Villains and Vigilantes - Round 4

Throughout my Junior year of high school, we continued playing Villains and Vigilantes. With Brad, John, and Eric leaving, we added more people to our regular gaming group. We added several people from the grade ahead of me and then several behind me.

• Mike Daniels created a character with an ice and power blast gun. He was one of our stealth characters as well – he had invisibility. He steadfastly refused to come up with a hero name or costume. Eventually, I drew him in a ‘Han Solo’ type uniform – white shirt, black pants, black vest. I think he actually called himself Han Solo.

• Dave Featherstone had a rather weird character who had an elastic body and a gun as well. He was first called Mr. Smith and had a real long underwear for his costume and his body (and mouth in particular) were always elongated and stretched out. I think I was trying for something a little more ‘traditional’ and eventually got him to be Omicron.

• Peter Wang created the character Lycanthrope. He flew, could shape shift into a wolf, a bear, and a rat, had adaption – which meant his body adapted to any environment and almost every attack – and had a vibratory attack and defense, which meant he was essentially untouchable. To fight him, I had to depend on four types of attack: Power Blast, sonic attack, force field attack, and silver. Amazing how many of my villains had those over the next several years…

• From my brother’s grade came Pat Daniels and his creation Diamano. Pat had some amazing powers that he was able to create. He had the mutant power to turn into diamond. He was able to create a magic spell for each level he was. He had a light attack, and could turn invisible.

• Phil Sens brought in a hero he called Four Dee. Four Dee essentially had the powers of Marvel’s Fantastic Four – stretching, armor, super strength, invisibility, force field, and flame generation.

The other two who joined us during our Junior year I am still scratching my head over. Kenneth Ambrosius and Nick Dysktra are my two oldest friends. I still can’t figure out why they weren’t playing with us from the very beginning. They had done a little roleplaying in 6^th and 7^th grade with the rest of my little Gang, but for some reason they didn’t join us for the other DnD games. Once they started playing, however, they were with us for the rest of high school and then into college.

• Kenneth created Storm Driver. He had storm control as well as a very powerful – and fast – hovercraft with a powerful force field. He was also able to teleport and had a laser pistol.

• Nick’s character was Rattler. He rolled reptilian powers, which allowed him super strength, super endurance, but was cold blooded and had limited agility (i.e. he was slow). He could fly, and had a sonic attack (through his tail). His most powerful ability, though, was to absorb the abilities and strengths of his enemies. So, if Nick was able to land his absorption attack, he could go from someone who was moderately powerful to someone who was a Omega Level Threat. He loved absorbing speedsters so he could go more than once a turn.

I was heavily influenced by the Marvel comic books the Uncanny X-Men and the New Mutants (these were the only two Mutant books at the time. Ah, the good old days…) One of the most interesting places that was introduced in the X-Men was a place called Limbo. It is place where time doesn’t really matter. I took that idea and went hog wild with it. I created my own little limbo, calling it Baalthasar’s Dimension, and created a series of charts for each room and hallway in the dimension. When a character went into a new room, they would have to role dice to see what was happening in that room. I also tossed in all my favorite superheroes and villains from the various mainstream comic worlds (DC and Marvel) and other worlds (including Star Trek and the old DnD games) with the possibilities of facing/fighting these heroes and villains. Eventually in this world, I believe my character Mithril got pummeled by Superman rather severely. Also lying around the hallways and rooms were the remains of various heroes and villains – a mithril skeleton, Shogun Warrior’s head in jar of water, the crumpled remains of a Stormcraft, the broken pieces of a big iron golem, the shattered diamond remains of Diamano, Thor’s hammer, that sort of thing. Speed Demon was mutated into an 18 foot tall, insane super fast, super strong giant who had a crossbow (ballista, really) with diamond tipped bolts. Guess where the diamonds came from.

Over the years, our adventures returned and returned to that world, and it got more and more complicated. I believe one of my college players were entering a room, rolled, and saw my character from six years earlier walking out of the room through a different door. I had fun with it. I may have to revisit it, now with all the character changes in the Vigilantes’ world, the DC world, and the Marvel world. Oh, what craziness could occur now!

Yeah, I know. Calm down, Zierath. You don’t have time to do that right now. Maybe when you are 110, you can do that…