Sunday, August 30, 2009

Champions!

A young relative of mine recently posted a picture of their Champions Online character on Facebook. The game has changed a lot since my friends and I played Champions back in the early 1980s. It’s probably easier to set up a character and keep track of all of its super powers and other attributes. The characters and backgrounds look pretty cool, too.

Dan and I found some of the old character sheets that we used back then. We would create our characters by looking up the various super hero powers, skills and disadvantages in the game book. The sheets were filled in with all of our character’s information and we hoped they’d never get lost as we seldom made copies. The sheets also had rudimentary figures sketches that we would customize with character’s costumes.

Here are some of the characters that were created by me and some of my friends that played back then.

“Pixie” was my character. She was an alien that could fly, but only when she was tiny. She also had bracelets that shot energy beams.

Rick was inspired by Greek mythology when he created “Polyphemus”. This was the big, strong guy.

Wheatie Man was by Brian and I have no idea what he was thinking about when he created this. It’s been years since I’ve seen Brian so I can’t ask him.

The last one was by Jennifer, another friend I lost track of. She didn’t write down her character’s name and I don’t remember what it was. He looked like a smaller version of the Thing and had martial art skills. I don’t recall her being into comic books so maybe she borrowed a few for ideas.