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Post by andrewallen on Feb 23, 2014 2:23:15 GMT
For me, it would be Gestalt, Guardians (2e and 3e), Strike Force, and Protectors.
It just occurred to me that two of those were created by Scott Bennie.
BTW, has anyone checked out Algernon Files? What did you think?
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Post by Chris Goodwin on Feb 23, 2014 21:16:41 GMT
I haven't looked at the Algernon Files, but Villainy Unbound was one of my favorite Enemies books.
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reggie2602
Double Digit Master
Cosmic Crusader of Earth
Posts: 14
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Post by reggie2602 on Mar 26, 2014 0:44:01 GMT
My faves: 4th Ed Champs CHTNM Champs 5th & 6th Ed Champions
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Post by rjcurrie on Mar 29, 2014 5:37:34 GMT
I always prefer my own universes. Learning published material is a pain.
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Post by tikiman on Apr 17, 2014 0:27:07 GMT
You may be getting fewer votes than you should. I got boxes to check but no way to submit my vote. Feels like an election in the Crimea.
Anyway, I would have voted for the Guardians of 1st/2nd edition game, though all I know of them is what's in the rulebook examples and the Eclipse Comics miniseries.
Have never read Strike Force. Every copy I have seen for sale has been prohibitively expensive.
Don'n know anything about New Millennium...once I read that Detroit was destroyed and replaced by a fake city, I had no interest (I like to set my games in the "real world").
Haven't seen anything for 6th edition. I have editions 1-5 and "Champions Complete" but I play 4th.
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Post by Tasha on Apr 17, 2014 8:03:28 GMT
Champions New Millenium takes place in a rebuilt San Francisco Bay Area. Which is largely the same as today with some improvements like Light rail running all the way around the bay (which it doesn't IRL) and rebuilt bridges, which sort of came to pass IRL. New Detroit aka Millenium City is part of 5e and later's Champions Universe, not CNM.
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Post by tikiman on Apr 17, 2014 13:48:06 GMT
Champions New Millenium takes place in a rebuilt San Francisco Bay Area. Which is largely the same as today with some improvements like Light rail running all the way around the bay (which it doesn't IRL) and rebuilt bridges, which sort of came to pass IRL. New Detroit aka Millenium City is part of 5e and later's Champions Universe, not CNM. My mistake...I confess I am largely ignorant of the Champions "universe" post-1990-ish...I have a secondhand copy of the 4th edition book, which I thought was not very good, and the 5th edition "Champions" book, which I found to be very good (Allston, right?) until it came to the actual Champions universe characters, for whom I did not care. I partly blame the publisher for using similar names for its products! Either way, I prefer the Guardians. They just seem to have more flavor and personality, plus (for me) a more reasonable power level. I like Marksman's afro and indeterminate ethnicity, too. Wish there were more material/information about those guys.
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Post by cassandra on May 9, 2014 4:03:10 GMT
5th Edition Champions.
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Post by tikiman on Jun 11, 2014 0:08:17 GMT
Heck, I just re-read the 6 issue Champions miniseries from Eclipse and was overwhelmed by nostalgia seeing those characters and the simple write-ups despite the overall poor writing and mediocre artwork. Fun times.
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Post by Tasha on Jun 14, 2014 7:47:19 GMT
Champions New Millenium takes place in a rebuilt San Francisco Bay Area. Which is largely the same as today with some improvements like Light rail running all the way around the bay (which it doesn't IRL) and rebuilt bridges, which sort of came to pass IRL. New Detroit aka Millenium City is part of 5e and later's Champions Universe, not CNM. My mistake...I confess I am largely ignorant of the Champions "universe" post-1990-ish...I have a secondhand copy of the 4th edition book, which I thought was not very good, and the 5th edition "Champions" book, which I found to be very good (Allston, right?) until it came to the actual Champions universe characters, for whom I did not care. I partly blame the publisher for using similar names for its products! Either way, I prefer the Guardians. They just seem to have more flavor and personality, plus (for me) a more reasonable power level. I like Marksman's afro and indeterminate ethnicity, too. Wish there were more material/information about those guys. The Marksman is Jewish. I have it on VERY good authority that is the case. He appears in Champions New Millennium mostly in his secret ID. I would imagine that he appeared in that because his Player, Bruce Harlick was one of the book's authors (and he was still Hero Game's Line editor at that time). The reason that they were never official is that the characters belonged to the player's in George's original Champions Campaign. I don't think that Hero Games could or wanted to get licences for those characters. Also I am not sure that the players wanted to lose control of their characters. Dennis Mellonee (Creator of the Champions Comic) he could get a licence at least for a while to appear in his comic (some of the people changed their minds after seeing how bad the comic was). Champions 4e was the last of the Genre + Rules book and was at least as complete as 3rd edition with more stuff. Esp since they had all of the Aaron Allston roleplaying essays (ie Player Personality type and many others). Champions 5e was the one that was lack luster IMHO.
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Post by tikiman on Jun 15, 2014 5:40:04 GMT
My mistake...I confess I am largely ignorant of the Champions "universe" post-1990-ish...I have a secondhand copy of the 4th edition book, which I thought was not very good, and the 5th edition "Champions" book, which I found to be very good (Allston, right?) until it came to the actual Champions universe characters, for whom I did not care. I partly blame the publisher for using similar names for its products! Either way, I prefer the Guardians. They just seem to have more flavor and personality, plus (for me) a more reasonable power level. I like Marksman's afro and indeterminate ethnicity, too. Wish there were more material/information about those guys. The Marksman is Jewish. I have it on VERY good authority that is the case. He appears in Champions New Millennium mostly in his secret ID. I would imagine that he appeared in that because his Player, Bruce Harlick was one of the book's authors (and he was still Hero Game's Line editor at that time). The reason that they were never official is that the characters belonged to the player's in George's original Champions Campaign. I don't think that Hero Games could or wanted to get licences for those characters. Also I am not sure that the players wanted to lose control of their characters. Dennis Mellonee (Creator of the Champions Comic) he could get a licence at least for a while to appear in his comic (some of the people changed their minds after seeing how bad the comic was). Champions 4e was the last of the Genre + Rules book and was at least as complete as 3rd edition with more stuff. Esp since they had all of the Aaron Allston roleplaying essays (ie Player Personality type and many others). Champions 5e was the one that was lack luster IMHO. If you mean Hero 5th edition was lackluster, then yes indeed. The Champions genre book for 5th, however, is to me far superior to the 4th ed. Champions sourcebook with all the "refer to this other book" mumbo jumbo. Champions/Hero 4th ed. is the game plus Allston, which is for my money the best version so far. Mainly the writing by Steve Long isn't for me in the later stuff.
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Post by dan2448 on Aug 29, 2014 17:03:56 GMT
I voted for the Guardians (1e/2e) primarily for sentimental reasons, because my introduction to the game was as a high school kid playing 2e and then 3e.
-As an aside, does anyone know why those superhero characters disappeared from "Champions" publications starting with 3e in 1984, despite the fact that supervillains created by many of the same people continued to be featured prominently in subsequent editions of the game? I know that the heroes later starred in their own comic book (which I bought as a teenager when it was first published in 1986). I thought there might be a connection. But the comic book began publication a couple of years after 3e was first published, and the supervillaisn that continued to feature in the RPG also made appearances in the comic book for years.
I also voted for 5th edition in this poll, because, having missed 4th edition during about 20 years away from the hobby, I was blown away by what D0J did with a "Champions" universe that I had remembered fondly from childhood, but also as very Bronze Age-y and sometimes silly. I thought they updated and expanded on it marvelously. (Though I later learned that 5e built on a foundation laid in 4e, with which I had been unfamiliar.)
I also bought and read "San Angelo" (and the two published companion volumes). I liked it, and found it, as many have remarked before, resonant of Kurt Busiek's "Astro City," which I also really like(d). But for my personal taste, the super heroics seemed a little too muted for a super hero RPG.
I also bought and read the "Champions: New Millenium" books, and I agree entirely with what has already written about them in this thread above.
With regard to 6e, while I didn't make a detailed line-by-line comparison of the books, my impression was that the contents of the 6e "Champions" genre book and the 6e "Champions Universe" book do not vary widely from their 5e predecessors.
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Post by dan2448 on Aug 29, 2014 17:26:11 GMT
The reason that they were never official is that the characters belonged to the player's in George's original Champions Campaign. I don't think that Hero Games could or wanted to get licences for those characters. Also I am not sure that the players wanted to lose control of their characters. Dennis Mellonee (Creator of the Champions Comic) he could get a licence at least for a while to appear in his comic (some of the people changed their minds after seeing how bad the comic was). I was disappointed in the "Champions" comic book, too. But I bought it as a teenager from the very first issue published in 1986, and continued to buy it for years until it petered out (not for the first or last time) in 1993. I wasn't "wowed" by the artwork, but I mostly wanted it to feature the Champions Universe supervillains and organizations more prominently. (The characterization of Flare was not to my personal taste either, for the most part.) I continued to buy the comic book mostly because I had developed a fondness for these superhero characters since they appeared frequently on the covers and interiors of various "Champions" publications in the 2e era, including "Champions II" and "Champions III." But this stopped abruptly with the publication of 3e "Champions" and I always wondered why. (My best guess from afar was that 'someone' became aware of the potential intellectual property issues.) Looking at my back issues of the old "Champions" comic book just now, I see an editorial in an issue dated January 1993 informing readers that "Bruce Harlick prefers to withdraw his creations" (Marksman and Foxbat) from the "Champions" comic book. What precipitated that, I've wondered a few times over the years. But Bruce Harlick's characters were prominently featured in these intermittently published "Champions" comic books for seven years before he pulled them. The "Champions" comic book (by then re-titled "League of Champions") ceased publication again (not for the last time, however) just a couple of issues later in 1993, leading me to assume in the absence of available facts that this might've been about money. I'm not aware of anyone of the other creators puling their characters. Amazingly, a new issue of "League of Champions" was published in 2009, after a 15 year hiatus, and another issue was published just a couple of months ago. Both continue to feature Stacy Thain's Flare and Glen Thain's Icestar. Steve Peterson's Goliath (renamed Giant in the comic bok) was killed off at the end of the original 6 issue mini-series from 1986. But an identical-looking character (his son) appears in these recent issues. Rose is also prominent. (Though she now seems to go by the code name 'Psyche.' So maybe Tom Tumey pulled his consent at some point?) I also noted that the 4e "Champions Universe" book by Monte Cook (et al) published in 1992, despite referencing explicitly eleven prior years of Champions Universe development and history at the start of the introduction to the book, makes no reference whatsoever to Bruce Harlick's Marksman, or Stacy Thain's Flare, or Glen Thain's Icestar, or Steve Peterson's Goliath, or Mark Williams' Gargoyle or Tom Tumey's Rose, all of whom featured prominently in illustrations in "Champions" publications in the early 1980s. But that 4e "Champions Universe" book does reference Bruce Harlick's villainous Foxbat, as well as the villain Icicle, and Andrew Robinson's DEMON, all of whom appeared regularly in the comic book for years. I always thought that the total exclusion of these heroes from the history of the Champions Universe was a little 'weird.' All of this is made even more curious, I think, by two sentences in a full page editorial by Steve Peterson in the very first issue of the "Champions" comic book, published by Eclipse in 1986, which reads, "One more item of note: later this year, a CHAMPIONS supplement will be published that does reveal much of the background information regarding the Guardians [re-named "The Champions" in the comic book] and the Hero Campaign. We'll be giving you the current, more powerful versions of the characters, plus the characters as they appear in the comic book, and important material regarding the Guardians' headquarters and resources." Yet that never happened (for whatever reason), and those superhero characters seemed to be written out of the history of the Champions Universe (while the villains endured). These heroes lived on only in this intermittently published independent comic book.
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Post by CRTaylor on Aug 30, 2014 15:48:06 GMT
I started up an alternate universe version of the Champions from 4th edition quite a while back but I found that I couldn't keep up the pace of even one page a week. I had the characters renamed and with new costumes but very closely related to the original characters. Defender became Valiant, Seeker became Shiva (with 4 arms), etc. I had 10 or so issues scripted and plotted and was going to just start running them through published adventures one at a time. It would be super easy to do, were it not for the artwork.
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Pariah
New Member
21st Century Schizoid Dad
Posts: 3
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Post by Pariah on Jan 9, 2015 15:25:08 GMT
I like the 4th Edition universe best. To me, it's the one where Champions finally moved away from the kids' table and became a proper gaming setting.
I also like the earlier version with Marksman, Goliath, Rose, Flare, and the rest as The Champions. That stuff had a real four-color feel.
YMMV, obviously.
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