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?
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(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.
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.
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.
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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.
You are of course free to disagree with that line of reasoning
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