Remembering RPG Campaigns Past

Meet The Crusaders

Some Background

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 super hero campaign I've ever run. I had the luck to have a great group of gamers who were willing to cut loose and have a great time with the genre and who felt free to push the limits of the DC Heroes game system.

This particular campaign led me to the realization that for my style of play, there is no better designed game than DC Heroes if I want to super hero game. I love the Marvel Saga System and have soft spots for Champions and Marvel (FASERIP), but DC Heroes is my true love. I haven’t played the new Marvel game enough to give it a proper comparative evaluation yet. It’s a very good game, but Greg Gorden (and later Ray Winninger) really created something special with the DC Heroes/MEGS game system. It’s flexible and allows for a ton of creative input from players.

It’s not just the basic mechanical engine that makes DC Heroes great, it’s the game’s approach to play. There are chapters for how to include “subplots” into your super hero games. A typical subplot is when a super hero has to balance their private lives with their responsibilities as a super hero. These are the kinds of storylines that make for great comics and they make for great role playing game sessions too. The DC Heroes discussion of what they are, how to implement them, and how to reward players for creating them (yes, the game recommends that players create the prompts) were cutting edge at the time. Only FASERIP’s Karma system comes close to fostering this kind of play and how to use Karma to inspire that kind of play wasn’t as fully discussed in the Marvel rules as subplots are in DC Heroes. Oh, and the section on players spending Hero Points in order to “alter the environment” was mind blowing to me as a player and game master at the time.

At the time I ran the DC Heroes game my go to super hero game had been Champions. In fact, I had just finished running a Champions campaign, but my gaming group was expanding and while the new gamers wanted to play a super hero game the Champions rules intimidated them. Champions is great, but character creation requires a spreadsheet and combat is VERY tactical. So I opened up my DC Heroes boxed set and got about learning to play so that I could run a campaign for players experienced and inexperienced.

The Campaign

The premise of 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. I wanted the heroes to be powerful, but not cosmic in capability. I also wanted the game play to have a touch of the feel generated by the Giffen/Maguire/DeMatteis run in the Justice League books.

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 Monty Python's Holy Grail, which is currently getting its own rpg. Instead of fighting the tendency for the ridiculous, 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 and while my wife’s own Nicnup comic strip won the Charles M Schulz Cartooning Award this strip was for a much more niche audience.¹

Eventually, I might present statistics for the Crusaders in this Substack, but that will mostly depend on your interest in seeing them. I can provide them for a host of systems ranging from DC Heroes (I still have the character sheets) to the Savage Worlds, Tiny Supers, and the new Marvel game. Let me know if you have any interest in the comments below.

Now it is time to introduce a couple of the main team members to you.

Two Key Team Members

GABRIEL: ARCH-ANGEL

Gabriel was 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. The key here is “who believed himself to be.” The DC Universe does have God and Lucifer, so the character might actually be the Archangel Gabriel but that was a point left ambiguous for the two years we played in this campaign. My sense is that he was, but his creator might differ.

At one point during the campaign, the Crusaders were battling against Ares who was causing a “War Through All Time.” DC is big on retcon events involving time and that shaped my campaign idea. The battle was taking place in the English Channel and included not just the Crusaders, but a number of other characters including the tremendously outclassed (power wise) Losers of WW II. Their involvement in the battle was inspired by the cover below, and yes Sgt. Rock was there too.

During this hard fought battle with the god Ares, Gabriel’s player guessed that Ares might be more vulnerable to spiritual attacks than physical ones and so attempted to use his Aura of Fear power to cow the God of War into surrendering. Because of the “exploding” nature of die rolls in DC Heroes when you roll doubles, he ended up not only succeeding at cowing Ares and winning the day but also in causing the entire continent of Europe to quiver in fear. The combination of him pushing his power and the HUGE die roll result ended up extending his aura over the geographic area of Western Europe. It was a massive effect and one that felt epic at the game table.

Gabriel: Archangel was played by my good friend, and future best man at my wedding, Matt.

Matt was, and still is, a very experienced gamer and he made the most of many situations. The next character was played by someone far less experienced and his game play led to a continuing running joke in our games.

AQUARIUS

One of the great things about the DC Heroes system is its ability to make almost any super hero and without the need of a massive spreadsheet of potential effects to do it. My friend Robert's character Aquarius was one that really demonstrated the strength of the rules and how they allowed for innovating characters with an interesting collection of powers.

Robert wanted to play a super strong character who was a living water elemental and whose body was made of water and who could transform his hands into any weapon he imagined. In this particular case, the powers to accomplish this are called Omni-Arm, Density Increase, Dispersal, and Water Control powers. In the case of Water Control, Robert took the power twice, once with the “Self-Link” which meant his whole body was water. Robert was a relatively new gamer at the time, and had never played a super hero 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 and the moment that changed is captured in the comic strips below.

This is just a glimpse at two of the members of the team. I want to save the other strips for when/if I present each member's statistics, so you will be seeing these strips again as well as those for Jynx, Vanguard, and Spirit. You might even get a glimpse at the most bizarre super hero ever made. Jody's beloved "Less" who was a character inspired by John Carpenter's THE THING and Larry Cohen's THE STUFF. Who is Less? Why is Less called Less? You'll have to wait for another time.

1. You may notice my wife’s name as Jody D. Lindke in the Award entry. She was only my girlfriend at the time she won and it was I who took her last name after we married.