Heroes Inc.

Heroes Inc. was the creation of my lifelong friend Paul.  Back in 1984, when I was absorbing the Marvel Super Heroes rulebooks, Paul took his turn as Games Master and ran Golden Heroes for me as the player.  It is wholly truthful to say that, after all this time, I owe Paul a huge 'thank you' for getting me into the game at that point.  A few years ago, Paul handed me his Golden Heroes box set and the Heroes Inc. notebook in which he had written some of the ideas he had back then - gold dust to me, and I have had my own ideas regarding the team since then.  But I am jumping ahead....

As per the rules we both randomly rolled a set of characters - three apiece - and Heroes Inc. was born!

His characters were all male: Earth Stone, Missionary Man, and Mercury Man.  Mine became all female: Heroine, Psi Queen, and The Foreigner.  I shall post stats and some background for each of them as I progress with the site, plus sketches and mock comic covers as I go on.  I am not an artist by trade nor training, but I am by hobby, and I love to produce visual representations of RPG characters; I have been drawing them, and mock comic covers, on-and-off for forty years.  Strangely, I get no better!

I seem to remember that our first foray into playing Golden Heroes was the Crossfire scenario from the Supervisors Book, though I have no other recollection of how the team performed other than nobody died and we saved the day.  After that came a short adventure that saw Psi Queen and Missionary Man taking down the Weather Wizard before he could lay waste to more property and extort a small fortune from the local authority to pay him off.

Game mechanics were scrutinised, heads were nodded, and....we liked it.  But, that's pretty much where it stopped, and we never got around to it again.

Fast forward to COVID lockdown and I began to hanker for the good old days of Superhero RPGs', and weekends rolling dice with my great friends.  I discovered a few new friends via the internet and Facebook who liked Golden Heroes and before I knew it I was playing the game and loving every minute of it!

The spark had become a flame, and I was running with it!  Campaign ideas, new characters, the urge to be a Games Master again....these all coalesced into the dream to form a new, modern Golden Heroes universe, using as much of the original material as was feasible, even the examples and 'name-only' characters from the rulebooks, and Heroes Inc. were set to play a big part in it.

What Paul did, in the aftermath of creating the Heroes Inc. team, was to establish a short prequel, wherein he established that three of the team - Earth Stone, Heroine, and Mercury Man - were "survivors" from an original line-up, and the other three members - Psi Queen, Missionary Man, and The Foreigner - were new recruits.  He then lovingly created several characters that were in this original, earlier team - Matrix, Fish, Tom Cat, Paladin, Metamorph, Supreme Sorcerer - and killed them!  Yep, stone dead.

It turns out that the original team had disbanded following the murders of the aforementioned heroes by a Megavillain going by the name of Lone Wolf.  He was either an alien or from another dimension, and he was given suitably powerful stats and abilities, befitting his status.  In his surprise attack on the team's headquarters he killed the six aforementioned heroes quite quickly, but was stymied when the security systems finally managed to warn the others, giving the heavy hitters - Heroine and Mercury Man - time to save Earth Stone, the team's leader.  Lone Wolf was matched by the two heavyweights and vanished through a portal, but not before he warned of an invasion by his race!  Battered, wounded, bereft of two-thirds of the team, Earth Stone disbanded Heroes Inc. and disappeared.  Heroine was a genetic scientist and returned to working in gene-splicing research; Mercury Man was green-skinned so couldn't hide himself, but got by somehow.

I now like to think that a couple of years, maybe three, passed in the game world before the incident occurred that began Crossfire.  That incident was a running battle between D.I.C.E. (the Golden Heroes paramilitary liaison organisation) and a hostile in a powered armour suit.  At this point the three new arrivals turned up to see what all the commotion was about, getting involved and bringing the - later to be revealed - alien to justice.  From the shadows appeared Earth Stone, drawn to the battle despite his misgivings, but impressed with these three previously unknown heroes, all of whom readily accepted his invitation to form the all new Heroes Inc.  It wasn't long before Heroine and Mercury Man were back on board, though these two characters were used less often as they are very powerful, and we preferred to play the weaker characters who would face more of a challenge.  

Golden Heroes can produce powerful characters if they concentrate their power rolls into one or two abilities; randomly rolling characters usually produces lower-ranked powers with a greater spread if you choose not to rack your power rolls up, or choose to spend a power roll on an Advantageous Background or two.  We didn't really like the idea of playing a "Superman" character, as it simply meant that the villains had to be grossly powerful as well.  Weaker characters can be put into more peril with weaker villains and role-playing situations, which we much preferred.

I would like to think that, someday, I could run a session or two with new players using the original Heroes Inc. team, just to see how they would have played given the chance.  Fish, as you may suspect, was a water-breathing hybrid, and that in itself opens up the possibility of adventures based in oceanic or coastal locations, which can make a nice change to the usual city-bound scenarios.

Moving forward with Heroes Inc., I would love to give a new set of players the opportunity to run the current characters, again leaving Heroine and Mercury Man as back-up.  I think four active players would be great, and each of those characters has plenty of role-playing hooks or quirks to let a player get into a mindset from the start, whilst leaving a lot of blank space for them to add their own personality to the mix.  Whether this will ever happen is another matter, but I'm working on the idea anyway.