| Comic Relief
Seattle sports two villains whom the GM has traditionally used to lighten the mood. Without further ado, the comic relief:
The Great and Terrifying Psychic Vampire of the Night! usually doesn't get done saying his codename before being knocked unconscious. The GaTPVotN! is prone to jumping out at people in the park and announcing himself, trying to scare them. He has a draining attack that might actually be fairly scary, if he could manage to hit anyone... [SP says of him, "The worst-designed 250 point Champions character I ever created. I wanted to see just how close I could get a character to being plausibly effective, while still being utterly useless."]
"I am the Great and Terrifying..." "Oh. Him again." *thwap*
The Silver Paladin is, in his own eyes, a hero among heroes, a friend to the weak and downtrodden. In reality... not so much.
Calling him dumb as a box of rocks is insulting to boxes of rocks. He is painfully, appallingly stupid - so much so that he sports enormous mental defenses on the grounds that it's hard to find his mind. Alas, his ego is quite intact.
The Silver Paladin is a flying brick who wears enchanted armor. He is monstrously strong and nearly invulnerable to all forms of damage. His sole idea of tactics is to dive-bomb his target, usually leaving a large crater. (It never hurts him, of course!) But he has one other minor power, that causes more trouble than the rest put together: He has a super-sense for detecting heroes and villains. Which is always, always wrong.
So... Shadow-Force would be fighting a villain group, really mixing it up. Maybe they'd even be getting the upper hand. And then they would hear the dreaded sound, the sound that strikes fear into the hearts of heroes everywhere:
"Hey hee hee HO ho! Halt, villains!" (Words on a screen do not do this justice. You have to hear SP do this to appreciate the full horror.)
Turning to the villain team, he would congratulate them on their selfless service to humanity, and then start dive-bombing the good guys, all the while saying things like, "Your wicked ways have come to an end! Now you will learn that Crime Does Not Pay!" He will lecture upstanding heroes on their moral depravity at the drop of a hat. (No hat actually necessary.)
Reasoning with him is useless (see 'painfully, appallingly stupid') and just confirms his every suspicion. He sees what he sees, and that's that. He also is incapable of realizing when he has lost a battle. You can be dragging him away in chains and he'll go on saying things like, "Ha! I have defeated you!"
The Phantom finally figured out how to get rid of this thorn in their side. Configuring his psionic Variable Power Pool to Mental Images, he made himself seem like the most evil being imaginable, a cross between Hitler and Cthulhu. This, naturally, caused the Silver Paladin to all but worship him. (Mental Defense doesn't apply to the Images power, so this was his Achilles heel.)
"O great Silver Paladin, you must not waste the powers you have been given on these petty villains! Your true quest is to recover the Holy Grail!" "Where is it, kind sir?!" "It is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench." The Silver Paladin didn't know where that was, but the Phantom was only too happy to give directions.
So far as I know, he's still looking for it.
In later years, SP tried to give the Silver Paladin a tragic twist, the enchanted armor that gave him his powers gradually destroying his brain... but nobody bought into it. :)
[Note: The Silver Paladin was briefly mentioned in 'Bolt From the Blue', but SP says he isn't likely to turn up in this campaign. (The siren song of the Mariana Trench is just too much, I guess! :) The GATPVotN! conceivably might.]
__________________
"All right, I am not the Shadow. You have nothing at all to worry about. Except, oh, wait, I'm pointing a gun at you."
--The Shadow | 
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