Champions 3000 Lore Question

kaosarcanna

I've not had any luck with a web search, so I'm asking here.


My limited understanding is that the Champions Heroic Age eventually comes to an end and super heroes lose their powers. (I swear I heard in chat that happens around 2020 in the PNP.) 1000 years later Witchcraft is still alive and is the Archmage and a New Age of Heroes begins.

First question: is that more or less what happens in the PNP?

Second-- I presume the Future Setting (if it exists) was to give Champions a Legion of Super Heroes/Original Guardians of the Galaxy type setting.
Do we know what happened to the following:

1. The Irradiates?

2. The Manimals?

3. Existing races such as the Elder Worms and Lemurians?

4. Do any of the current Champions have descendants or namesakes active at that point in time?

bulgarex

The story of that future era of the Champions Universe -- with a synopsis of the events leading up to it -- was published in the PnP source book titled, Galactic Champions. As per the timeline described therein, in the year 2020 the mighty extra-dimensional tyrant, Tyrannon the Conqueror, invaded Earth. Witchcraft, who held the office of Archmage at the time, spearheaded a grand alliance of superheroes (and villains) to oppose him. Witchcraft sacrificed her own life to cast a mighty spell to defeat Tyrannon. However, a side-effect of that spell was to "dam" the flow of magic into that universe, which had rendered the laws of physics flexible enough to allow super-powers and supertech. Within two years, all of Earth's supers had lost their powers, and either retired or died.

(Note that GC was published in 2004. I'm sure Hero Games management figured, if they were still publishing CU source books sixteen years later, they could revise that timeline appropriately then.)

In the year 3000 a cosmic accident will release magic back into Champs Earth's universe, restoring super-powers almost overnight. At that time there will be no Archmage, since previous to that date there was no magic. But new heroes, and villains, will quickly emerge, and some earlier ones return.

The intent of GC was indeed to lay the foundation for a Guardians/Legion future-supers campaign, both in outlining an update to the setting, and providing advice and examples for running a high-level space-spanning campaign.

The Irradiates were conceived of by Cryptic Studios years after GC came out, so their future isn't described in it.

The Elder Worm are partly creatures of magic, and could not function and survive in a world without it; but their ruler, the Slug, placed himself and his followers in hiding in suspended animation, until the return of magic in 3000 AD awakened them. (GC contains a full write-up for "Slug 3000.")

The fate of the Manimals is not recorded in GC or elsewhere. However, their genetic alterations don't lend themselves to easily producing offspring, and even today their original colony of Beast Mountain is dwindling in population. If Dr. Moreau was stopped from producing more Manimals (if only by his ultimate death) they would have eventually died out.

Neither is the future of the Lemurians spelled out, but several possibilities come to mind. One, they could have suffered the same fate as other magical beings, the collapse of their magic and end of their race. However, the Lemurians had survived the global cataclysm which ended the prehistoric Atlantean Age, by building a great "Clockwork Engine" which placed their entire city in stasis, frozen outside of Time, until the planet had healed and renewed itself. There's no reason they couldn't do so again to wait out the return of magic.

(The above details about Beast Mountain and Lemuria come from the book, Hidden Lands, which describes both of them, and other remarkable places in the setting.)

Another possibility is that the Lemurians might have emulated the modern-day Atlanteans, another magic-based aquatic race, who translocated their city of Atlantis to the dimension of Faerie before magic completely faded on Earth (as revealed in GC).

Jack Harmon, a scion of the storied Harmon family, a great athlete and brilliant scientist, and a fan of his near-mythical ancestor James "Defender" Harmon, took advantage of the change in physics after 3000 AD to design his own powered armor and found a new Champions hero team to help protect the far-flung human race and its alien allies. Other superhumans known to earlier eras of Champs Earth became prominent again in this distant future, having survived due to their immortality or by traveling through time by one means or another.

bulgarex

BTW gradii, I'm afraid you're still "shadow-banned" by a forum moderator. The forum home page showed that there was a new post by you on this thread, but it's not visible to anyone else reading the thread. Sorry.

jaazaniah1

I guess I just don't see the point of wiping out all superheroes in 2020 as a basis to have a LSH type world in 3000. Why couldn't heroes just exist all along? Also, what does the elimination of magic have anything to do with heroes whose powers and abilities rely on tech or high level human training or who are mutants or are aliens? Just sounds like the Champions PnP writers were a bit lazy about working out a history and its implications for the next millennium and took the easy route of wiping out all heroes instead.

bulgarex

Well, I do see your perspective, but I would dispute your characterization of laziness. You see, Hero Games management made the decision to link the various modern-day, fantasy, and sci-fi genre settings they planned to publish, into a single universe with a shared time-line. (Whether any person agrees or disagrees with that decision isn't the point -- it's what they chose to do.) Hero planned to produce a cyberpunk-style version of their shared Earth with history starting in the year 2020 (which they never got to before the company had to downsize). They also published books detailing humanity's sci-fi expansion to the stars and meetings with alien civilizations. In the case of neither of those genres does the fictional source material feature much in the way of magic, nor traditional comic-book super powers. Mind you, bionic augmentation, genetic modification, and "psionic" abilities do have genre precedents, in some ways taking the place of those other powers; and those are included in the Hero future books.

As to the connection between magic and super-powers/supertech, we've had that debate ad nauseum on these forums before, which I'd prefer not to revisit here. If you really want to get into it this forum thread summarizes salient points of the discussion. But to put it simply, magic is the enabling device by which the mundane version of Champions Earth is enhanced to become a more fantastic one. The laws of physics in this world are "loosened" to allow for radical scientific inventions, superhuman genetic mutations, ch'i-fueled martial arts feats, and all the other extraordinary abilities we see in comics, which obviously break the laws of real-world physics all the time. The books explicitly state those things aren't magical in themselves -- magic only makes them possible.

If anyone wants to dissect why and how this works or doesn't, rather than hijack this discussion I refer you to the above-linked thread.

kaosarcanna

Thanks for all the information.

I guess I couldn't find anything out because I was looking for Champions 3000 instead of "Galactic Champions."

I hope the CO Devs will create some kind of Endgame event where our heroes prevent the Super Hero Apocalypse.

bulgarex

You're welcome, but I'm not betting on your hope. After all, the devs mostly ignored the setup for Luther Black's apotheosis as laid out in the PnP books to design their own scenario, even pre-empting it a year early; and undercut the Hzeel invasion of Earth that Champions publications had been building to for years, to play up the Gadroon and Qularr, who until then had been little more than side notes in the past history of the setting. They even supplanted the true Dr. Destroyer with their Shadow D, which required rewriting some recent Champions Universe history.

markhawkman

Which means there's nothing stopping them from simply pushing the date back,, maybe even a Vibora Apocalypse redux kind of story.

jonsills

Or just ignoring it altogether. They own the IP, after all, they can mess with it any way they like.

kaosarcanna

True but it would make for a nice piece of end game content. I think the PNP fight takes place at the Lemurian Cannon ... would be an excuse to create an epic lair there.

bulgarex

One of GC's more radical departures for a present-day character in the future concerns Mechanon. In one of his schemes Mechanon was apparently disintegrated by his own experimental weapon. In reality he was hurled through both space and time, his inert body discovered across the galaxy a thousand years later by a (relatively) primitive space exploration ship of a humanoid race. Unfortunately said explorers revived Mechanon, who promptly killed them all and piloted the ship back to their planet. Not having to face the kind of super-powered heroes who opposed him on Earth, Mechanon and the robotic army he created quickly scoured the planet clean of life, turning it into a gigantic factory. Using that resource he built a new star-traveling form to house his consciousness, resembling his old body's head, but as big and powerful as the Death Star. Mechanon then set out to carry his genocidal campaign to every living world in the Milky Way.

kaosarcanna

That's pretty much what happened to Brainiac right before Crisis on Infinite Earths. He went from being a green skinned pink shirt wearing android to a skeleton-like robot who rode around the galaxy conquering worlds in his skullship.

jaazaniah1

I've seen a few game companies come up with a system good for one genre and then have grandiose plans to extend it across other genres. The extensions often don't work, the company is stretched too thin and eventually goes under. To my mind, Champs was the best ever PnP for superheroes, but the crossovers I saws (back in the 80s) just didn't have the same magic.

In any event, I don't really see what they thought destroying the superheroes was going to give them story-wise that they couldn't have also got by leaving them intact and being more creative in their 3rd millennium time line.

bulgarex wrote: »

Well, I do see your perspective, but I would dispute your characterization of laziness. You see, Hero Games management made the decision to link the various modern-day, fantasy, and sci-fi genre settings they planned to publish, into a single universe with a shared time-line. (Whether any person agrees or disagrees with that decision isn't the point -- it's what they chose to do.) Hero planned to produce a cyberpunk-style version of their shared Earth with history starting in the year 2020 (which they never got to before the company had to downsize). They also published books detailing humanity's sci-fi expansion to the stars and meetings with alien civilizations. In the case of neither of those genres does the fictional source material feature much in the way of magic, nor traditional comic-book super powers. Mind you, bionic augmentation, genetic modification, and "psionic" abilities do have genre precedents, in some ways taking the place of those other powers; and those are included in the Hero future books.

bulgarex

I guess their thinking amounted to, if you want to draw the maximum number of gamers to a particular genre you're publishing, you don't want to stray too far from their expectations. If you want a unified timeline (which has advantages and disadvantages), you want a rationale for why superhumans are in one era and not in another.

You are of course free to disagree with that line of reasoning

theravenforce

As always bulgarex, excellent information provided!!

kjodell

kaosarcanna wrote: »

That's pretty much what happened to Brainiac right before Crisis on Infinite Earths. He went from being a green skinned pink shirt wearing android to a skeleton-like robot who rode around the galaxy conquering worlds in his skullship.

All Brainiac wanted was a pair of pants