Up, Up, And Away!

Sorry for the lack of blogging over the past couple of days. I've been busy expanding my pop-culture horizons.

The thing is, the group I game with is going to be dropping our current Torg campaign for a while in favor of D.C. Heroes. While I don't necessarily mind the change of pace, I have to admit to a certain amount of hesitancy about this particular choice. I have played the D.C. Heroes system before, briefly, but I don't really remember the mechanics of it at all. Well, to be honest, I'm not sure I ever completely understood the mechanics in the first place. And superhero stuff is really not my genre. As I put it to one of my fellow gamers, my idea of a comic book is Sandman.

Well, they seemed to consider that easily fixable, with the result that I've spent a largish chunk of this weekend being educated in matters superheroic. Or at least, I got handed a stack of comics[*] and shown a bunch of superhero cartoons[**] featuring Superman, Batman, and the various members of the Justice League of America. I have to say, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the Superman cartoon series (which, unlike the Batman, I don't think I'd ever seen before). Superman tends to be associated in my mind with a certain over-the-top level of cheesiness[***], but this was actually pretty intelligently written, with humor, character development, and what looked to be some very interesting setup for future plot developments[****].

Anyway, we did that on Friday, and Saturday was the character creation session, so I now have a "superhero" PC: a gadgeteer kid whose only superpower is a weird psychic affinity for machinery. But I do get to pal around with a giant robot (also a PC), which promises to be fun. All in all, I'm starting to feel considerably more enthused about the whole thing. We'll see how it goes!


[*] I'm not at all sure what reading about "Mr. Nebula, Cosmic Redecorater" was supposed to do for me, but I have to say, it was pretty darned funny.

[**] Not that that was entirely for my benefit. Watching some superhero stuff as "prep" for the game was mainly considered a good excuse to get together and grill up some hamburgers.

[***] Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with cheesiness. I think Superman II is tremendous fun. Kneel before Zod!

[****] Indeed, I'm rather tempted to check out some more of the show, if only out of curiosity to see what they ended up doing with the Kryptonian computer[*****] they introduced in episode 1.

[*****] I gather this character had a very different origin story in the cartoon than in the comic books, but the comics fans in the room all seemed to think it was a definite improvement.[******]

[******] You know, when you start adding footnotes to footnotes, things are really getting out of control. Help!