Logs 196-224: Heroes Unlimited Part 8: The Universal Council and Judgment Day

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 196-224: Heroes Unlimited Part 8: The Universal Council and Judgment Day

Unfortunately, today’s log suffers from the same issues I faced yesterday. I know the number of sessions played, what days we played them, and who showed up for them, but I lack my notes about what specifically happened at each session so I’m going to provide an overview of this entire chapter of our saga. Players included: NH, AJ, BW, BD, MW, JFP, LH, MR, LV, and HJ.

JerVerse Adventure 196-224: The Universal Council and Judgment Day

The major player characters were back in action: Femme, Feli, Valas, Raven, Al, Charr, Thomas, Turlock, Nelor, Lott, Sledge, Goliath, and even Greg Haylege. The characters surveyed the environment in the year 7,777 and realized they needed to form alliances with the major ancient races and intergalactic organizations. Thus the group formed an intergalactic congress that they called the Universal Council. Essentially, they formed a one-universe UN-type assembly that tried to protect people and keep the peace.

Believe it or not, the players enjoyed spending many sessions debating intergalactic politics instead of just engaging in combat all the time. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of disputes came up that caused conflicts and combat; but when possible, the characters used diplomacy to resolve their issues. NPCs such as Mayhem, the Connected Meerkat, and Pyr were just as good at getting into trouble as helping the group solve problems. Villains attempted to bring back the Dark Ones and end the universe, but the heroes prevailed. I wish I could remember more details about the middle adventures, but I know some of the details and I have some typed files about the end events.
Along the way major threats came from Temptrick and Lady Temporanna (who had been the lover of Arcanus and mother to both Zah and his brother). With her time travelling powers, Lady Temporanna was able to go back to when The Dark Ones still existed and bring some of them into the current time to bother the players.

This is probably a good place to also mention that, somewhere along the way, the characters inadvertently created a second universe. They had dealt with dimensional counterparts from their own universe, but they ended up having to deal with universal counterparts as well. In the second universe Feli’s counterpart was Mar; Mar had a child with her version of Zahadoom named Maladoom. Lott’s counterpart was named Ttol. The universal counterparts were evil/opposites like the Mirror Universe in Star Trek.

I remember creating a long-term (though subtly introduced) plot with the concept of the 4-Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Over the course of many adventures, certain characters were brought into the plan to destroy the universe and bring about the ultimate apocalypse. Good ol’ Dr. Lane was possessed by the ancient goddess of thievery Vanesli and became Pestilence. Jinnai was brought back to life to serve as War. Dread had been calling himself Death and was the obvious choice to take on that role. Someone else represented Famine. As per the mythology, the “horsemen” arrived one at a time. If all four of them came to a world, it would be destroyed.
The end events came to a head with a predetermined “Judgment Day” (from the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse) that the characters had to prevent. After they saved the day, we concluded our story with Turlock’s wedding to his NPC love interest Lady Ashley. For his reception, Turlock hosted a tournament and promised a special reward to the winner [side note: the player LH came up with this idea, but it worked great for ending the RPG saga adventures since we liked having tournaments].
AJ’s character Valas won the tournament, but everyone was shocked (and disappointed) when LH announced that the reward Turlock was giving the winner of the tournament was the chance to face Turlock in combat. For months LH had his character quest to get an ancient Shaper body and had his soul put into it; the ancient Shaper being could steal the powers/abilities of anyone he fought. It turned out LH wanted to see who was the most powerful and then steal that person’s powers. What he didn’t realize was that AJ’s character Valas had a soul-swapping ability. AJ asked LH three times if he was sure he really wanted to have Turlock and Valas fight. When LH insisted they battle, AJ won initiative and used his soul-swapping powers to steal Turlock’s Shaper body; Valas teleported out and Turlock was stuck with a powerless body.
Turlock tried to convince his family (everyone related to Draconias) to go to war with Valas and the rest of the Vemniriscotts, but they refused his request. The rest of the main characters in the story were very happy that they had achieved peace in the universe and they were not willing to sacrifice that accomplishment for a personal vendetta.
Reflections

Ending with a wedding, a tournament, and player v. player shenanigans gave our RPG saga the special send off that it deserved. At that point in my life, I was finished with my RPG multiverse. I enjoyed wrapping up all of the storylines and ending the saga. Within a month though, I found myself running a one-off session for friends; I used the Heroes Unlimited system, but gave my friends (NH, BD, AJ, BW, and JP) character sheets to play themselves in a modern setting. We had a lot of fun with that RPG session and my friends spent months talking me into starting up a new game.

Six months later we were making RPG characters who were in college, as part of a secret society...