Thursday, May 1, 2014

Just Super

Lately, there's been a whole lot of Supers going on.


 
A Justice League commission by the incomparable Kevin Macguire


Some time ago, I got in on a weekly Google Hangouts campaign of Kapow!, a free Superhero RPG, with the game's designer and creator, Joshua Macy. It's a fun, relatively easy to grasp game with simple and neat mechanics that fit the genre and work well for gaming over the internet.




Every two weeks or so, my friend Dan runs his homebrew Superhero game that is less a traditional RPG and more of an improv, storytelling exercise, but loads and loads of fun. We play different characters every session, chosen from whatever Heroclix minis Dan happens to own. One week we might be members of the Justice League battling the Secret Society of Supervillains, while the next we're duking it out with Sentinels as the original X-Men.




Finally, I am about to embark on a new Champions campaign beginning this Saturday, May 3rd.

Entitled 'Champions: REBIRTH', the new story returns to the world I used in my last Champions campaign, which was created by my good friend Will and used for his nearly 10 year long campaign (which ended in 1993).

Now the last big Champions campaign I ran, well, didn't turn out so good. It started awesome, got even more awesome, and then suffered a change in player schedules and the addition of two new players who sort of jived with the game and sort of didn't. There was also Marcus, one of my players who for the life of me I am not sure why I don't kick his butt out of the group. He just makes my job as GM so much harder than it has to be.

That is a discussion for another time. *Sigh*

Yeah, there is a major Superhero vibe going on round the Doghouse of Solitude these days and it's unlikely to ebb any time soon.

Let's see where it takes us...

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Barking Alien



8 comments:

  1. Completely off topic but your first picture got me thinking about it. What do you thing about the whole Manhunter storyline going on over in DC? Last I heard he was a master villain just waiting to overthrow the world and his plans could not be stopped - ha, ha, ha! Seemed like an odd turn to me.

    You?

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    1. I am currently boycotting DC comics.

      I dedicated fan since before I could read, I can't start a single thing they are doing with the nu52, most especially the universe itself. The characters are a**holes, the stories are filled with unnecessary shock, sex and gore, the female characters are either vapid morons or...don't even get me started on what they did with Barbara Gordon and the continuity and history in non-existant and boring.

      When they write their next Crisis is when I next look at a DC comic.

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    2. Wait, what did they do to Barbra?

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    3. Eh? Really?

      Major Spoilers From Three (Was it?) Years Ago:

      Barbara Gordon is back to being Batgirl. The injury to her spine that she received when the Joker shot her in 'The Killing Joke', and which rendered her paraplegic, was retconned into being a 'temporary' condition lasting only three years,

      Aside from robbing the DC fictional universe of the character she had developed into, Oracle, we are also robbed of Stephanie Brown, once known as The Spoiler, who was just coming into the Batgirl mantle prior to the nu52.

      Moreover, many readers, especially female and handicapped fans, felt betrayed by DC's editorial choice. Now, in an industry where those groups are already poorly represented, the one iconic, multi-layered character who represented strength and self-sufficient capability was gone.

      DC sucks these days

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    4. "These days"...DC has sucked since Crisis on Infinite Earths destroyed its history and permanently effed so many beloved characters. Superman lost his wonderful mythos developed over 40 years, Wonder Woman was reduced to a naif then morphed into poor man's Xena, Batman turned into Angrya-holewithnofriendsman, the likeable Kid Flash took over as Flash and suddenly changed personalities like whiplash, Aquaman grew a beard, lost a hand, and started wearing armor, Hawkman oh geez let's not even start, Green Lantern apparently became a psychopath and when that didn't work out they made him a cocky arrogant womanizing a-hole to show he has "personality"...yuck...the whole thing screams of fanboys taking over where the professionals left off and "daring" to be "edgy."

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    5. "Eh? Really?

      Major Spoilers From Three (Was it?) Years Ago:"

      And you thought you were the only one boycotting DC! ;P

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  2. Read your link, you had a bad game. I've been there. The GM kicked our asses when the indecision got everyone bogged down. We sure did need a time limit, you know, so we didn't have the time to over think it.

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    1. It was largely my own fault.

      I let them get away with too much because I did want to just kill them, which would've been so easy. I got fried and dropped the ball after continued exposure to their inactivity and general pain-in-the-tuckus-ness.

      Hopefully, this time will be different.

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