A Life of Its Own

 This thing isn't exactly going the way I thought it would when I thought it up.

I thought I'd talk about the games in my collection, as that's something I want to do - but this had taken on a life of its own and it's kind of organically becoming something else. I'm not going to force it in one way or another, but there may be some jumping around.

Ever since my brother handed me that Marvel box, I've loved games. I have hundreds of them now, something I never thought I'd have when I was growing up. I remember spending time with my brother and his friends, and seeing some of their gaming collections and being in awe of the sheer amount of cool stuff they had.

I remember being very intimidated about gaming with my brother, and to an extent that feeling is still around today. I've played in several games run by my brother, and I've run several games with my brother in it over the years, and it's always been a great time.

It would be several years after he got me into roleplaying, and several years of me being the designated GM of my small group, before he ran a campaign that I was able to play in. Now, I don't know if that was a conscious choice on his part - a little of, "I don't want my little brother around while I'm gaming with my friends." I really suspect it was a matter of game-content and how gaming groups can be around a gaming table - it was probably not the right kind of atmosphere for a 10-year-old to sit around with some 17-year-olds and play games. Not to say it wouldn't have been fun, but it would have been a strain on him and his friends to manage the content/language/Monty Python references with someone seven years their junior sitting at the table.

My brother chose to let me mature as a gamer for a few years, to shake out the kick-in-the-door-and-kill-the-monster attitude that a lot of us go through when we first get into the hobby at a young age. It makes sense to me that an RPG ran and played by 10-year-olds would be diametrically different than one ran and played by 17-year-olds.

That all being said, I remember when my brother gathered some of his friends together to run a game. I remember there was my brother, Erik, his friends Darren, Jim, and a tall guy I think was named Matt. There may have been others, but I honestly don't remember.

I must have been at least 13 because my brother was running Dark Champions, from the Hero System 4th Edition at the time, and it came out in 1993.

Dark Champions was the superhero game that mirrored what was happening in the world of comics at the time - shoulder-pads, pouches, and anti-heroes. It was Champions, but "Dark." I had graduated from the Marvel Superhero Role-Playing Game by this point and was running Champions 4th Edition for my friends - my first full-fledged campaign with a story and everything.

I was used to playing - well, running - games with two, maybe three players. We had my core two players, Sam and Anthony, and others would float in and out over the years. I was in charge and I was the guy running the show. When Erik invited me to play in this game he was starting up, I remember really wanting to not be the annoying little brother - the youngest kid there who everyone thought was there just because the game was being run by my big brother. I didn't want the other players to resent me for being there, or, worse, resent my brother for making them play with a kid.

I would love to be a fly-on-the-wall in the conversations he probably had with his players, and know what he told them, or what arguments he used to get them to agree with letting me play. I'm grateful to him and to them for letting it happen. They were a fun group, and they never made me feel unwelcome.

I don't remember a whole lot from the campaign, to be honest. I remember bits and pieces of the game - not the overall plotline or anything - but it gave me my first chance to play, at the very least, in a campaign with a character of my very own. I don't remember if this game happened before or after I went to my first game convention, Kulcon II in Lawrence, Kansas, which would have been around 1993, if I recall correctly. I think I'll save my stories about the first two gaming conventions for another time, but I think they were around this time.

So, I may have actually played a game by this point, not just run one, but it would have only been convention games. This Dark Champions campaign gave me the chance to create my own character for, really, the first time.

Now, anyone who remembers Champions 4th edition knows that calling the Hero System and character creation "Crunchy" would be an understatement. I've seen worse since then, but the character sheets were akin to tax forms, and we rolled so many d6's it became ridiculous. I remember counting up the dice for Stun damage, then counting the Body damage, then calculating knockback, and rolling more dice to figure out the Stun and Body damage from that. Rounds of combat were measured in hours of real time in the Champions game.

I loved every freakin' minute of it.

Erik was running Dark Champions, so there was an edge to this game - something darker and more, uh, edgy than a run-of-the-mill, four-color superhero game. I'm sure he wanted us to make our characters accordingly and adhere to the tenets of the dark, comic-book genre that was prevalent in the comics industry and zeitgeist of the time.

I, of course, ignored that completely.

The character I created was a speedster called "Speed Demon," who was a complete rip-off of the Flash, of course. I remember he got his powers after falling into an electrical generator when these gray monsters attacked the power plant he was working at. I want to say he had a supernatural twist to him, but I honestly don't remember. The character evolved many times over the years, and made numerous appearances in subsequent superhero games, converting systems at least three or four times, and each time he got revised a bit here and there, but the core jackass speedster was there.

Anyway, there are a few highlights I do remember from the campaign.

The character Jim was playing stuffing something in his shorts that these big bad golem-things wanted, so they picked him up and "squeezed him in the Jimmies," causing light to explode from his nether-regions. I remember Jim was a student at KU in Archaeology and he told stories of going on trips to Central America where they had to beat "giant" spiders to death by catching them in a garbage bag, and one story where he ventured into the jungle to take a pee and held his flashlight up to his head, the light pointing out into the darkness, and seeing lots of eyes reflecting back at him from unseen jungle-creatures.

I remember someone coming to the door of the apartment we were at trying to sell something, and I think it was Jim who was politely trying to get the guy to go away, when the big guy who I think was named Matt loudly shouted, "Go away," marched across the living room, and forcefully closed the door in the guy's face. I remember Matt, if that was his name, being a big guy with black hair and a pony-tail, but he was super nice and pleasant to be around.

The last thing I remember was roleplaying disadvantages, or "Disads" as we called them. It was the first time I really experienced a mechanic that tried to make you roleplay or act in a certain way in order to emulate a trope of the comic book genre. I had some kind of heroic disad that meant I would help those in need, always, and when a bad guy we were watching or following or some such started roughing up an innocent bystander, I ran in and clobbered him with a run-by attack. I recall my brother telling me that I jumped the gun a little bit on that, but we all had a good time and I think we lived through the encounter.

The only other things I remember from the game was terminology from the system. Disads were disadvantages, Perks were Prequisites, Body, Stun, Knockback, that sort of thing.

Now, I held onto that Speed Demon character for a long, long time. I had his character sheet for well over a decade, but it has sadly been lost in the shuffle of multiple moves, cleansings, and other natural/unnatural disasters. The character lives on, however, and would make numerous appearances in subsequent campaigns ran in, well, Champions, obviously, Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, and I believe I statted him up in Savage Worlds at one point.

My Brother, Erik

It was a great experience, and I remember it fondly. I know I'm one of the lucky ones who has a brother that never made me feel like I was unwanted or an annoyance, when I know I was most certainly the latter more than once in our relationship. As I said I'm grateful for him and the guidance and counsel he's given me over the years. I greatly treasure the relationship I have with my brother, and in the times when things were strained between us, I never stopped thinking of him as my best friend.

My sister, on the other hand, is a complete butthead.

Just kidding, Ellie, I love you, too.