Tar Markvar
First Post
I ran a "Champions" game a couple years back that had a few interesting special points:
1) The game was so rules-lite that when I converted it to Aberrant, no one noticed.
2) The game was played with a light sense of humor. Not quite the level of The Tick, but along those lines. The extent of the angst was "What happens when the Bionic Hulk is caught at the gym without his costume?"
3) The plot and NPCs were almost completely ad-libbed on the spot. I have a history of comedic comic-book-based writing (I had a short series of stories called "Silopolis," which was online for a time, but which I took down because I didn't feel like keeping up the monthly payments on a site no one but me ever saw), and I trusted myself to come up with good superhero plots a lot more than I do D&D stories.
It turned out to be among the best games I ever ran, and easily the longest in terms of number of sessions.
The characters: Bionic Hulk (known as CyberHulk in Japan--while the real-life Bionic Hulk was a recluse and a hermit named Alex von Stubing, the comic-book version in the game world was dashing and romantic), Ghost-Wolf (my friend's uber-munchkinned character, who could become a werewolf, turn invisible, grow three times his size and fly at MACH 2), and Roswell Lee (a young master of an alien martial art, whose staff-blocking techniques were so fast they were considered Armor).
The Setting: My alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology. The heroes were members of a frat on campus.
The enemies: The first enemy, made up on the spot, was The Clone Army, who was one man who, everytime he was hit, split into two duplicates of himself. Those dupes would split, too, until eventually, you were dealing with an entire army of this guy. He was followed by the recruits of a rival frat, which began offering a scholarship to superhumans to put up against the heroes' frat. The leaders of these were The Fearleader (a cheerleader who could cloud the minds of men and force them to do whatever commands she put into the form of a chear) and The Flyer (a super-strong juggernaut of a hockey player, who changed his name the The Tiger (RIT's mascot) to show school spirit. There was also an invisible alien menace that was abducting students and replacing them with paranoid superhuman clones. At one point, the team had to battle a clone of Ghost Wolf, which occurred when the nano-machines that gave the Clone Army his powers infected the 'Wolf, and he split in two. The Clone Wolf wasn't evil, just simple-minded. There's also a clone of Roswell Lee off in space somewhere, though no one was ever sure whether the Roswell that remained with the group was the clone or not.
The storyline was as muddled and chaotic as those of comics, and it was great fun. I created NPCs on the fly by mentally noting a few rules (Clone Army divided when he got hit, had the ability to teleport, and was vulnerable to "radiation") rather than hard and fast stats. What eventually happened was that everyone had stats that showed how relatively powerful they were (Bionic Hulk could, according to Champions, lift a battleship), but we rarely rolled dice. It was a fast and fun superhero game, and one I'd like to reproduce sometime.
1) The game was so rules-lite that when I converted it to Aberrant, no one noticed.
2) The game was played with a light sense of humor. Not quite the level of The Tick, but along those lines. The extent of the angst was "What happens when the Bionic Hulk is caught at the gym without his costume?"
3) The plot and NPCs were almost completely ad-libbed on the spot. I have a history of comedic comic-book-based writing (I had a short series of stories called "Silopolis," which was online for a time, but which I took down because I didn't feel like keeping up the monthly payments on a site no one but me ever saw
), and I trusted myself to come up with good superhero plots a lot more than I do D&D stories.It turned out to be among the best games I ever ran, and easily the longest in terms of number of sessions.
The characters: Bionic Hulk (known as CyberHulk in Japan--while the real-life Bionic Hulk was a recluse and a hermit named Alex von Stubing, the comic-book version in the game world was dashing and romantic), Ghost-Wolf (my friend's uber-munchkinned character, who could become a werewolf, turn invisible, grow three times his size and fly at MACH 2), and Roswell Lee (a young master of an alien martial art, whose staff-blocking techniques were so fast they were considered Armor).
The Setting: My alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology. The heroes were members of a frat on campus.
The enemies: The first enemy, made up on the spot, was The Clone Army, who was one man who, everytime he was hit, split into two duplicates of himself. Those dupes would split, too, until eventually, you were dealing with an entire army of this guy. He was followed by the recruits of a rival frat, which began offering a scholarship to superhumans to put up against the heroes' frat. The leaders of these were The Fearleader (a cheerleader who could cloud the minds of men and force them to do whatever commands she put into the form of a chear) and The Flyer (a super-strong juggernaut of a hockey player, who changed his name the The Tiger (RIT's mascot) to show school spirit. There was also an invisible alien menace that was abducting students and replacing them with paranoid superhuman clones. At one point, the team had to battle a clone of Ghost Wolf, which occurred when the nano-machines that gave the Clone Army his powers infected the 'Wolf, and he split in two. The Clone Wolf wasn't evil, just simple-minded. There's also a clone of Roswell Lee off in space somewhere, though no one was ever sure whether the Roswell that remained with the group was the clone or not.
The storyline was as muddled and chaotic as those of comics, and it was great fun. I created NPCs on the fly by mentally noting a few rules (Clone Army divided when he got hit, had the ability to teleport, and was vulnerable to "radiation") rather than hard and fast stats. What eventually happened was that everyone had stats that showed how relatively powerful they were (Bionic Hulk could, according to Champions, lift a battleship), but we rarely rolled dice. It was a fast and fun superhero game, and one I'd like to reproduce sometime.
