My Life And Roleplaying... (the ultimate chapter)

(1=) Villains & Vigilantes (Fantasy Games Unlimited). Very early in my roleplaying life I had seen a game called Superhero 2044, but although it was superheroes it didn't really appear to represent the comics that I knew and loved, being more a futuristic, sci-fi game.

At the time Tunbridge Wells had its own roleplaying shop (The Dark Tower) and associated gaming club, and it was at one of these I picked up the first edition of Villains & Vigilantes, attracted by the colourful, comic book-style cover.

The game itself was a bit of a mish-mash, but it was exploding with ideas - the central one, that really grabbed me by the throat, was that you played yourself with random superpowers! How cool was that?

I read and reread my copy until it fell apart, but never really played it - except for some solo games featuring my first character: Supertich (don't ask!)

Eventually a second edition came out and by this time I'd started gaming regularly with Steve, Pete and Nick. Steve and I in particular took to this game like ducks to water; everything about this game fired our imaginations.

Even the character generation was fun - Steve recalls a time I made up characters for everyone we knew (not just the gamers) so that we had a Legion of Super-heroes-style team.

In the early 80s Steve ran a campaign-starting adventure for a small group of us , after watching the Doctor Who story: Enlightenment (Edwardian sailing ships in space).

We were all 'normal' school kids, kidnapped by aliens and 'adapted' (ie given random superpowers) to take part in an interstellar sailing challenge!!!!

That particular campaign never got further than its first issue, but my character, The Acrobatic Flea, stuck around for future adventures, becoming the "face" of our Villains & Vigilantes campaign and its eventual morphing into HeroPress.

Steve hit upon the idea of producing an A4 (then A5) newsletter, typed, handwritten, drawn and photocopied by us, for our campaign - there was no Internet for blog sites or even really fancy computers for desktop publishing in those days. This he named HeroPress, setting in motion a chain of events that would change my gaming world.

By this time we had already drifted the rules so far from the original that they were only vaguely recognisable as the same game - we'd rewritten combat, initiative, some of the powers, parts of character creation etc

So then, with issue three of HeroPress (sporting one of Pete's funky cartoon covers), it was decided that I would take over running the Villains & Vigilantes games, not only cherry picking the best bits from our old games and scrunching them all together as some kind of unified whole, but also with a postal element to the game.

I can't really remember if we ever actually played Villains & Vigilantes 'face-to-face' again after that because, following a small ad in The Adventurer (issue 4), we started to get players from around the country wanting to play our postal game.

It was at this point - not really understanding how these things worked - that I thought, rather than promoting it as a Villains & Vigilantes game (especially as we weren't playing it strictly by the book anyway), I'd better streamline the rules further for the sake of the postal game.

And so was born HeroPress the play-by-mail game and many, many, many years later this blog.

Since starting this "My Life And Roleplaying" segment, I've been convinced by PMikey over on the Midnight's Lair message boards (another old school Villains & Vigilantes player) that this new-fangled Mutants & Masterminds is 'basically' just a third edition of Villains & Vigilantes, so who knows what the future holds for my long dormant roleplaying skills?