Numbed

Mike is dead.

It’s horrible to say it that way. “He passed,” is a phrase I cannot use, although I recognize that others take it seriously. “He died” sounds active, like he went and did it. I say it horribly because that’s the way I feel about it.

Aces high

Art by K.C.

This is a tribute post to K.C. Ryan and a reflection on his superhero group the Four Aces. You may be surprised to know it’s not a role-playing post at all, and part of the reason I’m writing about it is to investigate why not.

Medium and idiom: they fight crime!

Back to role-playing game talk again, this time hitting a second-order topic based on the foundation laid by some older posts. Bluntly, what on earth is this activity doing? What if anything do the texts have to do with this answer?

Snakes and hotties

Serpentine, AKA Naomi Pierce

My final and best major Champions game was played in Gainesville 1990-1992, during my Master’s studies. It was set in Tampa and the supergroup was called Force Five.

Cloaky Spookydark

illustrated by John Mietus

This was early 1988, following college graduation the previous year, while I was working at the Field Museum of Natural History. A fellow staff member invited me into Ran Hardin’s Champions game, played in Chicago, set in Chicago. The group was called Northwatch, an iteration of a game he’d begun years before.

Math is not hard

I got some advantages, I got some limitations …

BONUS POST: Thanks to Ed McW and his July pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! It’s really easy. In Champions, you pay for a ton of stuff in points.

Do the two-step

Steve

Some orientation: Steve Long and I met in the early 2000s in the context of role-playing publishing, as he had just become the lead line developer for Hero Games and I had shifted my digital-only products to book form for Adept Press.

Looking for a hero

1976, presented in comics form 1987

BONUS POST: Thanks to Larry Lade and his April pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! Lockdown first: I’m restricting this conversation to the first six-issue series Marshal Law (collected as Fear and Loathing), because both further development of the line and fandom have defiled it, frag them. I bought it issue by issue in 1987-1988, delighted and stunned.

K.C. Ryan

Summer ’88

I don’t exactly remember how they came to contact me, maybe due to some embarrassing letters published in some comics (maybe more than “some”), but I was invited to join The Clobberin’ Times Amateur Press Alliance when it was begun by Tim Watts and Mike O’Connell of Sacramento, California, in the summer of 1988. The topic was any-and-all things Champions, meaning the roleplaying game published by Hero Games, then in its third edition (1985) and – although gaming culture seems to have forgotten – considered at the time simply the most with-it, solid RPG in the hobby.