19th Level

With the release of the new Golden Age Champions , at some point in my future there's a Golden Age superhero campaign (not this calendar year though - still adventures to do in Hyperborea). Though much of the writing and art of the Golden Age of comics is extremely juvenile (with a much younger audience in mind), I've always liked many of the "big ideas" of the era. I'd love at some point to do a game that establishes a superhero universe from the start. I'd like to get a good campaign going with Champions  itself - the Hero System, of which Champions is a part of, is one of those games that have been on my bucket list for some time. One additional hindrance to me is given I use Roll20 for gaming nowadays and there's only a basic Hero System sheet there. Mind you there's none for our current game of Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea at all, though I sometimes think of trying to tweak an AD&D sheet into one. My hunch is I'l...

Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. By this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.  Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land  introduces the term "grok" which is a bit difficult to understand - I've always viewed it as a full and total understandi...

The version of Golden Age Champions that I have dates back to 1994 and was published by Iron Crown Enterprises for the 4th edition of the Champions RPG. The first 30 pages deal with the campaign premise. It discusses possible campaign lenses such as a more Dark Champions campaign (with characters more like the Spider, the Phantom, etc.), super-patriotic games, and something in-between. It gives a brief history of the Golden Age of comic books, different types of package deals for characters of the period, a discussion of draft deferments for those characters who will not be participating in World War II, etc. Next up is a large section of historic source material. It covers people and organizations of the period, a glossary of WWII and homefront terminology, and three parallel timelines - the real world, the Champions universe, and and "Axis Victory" universe. Regretfully these timelines only cover up to 1946 - it would have been interesting to see them go a bi...

High Rock Press currently has a Kickstarter going for Darren Watts's  Golden Age Champions . You should go support it. It needs about $5000 more over the next two weeks to reach its $20,000 goal.  I'll offer my own reward... Assuming no hiccups in my regular gaming, I'll run a Golden Age Champions campaign and write about the experience. It should make for interesting reading as while I've read a number of Hero products and played in a few games in college, I've never run a Hero game. Champion Complete  peels away many layers of complexity from the 5th and 6th edition Hero games - fine games, but games whose crunchiness really started loading up. My impression is that while Champions Complete  is based on the 6th edition of Hero, it seems to be closer to the 4th edition in complexity (the version I played a few times). I've got some Golden Age maps of Port Henry to break out - the Earth-38 version of Port Henry of course. High Rock Press did a gre...

I'm continuing thoughts on a possible superhero campaign, this time focusing on system. I'm going to be thinking about systems with a few criteria. They are: My thoughts on the system How well a fit it is for my group Any possible hiccups running the game with Roll20 The availability of the game My group consists of people who have all played a decent number of systems and genres. Some are pretty knowledgeable on rules and gaming history while others are more of the "here's what I want to do, tell me what to roll" style. We've dabbled in Fate-style games in the past - I like them quite a bit but I'm not 100% certain we're a great fit for such a strongly narrative style of play (though as I've said before, when Dresden Files Accelerated comes out we are most definitely taking it for a spin). We've made use of Roll20 for our gaming, with players concentrated in Massachusetts but with a number located further south. The character ...

I received some discussion, both within and outside my gaming group when I mentioned my desire to at some point dive into Hero System and Traveller. I've a few further thoughts on those two settings and I figured I'd explore them a little bit more. The earliest I see a new game would be the late-March/early-April time frame, fitting in with my grad school schedule. Given I'm currently doing a science fiction game I figured I'd mull over some thoughts about superhero campaigns. It may just be a thought exercise but what GM doesn't like such exercises... I've grown to think that what one sees in superhero television shows of late make for a good model to emulate. I've been working my way through Arrow and The Flash of late (I'm about a year behind...) and have also seen the Netflix Daredevil and Jessica Jones  series and I've found I really like the feel of such shows. In these settings the heroes are not unique but they are extremely special. ...

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him. I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom and round Perdition's flames before I give him up!  - Star Trek II Channeling Moby Dick I've been gaming since the early 1980's so I've run and played in a lot of games. But there's a few games I've never really gotten the chance to run or play in much more than a few standalone games here and there. I've mentioned Traveller  a few times in this blog. I remember seeing those little black books at my gaming store in the 1980's but never got into it. Over the years I've picked up a number of the books for it and have a pretty complete digital collection of the original game. It does have a few challenges. The first of which is having a bit of trouble selling it - it does have a reputation of being "the game where you can die in character creation". There's also the challenge of the Imperium, a massive sett...