Logs 36-50: Heroes Unlimited Part 3A: War on O-H-M Earth

Disclaimer

I lost my detailed notes from these adventures years ago and I’m guessing for some of these details, but I want to provide a coherent story with these logs so I’m piecing it together as best as possible from my remaining notes.

Logs 36-50: Heroes Unlimited Part 3A: War on O-H-M Earth

Some players challenge storytellers in amazing ways. I enjoy a challenge, but my inexperience as a GM started to show through as new players found loopholes in the Heroes Unlimited rules and ways to manipulate the game in ways that I wasn’t expecting. I also failed to foresee some obvious conflict brewing that I unintentionally helped push along with my O-H-M Earth war story. The way I roleplay and run games today is very different because of the lessons I learned back in the day.

This part of our RPG saga differs from the most of the rest because, for the most part, I actually ran two different groups of players that occasionally ran into each other (and battled each other because they were on different sides of the war going on). The two groups of players were mainly: Team Feli (NH, RW, BD, SS, MS, KL, AC) and Team Zah (AJ, BW, JS, AF, TV, LV).

JerVerse Adventure 36: Introducing Zahadoom

My friend AJ listened to me describe the different worlds in my RPG multiverse and stopped me when I explained O-H-M Earth’s Magi. He wanted to be a wizard-like character and, since Heroes Unlimited wasn’t exactly Dungeons & Dragons, that option provided the closest concept I had to a wizard. His choice to play a wizard caused me to focus more effort on my O-H-M Earth war storyline and caused him to end up on the opposite side of my longtime player NH’s character Feli. But, at the time, I didn’t think about any of that. I just thought: “Oh cool. AJ is going to play a Magi!”

Zah’s backstory included killing his own parents as a child and being raised with torturous training as an orphan taken in by the Magi military. They groomed him to become one of their elite Magi soldiers in the coming war with the Outas. For his initial field mission, Zah found himself in charge of a special ops team in Magi District 11. Zah, Dion, Tres, and Chill took their orders from their Magi leader Azul.

JerVerse Adventure 37: Introducing Raven

AJ recruited BW to join our RPG adventures. BW told me he wanted to play a bionic warrior. We created a background in which he was a sleeper agent as a human recruited by the Magi to infiltrate the human bionic forces. After he received his bionic implants, he started his work as a double-agent spying on what the humans were calling their Bionic Elite Forces (BEF, which they pronounced as “beef”). Raven impressed his bosses on both sides, but ultimately left BEF to join up with Azul’s team at the Magi HQ.

JerVerse Adventure 38: Zah & Raven v. BEF

Zah and Raven used Raven’s intel to break into a human BEF facility to neutralize the threat of the humans interfering in the future Outas-Magi conflicts. Zah and Raven, along with their NPC assistants, successfully defeated the BEF team and destroyed the facility.

JerVerse Adventure 39: Introducing Doc Roc

AJ and BW recruited their friend JS to join our games. JS wanted to play a mutant. His character greatly resembled X-Men’s Beast, but instead of his body being covered in fur, it was covered in blue rock-like skin. I suppose that made him a mix of Beast and the Thing from Fantastic Four. But we weren’t trying to steal from the comics.

Doc Roc was a genius and weapons expert who loved explosives and killing people. The magi recruited him as a weapon against their BEF and Outas enemies. Doc Roc proved himself by killing several enemies of the Magi.

JerVerse Adventure 40: MSF v. Outas Operatives

Zah, Raven, and Doc Roc teamed up as Magi Special Forces (MSF). Azul sent them to assassinate an important Outas politician. Zah, Raven, and Doc Roc attempted to infiltrate an Outas political base. Zahadoom was afraid he would fail at deceiving the psionicists, with their mind-reading powers, so he honestly told them “We want you to let us in. Someone is trying to kill your leader and we can tell you all about it.” Of course, we was talking about his own team, but the guards there fell for his creative trick. When he got to the Outas political leader, he declared “I am the one who is here to kill you.” Mission accomplished.

JerVerse Adventure 41: Space Station Tigerstar

Back to our old group of characters: after some time back on Earth Prime, Team Cherry was recruited to join the new Space Station Tigerstar; the U.S. government funded a space station to help watch out for alien threats and act as a base for superheroes working together to protect the world. Each character was given the opportunity to come up with a new costume with superhero suit provided; Tiger, who had been appointed to run the station, also encouraged them to each pick a new “codename” to go by and offered to fund whatever projects they wanted to work on. Al, Linus, Dr. Lane, Chad, Jim, Vic, and Verali Daine planned out projects to work on while Feli and Bren continued their romance.

JerVerse Adventure 42: Team Feli v. Team Zah

Feli, Al, Jim, and the Mighty Xedus returned to O-H-M Earth so Feli could visit with her mother Meli, but Meli was off with her fellow Outas agent and friend Aniece. When the group investigated the situation with the Outas and Magi forces working against each other, they ended up at an apartment complex where Zahadoom had brought his team to hunt down enemy Outas agents (including Meli and Aniece and the rogue Magi Bren Fox).

As a GM I suppose I thought the two groups would work together to find a solution to the bigger mystery; instead, Feli’s team and Zah’s team ended up fighting each other. When Feli’s team dominated the battle, Zah teleported himself away (disappointing Raven, Doc Roc, and their Magi henchman). Feli’s team escaped, met up with her mom, and found out all about the war.

JerVerse Adventure 43: Dr. Lane Returns to the Cave

MS was very busy during the summer preparing for her early college program that she was starting in the fall. We managed to get her back to roleplay a little. This solo side quest was meant to help get her back in the game, but it was one of the last times she was able to join us. I had Dr. Lane follow the mysterious voices that led her to her mystic short sword back to the cave in Vancouver, where she discovered fairies hiding there. She engaged in an adventure with them.

JerVerse Adventure 44: Al & Linus, Super Spies

BD and LS were available one day so we played a side adventure with the two of them going back to work for the Techno-spy organization. Effectively, Al recruited Linus to come train with the techno-spies (which was really a great excuse for the two of them to steal some technology). They had to deal with a rival spy, the Chinese food delivery agent known as Ding. I enjoyed playing the NPC Ding so much that he ended up becoming a recurring character over the years. At any point, when they least expected it, some Chinese food would arrive (and that meant danger).

JerVerse Adventure 45: Introducing Earshot

RW decided to make a new character. He was concerned about the antagonism with the Zahadoom group and hoped that by making a character with some special superpowers (with a daze ability as well as powerful energy expulsion), he would be able to help fight the enemy much better. I ran him through some scenarios in which he was able to test out his powers with great success. This character came from Htrae as an agent of their Planetary Defense Ministry, but he was happy to come to Earth and help Space Station Tigerstar.

JerVerse Adventure 46: Team Tigerstar v. Scaline Scoutship

Not wanting more conflict with Zah’s team, Feli took Tiger’s advice like the rest of Team Tigerstar and donned a superhero costume and mask; she took on the alias Tempest. Al, Feli, and Earshot led a team of heroes from Tigerstar in stopping the threat of a Scaline spaceship that came to Earth Prime.

JerVerse Adventure 47: Earshot v. Zahadoom

Not wanting to leave a threat out there, even in another dimension, Earshot insisted on being teleported to O-H-M Earth to fight Zahadoom. This adventure, unfortunately, just led to more conflict amongst my players and left both RW and AJ frustrated with the game (not to mention me, as GM, realizing that my players were openly warring with one another). Oops.

JerVerse Adventure 48: Introducing Swoosh

My cousin AF came to town and asked to join the RPG campaign. I helped AF make his character: Codename Swoosh, who had a prehensile tail and could adhere to any surface with an adhesion ability. Swoosh completed a mission as a mercenary for hire. In a hilarious twist, any time the enemies started to win my cousin would have his character surrender to them. After surrendering, Swoosh would look for some sort of advantage.

JerVerse Adventure 49: Zah & Swoosh v. Aniece Long

Magi Special Forces hired Swoosh and had him team up with Zahadoom. Together, the duo dealt with Zah’s romance interest Lady Katrina while on a mission to kill the Outas agent Aniece; Swoosh actually got the kill, before Zah could finish off Aniece. Katrina and Zah seemed to have a chance at a life together until she turned out to be a double or triple-agent working with possibly all three main alliances on O-H-M Earth.

JerVerse Adventure 50: MSF v. Outas Leaders

Magi Special Forces had a rival Magi group that took on other missions for the Magi - Commander Anderson and his Mustard Men. Unfortunately, the Mustard Men were often sloppy in their work and Magi Special Forces had to come in and clean up after them. Zah, Doc Roc, Raven, and Swoosh went in to clean out some warehouses when Commander Anderson’s team failed to stop the secret meetings of the Outas leaders. Zah’s team was much more successful at taking out important Outas agents, but Swoosh died during the combat in this adventure.

Reflections

What an exciting summer campaign! We were playing all the time. Unfortunately, during this part of the RPG saga I found myself really stressed out because of how much player conflict resulted from the war storyline (and the personality clashes from my two different groups of friends). For a long time NH and RW really hated AJ and his friends as a result of the in-game conflict. To help correct the situation, I needed to either keep the groups of players separate or find ways for them to work toward shared goals. Either way, I knew the situation also required time so I wasn’t expecting immediate results...

Logs 26-35: Heroes Unlimited Part 2B: Freeing the Fairies

Disclaimer

I lost my detailed notes from these adventures years ago and I’m guessing for some of these details, but I want to provide a coherent story with these logs so I’m piecing it together as best as possible from my remaining notes.

Logs 26-35: Heroes Unlimited Part 2B: Freeing the Fairies

The Heroes Unlimited system provided an amazing set of inspirational powers and abilities. I disliked that different character types used different experience point (XP) charts so I created my own unified chart and let my players know, moving forward, everyone would use that chart.  My players let me type up character sheets with a text-based program on the computer and, when they leveled, we printed out updated versions of their characters. Thankfully, over the years, I managed to save some of those files on a harddrive and then a thumbdrive, and ultimately to my Dropbox RPG folders; thus I still own easily printable digital copies of many of the old characters.

After the disaster from Glimmer’s explosion, we talked through RW’s concerns and managed to continue our RPG saga...

JerVerse Adventure 26: Introducing Verali Daine

NH and I worked with our friend DF to create her character Verali Daine (who was not related to the previous villain Lady Daine). DF chose to make a psionic character, similar to Feli, but with pyrokinesis abilities instead of hydrokinesis. Her character also suffered from amnesia that caused her to forget most of her origin story, which DF requested to make herself more comfortable playing a character in our strange adventures.

The other players joined us and I told the group the characters had been sucked into an alternative reality/imprisonment dimension and asked if anyone wanted to guest-GM for a session to create a different/interesting setting. NH volunteered and her imagination inserted some mysterious, playful fairy creatures that toyed with the characters as they explored the forests and got to know Verali, who had also ended up there as a result of an energy explosion. Some of the fairies tested the characters by manipulating them into situations and seeing how they responded. The fairies used these scenarios to judge the characters.

JerVerse Adventure 27: The Mighty Xedus

No one else wanted to guest-GM so I retook my role in the game and expanded on the fairy imprisonment dimension. I created some weird alien birdfolk that often, like an uncontrolled Turrets-reaction, yelled “Squaw!” The violent birdfolk also dive-bombed out of the sky, attacking the characters. As the characters befriended some of the good fairies (including Prince Xedus, who called himself “The Mighty Xedus”), they learned lore about the ancient fairies: apparently all ancient fairies were born with a birthmark on one of their feet and that mark determined whether the fairy would end up a good fairy or an evil fairy; technically this mark had nothing to do with the family line. The team discouraged the court of the good fairies from judging one another or the evil fairies based on their birthmarks.

JerVerse Adventure 28: Trapped with Evil Fairies

The evil fairies, including Olivia, attacked the group. Olivia’s wand was taken from her; thus the group learned that fairies thought they got their powers from their wands. Olivia believed herself powerless without her wand (thought that was just brainwashing from the fairy society, just like the good/evil birthmark issue). She tried to trick the team into giving her the wand back, but the group saw past her tricks. The team defeated that group of evil fairies and made their way toward the control room for the imprisonment dimension.

JerVerse Adventure 29: Escaping the Fairy Dimension

The team worked together to help the army of good fairies assault the high-tech command room inside the imprisonment dimension. The evil fairies had already taken out their alien captors. With the group’s help, the good fairies gained control. Unfortunately, the controls would not allow any of the fairies to teleport out without the Cosmic Key. They found files in the computer that would allow the group to leave and thus the fairies teleported Team Cherry to a world that they thought had clues to finding the Cosmic Key in exchange for the group agreeing to trying to find a way to free them from imprisonment. The team debated the issue since releasing the good fairies would also release the evil fairies, but they needed to escape so they accepted the deal.

JerVerse Adventure 30: Revealing Alicon’s Identity

The team ended up on an alternate version of Earth with someone who resembled the Red Baron character from the Cherry Research Institute, but he was calling himself Alexander. Through their investigation, the team realized that Alexander/Red Baron was actually Alicon Arc. Alicon was a Guardian of Htrae. This alternate reality version of Alicon told the team about the legend of the Cosmic Key (being a magic item created by joining the mystic red battlaxe with the mystic blue battlaxe).

JerVerse Adventure 31: The Return of Bren Fox

Still unsure how to get home, the group found their answer when Bren Fox showed up to rescue Feli. He professed his love for her and explained how he found out about the portals that his father and brother had been working on; he used a portal to find the Cherry Research Institute and, with the help of Gemini (who had gone to Earth Prime looking for the team), used a combination of magic, technology, and luck to interdimensionally locate Feli.

Bren brought the group to Earth Prime, where the team spoke with the true Alicon Arc and worked together to find the mystic magic battleaxe. Gemini gave the group a robot he called Robo-Jim so that he and the 16-year old Jim could stay out of danger for awhile. With the blue battleaxe, Bren was able to teleport the team to Htrae...

JerVerse Adventure 32: Introducing Niles Nivek

My buddy KL wanted to join in on our RPG adventures. We created the character Niles Nivek (Nivek is his first name Kevin backwards). For his background story, we had the character working for the evil General Divinitii (who was the younger brother of Divinity, the character that attacked Jay and Argonia’s team when they arrived on Htrae). Niles grew tired of working for his evil master and split off on his own, to oppose Divinitii, causing some battles (that Niles easily escaped from since he could fly and turn invisible).

JerVerse Adventure 33: Team Cherry v. Divinitii

Even though Bren had teleported Team Cherry to Htrae, the group lacked the knowledge of where to go for the ancient temple with the mystic red battleaxe that they needed to use to combine with the blue axe and create the Cosmic Key to free the fairies. In their search, they joined forces with Niles Nivek and warred with Divinitii’s army.

JerVerse Adventure 34: Joining the Olympus Crew

I synched up the timeline so that Team Cherry had a chance to interact with Jay, Mysto, and Argonia (whose mind was now trapped in the spaceship Olympus). This caused Part I of the RPG saga to come full circle with our current adventures. With their combined new team, the heroes were able to squash a new assault from Emperor Divinity’s people.

JerVerse Adventure 35: The Temple on Htrae

Jay, Mysto, and Argonia provided assisstance from Olympus while Team Cherry went into the ancient temple on Htrae; Team Cherry defeated Emperor Divinity one last time and united the mystic battleaxes that formed the Cosmic Key. They freed all of the fairies from their ancient imprisonment dimension. The group on Olympus offered them a ride home, but the trip through space would take 6 months; instead, Bren opened a portal that took the team (and some invisible fairies with them) back to Earth Prime. Niles stayed behind with plans to help lead Htrae into a better future.

Reflections

I realize, looking back at these early adventures, that I allowed an extreme Star Wars-level of cosmic coincidences to work out in the favor of the group so that they all reunited and accomplished their goals. But sometimes stories need those coincidences so the pacing doesn’t drag out forever. Bren Fox, an element of Feli’s backstory, provided the McGuffin I needed to start wrapping up the plot. I also relied on the lore I had made in the past with the mystic red battleaxe, but I built upon that with the Cosmic Key element.

I congratulated myself on wrapping up the campaign from our sophomore year of high school and considered my work finished. But my players asked, “When are we going to play this summer?” And word of our fun adventures spread; I soon found more people asking to join my RPG table. Luckily I had a lot of free time coming up. Tomorrow I plan to write about the summer campaign that took place between my sophomore and junior years of high school...

Logs 13-25: Heroes Unlimited Part 2A: The Cherry Institute

RPG Advice

My RPG advice for today includes buying craft organizer boxes from an online store, a Wal-Mart type store, or a hobby store. The dice box I bought all those years ago is still with me today, along with two more. I organize my original box with dice sorted by type so any players who need dice can easily grab them during the game and roll them. My extra dice boxes contain sets organized by color.

Logs 13-25: Heroes Unlimited Part 2A: The Cherry Institute

My friends BD, RW, NH, SS, MS, DF, and KL all joined in for the second part of our RPG saga - but not all at once. After they convinced me to GM new adventures with new characters I decided I wanted each person to engage in a solo introductory adventure. That way each new player had a chance to learn the mechanics of the game; the solo intro sessions also allowed us to play out each character’s backstory and establish individual goals before having the character join up with the group.

At this point I was only a sophomore in high school and I still had plenty to learn. My imagination ran wild and the Heroes Unlimited book provided the basis for allowing the players to either pick their abilities or roll randomly for them. At that point I had not yet grown concerned about establishing an adventuring party, thinking about party balance, worrying about jealousies or competitions between players, or even thinking about the possibility that we might want to establish a set schedule to roleplay. We simply gamed when our schedules allowed us to get together and approached the activity as cost-free entertainment.

A disclaimer for the following: I lost my detailed notes from these adventures years ago and I’m guessing for some of these details - but I want to provide a coherent story with these logs so I’m piecing it together as best as possible from my remaining notes.

JerVerse Adventure 13: Introducing Feli

NH and I created her character Feli. I had envisioned a modern sci-fi/fantasy world that I called O-H-M Earth (which stood for Outas-Human-Magi Earth); the Outas were a race of humans with psionic powers and the Magi were a race of humans with magic powers. The ordinary humans needed to compete and thus they created specialized bionic technology to enhance their soldiers. The Outas and Magi hated one another and were on the verge of a war. Feli was the teenage daughter of an Outas agent (named Melissa, Meli for short); Feli didn’t care about her mother’s politics or the coming war because she had fallen in love with a Magi named Bren Fox.

One day, when Feli was hoping to spend time with Bren, she saw what looked like him going into the woods with some other Magi. After a while, she got the nerve to follow after the trail and she found a circle of Magi in a ritual that opened a portal to another dimension. They discovered she was there and, to save herself from being killed by the evil Magi leaders, she ran through the portal before it closed behind her. She ended up on our modern Earth (Earth Prime) in the 1990s. On Earth Prime, Feli befriended the Cherry family that ran the Cherry Research Insitute; teenage Jim Cherry was also running around getting in danger and needing help. Feli rescued him from some thugs using her psionic abilities (which included hydrokinesis powers).

JerVerse Adventure 14: Introducing Glimmer

RW and I made his character Chad a.k.a. Glimmer, who was an animorph mutant (meaning he could turn into different animal forms) working with the Cherry Research Institute (which conducted mutant research and experiments). NH ended up joining us and their characters worked together to save teenage runaway Jim, who turned out to also be a mutant (with the abilities: negate other super powers and multiple lives). Their team also included NPCs Vic (who could transfer his mind into a helicopter or motorcycle) and a hero who called himself the Red Baron (who was actually Alicon Arc, the missing brother of Argonia from the Super Hero Society).

JerVerse Adventure 15: Introducing Linus

SS and I created his character Linus (who was basically a ripoff of Iron-Man but with more of a super spy personality) with techno-specialist skills. Before he got his suit of Iron-Man-like armor, he had to rely on his wits and MacGyver-esque skills to solve problems and keep himself out of danger; his background included growing up as a French executive/embezzeler who used the money he stole for his inventions. He fought off gangsters who wanted to steal his stolen money. Linus saw his opportunity to work with the Cherry Research Institute as a chance to upgrade his own technology and start a new chapter in his life.

JerVerse Adventure 16: Introducing Dr. Lane

MS and I argued a while about her character during creation because she was somewhat obsessed with the Superman-Lois Lane romance story and insisted on naming her character after Lois Lane and I did not want to use names that were directly stolen from copyrighted published material. In the end, I realized the happiness MS got from playing a character named Lois Lane was more important than continuing to press the issue. Besides, her character was a medical doctor with a mystic weapon and nothing like DC’s Lois Lane. Dr. Lane had a short sword that gave her super powers. She found the weapon in a cave in Vancouver, Canada after having visions that led her there. After dealing with some enemies, she found out the Cherry Research Institute was putting together a team and got herself hired on to work with them.

JerVerse Adventure 17: Team Cherry v. Lady Daine

The team from the Cherry Research Institute included Feli, Glimmer, Jim, Linus, and Dr. Lane. They worked together when a threat came from a palace in Africa. An evil lady there named Daine was causing problems. The team managed to stop her evil plans, but they were sucked through a portal to another dimension (where they were effectively “lost in space” on another world, questing to find a way home to Earth Prime).

JerVerse Adventure 18: Introducing Al

My buddy BD knew more about creating characters out of the Heroes Unlimited book than I did and put together an amazing combo for his character Al; he picked energy expulsion and the superpower that let him make force bubbles, which could be either shields or weapons. I came up with a backstory that he was from the world I called Techno-Earth (which was a more technologically advanced version of our Earth) and worked as a government agent/techno-spy with the cover of being a pizza delivery guy. On Techno-Earth, only government-sanctioned technology was legal and Al was one of the agents who was supposed to report on any illegal technology found out in the open. But Al didn’t really care about the government; he was a techno-genius himself and wanted illegal technology to study. He and his spy partner Patryn (who could shapeshift into objects and usually disguised himself as a chair) found some illegal tech and stole it for themselves.

JerVerse Adventure 19: Team Cherry v. The Techno-Police

Feli, Jim, Linus, Glimmer, and Dr. Lane fought through some enemies and ended up on Techno-Earth with no idea how to return home; they also had no clue about the laws against illegal technology or that they were carrying some tech that would get them in trouble since they were not from Techno-Earth. The group took refuge at a residential home where the family had ordered pizza. Al spotted the group and, curious about their tech, offered to help them. In doing so, Al helped them evade the Techno-Police and hide in a warehouse.

JerVerse Adventure 20: Team Cherry v. Scaline Hunters

The team caught the attention of some interdimensional Scaline hunters; the Scalines were lizardfolk warriors from the planet Posnarah [with ideals/philosophies similar to Klingons from Star Trek] who used their interdimensional teleportation and cloaked ship technology to hunt aliens for sport. With teamwork, the group killed off the Scaline hunters and took control of their alien ship; along the way, they had to deal with a dimensional counterpart of Jim who was working with the pizza delivery spy service, who was somehow 3 years older on this version of Earth (so they called him 19-year old Jim, but eventually he went by Gemini to avoid confusion). Al used the info the others gave him and his advanced degree in astrophysics to try to use the Scaline controls to teleport the team back to Earth Prime...

JerVerse Adventure 21: Team Cherry v. King Frederick

Instead of arriving at Earth Prime, the group found themselves on another alternate Earth; this planet featured an evil empire run by King Frederick, the dimensional counterpart of Jim Cherry’s step-father. King Frederick’s head of security was named Toby, but he was a dimensional counterpart of Linus. Linus took Toby’s technology when the team defeated these enemies and teleported away to another dimension. The 19-year old version of Jim tried flirting with Feli, but she told him she was hoping to someday reunite with her lost love Bren Fox.

JerVerse Adventure 22: Team Cherry v. Robot Army

Al teleported the team again, but this time they encountered a world with an evil robot army that was killing the human population. Team Cherry had to go to war with the robots and organize a resistance. They fought and then worked with the dimensional counterpart of the evil alien Comet. Gemini, Linus, and Al were able to use technology to hack into the robots and reprogram them so they would stop attacking. Gemini volunteered to stay behind and help the people rebuild (though he was actually studying the robots so he could create his own robots in the future).

JerVerse Adventure 23: Team Cherry v. Catfolk

The team’s next teleport, as Al continued working on the calculations to get the rest of the group home, brought them to a world with cat-like humanoids. Unfortunately, the team found themselves in dispute with some of the alien catfolk before leaving for their next destination. Ironically, when Gemini came here to join rejoin the group, they had already teleported out.

JerVerse Adventure 24: Team Cherry v. Ancient Meerkats

An ancient group of militaristic meerkat-like humanoids, about 2.5-3.5 feet tall had hidden away on a planet until the team found them. Al was amazed at the tanks, energy bazookas, and explosives used by the chaotic meerkats. While the meerkat clans warred with each other, the group befriended the Godfather-esque clan leader known as the Connected Meerkat (CM for short). They saved CM’s life and he made them “connected” to his “organization.” Secretly, CM was no ordinary ancient meerkat; he was actually the child of both an ancient meerkat and a mystery secret second parent; that was why CM had special powers beyond those of ordinary ancient meerkats.

JerVerse Adventure 25: Total Party Explosion (TPE)

The team teleported once again, but still failed to arrive at Earth Prime. They argued amongst themselves. Glimmer blamed Al and the others and said he was tired of their inability to get home; he used the meerkat-made backpack of explosive he had brought onboard and set off an energy explosion that expanded out covering the entire ship. All of the team members should have died as their ship exploded, but instead they found themselves teleported into an imprisonment “pocket dimension” by ancient creatures with a machine that allowed them to capture people when caught inside a certain energy signature [a.k.a. I didn’t want to let the actions of one player kill off the entire group just because he was annoyed with the plot].

Reflections

I really enjoyed creating different worlds and providing alternate versions of Earth. Most of my players seemed to enjoy the “Lost in Space” concept of the team exploring the universe while trying to find their way home. RW never mentioned that he had grown annoyed with the plot or the pacing of the adventures, but suddenly - BAM - he found a way within the rules to have his character not only kill himself, but the entire party. I never expected a player to behave that way during an adventure, but - looking back - I think he grew jealous of the powers of some of the other characters and wanted everyone to start over.

It was only because of quick thinking on my part that I saved the group; despite the shock, I came up with a new concept for my universe that allowed me to GM-cheat the situation. That new concept gave birth to some huge plot developments. Thus, in some ways, I ought to thank my player - but no, really, he pulled a BS move. I wish he would have just talked to me about the situation outside of the game, or even during the game at that point. Anything would have been better than trying to kill the other player characters.

I also had to figure out what to do if all but one player was available. Do we not play? Do we have that character “guard the ship” while the others go off adventuring together? Does the absent player’s character just wander off or temporarily become an NPC? I learned to ask players for their preference for these situations, but found that they all trusted me or another player to run their characters in their absence.

The second half of this part of the RPG saga included the characters trying to escape from their new location and deal with the ramifications of the imprisonment pocket dimension. I plan to write about those adventures tomorrow...

Logs 1-12: Heroes Unlimited Part 1: Super Hero Society

January 2017 Challenge! For this month I challenge myself to write out reflections about my non-D&D RPG experiences. I still roleplay, but D&D took over my gaming interests years ago. Before getting to my awesome D&D reflections, I want to go back through my equally phenomenal non-D&D experiences. I might need more than a month to give them their due, but I want to try to squeeze them into 31 days and see how the experience goes. Wish me luck and check back at the blog each day because I plan to tell some interesting stories.

Logs 1-12: Heroes Unlimited Part 1: Super Hero Society During my childhood I loved playing pretend and I even remember making my own board games with one of my cousins. In middle school my friend BD tried to get me to play RPGs and, unfortunately all I knew about roleplaying games came from the mainstream media accusing Dungeons & Dragons of containing satanic elements. My parents forbid me from playing D&D, which BD’s family found strange; after all, they named one of their cats Tasslehoff. BD showed me his non-D&D gaming systems: he owned BattleTech and several of the Palladium Games books (RIFTS, Ninjas & Superspies, and Heroes Unlimited). I tried BattleTech, which I plan to write about later, but Heroes Unlimited won out as the game that stuck with me. BD explained the Palladium RIFTS concept of a multiverse with interdimensional travel; as an avid reader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, I was already familiar with interdimensional conflicts.

Unfortunately, the sheer number of RIFTS books intimidated me. They created a vast multiverse with details of many planets, aliens, and organizations. I wanted to start fresh with something simple. Plus, as a kid, my $5 a month budge failed to provide me with the means to acquiring all the materials to play in an officially-created gaming universe.

“No problem,” BD let me know. We started gaming with BD as my first storyteller/GameMaster (GM for short). He created a game based in the real world, our world; in fact, our adventures began in our county with adventures in shopping malls and nearby cities. We used what we knew. With the Heroes Unlimited book, we made my first character - a bionic (cyborg) superhero. My middle school mind came up with the cheesy hero name Exo-Man and the character existed very much as a ripoff of RoboCop with Wolverine-claws. We told one of our friends, RW, about the adventures and he joined us.

Back then we used simple drawings on basic paper to represent combat situations, with a letter or number written down for each person involved in the situation. We never dreamed that products such as detailed 1” squared battle maps might exist some day; by the way, I recommend products like those shown on DMDavid’s blog, to people who play RPGs today: http://dmdavid.com/dd-fantastic-locations-and-map-packs/ - many of those maps remain on the market in used form via various online websites. Paizo also offers spectacular new maps through their website: http://paizo.com/pathfinder/accessories/maps

Years ago I found a file with some notes about our middle school adventures. Based on those notes and my memories, I give you my best attempt to recreate the details of our Super Hero Society. As a disclaimer, I must admit that my memory may be off on some details, but I will do my best to present the events as I recall them...

JerVerse Adventure 1: Exo & Quazi Origins

Exo-Man’s RoboCop-esque origin story involved him waking up after a horrible accident with a private security/technology company informing him they saved his life by giving him bionic implants, but now he owed them and needed to complete missions for them to repay his debt. They sent him to rescue an Australian weapon-tech specialist/mechanic named Quazi that had been captured by some bad guys. Quazi became Exo-Man’s [non-player character a.k.a. NPC] sidekick.

JerVerse Adventure 2: Exo & Quazi v. The Enemy Helicopter

Macro-Tech sent Exo-Man and Quazi to retrieve stolen blueprints from another company. Exo had to take down an enemy helicopter, but the duo ended up victorious.

JerVerse Adventure 3: Exo & Quazi v. The Crime Masters

Exo and Quazi fought the super villains called the Crime Masters who tried to take over a passenger train. The heroes saved the day.

JerVerse Adventure 4: Exo & Quazi v. The Nuclear Threat

Macro-Tech sent Exo and Quazi to stop a possible nuclear threat halfway around the world. Exo got to fly a jet, though he ended up playing chicken with an enemy jet; he and Quazi ejected to save their lives as both jets ended up destroyed.

JerVerse Adventure 5: Exo, Quazi, & Tiger v. Looters

A new hero who called himself Tiger (who had animal-morphing abilities) joined Exo and Quazi when they went to stop the looting of a nearby shopping center. At first, Exo thought Tiger an enemy, but the new hero helped save the day and joined the team; they decided to call themselves the Super Hero Society (SHS for short) [even though superhero really should be just one word].

JerVerse Adventure 6: Adam Axe & Blue Beauty Origins

The origin of Adam Axe involved a police officer named Adam who found a mysterious box in the sewer labeled “do not open until 1999.” He opened the box and found a mystic battleaxe with a red handle and the letters “AA” inscribed on it. When he touched the weapon, he received a vision of the Legend of the Red Magic Battleaxe: The legend told him of the need to return the item to a monument on the planet Htrae by the turn of the century or else both Earth and the sister planet Htrae would be destroyed. The axe also gave its wielder the ability to fly, to shoot out either lightning bolts or fireballs, to use a healing touch, and to create a mystic shield to protect himself.

Adam’s first adventure involved rescuing the kidnapped Canadian superhero Blue Beauty. In investigating the kidnappers, Adam ended up in jail and breaking out; while on the run from the law, he encountered Exo and Quazi; together, they rescued Blue Beauty. She told the group about the experiments done to her that caused her mutations (turning her skin blue, giving her the ability to fly, and transforming her into a person of extraordinary beauty).

JerVerse Adventure 7: Arch-villain Comet Revealed

The evil villain that opposed Macro-Tech and had been behind the kidnapping of Blue Beauty turned out to be the alien called Comet [with powers similar to Marvel's Fantastic 4's Human Torch]; with Adam Axe gone on vacation, Comet sent a truck after Exo and Tiger that exploded on the highway. Robots swarmed the heroes, trying to kill them and destroying everything in their path. Comet got away while the heroes stopped all of the robots.

JerVerse Adventure 8: The Death of Adam Axe & The Burning House

Adam Axe, while on the return flight from his vacation, found himself attacked by a ninja assassin; their battle caused the plane to crash into the ocean and killed everyone on board. Meanwhile Exo, Quazi, and Tiger fought a mutant in a burning house; they survived, but the enemy died in his own fiery death trap.

JerVerse Adventure 9: Super Hero Society v. Thieves & Uberbot

Exo, Tiger, and Quazi attempted to replace Adam Axe with a guy who called himself Crazy Cowboy; unfortunately, the new guy died while helping the team stop a jewel heist. After that, Comet sent his new Uberbot after Exo and Quazi, who were lured to a warehouse and forced to fight the robot.

JerVerse Adventure 10: Quake Origin & Comet’s Army

A new hero arrived to join the group, a mutant named Quake who had the ability to control the earth. He joined Exo, Quazi, and Tiger when they went to New Mexico to investigate the disappearance of Macro-Tech’s secret facilities; at first they fought some local punks, but the true villain turned out to be the group’s arch-nemesis Comet. Comet had a massive army of robots in the desert; the group engaged in an epic battle in which they stopped the robot army and Comet got away again, after severely injuring Exo-Man. Exo ended up stuck in the hospital for a while.

JerVerse Adventure 11: Super Hero Society v. Comet

Quazi rescued an alien woman from a crashed ship. She announced herself as Argonia Arc; she and her brother (who disappeared in the crash) came to earth to retrieve the legendary red battleaxe and bring the weapon back to their world of Htrae. Quazi told her what he knew about Adam Axe and the plane that exploded over the ocean.

Once Exo healed up, the team came together with: Exo, Quazi, Tiger, Blue Beauty, Quake, and Argonia. Together they retrieved the red battleaxe, but Comet waited in ambush. As a team, they finally defeated the supervillain. Unfortunately, they lacked the resources to get the legendary magic weapon back to the planet Htrae because they didn't have a working spaceship. Comet’s attacks had decimated the Macro-Tech corporation and they were forced to shut down the company.

JerVerse Adventure 12: Super Hero Society Epilogue

The United States government offered the Super Hero Society members official jobs working with a national superhero team that Blue Beauty had worked with in the past. Tiger, Quazi, Blue, and Quake agreed to join the government team. Exo and Argonia set up their own private investigation team, though Exo decided to drop the alias and go by his name Jay.

Mysto, an alien from Htrae arrived one day; he contacted Jay and Argonia because he detected the mystic red battleaxe in their office. He told them he could take them back to Htrae in his huge starship Olympus. Jay, Argonia, and Mysto ended up fighting aliens on their way back; a villain known as Divinity wanted to stop them from returning the axe. Argonia’s body was destroyed, but the team transferred her mind into the ship before she died. Jay and Mysto found the temple with the monument to return the axe.

Reflections

I learned a lot from my early gaming days. BD saw my excitement at making characters and actually asked me to create NPCs and scenarios along the way; he cleverly slowly transitioned me into the storyteller role. The character Tiger acted as a GMPC for him while I helped our friend RW come up with his backstory; I created the Legend of the Magic Battleaxe and NPCs like Blue Beauty. By Adventure 6 BD made me an assistant storyteller and, eventually co-GM. I ran the entire epilogue series of events since the battleaxe and Htrae were my creations.

One lesson I learned was that some players refuse to stick with one character. RW joined us as Adam Axe, for whom I helped create amazing lore and backstory. In looking through the Heroes Unlimited book, RW got excited about different powers and abilities and thus abandoned the character. Oh the frustration! BD and I asked what he wanted us to do with his former PC and either he told us to kill him off or BD just decided that would work better for the group. Thus RW briefly played Quake with mutant abilities, but again wanted something new. After that RW played Mysto, which allowed him to try out some alien powers.

We used some cheesy names for things, we stole ideas from different comics and movies, but we also created some really interesting lore and adventures all of our own imaginings. And yet, for some reason, when we matriculated from middle school to high school we stopped roleplaying for awhile. BD and RW involved themselves in band and other activities while I found myself joining up with the school’s speech and debate team.

We clearly missed gaming because we often talked about how much fun we had. One day, during my second year of high school, some of our other friends started asking about our RPG adventures and wondered if we could start up again. They asked me to act as GM and I accepted the challenge of creating new worlds for new characters to explore…