Pocket Review: Champions Universe

[gridlore]

One of my gripes about the whole superhero genre is that it is totally illogical. (Bear with me, I know I'm stating the obvious.) There's no way that a human shaped and sized being could lift an oil tanker, flight requires some form of thrust and lifting body, and let's not even start on the marvelous technology that seems to be used only by its inventors!

Then there's the fact that most four-color worlds seem to be just like ours only with people in tights flying around. There's very little impact on the world, which is wrong.

Champions Universe addresses this problem, and does it well. It starts with an overview of the game-world history, covering "men of mystery" from about the Revolutionary War on up to World War II. The rational for the superpowered milieu is a cabal of Nazi sorcerers.. they tried to use a magical ritual to open a gateway, but only succeeded in making the Earth more permeable to the fantastic and unlikely. Accidents that would normally leave the victim comatose now endow amazing powers. Mutants are born. Entities from alternate realities wander by for tea. Inventors build amazing battlesuits, etc.

The best part of the book is the exploration of how society reacts to the presence of metahumans. From the popular media to the government, the effects on day-to-day life are examined. For example, one of the most popular channels on most cable systems is SNN, the Super News Network. Along with news shows reporting on daily super-battles, it has such entertainment as Behind The Mask about the lives of heroes. (I'm imagining that one of their newest hits has to be Queer Eye for the Straight Super...)

Chapter four is a gazetteer-style overview of the rest of the planet. While sketchy, it does provide some useful ideas (in Mexico, the masked wrestlers actually have powers!) This section suffers from having metahumans who have powers and IDs tied too closely to their home regions, but that's to be expected.

After that, we get a closer look at some important fictional places.. Millennium City, MI (built on the ruins of Detroit, which was leveled by Dr. Destroyer), Vibora Bay, FL, and Haynesville, KS (home of the late Captain Patriot and the United States' super-soldier program.) Then were off to the usual Jack Kirby-esque Secret Lands.. Atlantis, Lemuria, Monster Island.

But the book is called Champions Universe! Aliens and their empires are not ignored. Neither are alternate dimensions just chock-full off baddies.

The last few chapters go over organizations, both good and bad, and hints for running games in the CU. There are several characters in the book, ranging from normals to world-smashing villains.

A great treatment of the subject. I'll use this material, but my primal cause of the superhero explosion is different.

I'm stealing from isomeme here, a shared universe he played with in college.

A long time ago, in another dimension, the V'reln and (race name?) were at war. In a final assault, the V'reln surrounded the enemy home world with ships mounting the feared Probability Inverter! They fired, and the planet vanished. Alas, the beams intersected and things got very weird.

Several of those beams popped into our universe and hit Earth and various points in our history. Each hit raised the level of improbability on Earth a little, until the final hit in the 1920 just made things crazy. Science, magic, genetics.. all went nuts. Aliens started avoiding us because of the odd things that happen here. They were really put out to find that our weirdness traveled with us!

Comments

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm honored (and surprised) that you remember the feverish little universe Matt and Lynn and I built. The empire against which V'Reln (my society) was battling was Xlint (one syllable; the X sounds like a Z). In that universe, the p-inverter cascade not only sent the Xlintic homeworld wandering eternally from node to node of a hyperdimensional lattice, it also introduced working 'magic' to a nearby low-tech world, the populace of which then began to colonize other worlds, thinking they were on other planes of existence.

By the way, one of the primary research universities in Xlintic space, specializing in computational linguistics, was the University of Xlint Ambril, located on the moon of that name circling the very large gas giant Ambrogulomodisprosimiolysorumulax.

Ah, bright college days...

A number of people...

[seawasp]

... have done similar approaches to trying to make a coherent superverse. White Wolf's Aberrant is one such. I have my own design for such a game/writing universe which I may get to (or may not, depending on my career). I'll certainly use it in private gaming, whether or not it gets published.