Because 7-8-9

 In taking a look at my gaming shelf, I realize that I have a lot of superhero game systems at my disposal, and none of them the perfect choice for a superhero game.

I've gone on about Silver Age Sentinels recently, and it's one I will most definitely look into again, especially now that I know a new edition is coming out this year.

I got into a discussion with someone about Mutants & Masterminds, a game system I have very much enjoyed in the past. I have run several superhero campaigns, and my latest one was in Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition. The game did not go well - it fell flat and didn't really get me excited as a GM.

For the longest time, I blamed myself for it - that I was burned out, busy with other things, other distractions, etc. - but in having this conversation with a friend of mine, I really realized I was being obtuse about the whole thing.

I guess my realization is that M&M 3rd Edition is so bulky, that it gets in its own way. The system got in the way of the story I was trying to tell in the game, and I blamed myself for that. Now, I do certainly have my fair share of the blame, but I have to recognize what the M&M 3E system did to me - it made me a hostage of a rules system that allows abuse of those very rules.

This is why I don't review games or movies - I get blinded by the shiny bits and it may take years for me to see things as they are.

As I've said, I started with the FASERIP system in the Marvel Superhero Roleplaying Game from TSR back in the early 1990's, graduated up to Champions 4th Edition later, and then on to Silver Age Sentinels.

Well, from there, I, of course found Mutants & Masterminds, The first edition was okay, but didn't really make a cohesive superhero game until the second edition was released. In retrospect, the second edition was the best iteration.

The books looked good, the art looked good, and the writing was top notch. Third edition decided to try to be everything at once, and it got muddled in the process. I created many a character, villain, and story in the second edition of M&M. I like their Freedom City setting very much, and love the heroics that overshadow the game world in general. I folded much of it into my Superpowered setting.

When I became disillusioned with M&M 3E, I gave Savage Worlds Supers a shot. Now, Savage Worlds does some things very well - that being pulp adventure stories and modern action. It flows well once you get the hang of it, and it's a simple enough system. When you start adding in a superhero power structure, things can get a little crazy.

When Pinnacle released their second edition of the Super Powers Companion, the revisions they did were done well. I ran one game using these rules and it worked fine. It's hard to tell how it would have worked in the long-run, since I was running a game for some middle-schoolers at a birthday party, and things were a little chaotic to say the least.

I converted several characters over from M&M 3E to Savage Worlds and it worked just fine, like I said. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me to want to try it again. Things got sidelined, however, when Pinnacle released the new edition of their Savage Worlds rules, the Adventure Edition, they announced they would be updating all that stuff as well ... eventually.

Now, I'm not complaining about Pinnacle, mind you. They put out great stuff. They've put out a new edition of Deadlands, Deadlands Lost Colony, are coming out with a Pathfinder conversion, and are busy making good stuff as quickly as they can while managing to make a good quality product. I'm content to wait until their companions are ready to come out.

So, let's see, that's seven different game systems I've ran that I can remember. I've played in a  few others - a homebrew system from someone about 15 years ago that wasn't bad, and I played in a one-shot of Tiny Supers, which, while fun with the people I was playing with, was a God-awful system and very much not to my liking. So much so that I opted not to play in the follow-up session.

I'm going to go ahead and look into the Sentinel Comics RPG, based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse game, as I've heard some good things about it, but I do so hesitantly. Like I said, I will get the new edition of SAS, oddly titled "Absolute Power" for some reason.

On a side note, there is a system that Modiphius uses called the 2d20 System. They've used it in their Mutant Chronicles, Star Trek, John Carter games, and other books, and I've played in it a few times. It's a good system, in my opinion, and I'd really like to see what they would do with a superhero iteration of those rules. It might be really awesome. I'd love to see it, but thus far, they've stuck with licensed settings like Fallout, Dune, Conan, and The Elder Scrolls. That's fine, too, they do excellent work, which is why I'd like to see them take on the superhero genre in some way.

Enough capes and cowls, it's Friday!

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

 I'm done clearing the way in my collection for new/old stuff to come in. I've been going through my game collection and culling out some things and shipping them off to Noble Knight (free plug) for trade credit and turning old games into ... well, old games again, but at least it's old games that I actually want.

I'm also reading again for pleasure, something that I haven't done in a long, long time.

I read to my kids, of course. Right now we're in book three of the Percy Jackson series, and I'm enjoying it as much as they are - even though they fall asleep about five to ten minutes into reading each night. I've read The Hobbit, The Colour of Magic, and the first two Percy Jackson books to them. They really dig it, and I really love reading to them.

I haven't read for pleasure really since before college - higher education killed my love of reading. Up through High School, I read a lot - mostly fantasy and sci-fi. When I was in Junior High, or Middle School for some of you folks out there, I remember reading the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy.

It was a big white book, the "Collector's Edition" that compiled all three books into one. It was a massive book and clocked in at 1,030 pages. When I set out to read it, it made me nervous, but I made my way through it. I remember when I finished it, I felt a real sense of accomplishment.

I would also put my bookmark in the book, then look at it from the top, sort of measuring how much I'd read. At first, I measured in millimeters, then it was centimeters, and finally, inches. The thicker the bunch of paper on the left-side of the bookmark got, the more proud I got. I read that thing for weeks.

Then high school and college came around and I was subjected to books I didn't care about. I also really got into film. Film is a passive medium, you sit and watch and absorb what you're seeing. It's a story shown to you using a different set of senses than a book does, so it's not necessarily less work, but different work.

When I had to put down books that I were interested in and had to read textbooks instead, or really read anything that wasn't the least bit interesting to me, I stopped caring. In fact, with the exception of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in my Western Civilization class, none of the books I read in college were interesting to me. None. They put me to sleep. Literally.

I transitioned to listening to audio books, since I had to commute to work, school, and home. Reading became a passive thing for me. Now, I've listened to countless audiobooks, and there are some stellar ones out there. The Dresden Files series, the Song of Ice and Fire books, Ready Player One, and the Expanse novels all come readily to mind.

So, I thought I'd start reading again, and while I had meant to start this last night, things came up, tonight, I plan on not turning on the television ... and reading.

Now, I'm reading The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'Amato right now, and it's a good read. I know it's not a groundbreaking epic of a story or anything, but it's something I want to read.

I've been slowly getting novels from the past that I haven't read in well over fifteen years, and it has surprised me what books came to mind for me when I said to myself, "What books would you read over again?"

Well, of course, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is one of those books that comes right to mind for me, but I've read it probably half-a-dozen times and it's one of those novels that I've managed to constantly have a copy of on my shelf, so that one's not a priority. I'm thinking of books that I've read that were fun, perhaps easy-reads, that made me smile when I thought of them.

Slowly, these books are arriving. None of them were expensive to get - and I could have just purchased the e-book versions of them, but I wanted to hold them in my hands and read them, physically turning the pages  on them like I did years ago. I have nothing against e-books - the books I read my kids are on my Kindle app - I just want that experience again of measuring where I am in a book.

The Forgotten Realms Phlan Trilogy was one I read a long time ago, I think in Junior High as well. I got Pool of Radiance because of the gold-box SSI video game we had on our Commodore and, eventually, on our my brother's Packard Bell 486DX2 computer. I never did beat the game, but I found the novel one day while browsing at (probably) Borders, and picked it up.

Little did I know, it was part of a trilogy. There really wasn't any indication that it was part of a trilogy if memory serves, but I later stumbled on Pool of Darkness and Pools of Twilight. I don't recall if I read either of those, but I have them now, so I will read them at some juncture.

I never read a lot of D&D books, to be honest. I read the Dragonlance Chronicles and the Pool of Radiance book and that's about it. I bought several others, but never picked them up to read. I remember owning a copy of Spellfire by Ed Greenwood and some other generic D&D novels from back in the 90's, but never being too into them. I didn't read the Lord of the Rings until my girlfriend at the time made me in the early 2000's. I was always more into science fiction, I suppose.

Superhero Bus Stop

I've said before that I've played a number of superhero games - from Marvel FASERIP, Champions 4th Edition, Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, Savage Worlds, and a few random others - all of them (well, most of them) good games.

I received a copy of Silver Age Sentinels today. It's a game I originally bought 19 years ago when it came out from a company called Guardians of Order, a Canadian gaming company that made their bacon back in the day with Big Eyes Small Mouth, a generic anime role-playing game using their Tri-Stat system. 

Now, as I recall, the original Tri-Stat System was d6-based, but they upped it to d10's for SAS (Silver Age Sentinels). It was originally published in 2002 during the d20 boom. There was a d20 version, too, but I wasn't interested in a d20 supers game with class-based superheroes. It felt too restrictive to me and superheroes needed to have some serious customization options available, especially for me and my players.

I do remember the d20 system had a better cover. The Tri-Stat version was once described to me as a bunch of superheroes looking like they were waiting for the bus, while other superhero games had more dynamic artwork both inside and out. For what it was, this was a huge step in the right direction with art direction that would ultimately be perfected in Mutants & Masterminds a short time later.

It was a good system and it worked well, but when Mutants & Masterminds came out, this went by the wayside. In some ways, I regret giving up on it. They did some supplements for it, but nothing ground-breaking. M&M came out in the same year and kind of stole it's thunder. I seem to recall SAS was out at Gen Con that year, but M&M just missed it or had a very limited run therein, so SAS was the choice for those of us with ready money at the con that year.

SAS had a pretty robust superpower system, with pseudo-guidelines in there for converting from, say, Champions or something else. Wile BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth) never really interested me (I'm not much of an anime guy), this was very much on my list of must-haves at Gen Con that year.

I got the book and got right to work making characters and creating a universe I'd call "Superpowered."

I remember driving to my then-girlfriend's workplace, a Dunkin' Donuts and getting struck by a weird burst of inspiration when I thought of a city name that just opened the floodgates of my imagination in such a way that I'm hard-pressed to think of another time where writing just flowed out of me so freely.

I was thinking about a superhero campaign, and a universe to run it in. SAS had a setting in it, but I was at a point in my 22-year-old life where I wanted to create my own thing, my own universe. So I'm driving to Dunkin' Donuts and I'm thinking about a superhero universe and the names of cities. While Marvel is a universe where cities are real, grounded places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc., DC is a place where you have imaginary places like Metropolis, Gotham City, National City, and others, and that was never as appealing to me.

It got me thinking, though. What if, due to superhero popularity, a city like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. changed its name as part of this sudden wave of superhero popularity. There were some places that already had cool, superhero-sounding names associated with them, like Century City in Los Angeles. I remember thinking about this and then mulling over that word, Century and how it sounded just like Sentry, more or less, and a place named Sentry City sounded pretty superheroic.

I then got to thinking about how to adapt our universe to a superhero universe, and I borrowed a page from the Deadlands playbook and decided that there could be a defining event that creates superheroes globally - something cosmic that changes the face of the world.

What came next was like someone threw gasoline on a fire. I got to Dunkin' and grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pen that were both in my backpack, and started writing. I wrote furiously, trying to keep up with the flow of creativity that was spewing forth from my unbridled right-hemisphere. I went inside Dunkin' Donuts and sat at the counter (it was an old-style Dunkin Donuts that had seats at a counter and all that) and just wrote and wrote and wrote.

It was a steady stream-of-consciousness of creation.

I wrote down names of cities, which lead to names of superheroes, which lead to names of superhero teams, which lead to supervillains, and so forth. I developed a classification system of "Superpowered," what these new beings would be called. I liked the play on words - "Superpowered" could be used in a variety of ways. I pictured, "This game is Superpowered," reading across three columns of a comic book. It was literal and descriptive at the same time. I loved it, so I ran with it.

I treated it like a book of my very own, something I hadn't done in years. I just clicked that night and exhausted myself with hours of writing down this setting and its inhabitants, the rules of the world, and everything just fit. It was glorious.

I attribute much of that to SAS, and I've chased that dragon ever since.

I realize that in all fairness, what I did was highly subjective and important to me and me alone, and when I try to explain the intricacies of writing all this stuff down, a lot is lost in translation, but believe me, it was like a possession. I had to write all this stuff down. I pulled up scientific information on the internet to make things fit into a remotely meaningful universe - a universe where I could BS just enough to make these extraordinary things that are impossible seem possible given the right justification.

I was was, and still am, very proud of what I created that night, and it's served as the basis of my superhero games ever since. I love the universe I created - meshing it with the M&M universe and folding in other concepts and settings as time went on.

SAS lent itself well to it, and I ran three campaigns in it over the next few years When second-edition M&M came out, I left SAS behind for greener pastures. As time has gone on, I realize a bit that I had gone backwards in my superhero game system journey without realizing it.

I had left FASERIP for the complexity and customization available in Champions. When that started to prove itself taxing, I moved on to SAS, which was not nearly as crunchy and felt more fluid than Champions had been. I moved on from SAS to Mutants & Masterminds second edition (the first edition didn't really click with me much, though I did like it) and followed along with that, thinking that this was the end-all-be-all of superhero tabletop games. It scratched the customization itch and we weren't rolling cups of dice to make things work.

I remember thinking that the M&M system was simple and elegant. Now, looking back, especially after the third edition came out, I realize that, while M&M was a great game, and still is, as I've gotten older, it's become too complex ... too abusable.

Don't get me wrong. M&M is a good game, and I'll sing its praises. To this day, it has some of the best source material and splat books for the superhero genre in general that you'll ever find (check out their Golden Age and Mecha & Manga books, those two in particular are some of the best books on the superhero genre you'll ever find).

I'm at a point where I want a system to support the story, not the other way around, and M&M can be manipulated into unbalance and awkwardness when in front of a GM that doesn't have the energy or will to fight against such things. It's not the fault of the system, it's the fault of me, the GM, for letting the system overpower me.

I look back and feel that, just maybe, SAS didn't do that to me. It did what it did, and didn't get in its own way. Now that I have a copy again, maybe I'll read it through once more, and see what comes out as a result of reacquainting myself with this old friend.

Guardians of Order died in 2006, it's properties going to ArtHaus Games, a subsidiary of White Wolf, and they never did anything else with the line, instead focusing only on Big Eyes Small Mouth. BESM Kickstarted a new edition last year from Dyskami Publishing and Japanime Games, but there's no sign of anything SAS-related.

What with the popularity of superheroes, it's a wonder why SAS never made a comeback, but maybe, just maybe, Dyskami Publishing has something up their sleeves, but it seems they're currently focused on bringing anime back to the gaming table, whether in a new BESM Edition, or using the D&D 5E system.

One can hope. After all, superheroes encourage hope, right?

P.S. GOO also did a d20 and Tri-Stat version of the anime, Slayers. If they were to bring that back in RPG and/or board game form, I'd be on that like ugly on an ape. Just sayin'.

Dad

 As you can see, I took a break this last weekend. Weekends in general are busy, and some moreso than others.

I'm married and have two small children - so that takes up a lot of my time and energy, obviously.

My wife talked to me about something the other day. Sometimes she goes out and had her nails done or something else the helps her relax and defrag. We all need things like this, obviously, and I support her whole-heartedly taking time for self-care.

She told me she gets a question almost every time she goes out and has a conversation with a stranger: "Who're the kids with?" Then she responds, "My husband." Then they almost every time say, "Uh oh ..." like leaving them with me, their father, is tantamount to letting them play some kind of Russian roulette with an exploding fart gun.

It irritates her when people make it seem like because I'm her kids' dad that I'm somehow incapable or unwilling to be a parent to our kids. She knows that when I'm watching the kids, she and I are a unified front of parenting, and that just because I'm the dad doesn't mean that when she returns from her well-earned time of self-care that I'll be a nervous wreck, somehow subdued like Gulliver vs. the Lilliputians.

It irritates me, too, to be honest.

I don't pay attention to any looks or comments from others about my public parenting. To be crass, I don't give a shit if they approve or disapprove of my parenting style or decisions - I know I love my kids and I'm doing the best I can. Do I get annoyed with my kids? Sure. Do I lose my temper with my kids? Of course. Do I melt into a puddle when my kids do something sweet for me or my wife? Almost certainly. Am I strict with them sometimes? Oh, yes, definitely.

All the same things there can be said about my wife, too. Neither of us purport that we're perfect - we just do our best, and I think our kids are amazing, awesome, and absolutely the best in the world.

I admit, I'm biased.

My kids are learning to read, and it's a slow process what with the pandemic and all. I look forward very much getting them back into public school this coming fall. I can only hope that we did justice to a curriculum for their kindergarten/first grade years and that they are ready for the next step. I'm terrified that we've missed something, or we've not done enough. I really have no idea how to measure their readiness.

I know adjusting to being back in a school setting is going to be difficult for them - especially my son who lost out on his whole kindergarten experience. I mean, c'mon, kindergarten was the best, right? Naps, playing, art, fun times in general - at least that's what I remember from my kindergarten times 35 years ago. I suppose things have changed since then - what with Pre-K and all that, now.

Make Words Go Now

 Lots of interesting things happen in this world, and sometimes they happen to me.

I'm in a spot where I'm happy at home and happy at work, and we're smack dab in the middle of a global pandemic. I've done many creative things in my life, some with more gusto and dedication than others.

I'm trying to make a habit out of this with no overall goal in mind other than to do just this - write and talk about stuff I like.

You see, the internet is full of people taking dumps on things - it's full of hate and animosity, contempt and sanctimonious smugness. If you doubt what I say, take 30 seconds, find a random YouTube video, and start reading the comments section.

I rest my case.

Now, I like griping as much as the next guy, but I find that, oddly enough, I don't like talking about things I don't like. I tried being a movie critic, and I found that I always look for some bright spot to take away from a film, even if it is as bad as Batman & Robin or Volcano. I understood that not all movies are high art, and I approached films with a varying degree of expectations.

This led to a number of reviews going up with a, "It's ok," or, "I enjoyed it," popping up somewhere in the review at least half-a-dozen times.

Truth be told, there are very few things in this world I actively despise. Most things I dislike I can avoid, and, like I said, I don't like talking about the things I don't like. The internet, however, thrives on that. Just look around and you'll find numerous "Top 10 Worst" lists and "Such and such, finally explained!"

It gets old, and I don't want my voice to be out there in a crowd of people simply spewing hate around, even if it's hate at irrelevant things.

So my promise to you is that I will rarely, if ever, write about things I don't like. I will try to talk about things that make me smile, or look for the best in the things I have.

A friend of mine once looked at a shelf of mine filled with movies, pointed to one, and asked, "Hey is that any good?" He quickly realized what he had just asked: "Hey, that movie you bought and put on your shelf there, do you like it?" We don't routinely keep things around if we don't enjoy them in some fashion.

This goes for games as well. I have had thousands of games in my lifetime, and I have had several games that I really like, then get over and then dismiss. With some reflection on a game, and maybe playing it a second or third time, things can dawn on me that I really don't like that game, and that there's this other game that does what this game is trying to do way better.

Take my long-running obsession with superhero games. I mentioned that I started with the Marvel Superhero RPG from TSR, then switched to Champions, then to Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, and then Savage Worlds. There is nothing wrong with any of these games and I had fun playing and running games in all of these systems. Each has its strengths and each has its weaknesses.

I've found that as I've aged, my specific wants from a game change. When I was younger, I wanted simplicity and beat-'em-ups that the Marvel FASERIP system could deliver easily. Then I aged a bit and wanted some more complexity and the ability to customize heroes in many more ways, so I started using Champions. After some time, Champions got old and we were tired of the over-complexity that came with the Hero system, and we moved on to Silver Age Sentinels.

The Silver Age Sentinels Tri-Stat system offered a good amount of customization and fluidity, yet was easy enough to play. I ran two campaigns in it and developed my own superhero setting that I've used ever since using those rules.

Then Mutants & Masterminds came along and knocked it out of the park. The notion of rolling a single d20 for everything was insane, and I bought into it whole-heartedly. Green Ronin did a great job creating a wonderful setting, rules, and went on to develop it over three editions that I both ran and played games in. I was a fan. I rode the tour bus, bought the t-shirt, and was all-around a happy GM with a superhero setting that I thought worked perfectly for my tastes.

Then I got older again, and the flaws of the game started to peek through after years of players figuring out loopholes, my inept handling of rules and campaigns, and new editions changing things over and over again. M&M is still a great game - a great system full of crunch and customization that should make anyone who loves comics blush.

But I found I wanted something simpler, more user-friendly, and not so minute in its detail. I moved to the second edition rules of the Savage Worlds Supers line. Now, I only ran one game in it, but it was a fun time. They have yet to update those rules to the new edition of Savage Worlds, so time will tell if that becomes the one I continue with, or if I go looking for something else.

This kind of took a turn in the middle there to talking about superhero games, which is not where I really thought I'd go. But, hey, it's where I ended.

I'm exhausted and going to bed now.

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.

Trying to Get this Organized

 Not a huge one tonight, and believe me, I don't want to get away from doing this on a regular basis.

I've been busy reconstructing some holes in my books, RPGs, and board games recently, so I have a lot coming in and have been busy getting things added to BoardGameGeek and RPGGeek in an orderly fashion. It let's me add dorky widgets like this:

This will show you 20 random items from my ever-growing collection of board games and RPGs.

I may have gone a little overboard, but my wife seems happy with all this.

Like I said, it's either this, or black-tar heroin, so ...

I hope people are enjoying this, and I know it's only getting started, and I expect a rocky start as I find a groove, but please know that anyone and everyone who gets some enjoyment out of this makes it all worth it. I'd love to generate some discussion and maybe spark a few creative fires.

I'll be using this outlet for a lot of creative things, so please bear with me.

I'll be talking a bit about miniature painting soon, I think, so stay tuned.