Magic Golden Age Heroes

Raiser of the ancient dead

Her costume is not as skimpy in this, her last outing.  If we had a low level magical detective-type hero, which we don't yet, he or she might make a good foe for her.  Or maybe if we ever re-started our Pulp Hero adventures again, a good foe then.
And since we have a Yogi who collected magical heroes of the 1930s to the ??, who says we don't have a villainous foe, like the Question who was Aman, the Amazing Man's teacher and main foe, who did the same thing?  Or maybe the Queen of Evil herself gathers mystical villains for an attempt on taking over the modern day world, thinking to preserve them until their mystical heroic foes are gone?

I now present to you Red Rube and his magical origin. I'll dig out a later story in the series tomorrow probably.

yeah yeah, he is a weak version of Captain Marvel. Near as I can figure, though a later story may prove otherwise, he basically is magically turned into a man with all his stats maxed to human perfection. No real superpowers but like I said a later story may give him superstrength and such.

Also tomorrow, I hope to put up the origin of Steel Sterling, a guy, who in order to become superhuman dives into a vat of molten metal!!

Reuben Reuben...

Yeah he doesn't seem dramatically powerful. A clear Cap Marvel ripoff who can transform into an athletic man and back into a boy. Strictly street level from the looks of it. Probably Dex 6 Str 5 Body 6 Int 6 Will 5 Mind 6 Infl 6 Aura 5 Spirit 6 various skills, running 5APs (50mph) jumping 1 (twenty feet) to start with. He could easily handle goons with 2s across the board.

Turns out Red Rube does have super-strength. He is strong enough to rip open a bank vault door. But he isn't invulnerable.

A modern bank vault door is 14APs! Got a picture of him doing that? Might give a clearer idea of what to stat his strength up as. Maybe stats as before but with Adrenaline surge on every stat/ability allowing him to temporarily boost it as he calls on whatever ghost/ancestor is required. That would do it actually. 15APs Adrenaline Surge with a catastrophic Burnout and the complication that it turns him back into a little kid if it fails. That last part probably isn't in character - these golden age types seem to have no weaknesses!

Maybe he didn't rip the vault door off, maybe he just pulled it open. But he is not bulletproof. He even comes across a nice villain in his next to last story. Here are some extra pages of him in action and his biggest foe he never got to fight twice.

I'm starting to think that maybe he could vary his strength a bit, so maybe he has 2-3 points of Power Reserve for Strength and Body with max physical human stats?

This was his last published adventure, BTW.

I'd probably stat him up at Dex 4 Str 4 Body 4 and do as you said - give him power reserve of 3APs for those 'super' moments he has. Getting clobbered by that 'gorilla' suggests he's not overly skilled or tough. The cheap way would be Adrenaline Surge 6APs (which in our rules means he pushes his stat with 6 vs 4 and boosts his abilities one at a time to 6 or 7 easily enough unless the rolls are wonky.) Power Reserve is the safer bet. Even at 450HP (this guy doesn't warrant more than that I wouldn't have thought, especially with the alter ego as a kid) I think Power Reserve 3APs is doable.

Do you have a list of possible good guys and bad guys for Prof Wynde's Friends and Rogues gallery? I'm tempted to send him back into the 30s/40s to help with Haunt and Steeplejack and get lost there then hook up with Jade Hood and Iron Fist (who if I recall were flying to the far east when last we left them).

The Lore Knights/HH and IF game was always a 'play whilst trying out new rules' thing though and there are a number of new rules I'd like to try out, mostly with character design. The main one is having to buy an Acting Value and Effect Value along with a Range separately for all powers, and the skills jumping up in cost by quite a bit as they are far, far more useful now than they ever were! Acrobatics and Martial Artist are practically musts for everyone (more dice to attack and defend). Not ready to introduce that but I haven't forgotten our pulp heroes and was going to suggest a start up until we went to 3 characters/player and our new player so something would have to give before I added any more to the workload!

That's a thought. Here is another idea. How about him eventually teaming up with Kid Kinetic, if his player wants, and freeing some Golden Age teen heroes? With the Advent having removed, by one means or another, a great deal of the modern heroes, those heroes waiting from the 40s to return would be a good thing. They don't all have to come from the Yogi having stored them away. And having our two beginning heroes team up wouldn't be a bad thing either.

I'm thinking something along the lines that Morgana, the Sword's foe, or the Question, Amazing Man's foe, or the Queen of Evil somehow got their hands on most of the magical based teen heroes of the WW2 time - the Sword, Lancer, Golden Lad, Golden Girl and Red Rube [the only ones off the top of my head] - and froze them in time or turned them into statues or something. Maybe they had formed their own little super-group back then and got caught in one of their earliest team-ups and frozen or stoned by the Head of Medusa or something? I would put most of these characters in the 450-800 HP range.

Prof. Wynde and Kid Kenetic could meet and team-up. Maybe they were working the same case from two different angles, unknowingly, and meet up and rescue the teen heroes? Said underage out of time kids would need a place to stay and the school for gifted youngsters would be a good place for them to go. Moe/Merlin could also show up some later time and maybe become an instructor there? It would give the two new heroes a connection to each other and the School and OOP could have a low grade connection develop with each other as well from that.

Not really sure how many golden age characters would fit into the power range of Prof. Wynde. But forming up a team, eventually, of his own wouldn't be a bad idea. So many of them seem to be 1000+ HP level characters, besides Wonder Man. Amazing Man and his sidekick probably would.

The Wizard, the Man with the Super Brain would would probably fit, though he isn't magic. Got to get his origin up here soon. Interesting character. A team wouldn't have to be all magical based characters, having an odd man out could work too.

A few characters whose power is basically mass hypnosis could work. I think I posted the one female character I ran across that had that power. Every team should have at least one female character on it. That's the standard. JSA had Wonder Woman and then later added in Black Canary. JLA had Wonder Woman and then later added in Black Canary. Fantastic Four has Invisible Girl. Avengers started with the Wasp. The X-Men started with Marvel Girl. The Doom Patrol had Elastic Girl. The All Winners Squad [from 1940s Timely] had Miss America.

You know, when AC Comics wanted to use characters that were in the Public Domain, this is back in the 1980s, they had a storyline of a massive alien invasion and needing more than the dozen or so heroes that were around at the time to help out against the invasion. So the Purple Claw, a very very minor 40s character that had a magical purple claw gauntlet, had frozen all those public domain heroes with their permission [explaining what happened to them after their last recorded adventure] in a magical timeless sleep. He then woke them up [after a bit of trouble of course] and the hundreds of heroes helped repel the alien invasion. These characters disappeared in the late 30s to the mid-1950s.

Wait a minute! This sounds familiar!

That does sound familiar!

On another note, is the forum loading slowly for you? I'm wondering if all the images are grinding it to a halt. I'm having trouble getting in to post, waiting 10-20 seconds per page change and it's like walking through molasses. I've not encountered this before so it might be an issue with forumotion (who run these boards) instead but do you mind if I delete the story sections (page 2 on) and keep just the initial page of the characters? I'm happy to keep learning of the golden age heroes and incorporate them into the game but need to try something or the forum will grind to a halt whilst I wait... and wait... and wait... for a new page to load. There may be a limit on forum size with images and after that we start chugging.

As for joining up with Kid Kinetic, his character is 450HP so the challenges he faces will be 450-900 (at most) so some of the characters won't be compatible. He'd feel like a fifth wheel. As for meeting up that would be down to the player so perhaps it might be worth a message.

If we can, we need to form a list of characters that are potentials for inclusion, their abilities and a guess at what HP would be needed to cook them up. You're familiar with the game rules and the costs for certain abilities (Sorcery, for example ) which may rule out certain characters. They may fall to a well placed cosh but otherwise shrug off battleship guns which is a weird thing of the era I guess. Makes them tricky to stat up and of course later issues had them adding to their list of abilities, a la Superman.

Plus the group would need a name of course. Some kind of Acronym hopefully. Legion of Forgotten Talents (LOFT) is a lame one I just dredged up but it might be worth coming up with a short word like MIGHT and trying to make it fit our purposes. Mighty Individuals Great Heroes Together!

Groan.

Actually that might not be bad. Oh. No pun intended.

Huh it was glacial for a time then sped up again. Maybe no need to delete the pages...

Yeah, I had the super low loading speed, not just here but all over the Internet during the day but by evening time, back to normal speeds. Maybe its all the folks home on the weekend way over using the Internet. OR someone let loose another virus that slowed things down until it was eliminated?

I forget but isn't Prof. Wynde around 500 HP, which is why I mentioned joining Kid Kenetic, similar levels of power.

And the gal I was trying to think of who had Super Hypnotism was Margo the Magician. From her origin story and the way her skin was colored compared to her dad's, she appears to be half-Chinese, an extremely rare situation of a mixed race person being put into a heroic position during those times. We never see or hear about her mother and her adventures were in China and she was raised in China so putting two and two together ....

Prof Wynde was 900 + weaknesses, so a fair bit out of KK's league. Jade Hood and Iron Fist were more in his power level, but they are pulp heroes/set in the 30s

I'll dig around, see if there is a list of Golden age heroes somewhere

Yeah, I think he was originally supposed to be teaming up with Frostbite, I think.

Music Master. Near as I can tell, he has Omni-Power with the interesting disad that he needs to hear music in order to activate his power. He can use it to fly, to wrap people up in notes, to shield people with notes, to carry people with notes and to take notes and use them as weapons.

Internet acting weird again, can't upload files. Will try again later today.

Here is a short run 1960s magic hero - John Force, Magic Agent. He uses a mystical medallion that when he presses one of the columns on the magic coin, he gains those powers of Telepathy, Illusion, Hypnosis, and ESP. So highly trained agent with magic coin.