More On Champions
Jun. 5th, 2009 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theronIn 1994, I moved to Houston. I knew virtually no one, and the few folks I did know weren't gamers. At the time, I was more fired up about Champions than I'd been in years, thanks to Red October, but I needed players. I found myself resorting to that most traditional and ancient means of finding players, leaving and answering ads on bulletin boards at game stores.
The results were mixed, but overall, it went better than I'd expected. The first prospective player was a disaster, but he knew people, and they turned out quite well. My first attempts for them weren't entirely successful; I'd been working on a "WILDCats meets X-Files" game called "Agents of IMPACT" that was a bit hard for the players to really get into. After a few sessions, I scrapped it for a more traditional game. I took my old campaign notes from the early 80s and used them as the backdrop for a new campaign, rising out of the ashes of that old one (not that the original ended badly, it just made for a good story). The New Alamo Defenders made for about a year of quality play, shed off the disastrous player, and saw us joined by a pair of additional great players in D and J.
Eventually, the campaign lost steam as I was struck by new inspiration. This happens to me a lot. I've never been able to keep a campaign of my own creation going for more than about a year; it's just the way I'm wired. My new idea was to try running a game in the style of an animated series (of the WB Batman or Superman shows, not Captain Planet or Transformers). The result was "Meridian by Moonlight," an Art Deco setting consisting entirely of my own creations. It was big and detailed, to the point of being too big and detailed. In the end, it flopped after a half-dozen sessions because I was more interested in imagining the setting than running games in it. I'm still quite proud of it, and going back and figuring out what worked and didn't about the setting taught me more about world building than actually running the game.
It was around the end of Meridian that I became a member of Haymaker!, one the older Hero System Amateur Press Associations (APAs). APAs were sort of the print version of internet forae. It afforded me the opportunity to try writing some longer pieces and put me in touch with some great folks, most notably Dave Mattingly, who later provided me with my only paying work to date.
But if things were going well for me Champions-wise, they weren't going well for the game line or the publisher. Hero ended their long-time publishing arrangement with Iron Crown, and announced a new partnership with R Talsorian Games. They also announced a new Champions setting, and new rules.
As it turns out, this was not such a great thing. Champions: the New Millenium brought the promised new setting, coupled with horrible late-90s Image Comics knock-off art and a new, stripped-down, rules system called "Fuzion." The aim was to bring new players into the fold, but the overall effect was to alienate the established fanbase. With Hero no longer producing material for 4th edition, it was a hard time to be a Champions fan. Gold Rush Games put out San Angelo, a setting that certainly had a following, but failed to impress me.
Out of the blue, Hero announced it had been acquired by Cybergames, a company notable for buying a bunch of RPG publishers. Despite many inquiries, no one could seem to say who Cybergames actually was, or what their product was supposed to be. If Hero's output before Cybergames was low, under the new management, it amounted to nil. Unless you count press releases and announcements of products that never actually came out, that is.
My own hunch is that they were basically the paper and pencil gaming world's equivalent of a Dot-Com. They had some initial backing money, planned on doing glorious things with it, and utterly failed on every conceivable level. Seriously, their incompetence was jaw-dropping.
(Aside: They got away with it with the Hero fans for quite a while because their "spokesman" was Steve Peterson, one of the founders of Hero Games and a known quantity to the fans, even though by the end, it was clear to even the staunchest fanboy that he was talking out of his ass and his promises were worthless. In other venues, this became clear far more quickly. Some years after the dust had settled on the shambles that was Cybergames, I found myself reading the archives of the Deadlands mailing list. Deadlands' publisher, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, had also been purchased by Cybergames, and as the mailing list showed, the fans weren't nearly so familiar, much less enamored with Mr. Peterson and his particular brand of bullshit. His tactics were largely the same: empty promises, excuses for delays, and when all else fails, blame the freelancers. What he didn't count on was the fact that the freelancers in question actually frequented the mailing list and loudly objected to being blamed when their work had been turned in months before Cybergames acquired Pinnacle. About the time Peterson tried to claim credit for getting a product out the door that had actually been at the printer at the time of the acquisition, the mob ran him out of town on a rail. If only the Hero fans had done the same.)
Eventually, it became clear that Cybergames was dying. The Pinnacle deal had been quietly undone (I heard from someone claiming to be in the know that their check to purchase the company bounced, but that's strictly hearsay), and it was obvious no more material was in the pipeline for Hero products. It looked like things were finally coming to an end. By this point, I was, personally, rather burned out on Champions. I'd grown tired of the complexity, and I was largely burned out on superheroes in general. D&D's third edition was approaching and it sounded a whole lot more interesting than doing more of the same thing I'd been doing for the past twenty years.
Next Time: Hero's savior, Pointless Champions, and embracing the new.
The results were mixed, but overall, it went better than I'd expected. The first prospective player was a disaster, but he knew people, and they turned out quite well. My first attempts for them weren't entirely successful; I'd been working on a "WILDCats meets X-Files" game called "Agents of IMPACT" that was a bit hard for the players to really get into. After a few sessions, I scrapped it for a more traditional game. I took my old campaign notes from the early 80s and used them as the backdrop for a new campaign, rising out of the ashes of that old one (not that the original ended badly, it just made for a good story). The New Alamo Defenders made for about a year of quality play, shed off the disastrous player, and saw us joined by a pair of additional great players in D and J.
Eventually, the campaign lost steam as I was struck by new inspiration. This happens to me a lot. I've never been able to keep a campaign of my own creation going for more than about a year; it's just the way I'm wired. My new idea was to try running a game in the style of an animated series (of the WB Batman or Superman shows, not Captain Planet or Transformers). The result was "Meridian by Moonlight," an Art Deco setting consisting entirely of my own creations. It was big and detailed, to the point of being too big and detailed. In the end, it flopped after a half-dozen sessions because I was more interested in imagining the setting than running games in it. I'm still quite proud of it, and going back and figuring out what worked and didn't about the setting taught me more about world building than actually running the game.
It was around the end of Meridian that I became a member of Haymaker!, one the older Hero System Amateur Press Associations (APAs). APAs were sort of the print version of internet forae. It afforded me the opportunity to try writing some longer pieces and put me in touch with some great folks, most notably Dave Mattingly, who later provided me with my only paying work to date.
But if things were going well for me Champions-wise, they weren't going well for the game line or the publisher. Hero ended their long-time publishing arrangement with Iron Crown, and announced a new partnership with R Talsorian Games. They also announced a new Champions setting, and new rules.
As it turns out, this was not such a great thing. Champions: the New Millenium brought the promised new setting, coupled with horrible late-90s Image Comics knock-off art and a new, stripped-down, rules system called "Fuzion." The aim was to bring new players into the fold, but the overall effect was to alienate the established fanbase. With Hero no longer producing material for 4th edition, it was a hard time to be a Champions fan. Gold Rush Games put out San Angelo, a setting that certainly had a following, but failed to impress me.
Out of the blue, Hero announced it had been acquired by Cybergames, a company notable for buying a bunch of RPG publishers. Despite many inquiries, no one could seem to say who Cybergames actually was, or what their product was supposed to be. If Hero's output before Cybergames was low, under the new management, it amounted to nil. Unless you count press releases and announcements of products that never actually came out, that is.
My own hunch is that they were basically the paper and pencil gaming world's equivalent of a Dot-Com. They had some initial backing money, planned on doing glorious things with it, and utterly failed on every conceivable level. Seriously, their incompetence was jaw-dropping.
(Aside: They got away with it with the Hero fans for quite a while because their "spokesman" was Steve Peterson, one of the founders of Hero Games and a known quantity to the fans, even though by the end, it was clear to even the staunchest fanboy that he was talking out of his ass and his promises were worthless. In other venues, this became clear far more quickly. Some years after the dust had settled on the shambles that was Cybergames, I found myself reading the archives of the Deadlands mailing list. Deadlands' publisher, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, had also been purchased by Cybergames, and as the mailing list showed, the fans weren't nearly so familiar, much less enamored with Mr. Peterson and his particular brand of bullshit. His tactics were largely the same: empty promises, excuses for delays, and when all else fails, blame the freelancers. What he didn't count on was the fact that the freelancers in question actually frequented the mailing list and loudly objected to being blamed when their work had been turned in months before Cybergames acquired Pinnacle. About the time Peterson tried to claim credit for getting a product out the door that had actually been at the printer at the time of the acquisition, the mob ran him out of town on a rail. If only the Hero fans had done the same.)
Eventually, it became clear that Cybergames was dying. The Pinnacle deal had been quietly undone (I heard from someone claiming to be in the know that their check to purchase the company bounced, but that's strictly hearsay), and it was obvious no more material was in the pipeline for Hero products. It looked like things were finally coming to an end. By this point, I was, personally, rather burned out on Champions. I'd grown tired of the complexity, and I was largely burned out on superheroes in general. D&D's third edition was approaching and it sounded a whole lot more interesting than doing more of the same thing I'd been doing for the past twenty years.
Next Time: Hero's savior, Pointless Champions, and embracing the new.