Logs 51-65: Heroes Unlimited Part 3B: Peace 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 51-65: Heroes Unlimited Part 3B: Peace on O-H-M Earth

In some ways our RPG saga functioned as a superhero soap opera just as much as an action-adventure game. Slowly but surely, I hoped to repair the relationships of my players. I worked at moving the plot so the players could end the war on O-H-M and deal with more common enemies.

Side Note: Years later the TV show Heroes aired and I swore the creators/writers of the show must have been using a Heroes Unlimited book and/or were somehow stealing ideas from my old campaign. My main complaint with the show was that they spent too much time with the characters separated out; the show would have worked better as a hero team-up show. Funny enough, I had plenty of problems with my players not always coming together as a team as well...

JerVerse Adventure 51: Introducing Wolf

My cousin AF’s new character was named Wolf; he could turn invisible and put magic armor over himself. A Magi, Wolf fit in much better with Magi Special Forces than Swoosh had in the past. Wolf completed some easy combat scenarios before joining up with Zah’s squad.

JerVerse Adventure 52: Zah & Wolf v. Outas Ambassador

Magi Special Forces had done enough damage to the Outas organization that they were ready to negotiate a peace treaty. Before the dust settled, Azul wanted one more assassination completed to pressure the Outas to settle for the terms asked of from the Magi leadership. Zah and Wolf sneaked in, killed their target, and returned to base. When they came home, Zah got in an argument with Azul and decided to overthrow his leader; Wolf was killed in the battle, but Zah killed his commander and went rogue.

JerVerse Adventure 53: For the Love of Sarah

Tigerstar Special Forces and former Magi Special Forces agents Raven and Doc Roc teamed up when a woman named Sarah was kidnapped. Both Earshot and Raven were in love with Sarah, though they each loved a different dimensional counterpart of Sarah. The woman they rescued turned out to be a third Sarah, who found herself falling in love with both Earshot and Raven.

JerVerse Adventure 54: Introducing Cassandra

My buddy AC wanted something different. We found the insanity tables in the Heroes Unlimited book and he rolled for multiple personalities. Cassandra was the daughter of the assassinated Aniece Long and one of her personalities wanted vengeance. Another personality saw fairy creatures (that weren’t really there) telling her to do strange things. As an Outas whose family was friends with Feli’s family, Cassandra was familiar with many of the characters from our story. One of her personalities was in love with Bren (which transferred to her being in love with his twin brother Bran); when Bren interacted with Cassandra and realized this, he took her to Space Station Tigerstar in hopes of keeping her safe. At the station, Cassandra joined the hero team and got to know the people there.

JerVerse Adventure 55: Team Tigerstar v. Evil Fairies

When Tiger decided to retire, Quazi was promoted to command Space Station Tigerstar. Feli, Al, Earshot, Cassandra, and Jim went on a mission to stop a group of evil fairies that were causing problems. One of the evil fairies was named Pyr, but the group talked to him and realized he was only “evil” because of his birthmark; they helped him join the good fairies and work against the evil fairy team of Knee, Ash, Bats, Sting, and Jester.

JerVerse Adventure 56: Team Zah v. The Fairies

Winter, the ancient mystical white tiger, had been trapped in an amulet (by the powerful ancient being known as Cinoma) and forced to follow the commands of whomever held the magic item; Zah ended up with the item and made a deal with Cinoma to become a fairy slayer. Zah began teleporting from place to place killing fairies. Zah left his former teammates Raven and Doc Roc behind and they got bored sitting around doing nothing.

For sport, Raven and Doc Roc decided to start shooting and destroying trees; little did they know, a fairy was disguised as one of those trees (because he had been spying on them); their actions brought them up against the “Fairy Review Board” who “sanctioned them” and told them they could never harm a living thing again. Raven and Doc Roc fell for the deception for a while, thinking they had been cursed by this group of fairies. Eventually they accidentally hurt someone and laughed to themselves for being gullible enough to believe the tricksters.

JerVerse Adventure 57: Zah v. Karag

The good fairy king was named Errius and the evil fairy king was named Karag. Cinoma wanted Zah to kill all the fairies for her, but first he went after Karag’s forces because Winter didn’t want to kill the good fairies and Zah wanted the mystic white tiger to stop resisting helping him. Zah found himself caught up in fairy politics when he discovered Xem was actually the bastard child of Errius (and younger brother to The Mighty Xedus), who had been working with the evil fairies to thwart his own father and brother. Zah didn’t really care about fairy politics so he killed as many evil fairies as he could before escaping their base.

JerVerse Adventure 58: Team Tigerstar v. Karag

Tigerstar Special Forces members Verali Daine, Val, and Olivia had been kidnapped by the evil fairies. The rest of the team from Space Station Tigerstar went to rescue their agents and were surprised to find Zah working with them when he returned to defeat Karag. Together, they accomplished their goals.

JerVerse Adventure 59: Team Tigerstar v. Bran Fox

Bran Fox had tricked Feli into thinking he was Bren Fox so he could spend some romantic time with her. When she found out, she went ballistic. Tigerstar Special Forces went after Bran Fox at his lair, only to discover several tricks and traps. Bran Fox escaped their clutches after threatening to kill Jim. The team saved Jim, but was unable to pursue Bran after he disappeared through a secret portal.

JerVerse Adventure 60: Introducing Whirlwind

I had played some Star Wars RPG sessions with AJ’s friend LV. LV decided to join in on our RPG saga sessions so AJ and I helped him create a character that would easily fit in with Zah’s current plot of killing the fairies. LV created Whirlwind, who basically looked like a gnome with a pudgy belly and green hair; he was an electrician with wind powers that had been tortured by the evil fairies. Zah saved Whirlwind from his fairy oppressors and asked him to join the new team he was forming. Together, they killed several evil fairies before moving on.

JerVerse Adventure 61: Introducing Porthios

LV’s brother TV was also available and wanted to try playing our game. We helped him make the character Porthios. We arranged the background story for Porthios so that he was a Magi that had been sent to Techno-Earth and was operating as a pizza delivery guy/spy/double-agent. We had Zah and Whirlwind travel to Techno-Earth to get the former Magi agent Porthios to join Zah’s new team. The three of them got into some shenanigans on Techno-Earth before pursuing their other recruits...

JerVerse Adventure 62: Team Zah v. Bran Fox

Porthios, Whirlwind, Raven, and Doc Roc joined up with Zah for a mission hunting down rogue magi Bran Fox, whose family Zah still felt a vendetta against. Much like Tigerstar Special Forces, this team had to deal with Bran’s annoying tricks and traps only to end up with the powerful Magi escaping their grasp.

JerVerse Adventure 63: Everyone v. The Evil One

In an unexpected twist of events, Bran Fox learned of a powerful evil that wanted to destroy the universe (knowns as The Evil One) and went to his two greatest enemies (Feli/Tempest and Zah) to ask them to stop it from happening. The Evil One was trying to use ancient energy to disrupt time and space. Convinced of the seriousness of the threat, both Tigerstar Special Forces and Zah’s new team joined together and saved the universe just in time.

JerVerse Adventure 64: The Fairy Tournament

After saving the universe, the characters found themselves invited (by the fairies) to participate in a special tournament; they would be fighting against one another (in one-on-one elimination matches, randomly placed into a bracket), with a prize to be given to the winner. Due to the special magical energies used to create the location, none of them would actually die when they died during the tournament battles; instead of dying, they would be teleported out to the audience to watch the rest of the matches.

Out of game, we rolled randomly to determine the brackets for the fights and played out preliminary rounds, quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals. The players who didn’t want their characters to compete either had someone else control them as an NPC for the day or opted out of the tournament and just watched in the audience. The finals round ended up with Al v. Cassandra; Cassandra used her new secret powers to win (she had been possessed by the evil Cosmosian Cinoma).

JerVerse Adventure 65: The Post-Tournament Epilogue

Al was actually part-fairy and part-Cosmosian, which was all revealed with the epic conclusion to this part of our story; Al’s fairy mother Quassara had been possessed by Danara, who was a Cosmosian and enemy to the evil Cosmosian Cinoma. Al’s fairy-DNA/powers only activated after he received his wand. The Cosmosians had creation energy/powers and were the ones who could create new dimensions and new worlds.

With this realization and the fairy wand, Al evolved into a much more powerful being. Cinoma and Danara engaged in an epic space battle in which Zah tried to interfere and was killed; Winter the mystic white tiger was freed from the amulet that controlled him.

Reflections

Along the way AJ had found ways to manipulate the rules to make killing characters easier than it should have been. Zah would break people’s necks or grab people and teleport them into walls or teleport way up in the sky and drop people to their deaths. I had no intention of running that type of game but, at the time, I was unsure how to deal with it; unfortunately, he often challenged the other players and tried to bully the table to get what his character wanted. I decided I had to talk to him about it outside of the game. That seemed to help some, which was part of why we had put his character on the new quest to kill the evil fairies.

I came to realize different people wanted different things out of their RPG experiences. Players like NH, MS, DF, etc. enjoyed exploring and engaging in politics and relationships with NPCs. Players like BW and JS enjoyed killing enemies and blowing up targets. Players like AJ and RW wanted to act as alphas at the table. Balancing game time to satisfy different expectations of different players became another part of my session prep list.