Introduction & Commentary

I ran this campaign from 1985-1988 off and on. It was built with the classic V&V structure in that it took place in Hartford (in our eyes then, a big city nearby) and the characters were based on the players. All in all, it was well received, if sporadic. This was in part due to my tendency to make things up as I go, and in part due to the players' strange attendance patterns. The game usually broke up into Mike and Greg (until Greg stopped playing games all together and it became just Mike), Dylan and Graham, and Steve, Jesse and usually Mike, with occasional appearances by Patrick and Chant. While this posed some problems initially, it has become helpful in the rewrite/retrofit into the world continuity.
     Ground Zero proper was technically Steve, Jesse and Chant's characters, with Mike as a mysterious helper who refused to be tied down to the team. Dylan and Graham would occasionally join in through government contacts. The team's membership fluctuated because Jessie and Chant grew bored with characters and kept introducing new ones (many of these have been removed, as they were too short-lived to merit serious attention). This left Mike's character as the most experienced (as he was at the most games), followed by Steve's, then Dylan and Graham's, then the others. I have tried to reflect this in the rewrite by giving Steve and Mike's characters a greater intensity, indicating their desire to spend more time in-country.
     Ground Zero was my first real attempt at non-player characters and sub-plotting, things that would only grow given time, but which had been totally absent from my first campaign (see the Great Hunt, coming soon [he claims -ed.]). Things casually tossed out for the players have become formative aspects of the world. Still, there were many problems. The group lacked focus, as did the campaign as a whole. It ran from gritty street gang fighting in Hartford to alien conspiracies to pure super villains to government anti-terrorist activities to high tech accidents to fighting demons. Since my attempts to consolidate the characters into a team in the last rewrite led to such a muddled group, I'm now taking a very different tack.
     Now, we can assume the existence of several concurrent series about these characters, making Ground Zero a lot more like the Avengers or the Justice League than the Fantastic Four or X-Men (which the Host more strongly resembled). Wildcard had his own monthly book, detailing his activities against the Mafia, in a sort of Dark Batman/Punisher way. Black Flag routinely guest starred in this book. Split Second had his own book. Rapidfire and Impulse had their own book. Black Dragon had two books—one for his street level adventures (Adventures of the Black Dragon), one detailing his more mystical adventures (Legends of the Black Dragon), kind of like the Amazing Spider Man/Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider Man division in the 80s, before 10,000 Spider Man books flooded the market. Grimouir was a perennial guest in the latter Black Dragon book. Finally , there was the Ground Zero book proper, which much like Avengers featured all of the heroes below, with a rotating roster every month. This means that Harborview was a busy place, what with having 6 super-hero titles occurring there.

The characters for this game were:

Steve Jones: Wildcard
Mike Coolican: Black Dragon, Concussion
Jesse Myers: Death, Split Second, Orion the Omen-Bringer, Future Boy
Chant McLeod: Black Flag
Dylan OConnor: Rapidfire
Graham OConnor: Impulse
Greg Bynum: Grimouir

    I would love to give you a detailed blow by blow of these games, but I can't, not really. Instead I'm giving you more detailed information on the characters, including things well outside the range of common knowledge. This is going to gloss over a lot of data, but it will provide a broad stroke outline of the campaign. There has been quite a bit of retroactive continuity here, because with broad strokes and the lens of time, I can make things more accurate and poetic for the nature of the game and the characters, especially in the way I wanted later players to see it. This is, at best, a quarter of the stuff from the game, and leaves out a lot of good things (the heroes waking up after weeks of brainwashed training in a BLF camp; the time Dragonhand attacked Black Dragon on national TV during our hero's wrestling match with Hulk Hogan against some prominent wrestling heels; a glorious fight between Split Second and Spyder, and dozens of others). But that's the nature of writing something up 15 years after it happened.
     Where are these people now?
     Chant lives in NYC, pursuing a theater career. He makes it out to CT once in a while for other games, and also plays Captain Awesome in the Host chronicles.
     Steven Jones did in fact marry his girlfriend Julie. The pair live in East Hampton, and Steve works as a suit for Gerber.
     Jesse Myers is married to Marilyn Friday, and they have a darn cute little boy named Lucas, age three now. Jesse works for ESPN doing computer work, and therefore gets to see a lot of cool games and hobnob with famous people. The jerk. Me? Jealous? Hah! Jesse, Marilyn and Steve are part of a regular gaming group in CT.
     Dylan and Graham both live in Boston, where they work for Newbury Comics as store managers and generally enjoy life. Dylan may one day marry Sherri, his girlfriend of 11 years now, but at this point, who's counting?
     Greg lives in New York, doing a massive number of weird jobs and generally continuing his practice of not doing anything I expect him to.
     Mike is a Lieutenant in the US Navy, and flies combat helicopters. Makes my job seem kinda boring, but my odds of being shot down are much, much lower than his. Mike is also mentioned on the credits page for the Future World game, that, I reiterate, was really darn cool.

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