Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Community
Playing the Game
Story Hour
Life and Light: Shadow-Force Reborn (Updated May 8, 2019)
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 4925087" data-attributes="member: 16760"><p><strong>Photon's Origin and Previous Exploits</strong></p><p></p><p>[Here's what I wrote up on Photon before the game started. Everything here is a recap of what actually went down in the original campaign, barring a few cosmetic changes, up to the point where he got shot by Jessica. (That bit really did happen, but everything after it is new.)]</p><p></p><p>Jonathan Winters leaned back in his office chair. Life was good. He had his dream job: Professor of theoretical physics, and at a strikingly young age. Challenging research in loop quantum gravity. (String theory, he liked to say, was "Brilliant, beautiful, and wrong".) Students who were sometimes exasperating but on the whole rewarding to teach. (Dr. Winters was a mildly popular physics lecturer at UW.)</p><p></p><p>He gazed out the tentative spring sunshine, both admiring its beauty and wondering, as ever, just how it worked. He let his mind run idly, as it often did, over Einstein's thought experiments, trying to imagine what life would look like from a photon's point of view... The universe frozen in time, all space compressed into a point of blazing light. To a photon, everything really was one.</p><p></p><p>Going deeper, he pressed his imagination to incorporate his insights into the shifting loops of spacetime he studied. The lonely, microcosmic photons refracted into each other, overlapping and dancing...</p><p></p><p>For just a second, something broke in Jon's mind, and he GOT it. For an instant he saw how it all worked; the true universe in all its silent splendor. The moment faded as quickly as it came, and Jon knew that he'd spend the rest of his life trying to capture that vision in inadequate equations. A deep joy bubbled up in him and he laughed aloud, reaching for his computer to try with happy futility to record the vision in mathematical terms.</p><p></p><p>After several hours of work, the sun shifted onto his screen, blinding him with its glare. He reached over absentmindedly to pull the blind, when suddenly the sun went out. Blinking, he looked over in shock. The sun was shining, yes, but very dimly. He stood up in alarm, and the effect vanished; the sun was bright as ever. He sat back down limply; dim again.</p><p></p><p>At this point, he got suspicious and started moving a pencil around, watching its shadow. Sure enough, there was a place where the shadow just plain veered off in an impossible direction - as if the light were being diverted somehow. While he was pondering this miracle, there came a knock at the door. "Dr. Winters?" Jon, sighed, recognizing the voice - a student who was hopelessly behind and couldn't seem to grasp that you couldn't do well in physics without knowing algebra. The door opened, and the hapless young man looked right at him. "Huh. And it's his office hour, too."</p><p></p><p>Jon was about to call after him, puzzled, when he noticed his hand fading back into visibility. Shaking, he experimented further.</p><p></p><p>He could create and banish light at will. He could cause it to flow around his body, rendering himself invisible. With some mental effort, he could make a laser beam. That was crazy enough, but then he had a weird idea and tried to imagine a mechanism for seeing in the infrared - and could. Or through walls. Somehow, the photons were responding to his will.</p><p></p><p>Thankfully, he had no more classes that day. He developed a feel for what he was doing. It was as if subatomic reality had gotten to know him, just as he'd gotten to know it, and decided it liked him. If he could imagine something for light (and to a lesser degree, other subatomic particles) to do in enough physical detail, generally it would happen. The feel of it was somewhere halfway between making a friend and programming a computer - the spacetime continuum was very literal-minded, if eager to please.</p><p></p><p>What to do with this amazing ability? Write a paper? Back it up with proof? Wouldn't Jenkins over at Princeton turn green with envy! But no. There were better uses for such power as this. Jon thought inevitably of his other childhood love, after mathematics: Comic books.</p><p></p><p>With great power came great responsibility. He could use this power to help people. And Seattle had only recently gained a hero team of its own - Shadow Force. They'd put out a call for heroes to join them a few months back, and Jon had followed their exploits with interest and a certain guilty pleasure. The names rolled off his tongue: The Phantom. Erebus. Technoid. X-97. Bazooka. Brimstone. Why not... Photon?</p><p></p><p>He closed his eyes and imagined a suitable costume: Gold and white with red accents, and a flowing red cape. On the chest the Feynman diagram for a photon - a wavy line and the Greek letter 'gamma'. No spandex please, he didn't exactly have bulging thews, something more comfortable... When he opened his eyes, he wasn't too surprised to find himself wearing it, and laughed aloud for sheer pleasure.</p><p></p><p>The next day he walked to the Shadow Force base. On the way he discovered he could fly.</p><p></p><p>----------------</p><p></p><p>The Phantom and Erebus were perplexed by him. He had power, all right - and he seemed to get better as they watched - but he was hopelessly idealistic and green as sprouting grass. They came up with the idea of matching him with some other newbie heroes in the area and calling them the 'reserve team'.</p><p></p><p>Photon got an object lesson his very first day, getting sprayed with machine gun fire while trying to stop a bank robbery. (Memorable quote: "Evildoers, you face Photon!" "Photon, meet M16.") Turned out his 'force field' hadn't been as well-tuned against physical objects as he'd thought... this would take work. (After he got out of the hospital, of course...)</p><p></p><p>He found his feet as a hero some months later, when the Guardians put out a quiet call for supers with backgrounds in theoretical physics. Volunteering, he found that scientists in certain disciplines were being kidnapped by a group calling themselves the Covenant, and put himself on the line to be next. Spirited away to a base in the South Pacific and made to work on villainous projects, Jon was instrumental in bringing the place down, and without compromising his secret identity. (Save to a fellow kidnap victim, a Korean mathematician named Kim Hei Ryung. Memorable quotes: "Who do you think you are, one of those weirdos in tights?" "Um." Later, when in danger with her: "You know how you asked me if I was one of those weirdos in tights?" "Yeah?" "Well, I, uh... am." *flies her past danger*)</p><p></p><p>The seasoned heroes of Shadow-Force tacitly accepted him as one of their own after that, and he played a minor but important role in two of their biggest battles - against the evil archmage Diabolus and against the criminal mutant mastermind Red Dragon - as well as a number of lesser ones. (Funny quote: "Wow! He must couple with the virtual gluon field to do that!" Erebus: "SHUT UP AND SHOOT HIM!" <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> </p><p></p><p>Jon is very shy and socially awkward. (He's been dating Hei off and on - she's been transferred into the area - but of course she had to ask him out.) His Photon identity is a way for him to let a more flamboyant (and, let it be said, a bit pompous) side out. He continues to develop his power, and there does not seem to be any maximum limit... He appears to be limited only by his imagination and his will.</p><p></p><p>Being struck by Jessica's darkbolt wrought a change in Jon's powers, a sudden deepening. He had long been able to take on a form of pure light, travelling at c. But suddenly he found that he could control it to a much greater extent - he could change direction, for example (creating and destroying microscopic black holes in order to do so!), and even turn it on for only tiny slivers of a second. What's more, he could "edit" his human form back to health while immersed in the cosmos. Bullets don't concern him much any more - he can dodge out of the way literally at the speed of light, and heal any damage rapidly even if one should hit.</p><p></p><p>Going it alone in Seattle, with Beta and whoever else might turn up, terrifies Jon. He's no tactician like Erebus, no planner and schmoozer like the Phantom. Despite his fear, though, he's determined to make it work. Where will it all lead?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Shadow, post: 4925087, member: 16760"] [b]Photon's Origin and Previous Exploits[/b] [Here's what I wrote up on Photon before the game started. Everything here is a recap of what actually went down in the original campaign, barring a few cosmetic changes, up to the point where he got shot by Jessica. (That bit really did happen, but everything after it is new.)] Jonathan Winters leaned back in his office chair. Life was good. He had his dream job: Professor of theoretical physics, and at a strikingly young age. Challenging research in loop quantum gravity. (String theory, he liked to say, was "Brilliant, beautiful, and wrong".) Students who were sometimes exasperating but on the whole rewarding to teach. (Dr. Winters was a mildly popular physics lecturer at UW.) He gazed out the tentative spring sunshine, both admiring its beauty and wondering, as ever, just how it worked. He let his mind run idly, as it often did, over Einstein's thought experiments, trying to imagine what life would look like from a photon's point of view... The universe frozen in time, all space compressed into a point of blazing light. To a photon, everything really was one. Going deeper, he pressed his imagination to incorporate his insights into the shifting loops of spacetime he studied. The lonely, microcosmic photons refracted into each other, overlapping and dancing... For just a second, something broke in Jon's mind, and he GOT it. For an instant he saw how it all worked; the true universe in all its silent splendor. The moment faded as quickly as it came, and Jon knew that he'd spend the rest of his life trying to capture that vision in inadequate equations. A deep joy bubbled up in him and he laughed aloud, reaching for his computer to try with happy futility to record the vision in mathematical terms. After several hours of work, the sun shifted onto his screen, blinding him with its glare. He reached over absentmindedly to pull the blind, when suddenly the sun went out. Blinking, he looked over in shock. The sun was shining, yes, but very dimly. He stood up in alarm, and the effect vanished; the sun was bright as ever. He sat back down limply; dim again. At this point, he got suspicious and started moving a pencil around, watching its shadow. Sure enough, there was a place where the shadow just plain veered off in an impossible direction - as if the light were being diverted somehow. While he was pondering this miracle, there came a knock at the door. "Dr. Winters?" Jon, sighed, recognizing the voice - a student who was hopelessly behind and couldn't seem to grasp that you couldn't do well in physics without knowing algebra. The door opened, and the hapless young man looked right at him. "Huh. And it's his office hour, too." Jon was about to call after him, puzzled, when he noticed his hand fading back into visibility. Shaking, he experimented further. He could create and banish light at will. He could cause it to flow around his body, rendering himself invisible. With some mental effort, he could make a laser beam. That was crazy enough, but then he had a weird idea and tried to imagine a mechanism for seeing in the infrared - and could. Or through walls. Somehow, the photons were responding to his will. Thankfully, he had no more classes that day. He developed a feel for what he was doing. It was as if subatomic reality had gotten to know him, just as he'd gotten to know it, and decided it liked him. If he could imagine something for light (and to a lesser degree, other subatomic particles) to do in enough physical detail, generally it would happen. The feel of it was somewhere halfway between making a friend and programming a computer - the spacetime continuum was very literal-minded, if eager to please. What to do with this amazing ability? Write a paper? Back it up with proof? Wouldn't Jenkins over at Princeton turn green with envy! But no. There were better uses for such power as this. Jon thought inevitably of his other childhood love, after mathematics: Comic books. With great power came great responsibility. He could use this power to help people. And Seattle had only recently gained a hero team of its own - Shadow Force. They'd put out a call for heroes to join them a few months back, and Jon had followed their exploits with interest and a certain guilty pleasure. The names rolled off his tongue: The Phantom. Erebus. Technoid. X-97. Bazooka. Brimstone. Why not... Photon? He closed his eyes and imagined a suitable costume: Gold and white with red accents, and a flowing red cape. On the chest the Feynman diagram for a photon - a wavy line and the Greek letter 'gamma'. No spandex please, he didn't exactly have bulging thews, something more comfortable... When he opened his eyes, he wasn't too surprised to find himself wearing it, and laughed aloud for sheer pleasure. The next day he walked to the Shadow Force base. On the way he discovered he could fly. ---------------- The Phantom and Erebus were perplexed by him. He had power, all right - and he seemed to get better as they watched - but he was hopelessly idealistic and green as sprouting grass. They came up with the idea of matching him with some other newbie heroes in the area and calling them the 'reserve team'. Photon got an object lesson his very first day, getting sprayed with machine gun fire while trying to stop a bank robbery. (Memorable quote: "Evildoers, you face Photon!" "Photon, meet M16.") Turned out his 'force field' hadn't been as well-tuned against physical objects as he'd thought... this would take work. (After he got out of the hospital, of course...) He found his feet as a hero some months later, when the Guardians put out a quiet call for supers with backgrounds in theoretical physics. Volunteering, he found that scientists in certain disciplines were being kidnapped by a group calling themselves the Covenant, and put himself on the line to be next. Spirited away to a base in the South Pacific and made to work on villainous projects, Jon was instrumental in bringing the place down, and without compromising his secret identity. (Save to a fellow kidnap victim, a Korean mathematician named Kim Hei Ryung. Memorable quotes: "Who do you think you are, one of those weirdos in tights?" "Um." Later, when in danger with her: "You know how you asked me if I was one of those weirdos in tights?" "Yeah?" "Well, I, uh... am." *flies her past danger*) The seasoned heroes of Shadow-Force tacitly accepted him as one of their own after that, and he played a minor but important role in two of their biggest battles - against the evil archmage Diabolus and against the criminal mutant mastermind Red Dragon - as well as a number of lesser ones. (Funny quote: "Wow! He must couple with the virtual gluon field to do that!" Erebus: "SHUT UP AND SHOOT HIM!" :) Jon is very shy and socially awkward. (He's been dating Hei off and on - she's been transferred into the area - but of course she had to ask him out.) His Photon identity is a way for him to let a more flamboyant (and, let it be said, a bit pompous) side out. He continues to develop his power, and there does not seem to be any maximum limit... He appears to be limited only by his imagination and his will. Being struck by Jessica's darkbolt wrought a change in Jon's powers, a sudden deepening. He had long been able to take on a form of pure light, travelling at c. But suddenly he found that he could control it to a much greater extent - he could change direction, for example (creating and destroying microscopic black holes in order to do so!), and even turn it on for only tiny slivers of a second. What's more, he could "edit" his human form back to health while immersed in the cosmos. Bullets don't concern him much any more - he can dodge out of the way literally at the speed of light, and heal any damage rapidly even if one should hit. Going it alone in Seattle, with Beta and whoever else might turn up, terrifies Jon. He's no tactician like Erebus, no planner and schmoozer like the Phantom. Despite his fear, though, he's determined to make it work. Where will it all lead? [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
Playing the Game
Story Hour
Life and Light: Shadow-Force Reborn (Updated May 8, 2019)
Top