The Wild Hunt Blog

Campaign History, Character Creation and RPG Philosophy

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Ghost Archer came to be after my very first encounter with Champions in the form of the Violet Avenger.  On a hobby shop hopping trip through the Tidewater Area I stumble upon a shop that allowed in-store gaming, a new concept to me and to many in 1982.   I’m a wargamer at heart but after running through the shop seeking new board wargames, I was attracted to a group of people sitting around RPing.

I’d played AD&D for a couple of years by this time but honestly, the Fantasy genre is not my first love.  I’d also been playing AD&D long enough to see the major faults in the system.  I despise random generation for characters.  This group of guys were playing a new game, a superhero genre game.  Oh, joy, now this is my idea of a great genre.  I grew up with comic books, most guys my age had.  After watching for a little while, the guy running the store, yeah the store clerk was playing, invited me to sit in and offered a pre-made character, his archer the Violet Avenger.  It took me about two minutes to get hooked on the system.  By the end of the evening, I’d cobbled together what would become Ghost Archer.

They talked of ‘concept’, something totally new to me as AD&D characters had random concepts, and explained the only limits to a Champions character were points provided by the number of disads you were willing to take.  That last point REALLY sold me.  So I started with the basis of my favorite all-time hero, Green Arrow and went from there but no one at the time was very good at actually building a character so we would search for a  power in another character published by Hero and steal . . . er . . . borrow that power.  My template was Rainbow Archer for the bow and arrows but the whole idea of desolidification was mine.

When I began playing my new character, I had no idea what to call him so for several weeks he was just the bow guy that can walk through walls.  At some point, he was given the name Ghost Archer.  The whole personality thing didn’t come for a long time since the group I was playing with were essentially ‘hack ‘n slasher’ from the old D&D school.  Only when I decided to start my own game did the idea of role playing enter the picture.

For many years Ghost Archer has grown and developed from a cardboard guy with a bow to something a lot more complex but the whole while I have always known one thing about my creation, he was a hero.  He was a hero because other people needed him to be.  He didn’t do it for glory or money or to get the girl, he did it because it was his nature.  That’s never changed and never will.  In the game he became the first to totally ignore combat to save others.  He became the first to try to organize the mob of characters invading the shop into something more than random battles d’ jour.  I became the first to actually be concerned with the whole background of a world populated by my creation.  It would be YEARS before I even considered playing a different character.

Now, 27 years on, Ghost Archer has become an icon in my universe and a major player in the world’s super scene.  He hasn’t fundamentally changed, he is still a hero because he was born that way but he’s had a lot of hard knocks that have left him battered but still game.  He’s lost loves, he’s lost friends, he’s gained a family and he’s become a teacher.
He’s still inherently a loner though he never lets on and, even with a wife, a house full of children, his own and students, a variety of friends and colleagues, lonely.  The loneliness stems from one of those lost loves, a girl that was and always will be the ‘one’ but he lost her to a goddess and struggled for many years to come to grips with it.  Though he has since found a woman totally dedicated to him, there is still that ache in his heart for the one he lost and her biggest fear is the return of his lost love.

Over the years he’s gone on hiatus as I developed other PCs but always he is around and always he’s been integrated into the lives of my other PCs.  It’s been years now since I actually played him but he’s still there, trying to save the world one person at a time.

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It’s been over two years now since I lost my best friend, JJ and I wanted to talk about him just a little.  When met we were in the Navy and hit it off for god knows what reason.  He was hyper, a drinker, a smoker and more than a little nuts.  I am calm, a non-smoker, a non-drinker and more than a little nuts.  For a lot of years we just hung out together with only one thing really in common, reading.  Both of us could plow though a new book in a few hours and both of us read sci-fi.  Hell of a basis for a 30 year friendship.

I guess gaming came into the picture slowly, starting with chess.  I’d been a pretty good player since high school and JJ would let me beat the crap out of him without complaint.  Sadly, he was never a good player but he tried.  When I got tired of beating him we started playing the Navy’s favorite card game, Spades.  Now this was something he WAS good at and we added up teaming together for a few years.  We were VERY good but we drifted away from it to pinball but after a marathon 14 hours playing one machine down in Jax Beach and getting asked never to come back by the owner, we pretty much stopped that. *Those were the days when you got three games for a quarter and could win more games.  We spent exactly fifty cents on that game, a quarter from each of us.

I’d been wargaming since my Junior year in high school so I introduced JJ to Jutland and prompt stomped him.  Then I tried Panzerblitz and promptly stomped him.  Next I tried the REALLY big game, War in Europe and stomped him for months.  Sigh.  Then in 1979 I found two things, Starfleet Battles and AD&D.  Starfleet JJ loved because it was Star Trek, AD&D I loved because he didn’t have to lose all the time.  AD&D morphed into Champions and JJ became a ‘buddy player‘.  *By definition a ‘buddy player’ is someone that just plays because his friend does, a perfect description of JJ.

When we began Champions, JJ decided to combine Starfleet and Champions and so War Eagle was born.  Based on his preferred Starfleet race, Romulan, JJ envisioned a character with a cloaking device and plasma weapon.  It was my first real introduction into character construction from scratch.  We, the guys at the hobby shop, debated long and hard about this character and after many week-ends of work came up with exactly what JJ wanted.  He became War Eagle to everyone.

So let me give you a little insight into a game with War Eagle.

GM: “Your go, WE.”

WE: “I’ll shoot him.”

GM: “War Eagle trains his plasma pistol on the hapless thug and pulls the trigger.  A ball of energy is ejected from the muzzle, instantly locking on to the target and streaking towards it.  The thug’s attention is drawn by the ruddy red glow of impending doom and he has a brief moment for his life to flash across his mind’s eye before the searing condensed matter vaporizes 80% of his skin.  He falls to the ground unable to comprehend the pain before his life is extinguished.  What will you do now, WE?”

WE: “I’ll shoot the next one.”

My favorite saying is a quote from Einstein: “Imagination is more important than intelligence.”

JJ never figured that one out bless him . . . but he tried.

Following seas, buddy.

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Just about a year ago I stopped RPing completely.  The primary reason was burn-out.  It’s happened before but in the past I had fallen back on an old favorite, Starfleet Battles.  Trouble is, all my SFB players are gone and I don’t have the patience to teach someone new.  Enter MMORPGs.  I hate them, but I was bored.  Of course I’ve heard about all the biggies, WOW, LOTRO, DAOC . . . but they cost money, initially for the program then each month . . . forever.   After trying some pretty childish FTP (free-to-play) games I bumped into Perfect World International.

Okay, I got a little hooked, damnit.

But like any game you tend to get tired of it after a few months and that’s the point I am reaching now.  To stem the boredom, I began to experiment with different classes and races discovering rather quickly I love to play a cleric which surprised the hell out of me since an archer is available.  Now though, the whole thing has become a challenge in logistics.  How can I advance each character and how can I get them the best equipment available?

I gotta admit, I spent some money in the cash shop, about $60 over the last year but only for things that made my character more playable.  I’ve never seen the need to buy weird mounts or clothes though I was given a few pieces by a friend.  Now I play only for the challenge of advancing one of my six character or to help other player.

Damn I am bored with it but it’s nicely mindless.

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Okay, so some years back I began a new campaign targeted on the next generation of the Wild Hunt.  With very little imagination I titled the effort the Lothlorien Academy and it was good.  At least I was having fun.  Unfortunately two of my players did not get along and the game fell apart after several months.  But . . . like all of the characters I create, more than a few of this group got under my skin.  The result of this ‘infection’ became the Legacy.

Legacy is purely me, no players have been hurt or even involved directly.  A solo campaign?  Yeah, I know, weird but to me its really just another form of writing.  The . . . conflict in Lothlorien Academy (LA), with real players, to me was some of the best RPing I’d ever been involve with.  The idea as teenagers discovering their powers and the angst that went with it.  Let me tell you, the angst was way over the top and there were many fantastic RP moments.  The main problem was, for at least one player, separating the game and reality.  Now, to be fair, the player was going through a major, major crisis, physically as well as mentally, and isn’t totally responsible for what came to pass. When I am involved in a game I tend to ‘channel’ the personality I have created to the point of ‘NO, he would NOT do it like that’ and nothing anyone can say or do will EVER get me to go against the character.

Anyway, Legacy.  Here I had a dead campaign, LA, unfortunately the characters I’d created would not leave me alone.  I felt they deserved more.  I felt they deserved a life.  One of the final scenes in LA involved the angry departure of two of the characters, all RPed, some I used that as a basis for what came to be Legacy.

Every character I design, especially ones I use as a PC, are living, breathing beings and Nat Ryan was no exception.  From the beginning I had doubts about him, more or less despising’brick’ characters’ but something in him hit home.  And once I began to play him in LA with others he developed into a fully realized personality, one that was forever stuck in my mind and clamoring to get out.  Problem was, no matter how much I wanted to continue playing him, the fact was the group had exploded and nothing I could do would ever put it back together.  I was alone in my need to continue the story.

The crux of the LA break up was a romantic triangle, pretty typical of teens.  Jessy loved Nat, Nat loved Wren, Wren didn’t trust her feelings for Nat, Jessy hated Wren, Wren was mostly indifferent, Nat felt guilty about Jessy but loved Wren too much, Wren started to give in to her feelings for Nat, Jessy did something stupid, said stupidity almost destroyed the Nat/Wren thing, Jessy ran away from home, Nat and Wren left the LA together and settled back in Nat’s home town.

The seed of Legacy.

Now I had two characters separate from the central core of the Wild Hunt and Seattle Hunt.  I couldn’t let it just die, sorry Jessy, but that’s the way it is.  Thing was, Wren’s player had IRL things to do and we sorta drifted apart but I had to write the story.  Enter the trope of a government sponsored school for teen supers.  Now I needed other students to round things out.  One, Zach, I brought over from the LA campaign, not that Zach’s player had anything to do with it but the character was a little lost and Nat had become his best friend so after a little background stuff the player never explained, I brought him into the story.  Others, Christiana, Alicia, Fuji, Josh, Slater and Ember began as someone else’s initial character design that I’d created but had been left with very little info on background when they vanished into the ether.  *Note: 99 times out of 100 the characters other people play are constructed by me as I know the game system far better than any of my players.  Generally it starts with a few hundred questions on my part and the occasional answer on the player’s part.  I try hard to bring to life the player’s vision.

NPCs to me are as ‘real’ as any PC I’ve ever made.  If they weren’t I’d never be able to portray them properly so in the last couple of years I have put just as much effort into NPC background as any PC I’ve every played.  I know a lot of character designers begin with a concept, a rough background and build the character from there.  I work the other way around.  I make a character first, the background forms from what I put together and once I have the personality in mind, I begin to write the background.

No character design survives in tact the process of writing a background.   As I write small things begin to creep in, like Fuji’s totally opposite personality when she’s playing an MMORPG.  I don’t go into a back story with any preconceived notion of the character.  To me writing has always been like watching a movie I’ve never seen before.  Things just unfold as the story progresses.

Usually I begin like most writers, with a hook.  It can be something simple like ‘Nat Ryan is a surfer’ or something deeper like ‘Slater is a genetic experiment by the Red Queen of Genocide‘.  Rarely do I have to struggle with a story as most of the time any problems stem from getting thoughts to computer.   From there the story just . . . becomes.  Rarely do I have to struggle with a story as most of the time any problems stem from getting thoughts to computer.   This is the situation lately.  I have so many ideas its hard to get it out.  I am hoping to use this blog to sort of organize my ideas.

Recently I decided the Legacy team wasn’t the first class in the new government school for the paranormal hence the creation of the Minutemen team.  As many Champions players already know, the term Minuteman was usurped near the beginnings of the Champions Universe by the anti-mutant group, Genocide.  In my campaign just after 9-11 the President demanded his Secretary of Defense set up some form of ‘offical’ superhero group.  One of the stipulations he made was that the first team would be called the Minutemen, thereby taking back the name from Genocide.   This team I designed from scratch with the exception of Nemesis and Mercury.

For this new American team I knew I’d need some kind of iconic names from the member but most are sort of trite and over used so in all cases the names were altered, Spirit for Spirit of America, Bell for Liberty Bell, Eagle for American Eagle, Liberty for Lady Liberty, Glory for Old Glory and Ranger for, well, the US Army Rangers . . . Bolt I am thinking about and Mercury I sort of associate with the Mercury dime but Nemesis is all the player’s idea.

As for power sets?  Ranger’s a half brick, Spirit has molecular powers, Bell sonic, Eagle has wings, Glory light powers and Liberty was a last minute addition with the power to teleport the team, hence ‘liberate’ them in a pinch.  Also I wanted a more representative mix hence my first African-American, Latino, Latina and Native American.   If they are too stereo-typical, I apologize but Superhero RPGs sort of rely on stereo types.

Once I’d ascertained power sets, I wanted to have them come from widely spaced areas of the country, Maine, Alaska, Los Angeles, Philadelphia,  St. Paul, Dallas with an Army brat tossed in for good measure.  I wanted a variety of home life situations, the Mentioned Army brat, artist, musician, ecologist, gang member, cop’s child, rich rancher . . . plus a variety of family lives . . . no parent, overbearing father, distant artists, single mother, extended family and nuclear family.  Each had to have a mind set, dreamer, realist, flippant, rebel, oppressed, pampered . . . patriot.

Once I’d defined who was who and what, the background took shape.  Then the integration into a whole new social situation.  I had to get in the heads of each to determine how they feel and relate to every other member of the class.  I am still working on that.  Once that was done, they had to meet Legacy and again the integration and relationships.  That’s still ongoing.

Anyway, this is what I have currently on my mind, the whole time wishing I had players willing to take up their characters once more.

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I started playing the Hero System when it was just Champions, about 1982 so I’ve been around through five editions and seen a gradual refinement in the whole thing.  As they moved from edition to edition little things changed, some for the better some I didn’t like but never did I encounter a new edition I didn’t wholeheartedly embrace.  Until 6th Edition.

I have nothing but best wishes to DOJ on this new product, trouble is, I’ll never use it.  There are just too many major changes in the system I’ve been playing for the last 27 years.

For years players have been bitching about things like the Killing Attack lottery, the usefulness of COM, the relatively cheap cost of STR, figured characteristics, Alteration powers . . . Sixth has addressed many of these concerns and in doing so, fundamentally altered the game I love.  Some changes are probably a good idea but as you grow older you become comfortable with the way things are.  That’s me and 5th Edition.  I am not claiming it’s perfect, ain’t no such thing, but it’s perfect for me.

Some time in the future I plan to purchase the HERO System Basic Rulebook just to see if it will convince me to change but I hope DOJ doesn’t hold their collective breath.  I promise that after I’ve had a chance to read it, I’ll come back with a scathing . . . er . . . honest opinion of the new system.  Until then . . . this is a 5th Edition site.

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As can be ascertained by perusing my versions of Marvel’s X-Men it has been some time since my last purchase of a comic book.  I admit it, I’ve fallen behind somewhat over the last 16 years or so but really, what the hell did I miss?

From what I can see, utilizing online sources such as Wikipedia and Marvel’s own site, a heck of the lot, hardly any of it something I’d want to read, so today I want to look at the ‘Ages’.

From the Hero forums I was informed of several changes in Marvel, first the purchase of the company by Disney.  There seems to be a consensus this is a ‘bad’ thing as Disney will Disneyfy the Marvel Universe and just in general ruin the whole thing.   How could they POSSIBLY ruin it anymore?  The second is their plan to return ‘hero’ to ‘super hero’.

When I started reading comics, it was Gold Key stuff, Donald Duck, etc, but soon moved on to Superman and Batman.  (My age puts me just on the trailing edge of the Golden Age here.)  I also remember Magnus, Robot Fighter and Tarzan along with Classic Illustrated (got me to read Ivanhoe for the first time).  Being the Golden Age, good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black hats, pretty cut and dried, perfect for the time.

When the Fantastic Four popped up, with that hideous Jack Kirby art (okay, flame me for thinking Kirby sucked, I can take it), I started reading Marvel and only drifted back into DC for Batman and Green Arrow.  The FF was followed by Spider Man and the Avengers, (it was only many years later I discovered the Uncanny X-Men) and I entered my Silver Age.  When Gwen Stacy died, no one had any conception of the changes it would bring, especially me.  To tell the truth, I never really considered the changes brought about by that one incident until the comic reading community began to divide things into Ages.

Well, finally, sometime around issue #90, I found the Uncanny X-Men and I was in the Bronze Age.  The interpersonal relationships, the trials of being a fear minority, the idea that this little group of mutants still fought to defend people who collectively despised and feared them, made the X-Men more interesting then what I’d read before and I stopped collecting everything else except Green Arrow (hey, he’s my hero).

For the next decade and a half or so I faithfully collected X-Men comics no matter where the story arc lead, Avengers, FF, Howard the Duck (okay not the last one).  I think I have the entire runs of the first volumes of X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur and New Mutants. Slowly I began to see deterioration in the moral compass of comics as a whole, not just the X-Men.  I’ll always blame Wolverine for that.

The character was not a terrible idea, don’t get me wrong, but he set off a chain of events that drove comics into the Iron Age.  As a kid, I’d quickly perceived the way the world worked by watching TV.  Someone produces a good Western and everyone else hops on the bandwagon (or chuck wagon more precisely), soon you have ten Westerns, with only two or three worth a damn.  Next its cop shows, then PI shows, then sci-fi (the poster child for crap follow-ups trying to capture the Star Trek audience).</p>

With Wolverine, suddenly everyone had to have a lone wolf killer.

Blech.

And killers were exactly what we got.

Brutal, casual, amoral killers.

Comics became a dark and terrible world to live in, worse than anything in the real world.

I think the point where I began to despair for the Marvel Universe was Jean Grey.  Not so much that she died and came back, actually a fairly sound plot device, but the crap going on in this girl’s head.  Could anyone in all comics be more f’d up?  Angst is one thing but damn, hers had to be crippling!

Back in #93-#94 I understood the change over to the new X-Men, someone was tired of the original five.  Cool, I can handle the change.  Oh, let’s kill one off right off the bat (there’s a floodgate breached).  Membership in the X-Men became more of a revolving door than the Avengers with an on-call hearse!  And what the hell do you do with all the new ones they make up?  Two teams, three . . . four . . . FIVE?  Let’s see.  Blue, Gold, X-Force, Excalibur, New Mutants, X-Factor< not to mention X-Man and the Marvel gods know how many others I missed.  Mutants were the Westerns of comics.

Around issue #350 I’d had enough.  Whether it was the cost of so many comics each month or disgust with the stories, I quite buying, completely.

What did I miss?

THEY KILLED CAPTAIN AMERICA!!!

Jean Grey died.

Again.

And again.

Cyclops died, more than once I am sure.

Cyclops and Emma Frost? WTF?!?

Juggernaught and WHO?!?  She-Hulk?!?

Magik . . . dead.  She was a child for god-sakes.

Miora MacTaggert . . . senseless.

Professor X, you f’in’ coward! How many times can YOU run from your own creation? I despise the character.

Joseph and the ensuing hide-the-Magneto.

Psylocke, second most f’d up character in the Universe . . . or maybe third behind Rachel Summers, maybe fourth behind Rogue.  Man, mutant women as SOOO screwed up!

Oh!  And the New New Mutants!  You kill off someone like Wallflower and Icarus!  Again, kids, damn it, I hate comics that kill kids!  Okay, so the world is a big bad place, yeah, yeah. (But it’s realistic, RPG! (remember those are my real initials, fate, huh?)).  Bullshit, some lines should not be crossed.

Genosha . . . M-Day.

Gee, a comic company that has every mutant on the planet trying to avoid genocide simply does it anyway after what?  40 years of  mutant struggle?  Poof.  Millions dead or de-powered. WTF part two.  At this point why the hell would ANY mutant give a crap about the rest of the world?  Gee, they have their own little floating island now.  Lovely.  Should have named it ‘New Devil’s Island’ or ‘Ground Zero’.  All Marvel needs to do is drop a nuke or two on it and the mutant problem is over for the next 15 or 20 years . . . until the next generation starts manifesting powers.  What the hell were Summers and friends thinking putting all the remaining mutants on one small island.  Do they actually believe the rest of humanity will leave them alone?  And it only takes one crazy . . . not like there are any of THOSE floating around the Marvel Universe.  God, I thought Xavier was an idiot.

Now I read Marvel has decided to put the ‘hero’ back into superhero.

whoopee

They should never have allowed the term ‘hero’ to become so polluted in the first place!!

For the last 28 years . . . god has it been that long?  For the last 28 years I’ve been creating my own little world, partly from Marvel stuff but only on the sidelines, and not once has my own creation, Ghost Archer, turned into an anti-hero or given up the ideals that set him on his life’s path to make things better for people.  Not loss of friends, or loved ones, not the world’s general refusal to ‘get better’ has made him so cynical as to become something he is not and never will be.  Not only that but he will not tolerate someone who does not have the same perspective.

Over those 28 years I have created very few ‘player characters’ for myself and though they are each quite different from one another at no point did I feel the need to manufacture someone remotely like Wolverine.  Maybe it’s my age, my environment growing up, maybe I still retain the concept of good and evil instilled in me during my Golden and Silver Ages, maybe I am just too much an idealist, but if you have one Wolverine, one is enough.

Be HEROES!

Your damn universe is broke, Marvel, have the balls to fix it or just go ahead and bomb Utopia and end it all.  And UTOPIA?!?  God, some people are SOOO optimistic.

Truth be told, I think Marvel just ran out of new ‘superhero’ names and wanted to recycle a few.  Maggot II?  Leech II?  M II?  Truly inspired names.  Okay, so Armor’s cute just ‘cuz it is and they made a joke out of it to a degree.  Also they can clear the deck for reuse of powers.  There’s already a winged X-Men so kill off the rest.  Hey, how about you get rid of a few of those CLAW guys!  X23.  Daken. Man they don’t even try to disguise the next Wolverine duplicate, just tell you out-right.  Look, Marvel, I know how hard it is to come up with new characters, I’ve been doing it for 28 years now but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever duplicated War Eagle or Ghost Archer or Giselle.  Sometimes it’s not easy to avoid previous characters but that’s where the background and personality come into play.

I’ve created hundreds of characters and once a character has served its purpose, it just goes into limbo and I never concern myself about it.  Hmm . . . maybe if I put them all in one place and kill them off . . . oh . . . wait . . . someone already did that.

Okay, broken down into a rant, time to stop and do something creative.  Seeya all later.

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One of the things one might notice when wandering through my various character pages is one in particular on the Wild Hunt page itself, a 5479 point character called Tsarsaidor.   Okay, when I wrote him up I took the time to put a 400 point cosmic power pool into perspective.  What I discovered was that, with the use of Mega-scale, this character can do a 1d6 RKA on the known universe.  Doesn’t seem like much, I know, not 1d6 . . . but it would kill every micro-organism on every planet orbiting around every star everywhere.  It would kill plants, animals, damage every square meter of everything.  It might not destroy the universe out of hand, but with microorganisms everywhere dead, it would kill all life within a short time.

You might ask “What the HELL were you thinking?”

It’s all that damn AD&D’s fault!

I was reading a Best of the Dragon magazine and found the crystal dragons, including the Ruby Dragon, Tsarsaidor.  In AD&D the crystal dragons are the Neutral between the Good metal and Evil chromatic dragons.  It appealed to me for some reason.  Tsar, as he became known, was designed as an all-powerful deus ex machina for me as GM.  He was never intended as a combat character but I just had to define him as a character.  I never expected him to become such a major part of my campaign nor that he would become Ghost Archer’s bête noire.

For the first few years, Tsar’s primary play toy was Sarge and that had a great deal to do with the path Mark took his character down as well as what I’ve done with him since Mark’s departure.  For some reason Sarge came to the conclusion Tsar existed solely to challenge his masculinity and picked up on a perceived threat only take it to the extremes.  At first he began a regimen of exorcises design with only one purpose, to be stronger physically than the dragon.  When that proved useless, Sarge began a quest for a Dragon Lance, a mythical weapon design for killing dragons.  It was an amusing hunt, at least Tsar thought so.

With Mark’s departure I was left with this mega-powerful NPC having no target for his amusement . . . thoughts turned to Archer.  Initially Tsar was used to bounce Archer around from Place to Place and Time to Time, serving as exactly what he is, a deus ex machina, but gradually he began to grow in me.  The personality was fairly simple, arrogant ass, but the interpersonal relations with not only my own characters but that of others became complex.   Then is dawned on me Tsar was no longer an NPC.

I guess every GM has those moments when an NPC evolves into a PC and Tsar was by no means the last time it happened for me.  Because he IS so powerful though, I had to be very careful and early on determined never to use him in something like combat.  Well, there was this time on a beach with Sarge, but he asked for it!  Instead I used him as the grand manipulator only to have it come back and bite him on the butt with Rogue.

Rogue was one of the first people I met online and she and Archer flirted around quite a bit until Thistle Grey entered his life.  Tsar, being the bastard he was, used Rogue to try to drive a wedge between Thistle and Archer just for the sake of doing it.  He discovered even the Master of Balance wasn’t immune to ‘human’ feelings.   When Archer lost Thistle to her goddess and had recovered somewhat from her lost by spending a few years time traveling, Tsar realized  Rogue, for whom only a few weeks had passed, would most likely be the Archer’s next romantic interest.

Wow, angst for a god-like being but he got the girl.

I wonder how often paradigm shifts in the way a GM sees a character happen like that?

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Not Hero . . . this whole blog thing.  See, I am hosting other blogs from my sight and in adding a new one, destroyed my own.  Screwed up, huh?  So now I gotta go back and see if I can recover the fabulous posts I’ve already added and avoid wiping this one out again.  It would be the fourth time.   Wish me luck.

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