Sunday, October 14, 2007

Twenty Years Ago..."Swords of Damocles"


Aegis #160
October 18, 1987

“Swords of Damocles”
Gamemaster: Scott Burnham

The fledgling hero Silverwing, while working for UNCLE, had infiltrated TAROT, a vast network of villains, under the guise of a rogue UNCLE agent. As his ticket in, he bore the Damocles Warhead, recently acquired from Angel Flight, who in turn had retrieved it from the Destroyers, who had stolen it.

Silverwing became Justice, one of the major arcane of TAROT. When he had gained all the information he needed, he realized that an entire UNCLE strikeforce was insufficient to destroy the arm of TAROT; so he enlisted Aegis, the local superhero group, to help him. This infuriated Silverwing’s superiors, but his actions turned out to be justified when the battle ensued.


Aegis was victorious, but only just. Their leader, Willforce (right), was struck down by the Grim Reaper’s cerebro-stunner and was only revived after they analyzed the scythe at the Laresa-Perov Life Sciences Institute in Baltimore.

That’s how it looked when I wrote my notes twenty years ago. You can see the use of KC Ryan’s original game world in the fact that UNCLE was a law-enforcement agency he placed in the world that Aegis inhabited. Scott’s mix of TAROT, from Villains and Vigilantes’ “The Pentacle Plot,” as well as Marvel’s Grim Reaper and Nekra, was an interesting mix of villains for Aegis to fight. This adventure featured the members of Aegis depicted here, together for the first time. This was Silverwing’s and Star Knight’s first adventure with the team. This would be the membership until New Year’s Day 1988, which will be a fun blog post. I audio-recorded that game session and I think I still have the tapes somewhere!

1 comment:

Dr. Jackal said...

Oh, man, the memories! I'm currently working on getting a lot of the original Forte updates online, which is letting me re-read them and relive the experiences (and marvel at how bad my memory is, since I don't remember half that stuff happening). I love being able to look back this stuff and feel 18 or 19 again! And it's great seeing some of the old Aegis stuff, too, which I followed so well in the old 'Times days.

And you audiotaped the game! Man, I wish I'd done that with some. Though everyone else probably is very glad I didn't... Somewhere I have, like, 14 audio tapes were I taped a Gamma World game Tim and I were in in, like, the 8th grade. Now THAT would be horrifying to listen to. Luckily for Tim (who still cringes knowing they exist), the tapes I used were cheap tapes to start with, and I'm sure (being almost 30 years old...) they've degraded into unusability. Too bad (in a way). Kind of nice, at this age, to be able to step into your old life and hear what you were like back at that age. In my case, the answer is that I was a giant nerd, so maybe it's best left alone. Come to think of it, I don't even have a tapedeck in my home anymore, so I couldn't even test them out if I found them...

Loving this Silverwing series! Keep it up!