Meet the Crusaders

Part 1: The Comics

When I was and undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno I ran a DC Heroes campaign that lasted for a couple of years. It is the most successful superhero campaign I've ever run. I was lucky enough to have a great group of gamers who were willing to cut loose and completely buy into the genre in a way that allowed them to push the limits of the DC Heroes game system. This campaign is reason number one that I think DC Heroes is the best set of rules to play a superhero game, though Marvel Saga System comes in a close second.

The premise I used for the campaign was pretty simple. I wanted to run a game where the characters were on the same power level as the Justice League, minus Superman and Wonder Woman, and I wanted game play to have a touch of the feel generated by the Giffen/Maguire/DeMatteis run in the Justice League books.

In other words, I wanted a mix of action and comedy. To be honest, based on my experience in running RPGs, I knew the “comedy” would come whether I wanted it or not. It's is the DM's Lament to want to run a game that captures the epic tales of the Eddas and Beowulf only to end up with Monte Python's Holy Grail. Instead of fighting that tendency, I decided to roll with it. The title of the campaign was Justice League: Auxiliary. The premise being that the characters were members of the Justice League, as then managed by Maxwell Lord, but where the second string of the team.

What a team it was too. The membership included an interesting mix of characters about whom my wife (girlfriend at the time) drew a couple of cartoon strips that ran in the school paper The Sagebrush. That brief strip was called "Meet the Crusaders" for obvious copyright reasons. If you are interested, I'll present the Crusaders game statistics for your perusal using the systems of your choice.

First, let me introduced the team to you.

Gabriel: Arch-Angel

My friend, and eventual Best Man, Matt ran this character who believed himself to be the Archangel Gabriel and who exacted swift justice on any he viewed to be in violation of his very strict code of morality. Matt would frequently have Gabriel scan the crowd for some random minor infraction in order to enact severe wrath upon the sinner.

One of the character’s “big moments” came during a battle with the god Ares. The team was getting hammered, as Ares is a Superman/Wonder Woman level foe. In a desperate attempt to win the day, Matt used Gabriel’s Aura of Fear power and ended up not only succeeding at cowing Ares but in causing the entire continent of Europe to quiver in fear. This was a case where DC Heroes’ exploding dice system really showed how it could create unexpected outcomes. Matt rolled so well that what is a relatively localized power ended up extending its aura over the entire continent.

Vanguard

Patrick, one of the group regulars, was a very mild mannered person and wanted to play a mild mannered superhero who was essentially the answer to the question, “What if Atlantis had Jedi?” Patrick also had me wondering if there was going to be a theme where most of the player characters exhibited some sort of connection to the Ancient world. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but Patrick’s low key love of pop culture seeped into the character who would frequently either want to see the latest Star Wars film or have to serve duty for the team at a local comic book convention.

That’s right, Maxwell Lord made this team shill merch.

Aquarius

One of the great things about the DC Heroes system was it's ability to make almost any superhero and my friend Robert's character Aquarius was one that really demonstrated the strength of the rules. Robert wanted to play a super strong character who was a living water elemental and who could transform his hands into any weapon he imagined. In this particular case, the powers were called Omni-Arm, Density Increase, Dispersal, and Water Control powers. Robert was a relatively new gamer at the time, and had never played a superhero game before, so in the early sessions he tended to limit his use of Omni-Arm to turning his hands into sledge hammers. That changed soon enough.

Jinx

My friend Doug created a character that really stretched the game mechanics of DC Heroes with his alter ego Jinx. Doug wanted to play a character who could manipulate Luck to the extent that it was an effective combat tool. The idea was heavily inspired by The Scarlet Witch, but he wanted absolutely no Eldritch Blasts. We ended up using the actual Probability Manipulation power the game already had, but supplementing it with a number of other powers that included interpreting his “Mystic Blasts” power as some form of probability manipulation. Since DC Heroes, like Champions is a very “Effects” driven game, all he had to do was say Probability was his special effect and next thing you knew when he used his Energy Blast on Gorilla Grodd, it resulted in Grodd accidentally being on the receiving end of one of Solomon Grundy’s punches instead of an actual Energy Blast.

Less

Keeping with the non-traditional hero trope that so many of my players aimed for, my girlfriend (now wife) Jody created the character Less who was essentially a bit of The Stuff that got away because he saw WKRP in Cincinnati and thought he was Les Nessman. That’s right, living yogurt who thought he was a mid-Western AM radio news personality. Less was a little bit of Martian Manhunter, a little bit Blue Beetle, and a lot of fun. His main tagline was, “I am Less, but I can do more.” All he wanted to be was a hero, so he walked around New York in his Tweed jacket and I Heart New York hat looking for wrongs to right and days to save. DC Heroes has a “subplot” system that rewards players for coming up with downtime narratives and Jody loved coming up with downtime narratives for Less.

The Comic

You may notice that I’ve got a couple of comic strip panels in this Newsletter. During a part of the campaign, Jody decided she wanted to see if she could produce a comic strip for the school paper based on our adventures. It ran once a week for a semester and she had a lot of fun practicing with it. Of course, her award winning Nicnup comic strip and the illustrations she did for the Opinion page of the Sparks Tribune took priority, but the comics she created still bring back fond memories of the gaming sessions.