now shows up along with her frenemy the merciless agent of order Mrs Meigs in any campaign I run that acknowledges such things.  Players smile and groan when she appears with her warm tea and Meig's Compass Men.

EDIT: As it has been pointed out that Brother Bone came from an earlier book by Dean Shomshak & didn't actually appear in Arcane Adversaries, I'll leave my praise as it's all for the same man but add:
- Black Fang.  As has been mentioned a long running PC in my games was a playboy prince whose family was "Cursed" with lycanthropy.  Black Fang was a "dark mirror" antagonist, showing *why* people were afraid of werewolves and was a constant threat to the PC's good reputation

53 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

Hey, someone used Dr. Teneber in their campaign! Happy author woohoo!

 

The Doctor of the Dead isn't just a villain I created for Arcane Adversaries. He's my PC from a "dark supernatural" campaign inspired by the "Midnight Sons" line of titles Marvel did for a while. Doc turned out to be far and away the "darkest" PC. Okay, he ended up crashing the campaign, but I had a lot of fun with him.

 

Dean Shomshak

That's very cool.  The PC in question has him as a contact, but only on an 8- so he frequently ends up deciding he has more important things to do than deal with her high school drama.  (Which, to be fair, a lot of it is).  He did come in handy when a weird interaction between Blue Wizard's arcane training, Archive's ability to randomly soak up knowledge, and a Halloween scary story contest summoned The Monster while shifting the dorms into a shadow realm.

As the GM, I've been playing him as sort of a Doctor Strange character but willing to exorcise the living if he feels that someone recently dead deserves their body more.  Other mystics find his philosophy repugnant, but he still wants to keep Tyranon or DEMON or the Devils Advocates from taking over the world & finds it disappointing that heroes like Dr. Ka and the Drifter have such limited imaginations.

The PC is basically "mostly dead".  The "rightful" soul for this body was a young psychopath.  Probably not ever really super-villainous or even violent but destined for a life of petty, casual harm to those around her.  The Sorta-Good Doctor swapped that soul for another.  The new soul has no memory of who she was.  The body was from a powerful and well-connected family, and was very attractive, and can pass for older than it is (the PC even spent points on a fake ID), but wasn't super powered.  After the Soul-Transfer the body is "mostly dead" and has a suite of solomon-grundy style "zombie" type powers (strength, damage resistance, ect).  That isn't what was supposed to happen and Teneber knows he didn't make mistakes in the rituals.  He suspects some outside force interfering but is keeping it from the PC until he has too.  He doubts telling her will matter for her life and doesn't want to over-complicate her adaptation to her new body.  He is pleased with how the new soul is using it's new life and considers the whole thing an interesting "complication" of his procedure.