The Aegis Tapes

I was starting to clean the basement this weekend and I knocked over a box. Out came old VHS videotapes, and...the Aegis Tapes.

On January 1, 1988, I audio recorded one of our Champions sessions. Our superhero group, Aegis, was making a transition from its second generation of characters to its third. I had just joined the group four months previously, and I suddenly found my character the most senior of the team. This game had been weeks in the making, with overlapping subplots coming to a head with an all-out assault on the headquarters of the nefarious Dr. Dread. It was one of the most fun and exciting times I ever spent at the gaming table. I will have to find a time to listen to these great tapes again, if I can block off six uninterrupted hours. We played this one all day!

Paradigm Shift

I have been a gamer for half my life, literally. For 22 years I have been a fan of role-playing games, computer games, and board games. I met my wife while playing an online role-playing game, so it's been very important to me.



Something has changed in me. After years of sedentary living, I have not-so-suddenly become an outdoorsman again. Last year, we went camping and I bought a bicycle. I buy my clothes at Cabela's. I yearn to get back outside and enjoy nature. But it's not just a sudden interest in doing things outdoors that has made me feel this way. The feeling came over me yesterday when my friend Rob was asking me when the gaming convention Gen Con was being held. I quickly replied with the dates because I am planning on going camping while attending. I've been to Gen Con many times and enjoyed myself every time. But suddenly I was thinking that all in all, I don't even know what I would do at the convention. I really don't plan on participating in any games while there. There may be a few interesting products to read, like the Wild Cards books that Mutants & Masterminds have begun to publish. But other than that, I have no plans at all beyond camping and going out to lunch with my friends at the various high quality restaurants in Indianapolis. What would I do for four days of a convention? I'll still go, because I want to be with my friends and do stuff with them, but the gaming part just holds no interest for me.



My last face-to-face gaming experience was really weird. We played a Mutants & Masterminds campaign that I thought went really well for an inital 12-run campaign, which got extended by circumstance to 13 runs, and then...nothing. No word, no hint at when or even if we'd ever play it again. I sent the gamemaster an email complimenting him on the game and received no reply. I guess that chapter in my life is closed. No one seems to want to run a game that I play in, so maybe it's me. So it goes.



I've been playing City of Heroes for almost five years now, and last night I unregistered my account. I went in to play for an hour with my buddies, and I just could not take the monotony of the game itself. Chatting was fun, but when the conversation turned to what the game developers have been doing to improve the game, my eyes glassed over and I tuned most of it out. I'd rather talk about just about anything than the game itself. To me it has just become a vehicle to maintain contact with my friends, which I don't want to lose, but I don't see the game as any fun at all any longer.



I was really excited about the new Champions Online game coming out this spring, but now I just can't see myself spending time on that when there is so little time available to me to spend with my family and on the big project I've been working on. Time is at such a premium that I'd rather spend it actually making something. I've been relearning some of my artistic skills so that I can be a more direct contributor to the art on my book. One of my colleagues, who has published a book series, told me that a publisher will hire an artist for me if they like the idea. I really don't want to do that. I want to have more control than that. Even if I have to self-publish, I want the book to look better than the other, similarly formatted books from the educational publishers out there. My niece has been doing some art for me, but she's very busy with her college education and I don't want to add to her already full plate right now. This is something I want to pursue during retirement anyway, and there's no reason to hold off on it now. Hey, that's what I'll do during Gen Con. I'll hang out in Artists' Alley and pick up some pointers on art technique!

Superhero Sundays

Sunday used to be my favorite day of the week. I lived for Sundays.

As I wrote about here, I joined a role-playing game campaign that changed my life. Seriously, it changed my life. I met the friends in that Sunday Champions campaign that I have to this day. I moved to the area in which I live to be closer to them, so that we can go out and do things together. The campaign has long since gone by the wayside (in 1994, to be exact), but my friends and I still hang out. Even the ones who have moved away hang out when we play City of Heroes on Wednesday nights. And when Champions Online comes out soon, I suspect we'll switch over to that, because it will be the electronic version of the pencil and paper game that we played all those years ago.

There's a certain element missing (no, not your character, Carl) when you create our characters for online games, though. You can create your character using the templates provided in the game itself. You can choose from thousands of costume parts and millions of color combinations, but it's still limited by the game engine. It seems that every group back in those days had an artist, and back in 1988, I was that guy for our group. Whenever someone had an idea for a new character, they would approach me and I would accomodate them by drawing their character the way they wanted them. I would throw in suggestions here and there, and sometimes what I suggested would inspire them to do something a little differently. I would take their order one Sunday and by the next week, I would have a finished sketch done for them on 11 x 17 Bristol board. Sometimes I even got paid! Ten bucks went a long way back in 1988, especially for a substitute teacher who worked part time at Pizza Hut. That was my fun money. I would use it to buy art supplies, comics, game supplements, and the like. My paychecks always took care of bills, but my sketch money was mine.

My problem was that I was a sketch artist. I had no formal training beyond taking one art elective in college. I didn't even take art in high school, since it wasn't offered. I didn't know anything about inking, coloring, painting, or anything other than simple pencil work. I loved design work, but the other elements of comic book art were way beyond me. At that time, though, you could go to a comic book convention and get a professional sketch done by a penciller and have it inked by a professional inker for a reasonable price. We had to have inked artwork so that you could transfer it to a character sheet, and pencil art didn't copy especially well, and this was long before Photoshop. So one of my friends, Scott Burnham, decided to get a pencil sketch I had done for him of his character Quantum inked by a pro. I loved that drawing so much that he gave it back to me for my birthday several years later. It also provided me with the inspiration to have more of my sketches inked by professionals. I have had my sketches inked by a pantheon of comic book artists. I still have it done once in a while, and it's still a thrill.

I think I'll put one of these sketches up each Sunday until I have used them all. There will be a story behind most of them, and it'll be fun for me to remember watching the process, as I was almost always present when they were being done.

Here's Quantum, pencilled by me and inked by Mike Gustovich. Mike was the creator of the Justice Machine and did a lot of work for Palladium Games back in the 80s:

New Gaming Blog Reading on a Snow Day

As I read on io9 this morning, there's a new gaming blog on the web that talks about that beloved hobby of mine, tabletop gaming. That includes RPGs as well as CCGs. And that reminds me, I should write about Magic the Gathering soon. Those were a fun couple of years for me.

And why am I reading a not-necessarily-safe-for-work website (gaming sites are forbidden in my school district) this morning? Well, about a million schools were called off today, including ours. So we're socked in at home. Below on the left is Sera's water and sandbox, and on the right is our dog Shadow, romping through the back yard. The trees are beautiful with all the snow on them!

The only thing I don't like about snow days is that we make them up in the spring. I'd rather have days off when the weather is nice and we could go outside and do something. But you know, with MLK day coming up on Monday, if we have another snow day tomorrow we'll have a five-day weekend!

Super Sera!

I'm home with Sera today, because her nose is leaking like a faucet and she's not sleeping well at all, and I thought I would introduce her to the world of City of Heroes.

Every Wednesday night, my friends and I get together to play, but it's right about the time I would be putting Sera to bed. So when I told her this week that I was going downstairs to play with my friends, she said she wanted to come, too. We laughed about it, I told her good night, but promised to take her to play soon.

Well, today we went down to the basement and got busy. At first she watched me play one of my characters, and then I thought to myself that the character creation tool is basically multiple choice, so why shouldn't she make her own character?

She picked the hair, she picked the face, and she picked the colors and the costume parts. I chose to keep the parts simple, but she did the hard work.

I set up a macro to target the nearest enemy and fire her main attack, and I controlled her movement. She seemed to enjoy shooting lightning, so say hello to Super Sera!

Gen Con

Gaming has been one of my favorite hobbies since 1983, when I first discovered Champions. Champions is the superhero roleplaying game that I played when I met my lifelong friends here in the Michiana area. Essentially you take the role of a superhero in a game of pretend, only instead of running around the yard with a towel around your neck, you sit around a table and use metal miniatures on a map, rolling dice to resolve actions, whether success or failure. There are hundreds of these games, from Dungeons & Dragons to Mutants & Masterminds, to Villains & Vigilantes. Gen Con is the ultimate experience for those who play roleplaying games, board games, even video games. This four-day convention is expected to draw 85,000 gamers this week, and today I was one of them.

My buddy Rob picked up a ticket for me when he was in Indianapolis on Thursday, which saved hours of waiting in line. He drove us down this morning and we walked right past hundreds of people standing in line.

I wanted to see the new Champions Online demonstration for myself. Champions Online will be an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) that brings the characters that I've been squaring off with for 25 years to our computer screens, and it's being made by the same guys who brought us City of Heroes four years ago.

I got to talk to Steve Long, former attorney and gamer who used to belong to a Champions Amateur Press Alliance (APA) with me and several other Champions players. He bought the Hero Games property some years ago and has developed it well enough that it was snapped up by Cryptic Studios for its next project. He is very excited about this new project, as well as the upcoming 6th edition of the Hero System rules. I don't blame him. The character costume generator alone on this new game is simply amazing. It's quite an upgrade over CoH. You can literally watch the muscle tone of your character change as you move an onscreen slider. It's that detailed! Game play looks very fast, and there are comic book fonts on the screen in both word balloons and captions. Instead of fully painted characters like CoH has, Champions Online characters appear to be drawn with line art with colors that are a little flatter and more like comic book art. It makes for an effective illusion that you are playing in a comic book story.

Champions Online will be released as both an Xbox 360 and a PC game, and if you have the PC version, you can either use a special Xbox controller or your keyboard and mouse. This looks like fun!

I passed by the WizKids booth in time to see a live Heroclix demonstration too. And when I say live, I mean they used living people as the Heroclix! They had actors playing Mr. Fantastic, Spider-Man (shown above), Daredevil, and Ms. Marvel. Each of them had a scaled up Heroclix dial, and a giant board to play on. They had little kids roll giant dice to resolve the actions. What a way to introduce them to the game!

Ms. Marvel apparently had the ability to withstand a giant wedgie. I'm not sure where that ability is on the dial, but she had it for the whole game!

I also picked up a book that I've been waiting for for quite some time. Green Ronin Publishing had advance copies of their Wild Cards sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds. I'm really looking forward to reading this one!

I also had lunch with two of my teacher friends, one of whom having moved to Tennessee this summer. We ate at Buca di Beppo and had some amazing Italian food. I got to see several of my South Bend area gaming friends and even one of my CoH friends, Ben, who lives in New Jersey. When I got home, I got a huge hug from my daughter, whom I had not seen all day. I brought her back a pink stuffed bear dressed as a ballerina in a purple tutu. She loved it.

All in all, I'd say it was a great day.