Doctor Zen

Still looking for players? I would be interested in playing.

You didn't go overboard as far as I am concerned. You gave me a wealth of information. Now I can look and decided for myself. I thank yoiu.

Thanks. Did not realize that CC would be good for modern day city maps.

What do you use to draw your maps? Do you freehand or is there a program that you use?

Thanks for replying. I really appreciate you taking the effort in supporting another player. Real heroes! ?

I would like to see if there is any interest in a play-by-email Champions game that will start out as individual heroes. They may meet up at some point, but I would like to see if solo running can work since I do not have blocks of time available to do group play online, but I can send out emails on a somewhat consistent basis most days. I am looking for 2 or 3 people to start. The game will begin in November 1940 in the fictional city of Port Indigo, a large town on the Eastern seaboard. The flavor I would like to go for is Golden Age -style heroes but with a Bronze Age-style of stories. The best examples are Spider-Man and his run-ins with various underworld leaders and groups, the Pre-Crisis All-Star Squadron and the Liberty Legion/Invaders books. This is not a Dark Champions campaign, but may include Dark Champions Animated Series type characters. Combat will be mostly hand-waved (with some random die roll results by me) unless it is against major villains or their chief henchmen. Players will be given the situation, and then send me a general outline of what actions they want to do. An example will be: Captain Avenger sees six men on the docks taking some boxes off a ship. No leaders or arch-criminals are present that he can see. The Player may send me a message that Captain Avenger will sneak up using cover and then try to take out as many goons by surprise as he can and then attack the rest when he is discovered. CA will try to keep one goon awake so as to interrogate him. Then I would send back the results of the confrontation. From time to time,, the results may dictate that a PC may be rendered unconscious. I hope players will be willing to follow the trope of being captured, taken to a hideout, learn some clue or the whole plan of the mastermind is their, maybe rescue a prisoner and then escaping. If this is not something you like to have occur, then maybe rethink about participating. In previous fantasy games I have run I have given players a lot of background information that they tended to not read. To prevent that, I would like any interested players to send me a list of 10 o 20 questions that can be answered in one or two sentences about various aspects of the game world and the city itself. No rules related questions at this time, please. I want to gauge interest before getting into the nuts and bolts. No reason to write up a character for a world you do not want to play in. Questions should be along the line of: Do aliens exist in the campaign? There are alien races currently known to the populace at large. If you are interested in being an alien or having an origin connected to an alien race, we may be able to work something out. Have superheroes appeared before 1940? Masked heroes and villains have appeared before. They are known as "para-normals" or "para-norms". The most well-known is Lady Liberty, who has appeared in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Great War. The largest number or para-norms appeared during the Great War, with the US, Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia all having one or more during the conflict. Also, some characters from fiction or legend may have been para-norms as well. What is the history of Port Indigo? Port Indigo was founded in 1645 by Swedish settlers and was known as Hamn Gustav (Port Gustav). It was eventually taken over by the English following the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664 and renamed Port Indigo because it was the major export at the time. It has grown to become the third or fourth largest port on the East Coast. Hit strongly by the Great Depression, it has recently begun to rebound and is beginning to flourish once more. These three questions are examples of what I hope people will send. The answers are, of course, examples of what is known to the players and their characters. So, if anyone is interested, let me know. Kenneth Crist kennethcrist1@gmail.com

Anyone know how the map for Hudson City was created for the source book? I would like to create my own city and have looked at a few programs but they do not seem to give the same results. I cannot draw at all, so that is why I am looking to see how it was done originally.

I found "Soon I Will Be Invincible" by Austin Grossman to be enjoyable. It is from the villain's point of view and you get to see the plotting of world conquest from the other side of the street. "The Avengers and the Thunderbolts" by Pierce Askegren. This was not an adaptation of published comics, but an actual story featuring both teams. I was a big fan of both groups and enjoyed this one. "X-Men and Avengers: Gamma Quest" by Greg Cox.was a decent story, but too me continues the unfortunate X-Men and Avengers fight each other and then the main foe and the Avengers decide that "Mutants are A-okay!" It happens a few times in the comics, which seemed to indicate that each time the two groups met, something erased the Avengers memories and they had to learn to accept the X-Men all over again each time. Strange for a group that had at least 3 mutants on its roster. Superman: Last Son of Krypton" by Elliot S! Maggin which came out about the time of the first Christopher Reeve movie. It was another origin story for Kal-El but had a interesting idea of the ship searching out the best person on Earth to raise young Kal and it could be a certain physicist teaching at Princeton in the 1940s and 50s.

I liked the Wild Cards books #1-7, 10-12. But as time went on, it just became more and more depressing. There were no real "heroes" and it seemed to embody everything I did not enjoy about the Dark Age of comics.

There is also the case of two of DC's Robotman characters, Dr, Robert Crane (1940s) and Cliff Steele (1960s). Robotman had a trial to prove his "humanity" in Star Spangled Comics (v1) #15 and later expanded in All-Star Squadron (v1) #17. Did Cliff Steele of Doom Patrol fame ever have to prove his "humanity"?

Long story lines in comics, such as the first Dark Phoenix saga and the original Captain Marvel/Thanos story seem more like arcs in a campaign, but not a campaign itself. I guess what I am really looking for is if any GM has gathered his players together and said that the main story of the game would be the heroes need to take down the forces of DEMON (or some other organization) or, maybe, there is a mysterious figure behind several things that are happening in the world and you are gong to stop it. Not every story would need to be connected to that but there would be a definite stopping point and the game would end. In fantasy, the quest is an obvious campaign trope, find the ring/sword/human avatar that will stop the Dark Lord from ruling the fair lands of Smiling Face peoples. This query came up from something I saw in the Golden Age Champions thread when someone mentioned that there were no campaigns presented in the released product. It got me to wondering if anyone actually used a campaign theme or if they followed the usual comic book style of combating menaces no one else can defeat and then stopping the next menace when it rears its costumed head.

In most fantasy games in my experience a campaign usually for the characters last for several real years of playing time. In the few Champions games I have have the pleasure of playing in, there is always a "Campaign City" but no long plot thread to send the players on. Does the superhero genre not lend itself to this kind of playing style due to the source material, of have I just missed out? Has anyone ever put their players through a long, drawn-out story line that could encompass a hero going from just starting out to being one of the premiere heroes in the country? The only "campaigns" I can think of in comics were for solo characters. I do not count "Watchmen" as a campaign as it had a single story to tell. The examples I see are: Cerebus: 300 issues telling the life story of one obnoxious aardvark. (Fun at first, but eventually lost in the bitterness of the writer) Starman: James Robinson's examination of the life of Jack Knight. Miracleman: While the story lost me at some point when I could no longer identify with the character, I think that Moore had a beginning-middle-end idea for this character. Now, I am not including Japanese comics which probably have a large number of these types of books (Lone Wolf and Cub, for example) because I have not read a lot of those. And probably the British and European comics have examples, but I have been exposed to only a few of these books. Can teams of supers go through a campaign?

I like this idea. Not all players will know the answer, because some players I know like to experience the world they are playing in before doing too much character stuff. But overall, I think having them describe how they fit into the world would help make it real for them.

This sounds like a lot of fun as a campaign. Minimal support. Limited resources. Impossible odds of success. I am so there.

For a more complex version of WWII, you could always look at James P. Hogan's "The Proteus Operation". Rat bastard oligarchs in a idyllic 21st Century invent time travel to go back in time and make the 20th Century go along a more war-filled fascist path and help an obscure political party in 1920's Germany, the National Socialist German Worker's Party rise up and unleash terror on the world. An now isolated USA and Canada in the 1970s in this new timeline get their own time travel and attempt to go back and stop the original meddling. The world were the Germans are taking over the world and advanced science achieved through time travel could have plenty of possibilities. Throw in possibly a little of David Brin's "Thor Versus Captain America" with Norse gods taking an active part in the war and it sounds like any other comic book universe: Nazis, time travel, gods, advanced science, parallel universes... what more do you want?