Villains and Vigilantes – round 1

While we were playing Dungeons and Dragons, Brad Gottschalk got a little tired of grinding through dungeons, and decided to play a superhero game. He introduced us to Villains and Vigilantes.

I’ve always loved superheroes. The idea of playing a superhero role playing really appealed to me and I jumped at the chance. One fun thing about the game is that you don’t necessarily get to choose which powers you get or even how many; you roll randomly for them.

For my first character I rolled I think it was five powers (a d6 plus 1), and then continued rolling randomly for the powers. I received Electrical Generation, Flight, Vibratory Attack, Heightened senses, and a magic spell (which you could create). I, being oh so original, named my hero Elektro. The magic spell I came up with was Alter Probability, which did not really work the way that I hoped it would. I literally stole it from Marvel’s Scarlet Witch.

The only other player I know for sure was there was Phil Sens. Phil was in my brother’s grade, which, at this point, made him an 8^th Grader. Phil was not lucky with his roles. His character was weak, slow, and ugly. He had a light blast and paralyzing ray. Phil decided to call his character Barf Bag.

Brad ran only one adventure with these characters. He ran the module that came with the game. Our mission was to fight a group of villains who had captured the premier heroes of the world – the Crusaders. I don’t remember a lot of the adventure, but I know Barf Bag and Elektro blundered into some of the villains, including an armored villain named F.I.S.T. He pummeled us both pretty badly. BB was knocked out, and I pulled out my Alter Prob spell and made F.I.S.T. fall asleep, which he did. I thought I had put him to sleep for a week, so I had Elektro grab F.I.S.T. and fly outside to get him far from the other heroes.

Apparently, when you fly with an armored supervillain, you may jar him a little, and he might wake up. He proceeded to blast Elektro, who, at thirty stories above the street, fell to his death, and F.I.S.T. got away.

That was really my first experience with having a character die through my own stupidity. It’s a lesson that on occasion I’ve taught some other gamers. Brad did try to warn me; I was just too wrapped up in my own plans to listen to the Game Master.

After I died, I rolled up another character, who I initially hated because he was permanently shrunk to 6 inches tall, but he had wings and a power blast. I called him Bloodhawk, but I never got to run him in Brad’s adventures. We went back to Dungeons and Dragons the following week.

But that was not the end of my time with Villains and Vigilantes. Far from it. But that’s a story for another time.