Logs 116-125: Heroes Unlimited Part 5B: Ancient Connections

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 116-125: Heroes Unlimited Part 5B: Ancient Connections

Some of the long-term players in our game had multiple characters at this point. We usually avoided them playing more than one character at a time because that tended to annoy them; NH had a scene in which Feli and Femme had to have an argument with each other and it was fun (for me, as the GM) to hear her roleplay the situation. BD switched off playing Al, Charr, and Jinnai.

I enjoyed creating the lore of the ancient beings, providing more mysterious elements for the characters to discover. Some of the elements I planned ahead of time, but I also just randomly created plenty of aliens and ancient beings on the spot based on the zany adventures the players chose to go on. Sometimes I felt I could predict their every move, but other times I really had to admit I had no idea what my players were thinking.

JerVerse Adventure 116: The Arena’s Tournament

An ancient being known as the Arena (who was the one in charge of “universal balance” and the Cosmic Knights) offered up a mystic sword as a reward for the winner of a tournament. Similar to the fairy tournament, the Arena controlled reality inside his own walls and would make sure no one truly died as a result of the combat; unlike the first tournament that featured one-on-one matches, this time the groups fought in teams. The winning team was forced to fight one another to determine the final victor.

While the others were involved in the tournament, Xoq and Verali were off having a cruise (setup by Draconias, who wanted the two to fall in love and produce him some more grandchildren for him). They were onboard the ship Cuboid, which was very similar to The Navicular.

Side Note: My notes don’t show who won this tournament, but I think it was Nelor this time. I know that eventually Linus ended up with an ancient mystic sword, but Nelor also had a powerful sword so this is probably how he got his.

JerVerse Adventure 117: Destroying the Universal Throne

CM realized he wasn’t really the “Ruler of the Universe” because there were so many things he just couldn’t do/change in the universe. The group figured out that Bran had lied and had been just using CM as a puppet. Bran went insane (as any “lesser being” would while trying to know/wield that much knowledge and power); the group had to destroy the Universal Throne to remove Bran from power. Unfortunately, Jarxen had died in his own attempt to take over the throne.

JerVerse Adventure 118: The Trial of the Century

Feli ended up with a second character, a short red-haired and blue-skinned Litlarian alien from the Intergalactic Peace Corps named Femme. Femme and Greg Haylege were asked to represent one of their friends when he was put on trial by the IPC. Unfortunately, their defense witnesses were people like CM and Pyr, who sounded crazy to ordinary people. Through investigation and argumentation, Femme’s team showed how their friend had been framed for a murder.

JerVerse Adventure 119: Al’s Imprisonment Dimension

For the sake of balance and justice, the Arena recruited Al to create an imprisonment dimension to hold the dangerous ancient beings that were running around harming the younger creatures of the universe. The Arena granted his agents the ability to capture the ancient beings.

JerVerse Adventure 120: Introducing ShadowAngel

AJ’s new character was an agent of the Arena; we worked together to craft a background that millions of years ago the Arena created even more powerful beings than the Cosmic Knights - the Angels of the Arena. One of those ancient warriors was ShadowAngel. We played out an adventure in ancient times when the Angels trapped ancient beings behind the ancient barrier. ShadowAngel and several others had been put into stasis.

In the current RPG timeline the Arena took ShadowAngel out of stasis and gave him the ability to imprison people in Al’s imprisonment dimension, with the directive to get to work protecting the “lesser beings” from the ancient threats.

JerVerse Adventure 121: Charr v. Evil Wizards

Charr had some blocked memories that finally came forward, revealing that an evil wizard had stolen his love interest Rajanna. Charr’s buddy Darn the dwarf helped him with his mission to rescue his lost love. Together, Charr and Darn joined up with the ShadowAngel and they all were able to rescue Rajanna.

JerVerse Adventure 122: Capturing Ancient Beings

ShadowAngel was joined by the others in his missions to capture dangerous ancient beings. Even Pyr and CM became Knights of the Arena to help with the mission. The team battled several ancient threats. Meanwhile, Al had been captured by the Evaew alliance.

JerVerse Adventure 123: The Game Master

The ancient Rakshasa called the Game Master (who had invented the HI cylinders) threatened the group when he heard they had been capturing his ancient allies. For a while, the Game Master managed to capture the group. When the group defeated the GM, his assistant surrendered to them and they were able to obtain more HI cylinders. They also gained the knowledge of creating the special HI shielding that was used inside the HI chambers.

JerVerse Adventure 124: The Evaew Defense Shield

The team focused on going back to rescue Earth Prime from the alien occupiers. They had to infiltrate the enemy to figure out how they were powering the new shield they used to protect their forces. They found out the aliens had captured Al and were using his fairy-energy as a type of mystic battery. Jinnai and Winter sacrificed themselves to free Al, who had been weakened after being used as a battery for so long.

JerVerse Adventure 125: Liberating Earth Prime

King Gemini’s Scaline resources were used to create enough Robo-Scalines to join the real Scalines and strike out against the alien alliances that had been occupying Earth. The team finally liberated Earth Prime from the alien threats by commanding different Scaline fleets and wiping out the main forces of the Evaew and LSW (though leaving Earth Prime rather scarred from the battles there). With the team’s success, the Scaline Empire ended up as the major intergalactic and interdimensional power in the universe.

Reflections

Part of my inspiration for the Evaew was the enemy alien alliance in Alan Dean Foster’s The Damned Trilogy (A Call to Arms, The False Mirror, and The Spoils of War), which I highly recommend as a great science-fiction read. I took the word Weave and spelled it backwards, as I was often prone to do. In fact, my players got so used to my word scrambles for names that - any time I introduced a new character or race or planet - they started writing down the word and seeing what they could make out of rearranging the letters.

To this day The Navicular remains one of my favorite creations as well. For that starship I researched actual yachts and based the layout of the ship on something I found on the internet. I also really liked the word that my mind made up to name the ship: Navicular.

I did my best to never miss a pun opportunity. I had created the aliens The Mee just so I could make jokes like “Shoot at Mee!” or “Whatever happens, kill Mee!” The meta-humor of having the team take on The Game Master also amused me because I trapped the characters in a simulated environment that they had to escape by killing the programmer/manipulator of their reality.