I’m going to hold off on posting a Megacrawl update until tomorrow or Wednesday – I want to make sure all the tactical geniuses who want to post a comment have had a chance. A first level party tangling with wererats could be a big deal – I want the Megacrawlers to have the best possible chance for survival.

In the meantime … Swampbilly

Five generations of Vances had hunted and trapped in the Louisiana bayou. minding their own business and doing no harm (well, except to the wildlife) when the federal government slated the area for mysterious highway project – mysterious because the locals couldn’t figure out just what the highway was supposed to connect. A few swamp families raised a fuss, but the g-men cleared them out in quick order – all except the Vances. The women and children found their way into government housing in New Orleans, but the men refused to leave and instead led the g-men on a merry chase through the wilderness.

Young Dovis Vance was among the more ornery of his family. Tall and good looking, he had a way with people and animals, and he more than the others was prone to wandering, harmonica in pocket, gun in hand. So it came that he found himself slipping past a hastily erected security fence and into the “highway zone”, where the federal government was working not on a highway in the traditional sense, but something much more impressive – a portal between worlds.

The project was in the experimental phase, and was intended initially to create a doorway between Earth and Mars using equipment seized many years before from Nazi scientists in the Arctic. As Dovis wondered at the tall, rectangular object standing in the midst of the swamp, it began to hum with activity and he found it impossible to move his feet. Arcs of electricity run up and down the black metal of the “door” until it began to vanish and he looked into a hazy vista of Mars. The experiment was over almost as soon as it had begun. The metal object returned to normal, Dovis found he could move again, and he high-tailed it back into the swamp.

Though he still looked normal on the outside, Dovis’ brush with the cosmic energies harnessed by the portal had left him a metahuman. Back with his father and brothers, he discovered much to his shock and delight, that with a thought he could change people with but a look and a thought. One night, when his brother Remi made a reach for his salt pork, an angry look changed the man into an oppossum. The others fled, of course (as did Remi), and Dovis soon found himself on his own. His travels took him first to little towns around New Orleans, and a crime spree that found him changing bank guards and tellers into ‘gators and him walking away with many thousands of dollars. In good time, government operatives made Louisiana too hot for him, and he followed the river north, where he finally found a home in the wetlands south of Shore City and a new community to torment.

To begin with – Inkwell Ideas, the creation of Joe Wetzel, is awesome. Period. Hexographer and the Coat of Arms Designer are my best friends when it comes to writing NOD and Hex Crawl Classics, and I need to delve more deeply into his Dungeonographer.

He also has a keen superhero generator as well as a superhero sketcher. So, being a random kind of guy who happens to be writing a superhero game, I played around a bit, generated a completely random superhero and then used to sketcher to bring him to life. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Powersource.

POWERSOURCE
As a top Shore City University research scientist about to run out of funding, Richard Beam was desperate for a breakthrough. His genetic modification experiment had worked on hamsters, cats and dogs, but not on chimps. He believed, however, that that wouldn’t be an issue on humans because humans didn’t have the same complications as chimpanzees. So the man who would become Powersource became the experiment’s first and only human subject. Unfortunately, the experiment skewed Powersource’s worldview and now he sometimes fights for what is right and sometimes sees what is right differently than most folks.

Tank Turlington, also known as the British Bombshell, is a professional wrestler known for his John Bull-inspired costume and the endless parade of arm candy he shows off in the tabloids. The Secret Service believes him to be not only a meta-human, born with super powers, but also the director of SMASH, the Secret Mobilization Against Super Heroes, a criminal organization dedicated to removing the super heroic threat to their way of life.

Unfortunately, the Secret Service has missed the mark. The British Bombshell is merely the bodyguard of the organization’s leader, a woman with the ability to change her appearance at will. This woman, called Prima Donna by those few who know of her, masquerades as Turlington’s “endless parade of arm candy” while overseeing the many cells of SMASH that have been set up all over the world.

No post tomorrow – my company is hosting our annual golf tournament for children’s charities here in Southern Nevada. We’ve raised over $2 million over the past decade. It’s always fun, but I’ll be far from the computer most of the day (which is not a bad thing) and dead on my feet when I get home.

Bess “May Day” Collins was one of the best barnstormers in her day, and notable because she was one of the few female barnstormers on the circuit. In 1927, in the closing days of the barnstorming craze, she was making a routine flight from Shore City to a Middledale to compete in a flying circus when a blast of lead from a racketeer’s machine gun sent her airplane down into a swamp, the racketeers assuming she was a spy.

As her plane sunk into the muck, Bess found herself unable to release her restraints. As the water creeper higher, she discerned a glowing green mist surrounding her and closing in. Before she went under, she took a tremendous breath and the mist entered her body. As her head sank beneath the murky waters, the surrounding willows reached their boughs into the water and lifted plane and pilot out.

Bess now found herself transformed – able to speak to plants and command them. Communicating with the plants of the swamp, she discovered the whereabouts of the racketeers and thwarted their smuggling operation. Although the days of barnstorming are over, Bess still works as a pilot in her normal life, and as the super heroine May Day when evil rears its ugly head.

Harvey Paxson was a grad student at Shore City University with his eyes on the prize – a research grant and a place on the faculty. In the summer of 1968 he became a research assistant to Dr. Barton Merryweather, a brilliant man regarded as something of a kook by other professors at the university, but highly favored by several donors due to his research into life extension and metaphysics. Paxson had no particular interest in the research – didn’t believe in it in fact – but he needed the money and wanted the contacts. If Merryweather’s research made wealthy donors happy, Paxson was only too happy to be involved.

And so it happened, as summer turned to fall, that Paxson found himself sitting in a chair in the laboratory with a metal box affixed to his chest by a dozen electrodes in an experiment, Dr. Merryweather explained in his rambling stutter, to “separate, enhance and reintegrate your essential self” – whatever that meant. Paxson was placed under a mild hypnotic trance and told to focus on himself (not that he needed a hypnotic trance to do that) and the box was activated and then everything went black.

When Paxson awoke, it was to a scene of horror. He was still sitting in the chair and the box was still affixed to his chest, but the laboratory was a shambles and Dr. Merryweather was dead, looking as though he had been torn apart by a jungle cat. In his usual reaction of self-preservation, Paxson attempted to tear the box, electrodes and all, from his chest and flee, but the box would not be removed, and the wires now appeared to have sunk into his very flesh. He could flee, though, and did so, seeking the shelter of his apartment on Toth St in College Town. He re-emerged the next day to plead his case to the dean, doing his best to hide the box, and although cleared of the murder and destruction, found himself on academic probation for fleeing the scene and not notifying the authorities.

Paxson again returned to his apartment, bitter and in a rage, and almost as soon as he closed the door, he passed out. He woke a few hours later to the sound of sirens and, a few hours later, discovered that the dean had been similarly mauled by a jungle cat. Being quite intelligent, Paxson had no problem putting one and one together. The box, in some manner, had worked. It had separated Paxson’s essential self – aggressive, self-centered, power-hungry – but had also unleashed it into the real world.

A series of crimes followed, as Paxson got the hang of unleashing his “inner self”. He made an attempt to conquer the underworld of Shore City, taking the name Shrodinger, but ultimately found himself defeated an imprisoned in Iron Island by the Golden Gladiators.

Image taken from HERE.