LAST EDITED ON 09-17-04 AT 00:13 AM (EDT)
 
>Out of curiosity, what kind of superpowers does the Silver Spectre have?
>Similar to his forebears (sneaking around in the night; scaring the
>crap out of, then beating down bad guys)?

He's what the game calls a Natural Scrapper (Natural because he didn't get his powers from a scientific accident, genetic mutation, technological gizmo, or magical study, although the last could be argued, since he has a Shadowesque "trained by ancient mystic monks in Tibet" background; Scrapper indicates he's a hand-to-hand combat specialist with no ranged attacks).

Thus far (the in-game version is up to Security Level 10, which is senior enough to found a Supergroup but still not particularly badass, relatively speaking), he has a range of spiffy martial-arts moves, a number of powers based on Super Reflexes which enable him to avoid damage of various kinds, a machinegun punch power which is the precursor to Super-Speed (he'll be eligible for that at SL14), and Stealth, which is partial invisibility.

So, yeah, basically he sneaks around looking for trouble, then suddenly appears and clobbers the bad guys with his fists and feet. The game's basic advancement design, where you earn new powers as you advance in level, works very well with his "rusty, but it's coming back to him" character concept; the more "super" powers he's starting to develop, like Stealth and the beginnings of Super-Speed, I explain as the ongoing recovery of the secret techniques he learned from the monks of Lakan Pakor as a young traveler in the early 1930s, before his first hero career began. (They may call it "Stealth" in the game, but I know it's really the Power to Cloud the Minds of Men. :)

None of that is actually important to the mechanics of the game, but it is a role-playing game, after all, even if 95% or so of the people playing it don't seem to get that part.

(Oh - and the Crimson Avenger was another of the Golden Age "masked hero in a nice suit" type of comic-book hero, like the Spirit or the Sandman, until the spandex costume thing became all the rage and he ended up in a goofy red outfit with a fin on his head. The original version had a cameo appearance in the Justice League Unlimited episode "This Little Piggy" as the guy in the dark suit and red cape who knocks on the door of the suburban house and tells the person who answers that he's looking for a pig.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/