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Reality Storm?
bluegrassbeast
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Okay, some background on the Beast - my first serious foray into superhero roleplay (coming into the hobby with D&D and then the WoD) was Silver Age Sentinels (though as a product of the 80s and 90s teethed into geekdom on the X-Men series and B:tAS, my love of superheroes long-predated that).
So naturally I was saddened to see GoO go under in the 2000s, and wouldn't discover Champions until 2011 (though I had heard of the game previous)....
But then I learned there was actually a Crisis Crossover of sorts between the Champions verse an the SAS-verse in '04.. and would love details on that if possible.
So naturally I was saddened to see GoO go under in the 2000s, and wouldn't discover Champions until 2011 (though I had heard of the game previous)....
But then I learned there was actually a Crisis Crossover of sorts between the Champions verse an the SAS-verse in '04.. and would love details on that if possible.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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There are a multitude of parallel universes, each with its own version of Earth. Two of these alternate dimensions lie side-by-side in the timestream, and each is home to a powerful madman with terrifying powers who has only narrowly been thwarted in his grand schemes of conquest several times by bands of superpowered heroes. Dr. Destroyer, of Millennium-Earth, and Kreuzritter, of Empire-Earth, have discovered at the same time the existence of the multiverse and the timestream it moves through. More, they have become able to travel out of their own universes to a place called the Crystal Palace, a strange building where they have found uncanny devices allowing them to control a vortex of temporal energy, a natural phenomenon that can be perverted to a most un-natural end; a weapon so powerful that it will give them the ability to conquer both of their native worlds, if only they can work together to master it.
While storms and disasters begin to strike both Earths, the villains greatest enemies are abducted and trapped fighting refugees from nightmare versions of Earth. Now only the Players are left to solve the mysteries of the Crystal Palace, rescue it from the most overwhelming combined forces of villainy ever gathered, and rescue the iconic heroes of two Earths before everything is lost to the Reality Storm.
BTW Reality Storm is still purchasable from the Hero Games website store, for a ridiculously low price: http://www.herogames.com/forums/store/product/380-reality-storm-when-worlds-collide-book/
EDIT: The Chris Stevens cover is a comic-book classic:
I was also very sad to see GoO go under. I know it was actually a slow slide down, but they kept it quiet right up til the forums went black, so to the fans it seemed to happen almost overnight.
Anyhow as a bonus, the adventure book also includes rather detailed notes on converting characters from one system to the other, and has all the Champions characters including the villains featured in the adventure written up in Silver Age Sentinels stats, and all the SAS heroes and villains in the adventure written up in Champions Stat blocks.
And of course all the miscellaneous enemies in the book have duel stat blocks as well.
[warning personal opinion below!]
Although honestly I don't think a very good job was done on any of the conversions, too much 'by the notes', not enough 'rewrite to fit the new native rules' IMHO. As an example, dodging and avoiding damage and soaking damage such as with armor or force fields and regeneration abilities all work completely differently in the two games, and ranged blast attacks are also handled mathematically in a totally different manner. Because of this, just building a character with a strait power to power conversion won't always leave you with a character that has the same battle feel from one game to the others ruleset.
The Red Phoenix write up as another example, in SAS energy use is only a thing if it is an option enabled for the entire campaign, or a player chooses to take energy needs as a disadvantage, so her powers and sword attack are useable at will. In Champions, everything always costs endurance unless you take an advantage to remove the cost, but this also prevents pushing. Red Phoenixs' Awesome Magic Sword attack in the Champions write up was made to cost something like 17 endurance per swing [!], and she has a 7 speed with a 17 recovery and 66 End pool. Once you add in the maintenance costs of her flight [2 end per segment if a half move action] and force field [4 end per segment], she basically burns herself out way too fast, and it doesn't 'feel right' that her main attack should be so costly to use, when it's free and easy to use in SAS.
I wonder if the person who made her Champions write up really understood how Champions works, basically. Did he think she should use up one of her action segments each combat turn just to take a rest to recover some endurance? If she is hit by anything in that entire phase the rest action is wasted.
That cover is awesome though, and features the Champions from Fifth Edition before Cryptic changed their appearances. Most I think work better in the old designs, but Current Defender is a far sight better than the one we had at launch.
Artistic license, she decided to bleach her normally red hair, minor error, I didn't worry about it much. She's kinds red / strawberry blond in the SAS full color book in half of the art she appears in.
Oh it was intended. I had the name in CoH on Virtue server, as well as in Champions. [The group wasn't really developed much at all in CoH, as I was involved as amember in another long-standing RP guild.]
One of the guys who worked at Goo before it closed down, Jesse Scoble, worked for Cryptic as a writer I think back in the CoH days, and I chatted with him then and had his "unofficial blessing" to use the name for my guild, which was the closest I could get short of emailing Mark MacKinnon I suppose. And I don't expect to get his contact info. :biggrin:
I'm sort of bummed I didn't get the chance to meet him while he lived here in Texas, but I probably passed by him at a game convention or two and didn't know it.
Before the book was actually published, Hero Games and Guardians of Order held a joint online "Superhero Showdown" event as a promotion for it. Each month one character from each of their franchises was pitted in a battle scenario against one from the other. A writer from each company would post a short story from the perspective of their company's character describing the battle, with their character winning. Then the fans would vote on which character they thought should have won the fight based on the stories.
Most of the characters you see facing each other on the cover of Reality Storm are the ones who squared off in the showdown. The exceptions are Slipstream, who faced Kinetik; and Sapphire, who was pitted against Officer Prometheus.
It was so well received by the fans that they continued the fights with other official characters, including villains.
I wish those were still up somewhere, I voted every month, and really enjoyed the little fiction pieces written for each hero during that event.
To me Sentinel is like a great amalgamation of the concepts of Superman and Captain America in one awesome character. He's sort of like Supermans power theme, with Cap's origin and personality. I'm a pretty big fan of the story behind all the SAS characters, but some of the write ups are.. honestly less than ideal.
I never knew about the continuation fights, were they held on the Hero Boards? There was no mention of them on the GoO SAS boards.
The continuation fights were conducted on the same section of the GoO website as the original hero battles, in the same format. My personal favorite was Firewing vs General Winter. Pretty epic.
EDIT: I was able to track down a few of the archived fights:
Ironclad vs. Sentinel
Kinetik vs. Slipstream
Firewing vs. General Winter