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...