Heroes, Unlimited

A few weeks ago, I was coming back from my Astronomy class when I heard people rolling dice down the hall. I wandered over, rolled up a character and played Heroes Unlimited with a bunch of acquaintances: James GMing and Zach, Pat, Sarah G and Dynée playing.

Dynée played a cyborg with a cat on the run from the law. That is, she was on the run from the law. I don't know about the cat. She spent the beginning of the game buying food for the cat, petting the cat, talking to the cat, etcetera. Then she started telling us things the cat told her to do and things the cat was telling her. As the GM, James was a little disturbed. Here was his basically normal world where super powers existed, and here was this crazy cyborg whose cat told her what to do. It was très creepy, and we were all somewhat glad when she quit early to go to bed.

My character was the only one who didn't go overboard in Intelligence. That's one of my one-shot RPG secrets: as long as you're not basing a lot of skills off of your level of Intelligence (like in GURPS), you can spend just enough points on it to be "average" and play your character the same as the ones with 20 INT. If you have to roll to solve equations, you'll screw up, but it's not like you have to role-play drooling on things.

Zach and Pat had extremely experienced characters. Sarah G and I tried our best to join up with them, but there wasn't really any reason for them to get together beyond seeing the lapel pin that says Player Character. GM James didn't seem too concerned, anyway. Sarah G's character was based on herself, so she decided to spend most of the first day surfing the Web and then sleeping in the afternoon. My character was painfully earnest and at one point put up little notices at Safeway and the laundromat:

"Single Mutant Seeking Crime-Fighting Team. No Freaks."

Sarah G's character had lots of minor mutant powers but nothing too impressive, so I spent all my powers on Invulnerability and Super Strength. I was basically a brick. It was pretty fun. Sarah G and I fought some demon-things that had to be killed by destroying an altar, while Zach and Pat's characters were investigating a robbery. It turned out that the gems stolen in the robbery were used for summoning the demons.

Eventually we got together. I'd been wandering around the twilight streets of the city in a luchador mask and tights until I found a weird demon-thing tearing the heart out of a bum. I punched it and punched it and punched it and eventually it died. It wasn't supposed to be killable, but James hadn't counted on anyone picking super-strength. I was awfully proud. Being a starting Palladium character, I hit the wall about as much as the demon. With my super-strength and the demon's damage capacity, the wall got the worse part of the deal.

I was terribly civic-minded, so after I killed the demon I immediately went to a payphone and called the cops - using the non-emergency number, of course. I hung around in the same area, dressed in normal clothes, until James remembered to tell me that I was covered in blood and it was glowing. Most people would notice that, so I left. That was probably good, because it turned out the demon had just been busy regenerating. After I left, it killed and ate the hearts of a good percentage of the town's police force.

Meanwhile, Pat and Zach were still investigatin'. Sarah G's character finally ran into mine at the library, and she had been yelling at them earlier for their bad driving habits, so that was enough for us to band together in a loose coalition of evil stomping! Yeah!

As we all wandered into the Evil Lair (TM), James mentioned offhand there were a whole lot of cages of monkeys and goats and stuff that the bad guys had been sacrificing to the Evil. Pat and I both perked up and said, in unison,

"MONKEYS?"

This cracked everyone else up. From that point on, Pat and my main goal motivation was to get those monkeys. I picked up the altar (with my super strength) and threw it and picked it up and threw it and picked it up and threw it. Then it broke and the demons went away.

Pat and I immediately started thinking about monkey division. James told us there were six mandrills and eight spider monkeys, so I did some quick calculations.

"Hm, that's two spider monkeys for everyone and two mandrills each for two people, one mandrill each for the rest."

Sarah G and Zach were quick to tell us that they really didn't want any monkeys, so we eventually decided that Pat could have the mandrills and I could have the spider monkeys. I declared I was going to house train mine. Pat, whose character was much more rich and experienced than mine, planned to get his mandrills cybernetically enhanced.

I think more games should reward good playing with monkeys, whether figurative or literal.