Golden Heroes

As most of you know i am compling and writing at least two books for Golden Heroes (Book one "Legacy" & Book Two "Beneath the shadow of the skys"), these will revise the white dwarf adventures and the published ones adding The Lancelot Caper along the way. i have staged the adventures in a chronolical Campaign as follows
Book 1 Story arc 1: Rise of the Uberlord (Overlord)
Peking Duck
Lancelot Caper
Legacy of Eagles
--big gap between LoE and QV allowing for an Assult on the Nazi base in Antartica--
Story Arc 2: A face from the past
Queen Victoria and the Holy Grail
StrikeBack (this linked to QV but may ultimatly become the last scenario of book 2 not sure yet)
--Charles Babbage and the Clockwork Orobous--
Book 2 story arc 3: An Alien Exchange
Crossfire
Reunion
Book 2 Stroy arc 4: Extraordanary Rendition
-- as yet unnamed segway--
The American Dream
Confusion..
--the last adenture--

The Scenarios are in Story arcs, so Peking duck/Lancelot and Legacy are all one QV&HG + Strikeback another.
I have addition segways to link the adventures were needed, between the QV/Strikeback and Crossfire/Reunion adventures which are end of book one and begining of book two is Charles Babbage & the Clockwork Orobous (Maltese Falcon). other scenarios maybe added if the old Golden Heroes Fanzine is mined for good ones not sure yet. the segways will be simple the link between LoE and QV&HG is a telephone call, "your queen needs you" other are more subtle (i hope)

Rather than actually play these scenarios i need to do a walkthrough of the segways, a playtest of the ideas. as the actual scenarios are 25 years old so have been played to death. hopefully the changes will make them fresher and modernise them a bit., hopfully. anyone helping will get named inthe credits.
It will be more a Beer n' Pretzils night rather than a RPG night. roleplaying light!

Well, you know i'm in.

Sounds interesting. Not entirely sure what you are looking for, but would be happy to contribute thoughts and ideas.

I dont want to fall in to the trap of staring at this too long, then publishing it for people to say WTF that make no sense...

i will also start to release snippest to you guys for critique, ideas and the like. also i am trying to put loads in and will obviousle miss loads so a wish list could be nice of topics or area you would like to see in a Supers book. the more esoteric the better. i am trying to mak the UK the centre of things, so things like Roswell etc are covered and written off as the crash of The Hoton boys flying wing/Delta Wing plane. etc

The idea, as i understand it, is that Kevin has his structure in place. What he wants, is to sit around a table with a few of us and do a read through of the overall structure and plot, rather than getting into an actual playtest which would take months. Just so he can make sure that what sounds good is in head isn't missing something obvious in the telling.

I thought that was what he was getting at. I am curious however as to what changes could/would be made to these venerable old scenarios or whether they would be pretty much presented 'as was'? Mainly because some of them were not written by Simon Burley (Marcus Rowland writing a few). Do you have permission to reprint those scenarios?

I would say however that playtesting is probably something you should consider doing if the any major changes are going to be made to the existing scenarios, as well as any playable additional material that you will be adding.

The other thing that I wonder at is tone. I know you like your games on the dark/gritty side of things. Is that the tone you are going for?

Simon Burley has contacted each of the original writers and has permission, from all of them, Marcus even offered Slayground as well. Phil Masters (Peking duck) just wants Simon to by him a beer next time they meet.

As for changes the idea is to have the adventures as the original writer, wrote them, but updating them and linking them together. for example, Overlord is the bad guy from LoE in the new ones he is the bad guy in the whole first story arc, and his motive is different. that is not to say the
The adventures are all set 2011/12 so some changes need to be made to bring them up to date. there is a part of the Lancelot Caper which has EU ministers meeting to talk about the proposed Euro.
Another change is in Queen Victoria, the section in which the group go to the USA the will meet Miss America and Jackson Stone from the American Dream. i am looking to make some changes to freshen things up but not to change things too much. also i want to add things in to allow the thing to grow beyond the original adventures, Joan of Arc was a girl possessed by some being from another dimension, She is not dead she is currently in stasis deep in the bowels of Porton Down guarded by 10 SAS troopers in Power Armor which was based on Gauntlets suit. the 10 are part of a team called Strike force. now the being is the sister of the being which possesses Shadow dancer from Peking Duck. now this idea is presented in the History of section but not acted upon by in the scenario.
Other changes will be things like the Shocktroopes from LoE are members of Combat 18. and the inclusion of a trophy room (i like the idea of having a large thrupenny bit in place of Batmans 1 dollar) the Spear of destiny is there.

As for tone, i will have something on this describing the levels of tone and the approach to this.

The segways are the thing that need the logical walk through to see if they work, Peking Duck was a simple single issue adventure it is now a three part adventure, part one is the set up, the meeting with the Snout Craig Tuner who tells the group about the dodgy goings on in the Peking Duck, the second part is the actual adventure as is not changed, other than including a PC rather than a large filing system. the third part is the aftermath when the team go looking for the Snout, who is dead. this part of the investigation leads in to The Lancelot Caper.

QV&HG leads in to Strikeback, with the new longer segment Charles Babbage and the Clockwork Orobous taking us in to Crossfire.

so the other thing would be to make sure the adventures are in the right place. should LoE be after QV&H or before it.

this a draft motive for Overlord

Overlord AKA Klaus Steinbeck is the main bad guy for the first story arc of Legacy, not mentioned in Peking duck and only in the back ground in the end of Lancelot (replacing Phillp Longchamps).

Now he can simply be a Mad scientist or he could have a very interesting history.

What if...his name was Klaus Kammler...

in 1945 General Dr Ing. Hans (Heinz) Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler along with a number of other scientists climbed on board a JU 390 (one of only 2 ever built) the massive transport plane had been filled with most of the secret Nazi high tech weaponry only the Horton H229 and the Atomic bomb were missed off, But the Bell, the Haunbe flying saucer were on board. Kammler lied to the Americans when he told them he was brining the high tech kit with him. Kammler was empire building, he had already sent Captain Scheffer in U-977 and Captain Bernard in U-530 to the secret base in the Antarctic, in the hold of that U-Boat was among other things "The Spear of Destiny". What Kammler did not know is that U-977 did not deposit all of the cargo to the secret base, one of the crew had stolen the Spear, and planned to use it himself. however when the U-boat was captured and handed to the British Hero John Bull the sailor panicked and gave up the Spear to John Bull, because he thought he would be killed other wise.

John Bull took the spear and kept it safe, he eventually put it in pride of place in the trophy room of the eagles nest.

Kammler arrived in the Antarctic base and began to rebuild. the British having discovered a possibility of a secret base sent a small team to destroy it in November 1945, they discovered a massive secret base with U-boats and a lot of High tech stuff, they also came across some sub-human guards they called Polar men. the SAS report states that they destroyed the base. This was a lie. they broke the back of the Nazi base by killing a large number of personnel but did not wipe them out, Kammler lived and started anew, His Son would grow up with stories of the spear and of the Atomic power which slipped from there grasp, the British had bombed the Atomic Bomb factory and with most of the Scientist the Americans took the rest in what they called Operation Paperclip.

Klaus Kammler was born in 69 and took over from his father when Kammler passed away. but with so few women in the base very few children were born those that were Klaus used in his experiments creating Worm and quagmire in the process. Klaus believes that if he can obtain both the Atomic power and the Spear of Destiny he can build and new empire. taking a modified U-Boat which he called the Scuttlebut, a Suit of Power armor and with a modified Hanube flying saucer Klaus went in the world. it was not long before learnt of John Bull and the Spear, he spent the next few years trying to locate the Eagles nest and trying to obtain a Nuke.

there is a little more to this including explanations to Roswell and Kecksburg (a Horton delta wing and the Die Glocke).

That's rather uncanny. I was sort of doing the same thing a while back (putting the published scenarios in a campaign order) and actually did a rework of the Overlord background. I mine (I think) I also had him as the son of ex-Nazi scientist, but in this case the father was captured by the Russians. When the wall came down his son became a highly successful industrialist. That was his public face. Secretly though he was Overlord/Uberlord; slowly building a massive criminal organisation and fueled by all the thwarted desire of the his father and the Third Reich.

I always assumed that Legacy Of Eagles preceeded Queen Victoria, if only because of publishing order and the fact that the events of Legacy would provide the high profile exposure needed to bring the team to the attention of the British Government and therefore be considered suitable to assist Victoria. Strictly speaking, I suppose, the events in the scenarios do not dictate any particular order.

BTW, i'm nearly done transcribing Queen Victoria. Do you still need it?

I would still like the transcript please, i have a piss poor OCR version.

The one thing that was obvious from the start was the natural flow from LoE to QV&HG. so the next thing was to find the natural flow of the rest, i have changes the order a number of times and when Lancelot arrive this i found naturally sat before LoE, with Peking Duck as the obvious starter. the later ones were already in order, Crossfire / Reunion, and once i have decided Who Jackson Stone was, Steve gave me the adventure from Fanzine, the flow from American Dream to Confusion was set. the nest one is QV&HG to Strikeback with the Charles Babbage segway. heres the thing i cannot use the Coven as we cannot contact the creator but i can use The Conclave (Merlin.Blaise, Hengist,Taliesin & Aneurin) if i have Alex Crowley summon up these ancient druids and leave them trapped in a magic circle in the celler of his old home. they can disrupt the balance and Morganna instead of going to hell she is transported far into the future. where she plots here return, still keeping the 147 rule (the max time you can travel through time) she is stuck. so she sends Bengi the robot to go back in time as she thinks Sherlock Holmes or the Iluminati have the clue to help get her back to the Grail.

this is why a walk/Talk through will help tie down any missing elements.

then end of the books will have a call from London something bad is happening maybe Hitler/Morganna/Mordred/Krai and Eldrich all come together for a big assault on the UK. something from all the adventures. as the heores in the Eagles nest put the phone down and, an intruder alert in the Eagles nest indicates someone is in the Trophy room, they get there and its King Arthur "My Country needs me, you there bring me my Sword, Bring me Excalibur", Excalibur is missing with the Eagles. There little time to save Britain, because first you must find the Eagles..book ends.


Russ, Small world, or is that great minds?

I think he may have to be the grandson of Kammler, given the time between 1945 and 2011.

I have been overdosing on Nazis and UFO and stuff just for research for this, i even got a Horton H229 for Christmas. i have also been mining the big 4inch 20th Century book going month by month to find interesting stuff, i am up to 1913, i found a great one the other day, Peter the Painter and the Siege of Sidney Street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sidney_Street. gonna add that in somewhere.

the idea for the book is to have a world of/History of the Golden Heroes to set the scene and to give a uk-centric setting for superheores.

i have a lot of stuff so far. things like Porton Down. Pool-Re, DA-Notices etc.

Simon has given me cart blanch to write this thing with the only real criteria being dont mess or change the published adventures too much.

i have a list of names of all the heroes mentioned in the rules books which can be referenced in the history. so there is Deadnaught who is the names sake of the giant battleships of WWI HMS Deadnaught was in fact named after him, though i am not touching 1914-1918 or 1939-1944 as these can be covered in the "Finest Hour" book which if the two books work Simon would like me to revise, and both wars can be set up like a Plot point campaign, with each major event covered allowing for a campaign to cover the whole war/s, but i will cover the aftermath of the superweapons of the Nazis. the other bit will be why some supers did not join up on day one of WWI, given that then Heroes who fought in the Boer war were appalled at the concentration camps the British set up, this changed when Lloyd George was offering Knighthoods and Peerages left right and centre which meant that (John Bull Aside, he was there day one) when Lloyd George took the office of PM the Heroes stood shoulder to shoulder with him.

i want to cover 1900 to 2010 in a layout like the Call of Chuthlu book. i also want to try and cover the few Company's mentioned in the adventures simularly to the old Cyberpunk Corp books, with hooks and depths like the Delta Green books, thats the plan we shall see.

i am mining my A4 Scenario books for ideas to put in, things like the very first super group was in 186x and was call the Charlie Fields Private Inquiry Agency, which i use in the Victoriana campaign. but Mr Fields was real. as was the agency.

This may also be a platform for my Paul Mcartney tapes idea.

Opps. looks like i am getting carried away. think i may go to bed..Now where did i put Admiral Byrds secret Diary.

I think getting carried away is probably a real danger. At the end of the day, these need to be playable adventures, hopefully hinting at a satisfying and rich campaign world beyond which can be explored if the desire is there, but the real meat should be the adventures themselves.
I think a walkthrough would be of real value as it would highlight any plot/adventure areas which need tightening before working on the flavour of the background.

I'll focus on the QV transcript as much as time allows so I can get it to you asap.

As you say getting carried away is all ways there, the thing i will say is that to avoid that i am currently viewing this has having two elements the adventures and the history/world part i think that whilst the world part can run and run the constraints on the adventures should mean there is some control there.

The one area that i maybe didnt mention is Sub plots. there will be a couple the main one comes from Lancelot caper with an MP calling for the Death penalty for Convicted Super villians which i am begining to expand, the idea is that NU-Bedlam could have a Chamber to deal with these undesirables at some point, the other one is the one i was runing inthe back ground of Anthrax island it will be a take it or leave it sub plot involving a hero killer, who beginf killing women with secret powers. the Harvester.

I have notes on the Coven from WD. though they will be called the Conclave (5 ancient Druids), who exiled Morganna to The Otherworld where she swapped places with Rhiannon to excape their ever watching eyes. the Conclave are currently trapped in a protective circle deep below Boleskine House on the side of Loch Ness. trapped by Crowley. they remain there to this day. as Crowley could not dispell them, they are behind a walled up part of the wine celler. the new Owner Johnathan Richarson (the Black Druid) is planning some renovations.

one big change to the Adventures is to gound them, so we can use Google maps for maps. Crossfire for example will take place in Portsmouth near the docks so we can use Stonehenge and Porton Down. Peking duck is set 75 Carlise street just off Soho. and the Eagles nest is just off Anthrax island.

I like the Google Maps idea, cuts down on costs for artwork if nothing else.

It does, it makes sense to grab free artwork if this may be a pdf only RPGnow release.

although if i could find the package Wizards used for the d20 Modern stuff..

What i would like to do is throw ideas at you guys for your thoughts,

EG.
Lost Tech,
Sometimes heroes or villians die and their secret base's become lost or forgotten with time, their gadgets lay covered in dust in some deep dark hidden place, in the world of comics Heroes dont die they just get re-booted every few years but in the golden heroes world heroes have been around for a long time, what if your team found an old Victoria era teams long forgotten base, or a recent one, like the Eagles base.

Mr good (name to be added later) who's real name was Albert dolittle was the caretaker of the little cematary behind the Buncefield oil refinery in Hemel Hempstead, his arch enemy Dr Bad guy, Dr Bad Guy after years of trying tracked down Mr Good to his secret base in the tunnels below Buncefield, however there final battle took place above ground on the 11 December 2005, this would later be known as the Buncefield fire. Both were dead, and both Mr Good and Dr Bads secret Base's remain hidden un til someone finds them.

Good / Bad / You got me out of bed for that....

Re: Lost Tech. What might be more interesting than old technology is what else you might find in these old bases and hideouts. For example, what did the British Brigade do with Jack The Ripper when they caught him and why have there been a series of copycat style murders in Manchester? Perhaps to preserve the secrets of the royal family, the Ripper was placed in suspended animation, much like Queen Victoria herself, or perhaps he's been kept alive for some other nefarious purpose.

thats the stuff

I don't know whether i'd go with the Buncefield thing as it's fresh in recent memory and people were hurt for real. Possibly concoct a fictional equivalent and ramp up the property damage a bit. Perhaps a British hero team were found negligent in the aftermath and were shut down by the Government.

When I first passed my test i used to go driving around the back of Buncefield, through the lanes there, My Great Aunt and Uncle are burned in the small Cemetery there hence me using it.

Season one of the BBC TV show Mistresses has the husband of one character fake his death in the Twin Tower bombings, and that was only 2009. But the main idea is to ground the book into some kind of history, I am going to be extra mindful of covering 2001 to 2011, but think that some events came be covered and some have to be mentioned because they are too big (Iraq I and II, The Twin Towers and the London Bombings etc, but these would need to be under a Terrorism section) , But once I get the dates all done I will post them so people can discuss if something should or shouldn’t go in. as for Buncefield , I was just thinking about it as an illustration of the idea for lost tech on thei forum, rather than a definite, event to be included.

The Jack the ripper idea is cool, and maybe be an interesting way to fit him/it in to the history rather than a date in the big list.

Your call, at the end of the day, and it is not an event well known to the general public so I guess it would be ok as is.

Probably the main criteria for including any of this stuff is, am I adding anything to help tell good stories or am I just putting in historical buzzwords and events to make the book seem relevant.

9/11 is interesting because if you include it in the book and by extension, the game world, what was the role of supers in these events? If the Americans have superbeings, which they do according to QV&THG, then did only one tower get hit because Ultiman (my character :-)), for example, got there in time to stop the second plane. Events may still happen, because no-one could have predicted these actions, but subsequent events are likely to have been affected by the presence of superhumans. You could note, therefore that the World Trade Center is now just the North Tower Center, with the South Tower memorial next to it. Subtle changes which suggest the impact supers would have if they existed in the world. Sorry, rambling now.

The problem with supers and the real world is, they would either be like the one that dies in Mystery Men, the one with the endorsment deals or like Watchmen and change history. the otherthing they would do is the lower powerd ones or for Moral or ideological reason would have real jobs, the Guy who can simple withstand fire would be be a very well paid Oil rig fierfighter. some one with powers like Terra from Tean titans may work for a gold mine or work for a council fixing pavements etc. Watchmen change things. Yes supers would/Could have stopped the planes or killed Hitler but then how far back would you go, 1811 and the Highgate killings which began the process of the creation of the Police, if supers were around then would the call for the police go away and we would simply have sanctioned Heroes and no police. AHHHHH

As for the twin towers i am some way to getting to that point so have not even begun to go there. i guess Jackson Stone may have something to do with it?

As for historical context, somethings will Sound cool and somethings will not, which is why i could do with a second opinon once i am done. See next post

Here is a lttle of the notes i have on 1900 to 1906 i will embelish these a bit more with name of Heroes from the Main rules, like 1906 and Dreadnaught

1901 - British Heroes are involved in ending the siege at Ladysmith on Feb 28, they were later asked by the Queen to help out at the siege of Mafeking in May, these were the last times heroes took part in the Boer war, because of their discovery of the Concentration camps. it would be 15 years before British Super would fight a war again.

1901 - Feb 26 the execution of the leaders of the Boxer rebellion, Chi - hsui who calmly went to his beheading had a secret, he was immortal, and despite being beheaded, awoke the following day alive, the curse of the yellow peril lived and for the next 20 years a number of heroes would fight him time and time again until he was finally captured and buried deep in a concrete coffin in the center of the forbidden city, by a small team working out of the Beijing office.

1902 - April 12 the well loved hero XX was asked to lay the foundation stone of the Institute of Journalists, he was reported to have been honored to have been asked.

1902 - June 28 a small contingent of British Supers have arrived in the UK with a large number of chests containing the $40 million in gold, which the US paid for the Panama Canal. it will be kept at the Bank of England over night awaiting transfer to Paris.

1902 - July 14 British supers involved in fighting anarchist in Venice accidentally destroy the campanile St Mark's Cathedral, which dated back to 902 and was 322ft high.

1904 - March 18 the first British Sub the Holland I goes missing the villain XX was thought to have stolen it, but was never caught.

1906 - Feb10 standing next to the King was a very proud Brit, the Hero Deadnaught, the the royal navy had honored by naming the most powerful battleship in the world after him. the HMS Deadnaught, little did anyone know that Dreadnaught is in fact John Fisher or to give him his full title First Sea Admiral Sir John Fisher.

What do you think