Meta-Game Notes on Variants England

Normally when I give meta-game commentary I'm babbling about how great the players were, and how the campaign actually ran, as opposed to what you see on the page. This one's a little different.
    The information for the Across the Pond section was originally designed for the Planet Moore Project. For those unfamiliar with the PMP, it was an attempt spearheaded by David Utter to make a shared V&V world on the 'Net, where we V&sV players could construct and disseminate characters, adventures and ideas in a shared world—reminiscent of, but not thematically similar to, the Wild Cards novels. We named it Planet Moore after one of the great comic writers, since David said that if Alan Moore routinely posted things to the web, he'd crawl over broken glass to read it, no matter how bad the HTML was. Hes never seen me try and code web pages, the lucky boy.
    I've been told since that these sorts of web shared worlds never work. Ah well. But we had such innocence and naivetÈ in those heady bygone days of 1998....
    Regardless, I had invested some time and effort in Storm City, my contribution to the PMP, until it became obvious that it wasn't going anywhere. Since I hate leaving anything in Limbo for too long, I modified the stuff to serve as the framework for the Variants Universe version of England. Storm City became London, and the rest just fell into place. I think the framework holds together well, but its not very British—I admit this. Being in London for a week does not make me an expert on British culture. If you want that, go buy copy of Kingdom of Champions by Hero Games and ICE. Heck, buy it anyway. It's a great sourcebook!
    Now we get to my usual acknowledgements and explanations:
    First, the four characters used as the New Danger Squad were developed by players, but never played, as part of an aborted game group. They were made by old friends from high school, but things never gelled for the campaign; it went as far as character creation, but no further. Nocturne and Balance were made by Jesse Myers and his wife Marilyn Friday; Synapse and Jayhan were made by Chris Mansfield and his wife Jennifer Friday. I'm an incurable concept packrat, and pulled the characters out to act as the current London super-team. Their backgrounds have been altered or tweaked as needed (Balance most of all, Nocturne not in the slightest, the other two in the middle) to fit into the new setting. Otherwise they are substantially unchanged from the original concepts.
    The rest of the characters were built using straight 2nd edition V&V power set rolls, to my mind again proving the strength and versatility of the V&V system. I can't even imagine the task of developing 30+ characters in the space of a week or so using Champions, but with V&V it was possible, if not easy.
    Since I was building things for a shared world, I wanted to go with some more primal archetypes then I usually do for the Variants world. That's why Stormchild and his rogues gallery bear a striking resemblance to the great heroes of yore, with elements of Superman, Flash and Captain Marvel in his nature, demeanor and enemies. It was a ton of fun to do, and when I finished, I found out that not only had everyone else in the PMP built pseudo-Supermen, but that the thing was falling apart. Thus, the Lad of Lightning finds his home in Jolly Old England.
    I'll stop tossing my two cents off my soapbox, and let you get on with things....

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