The Last WISH

Posted by Bryant on June 12, 2004 at 10:26 AM

Ginger has posted her last WISH. If you've never participated or read the WISHes, you've been missing out. Without Ginger's example of gaming blogs as discussion forums, I wouldn't have started the 20' by 20' Room. And so I wanted to answer the final WISH here.

Tell me your favorite war story. Why is it your favorite? What does it show about your character or the game/campaign you were playing? What does it exemplify about why you like gaming?

In 1996, Carl Rigney started his UN PEACE campaign. I think it's still the best campaign I've ever been in. The system was Champions, which I learned to love during the course of the campaign. The players included some of my closest friends, and people I'd been roleplaying with for about a decade. And, of course, Carl's a superb GM.

We played teen superheroes from all over the world who were members of a UN superhero training squad. Since in this world there were only 400 superhumans at any given time, there was no way we were going to just train; it took about one session before the UN acknowledged that we were going to be an active team. From there we discovered that in a world in which there were only 400 superhumans, it was very hard to stay innocent and unaware of the secret history lurking behind the walls of the world.

Lots of questions, some of which never got answered. What's the difference between a superhero and a supervillain? What can you do in order to protect the innocent? What do you do when you find out the President of the United States may be an imposter shapeshifter with his finger on the nuclear button? Why do superpowers appear to migrate to another person when a superhuman dies?

We wound up (for reasons not involving the President) making a practice of never setting foot on US soil. This wasn't a huge issue for us, since one of the core team members was Bulgarian, one was Canadian, and my character -- Emoticon -- was French. He was a purely projective empath with no other powers. By the end of the campaign he'd learned to use his empathy to slow other people down in combat, and he'd figured out how to use it on himself to make himself like physical training -- but the story of Emoticon's metamorphosis into a martial artist is a different story.

My favorite war story is the time the US government, somewhat reluctantly, asked Emoticon to come visit Fort Cheer and interview supervillains. Fort Cheer was the US supervillain prison. It wasn't a high tech marvel with sleep restraints and adamantine walls. It was an old massive hulk of concrete and steel in the middle of Kansas. It did not rely on anything to keep the supervillains under control except fear. This worked.

The government was not entirely happy with the current status of Team One, the official US superhero team. (Kind of our fault, if I recall correctly.) They wanted to put together a squad of "former" supervillains who would fight in exchange for commuted sentences. We all thought this was a horrendous idea, but we also realized that without Paul's input, the government would make bad choices and the situation would be even worse. So we reluctantly agreed, put together contingency plans in case the government kidnapped us, and headed out to Kansas.

I believe Carl tape recorded the session; I should get him to digitize the tapes and send me MP3s. I don't remember the interviews in detail, not because they weren't amazing, but because I have a lousy memory for that sort of thing. But the details I do remember...

I remember interviewing Orion, the strongest man in the world, still alive after 50 years of fighting for the Nazi cause. He was terrifying. I wasn't worth killing, so he didn't bother. I remember interviewing Silk, who was disturbingly intimate and conned me into breaking the rule against touching the interviewees. I remember the rapist supervillain, and I remember playing along with his disgusting insinuations about the female members of UN PEACE in order to get a better insight into his personality. I remember interviewing the speedster who was only in prison because of political reasons, and realizing that this was the mother of our friend Whirlwind. I remember never forgetting that I was sitting inside the most dangerous location in the US, and that the US was enemy territory.

Six hours or so of play. No combat. Some mind control. It vies with Waylan's death for the most intense gaming session I've ever had.