Fever seems have broken (finally! I am so tired of having chills in 98-degree weather!); other symptoms persist, though considerably lessened in severity and frequency.
Scanning has resumed.
#22, like many other issues of AC, is chock full of martial arts maneuvers and schools and a few things for Fantasy HERO. The usual. Articles are there, too, but honestly, it seems throughout the 4e run of AC, nothing got supported in its pages more than Ninja HERO and Dark Champions. (in retrospect, this is also the only era during which my FLGS ever carried AC, and seeing it then gave the impression that it was a vehicle for these two genres. This is probably why I never bothered to pick it up and see how awesome this magazine was.
Ahh, well.... So it's been thirty years or so; so what? Now that I have seen them, and have learned their true under-appreciated value, I am working harder than anyone but Jason himself to make certain they are available forever, for anyone else who might not have gotten them the first time around! See? I can learn! HA!
There's that ad for The Mutant File that both stresses the impeta CE of black leather for 90s comics and dredged up a hillarious (and sad) memory from years gone by, but way more important is page 15!
Check out page 15, where Dean gives us a stomach-turning horror that makes us want to rethink the OG villain Mosquito and how we make him more than interesting again...
Follow that up with the Tentacled Flyer around the corner, and you'll wonder why you're _still_ trying to build your own Beholder.
Now if you're like me, page 38 will be of uniquely strong interest to you, for on that page is an ad with the single largest HERO Games Hexman logo ever printed. It's nice and clean, and printed in crisp black-and-white.
Why is this of particular interest? Well if you're into doing your own digital restorations, this is a perfect swap-in for the corner logo on _all_ the 4e books and many of the 3e books. While it's not my style to cheat (learnwd that lesson with the Champs 3 cover), it would probably look just as good on some of the other books, too, and not everyone is going to notice the small differences.
Remember: high-DPI large images shrink much more cleanly than any image enlarges, so grab this one up. In fact, I'll check with Jason to see if he minds me making this one publically available, should anyone wish to use it for their own projects.
And just for the record:
There isn't much that can be do e for the image on the bottom of p 23. Too much ink, too much stippling, and too much trendy darkness. It's pretty much a blob on the source material, too.
But folks, if you can make it one page past that, you can thoroughly enjoy Scott Heine's sequal to the brilliant 3e "To Serve and Protect."
Ive already got a denouement in mind that's going to make this perfect for my youth group if this country switch itself from "Stupid" to "Let's get rid of Corona, dammit!"
#23, like 22 and all that come after it, will have to be straightened digitally. The books are true magazine size, and just barely fit on my scanner's patten width-wise. Thee isn't enough room to correct for any mis-alignment between print and paper. On the plus side, with absolutely no chance of straightening the originals manually, scanning will go faster. On the down side, that increases the chances for digital tell-tales of manipulation. That's one of the reasons I start with high-Rez scans: the higher your dot count for the initial cleaning and adjusting, the less obvious those signs are.
Fortunately, so many years had passed by the time these books made print that the technology had come a long way, and the misalignment are fewer and less drastic than in the earlier everything-was-hand-set issues.
Page 3 gives us a blurb for the - and please, someone correct me if I am wrong so that I may track it down and immortalize it- never-materialized (what's the paper version of "vaporware?") of "Ultimate Powered Armor."
Now if one of you talented folks would like to try your hand at a manuscript for such a project.....
It can't be me, because I'm not talented, and because no one else would be interested in a 2e-xompliant version of such a book. HA!
Between cover art and advertisements, one is left with the feeling that Dark Champions was the only product at the time with any measure of draw (or was particularly hard to move, but vigilante murder heroes in the 90s? Pretty sure that was destined for multiple reprints) , and Fantasy HERO fans were the only people still buying the magazine. Still, good stuff manages to fill the pages.
Page 6 was hillarious--not for the content mind you, but because it needed a manual adjustment to straighten, and every single time I adjusted it- it got worse! Of I returned it eight back to where I started, it got worse! Given that the sheer size of the thing versus that of my scanner meant there was very, very little room to make adjustments at all, it was confounding! By the SEVENTENTH adjustment, it was threatening my sanity....
I finally got it as close possible to straight, given the spatial limitations I was up against--
Only to notice that it was a themed piece for Horror HERO.
How appropriate!
Page 8 gives us something there was never enough of: something for Cyber HERO! I guess without Curtis, Mike and Mike could pull off the CH Companion. (I never learned how well the scholarship fund for Curtis's son went, but I hope the fans and publishers were able to at least provide him with the education of his dreams. It's a poor substitute for a lost parent, no doubt, but a step toward a brighter future was, I thought, a beautiful tribute to the man).
Still, if you're a cyberpunk fan, Surbrook's 4e HERO Plus "Kazei 5" makes a sweet companion piece, though there is a subset of us that will have to shake it pretty hard to get all the anime out of it. Still, with or without the big eyes and impossible hair, they work well together.
Page 22 answers a lot of questions for me. Apparently comic book writers read it, adopted it, and have been complelty unable to get over it, but here's an article on how to run your game like a soap opera. Realistically, it's some thoughts and suggestions for emphasizing interpersonal interaction amongst your characters and the world in which they live on a more personal level.
Whatever works for you, of course.
(not done, but posting before my phone eats it)
), it can't be published as-is, but it could easily inspire something....
), it can't be published as-is, but it could easily inspire something....
