I N  T H E  B E G I N N I N G

Somewhere in the 1980s, a college student named K.C. Ryan discovered a role-playing game called “Champions”. He was familiar with these types of games, but upon finding this one, he found one that spoke to him—him, a lifelong fan of comic books and super-heroes. This flimsy book with its bad typesetting and lackluster production values promised him the means to create a super-hero world all his own, and bring it to life.

He set out to create such a world, and decided that his super-hero world would pull together elements of all the things he loved about super-heroes, action and adventure. He imagined a world populated by his favorite heroes, but one without the restrictions of publishing companies. He integrated parts of the comic worlds he loved, and brought them together into one universe. Heroes from D.C. Comics, and from Marvel comics. And from other publishers as well. It was his universe, after all. Who was to say that Captain America and the Flash couldn’t exist in the same reality? He chose the heroes that suited him and brought them together, but he also established a timeline. In the comics, Batman has been Batman since his creation, and like other long-loved four-color heroes, never seems to age, but remains timeless. K.C. gave his world a history…which heroes came first, when they were active, and when they retired. These heroes had children, who later went on to become heroes in their own right. In K.C.’s world, Superman and Mary Marvel were wed, and gave birth to twins with powers like theirs. Known as the “Thunder Twins”, the children of these great heroes—who went by the names Captain Thunder and Thunderbolt—joined with other young legacy heroes and formed the Justice Squadron, the team that replaced the retired Justice League. His world had a living history.

But as comics were far from K.C.’s only love, he decided to pull in other fictional characters and elements. As fan of Jonny Quest while growing up, K.C. brought him into the world (though he added a “H” to his name, making him “Johnny”, perhaps to avoid copyright infringement), but, again, put time in play, and had him grown into manhood, and the president of his own international corporation, Questar. As a fan of James Bond films and other spy lore, K.C. introduced super-spy elements. As Marvel had brought the Bond bug into comics with SHIELD, K.C. used that organization, but decided SHIELD was the larger organization, and many nations had their own divisions. Japan’s division of SHIELD was known as RONIN, and was led by Bond character Tiger Tanaka. While America’s division was known as UNCLE—taken from the TV show that K.C. was a fan of. He drew from television, movies, classic Hollywood serials, anything that had influenced his love of fantastical tales. Again…it was his world. And soon, his world had taken shape.

T H E  P R E - H I S T O R Y

But if you know anything about role-playing games, you know that they require more than one person to work. While going to school at Notre Dame, K.C. found players to create heroes of their own and come into his world. The group of heroes that came together came to be known as Aegis. And the game K.C. ran for this team, as the gamemaster, was very successful. His world came to life and got wings, and many a South Bend, Indiana Saturday night was spent with this group of students saving that world from the forces of darkness (and sucking down way too many sodas and copious amounts of pizza). The game, and its world, was so popular that even after it ended, when K.C. graduated and took a job in Sacramento, California, the Aegis game went on, taken over by the former players, and new players were added over the years, creating a very long-lasting and much revered Champions campaign. They had their version of K.C.’s world, yes…but K.C.’s world itself left with him. And went west.

In the summer of 1986, while settling into his new life in his new town, K.C. decided on trying another Champions game as a way to meet people and get out his creative urges. He posted an ad recruiting Champions players in a game store there, which was soon found by a young man named Tim Watts, who had just graduated high school, while he was shopping for chess sets. He took the number down and called his best friend, Michael O’Connell (yours truly), and told him about it. The two had played Champions themselves in high school, but hadn’t had the richest experience with it. They’d always talked about trying to get into a “real game”. Perhaps this was the one. So, with the last summer of their teenage years ahead of them, the two decided to give it a try, and called K.C. They took their friend Everett Purdy with them, who had gamed with them some (Everett was still in high school, waiting for his senior year to begin). They met at K.C.’s small apartment on Sunrise Boulevard in Roseville, California, and were joined by someone else who answered the ad, an Air Force man named Jeff Baumgardner. They made characters (I had Beowulf, who would later change his name to Knightmare; Tim had Komal, the Greek god of thunder; Everett brought the actual Galahad out of Arthurian history; and Jeff created the armored Energon), and started becoming a part of K.C.’s world themselves, and all of them were captivated by the richness of it and the way K.C. made it seem so real and living through his storytelling. None had ever been in a game quite like it. Soon after, that summer, others found the ad. Another pending high school senior, Kevin Jones (Superion), and his movie theater co-worker, Mike Taylor (Starman (no, not that one)), showed up, along with their friend Rick Childress (Diamond Fist). The team of heroes they all created soon had a name (after a lengthy debate). The Paragons, defenders of Cleveland, Ohio, began to make their mark on K.C.’s world, and in their adventures, guided by him, began to change it.

The Paragons game lasted several months, but for some inexplicable reason (perhaps just because none of the players had ever been in a long-term game and couldn’t handle the change from their norm), though it was loved by all involved, the players decided that they wanted to make new characters and start a new team. K.C. obliged his players, and the final Paragons run ended with a bang—a very literal one (the nuclear explosion kind)—and with the death of several key characters, the closure of an ongoing plotline in the game, and the satisfaction of all involved. The follow-up began. First with one stalled attempt that didn’t quite come together (the W.I.L.D.Cards team). As the next attempt began, certain players, for various reasons, were gone from the game (Mike Taylor, Everett Purdy, Rick Childress). The Mid-Knights game began (defenders of not just Cleveland, but the whole of the mid-west…), and showed some promise. But the departure of Kevin Jones to the military left too large a hole, and the attempt was made to fill it with new players. Unfortunately, this group did not mesh together like the first. The magic that had happened when the Paragons came together (a group of players that largely ended up becoming life-long friends) was not rekindled. It became a bad experience for all involved, and after the departure of Tim and myself, K.C. closed the doors on that game, and, for the time, on his world.

T H E  F O R T E  Y E A R S

Some time later, Tim and K.C. met up, by chance, at a local comic convention. They discussed all the things that had gone wrong with the latter days of the Mid-Knights. And they both agreed that they missed the experience that the initial Paragons game had brought them. They decided it might be worth trying again, with another game. But this time, to avoid the problems, it was decided that a smaller group would be best, and best made up of people from the Paragons run. So Tim, myself and Jeff ended up at K.C.’s new condo, with new characters in hand, ready to try again. Tim created Phantasm, a skilled but sarcastic martial master who punched first and…well, most of the time didn’t even bother ASKING questions later. I decided to rethink a concept I had tried in the post-Paragons gaming that hadn’t worked out. With some tweaking, that character became Dr. Jackal, a super-strong werewolf-type that brought the super-hero/rock star metaphor to life (complete with the long Kip Winger hair that was already starting to become the rage in the late 80s). Jeff attempted something none of them had ever tried and created female character, an other-dimensional sorceress named Phantashia, someone new to Earth culture and all its complexities, the fish-out-of-water character. And K.C. decided that he would set his new game in Seattle, a city that had always interested him. And so, with one gamemaster and three players, the new game officially launched.

And on that Thursday night—November 5th, 1987—something began that would change K.C.’s world forever. That would literally change the lives of all involved, strange as it might seem, forever. Something that would last for just shy of eight years, and yet something that would live on after and still be around, twenty years later.

It was a team called Forte.

It wasn’t called that at first. As with the Paragons, when it first began, no official team name was decided on. It was something everyone felt they’d just get around to. The game was run weekly, starting around 6:30pm or so, when everyone was off work or out of classes. The first three weeks were pretty tame, pretty comfortable. But it was on the fourth run when K.C. decided to mix things up a little bit. To everyone’s surprise (especially with the whole “tested people only” rule that was a maxim for starting the new game), he brought in a new player. The bigger surprise, no doubt, was that he brought in a GIRL. At least to this group of players, such an idea as a female playing a role-playing game was unheard of. Sure, sometimes someone’s girlfriend would sit in on the D&D game to see what it was all about, maybe, but an actual woman gamer? WAS there such a thing? Well, yes and no. Kaye Dunham joined the game at K.C.’s invitation, as the two knew each other from a fan group they were in and he’d been telling her about it. Kaye was, however, NOT a gamer. A fact that turned out to be one of the secret magical ingredients of Forte.

When everyone got over their shock, they all started to realize that things were suddenly much better. Kaye came with a character named The Mist, a meteorologist with a belt that gave her weather powers and the ability to walk through walls. How the rules allowed her character to this, Kaye really didn’t have much of a clue. She really didn’t care much about the rules. She didn’t care how many dice of damage she could do to a bad guy, or how to tweak the system to save a few character points to spend on more skill levels. All Kaye knew was that you created a character…one with depth, one with layers, one with a real personality, and you role-played that character. Oh, wait…so THAT’s why they call them “role-playing games”… Aside from just being a great person to be around, Kaye brought an entirely new level to the Champions experience that none of the gamer guys had envisioned. She raised the bar. And it changed things from then on.

THE “CLUBHOUSE ERA”

The team began as four super-heroes in the city of Seattle. After a brief time, someone (history may never remember who) came up with the name “Forte” for the team, based on them being a foursome. It worked. And it stuck. So Forte began fighting K.C.’s own personal rogues gallery of villains in the great state of Washington—some old standards from his previous games (and some of those taken right from comics), some new ones he created for Forte. But more than slugging it out with evil was going on. Within the K.C. world, the world of Forte was being created, a dynamic world, one with not only plots, but with sub-plots and character arcs. K.C. created a living, breathing cast of supporting characters (“NPC’s”, or “non-player characters”, as we call them in gaming). The heroes of Forte began to forge ongoing relationships with them. With the returning Johnny Quest, who moved to his Seattle office and became not only a good resource for the team but a good friend. The people working at UNCLE Seattle—people like Bill Reynolds, Gary Williams and Cathy Gregario. People like Mari and Ravi Singh, local mystical types and father-and-daughter. The Forte characters began to create friendships. And even relationships. Phantasm became involved with Canadian heroine Bluejay. Dr. Jackal started out the game with a girlfriend in his backstory (a “DNPC”, or Dependent Non-Player Character, someone who depends on you and gets into trouble you have to rescue them from, something you get extra character points for choosing), but that relationship was quickly gone, and he started falling into a string of very short relationships, a pattern that fit his downward spiral of fame and excess, including a brief thing with a heroine called Ghost Girl, a member of Portland’s hero team, The Four Aces, another group of characters that became part of the team’s life and its tapestry.

The early times were very light-hearted for the team. The heroes were four friends who took their jobs seriously, but not TOO seriously. Instead of a high-tech hero base, they took over an abandoned warehouse and built thrown-together bedrooms (in case going home after a long fight seemed like too much effort) and put in a hot tub. It become more of a clubhouse than a base, really, their place to meet up and unwind and relax. Nothing fancy by any means. It actually became Dr. Jackal’s home for a period of time when he got too into his Dr. Jackal persona and the lifestyle, lost his “day job”, and gave up his “real life” and became the fun-loving hard-partying Jackal full-time, which made a continuous mess of his life. The foursome got along fine, save for the occasional mostly-fun friction between Phantasm and Phantashia. Seattle’s heroes weren’t like the big well-known teams. There was no roll call, no combat training. Just four people with amazing powers who did what they thought was right and had a good time doing it. They did make some news, and accomplished some big things, the pinnacle of which was probably their journey through time (culminating in the milestone “issue” of Forte #50) and their saving the timestream.

THE ROMANCE ERA

But change being a constant, things started changing with Forte. Phantasm decided to retire and get married to Bluejay and took a job offer to found the first Canadian arm of SHIELD known as BRAND (the Bureaucratic Regional Agencies for National Defence. Yes, that’s Defence with a “C”. It’s a Canadian thing). Mist began to step down from heroing, and started a career with UNCLE. Phantashia, who had become both a model and a basketball player (it could happen…), stepped away from heroing to pursue other avenues in her life. These changes all made sense for the characters. But they really took place because the players thought it might be fun to try something new. Unlike the Paragons players, the Forte players didn’t WANT to end the campaign. They loved the Forte world. But they wanted a little variety, and to spread their wings a little bit. So most decided to create new characters. I, myself, thought it was important for Forte to retain some continuity, so I decided I’d stick with Dr. Jackal to keep the foundation going (and that character had no desire to retire anyway).

So some new heroes began to appear in Seattle. First, Phantasm’s brother, Frank Clayton, a martial-arts speedster called Dash, joined up with Forte briefly (and didn’t last because the character wasn’t working for Tim). Soon after his (very literal) disappearance, someone else new stepped into Forte’s lives, and just before the exodus of most of the original characters. A heroine named Knightsabre, a very strong and beautiful teleporter, appeared and crossed paths with the team and ended up joining up with them. This was significant on several levels, but the biggest of them was because of what happened behind the scenes. A new player had joined the game. But not one that was TOTALLY new. Kevin, who had played Superion in the Paragons game, got out of the Army (thanks to a stress fracture in his ankle) and was back in Sacramento, and he was invited to come check out what the old gaming group was up to. So Kevin created Knightsabre, his first attempt at a female character, and stepped into the world of Forte and, no surprise, greatly shook things up (Kevin has a habit of doing that). Kevin brought, in Knightsabre, some challenges to the norm of that very safe and friendly game. He brought some conflict. He brought some drama. And his style of play raised the bar for the others and inspired them to step into some new areas.

So soon after Knightsabre’s appearance, another mysterious (mysterious being quite an understatement) hero started showing up, one that the others didn’t know if they could trust. He was a masked man named Vanguard who seemed to be spying on the team, a man with energy powers (culminating in an optical blast) and at least a dozen different identities. Was he friend or foe? Spy or ally? This was Jeff’s replacement for Phantashia, and if each of us in gaming has a character that is truly “us”, that character we were born to play, Vanguard became Jeff’s. The initial distrust of Vanguard soon turned to acceptance and friendship, and this quirky and paranoid British man became a staple of Forte from then on in. And two new heroes, too, stepped into the picture. One was a very flamboyant and wacky (and wealthy) Brazilian woman with stretching powers named Cincoflex, a woman running from a dangerous and tragic past…one created by her player, Kaye, who decided to try something very different from the much more stable and practical Mist. And a young man with sonic powers and martial prowess fell into Forte’s lives about the same time, a hero named Shrike, who would soon be discovered to be the son of Phantasm and Bluejay, cast back in time from a near-future. Tim liked to keep things all in the family.

So the dynamic of the team changed drastically, with new faces, new stories, new ideas. And new enemies. This new Forte faced a variety of new challenges, but their greatest nemesis became the powerful industrialist Maxwell Ravenscoft, a charismatic and influential businessman with secret plans to overthrow America as part of something called the Millennium Executors. He personified everything that was great about the Forte “comic”. He had no super-powers. He was not invulnerable. He was the best kind of villain…the most difficult to face. He was the mastermind, hiding behind attorneys and media and plausible deniability. He became Forte’s greatest threat to date (and a complete obsession for Vanguard), and one the heroes had to actually think their way around, not punch. He was the antagonist that defined much of this period of Forte evolution. And other things did as well. Like romance. Shrike and Cincoflex began a relationship together. As did Dr. Jackal and Knightsabre, something, I should point out, that was not played out in the game as such (that’s me covering for me and Kevin), but mostly in story decisions made by Kevin and I, and things written outside of the game. It made good story sense. You had Dr. Jackal, the carousing womanizer who hid his own insecurities behind burgeoning alcoholism and meaningless (and safe) one-night stands, and a strong, intelligent woman that actually challenged him and sought to break through the walls he’d built around himself. It made for good comic writing, and if Champions was meant to simulate comics, we were doing our best to give the “readers” what they wanted. This became sort of an unspoken ideal for Forte, this dedication to story. In many (if not most) games, players are just in it to kill stuff and get experience points. In Forte, we all cared deeply about the overall story, as well as our characters' individual ones. Maybe the fact that we were all writers (with one artist in the bunch) made that difference for us. Regardless, it made for a game that we were proud of, even if (at the time...) it didn't have any kind of "audience".

So there was a period of relative happiness for the team, despite personal challenges (such as Dr. Jackal going feral and being framed for murder) and new villains to face (like Dr. Cyber, a woman who had appeared briefly early in Forte history but became a major player in this era). It was during this time, also, that an eccentric private eye (with a monkey) named Erin O’Day stepped into Forte’s lives, someone who would end up being a part of Forte’s history from that day forward. Players began to take more risks with their characters, which made for better stories. Knightsabre became pregnant, not long after learning that she was actually a Scion, a descendant of the gods, and so was Jackal (a revelation to him as well). The further revelation that their “coupling” was what was driving Jack feral threatened to end things for them, but Jack’s panic at how to react to that led him to propose to her (not the first man to resort to that when unable to think of anything else to say). Shrike and Cinco’s romance continued to flourish, despite his brief struggle with alcohol. The team’s greatest challenge culminated in the discovery and defeat of the Millennium conspiracy and Ravenscroft’s involvement, and the difficult decision to keep the conspiracy a secret to keep the real facts from tearing America and its government apart. This also led to a hard choice about what to do with Ravenscroft as a result (as arrest was not an option), and Knightsabre, Shrike and Cinco sided with the idea of sticking him into a pocket dimension (by way of Knightsabre’s dimensional teleportation powers) for his crimes, while Jack and Vanguard stood opposed. Until then the Forte team had always known harmony, and this was their first real rift, a sign that the team and the game had evolved. Knightsabre ended up giving up her powers to be able to marry Jackal without driving him insane and murderous, and she retired from heroing, marking the end of another era.

THE INTERCRIME ERA

But the Intercrime era quickly began. The happiness and peace the team had known was about to become a bitter memory. A new hero appeared and joined Forte, a man named Synergy, who was the vessel for a mysterious energy source that gave him his powers (Kevin’s replacement for Knightsabre, who continued on in the game as an NPC, but wasn’t going to be much help in combat with no powers). The team stumbled upon the beginnings of a large new threat, a joining of several major crimelords into one coordinated organization known as Intercrime. What began as a simple investigation went fatally wrong. On the streets of Reno, during a pitched battle with a pair of extremely powerful villains that were part of Intercrime, Synergy lost his life…violently and brutally. This was a thing Forte had never known. And it certainly wasn’t planned by K.C. It was as much a surprise to him as us (those unpredictable dice…). But Kevin, in his love of story and drama, embraced the idea. And now a Forte member had fallen in the line, and Intercrime became, in an instant, the greatest foe the team had ever known.

But their assault on Forte was not over. Very soon after, in another Intercrime-related villain fight, the unthinkable happened again. A villain whom Forte had fought before, but was now much more powerful thanks to Intercrime’s augmentation, collapsed a burning building on both Dr. Jackal and Shrike. Dr. Jackal was rushed to the hospital after nearly losing his life. Shrike was not so fortunate. Not having Jack’s defenses, being a normal human with sonic powers, he perished in the fire and collapse, a horrible and unimaginable death. As with last time, this was not planned by K.C., and he even attempted to back away from it, but Tim, like Kevin, was excited by the idea, and what it did for the story. Another hero of Forte had died, not a new face like Synergy but a now long-standing member. And one who was the love of another Forte member, Cincoflex. Cincoflex (Kaye decided) went insane with her grief, and a long period of mental breakdown began for her. Forte was facing its darkest hour and greatest challenge. And a year-long storyline known as “The Intercrime Affair” began, with Forte scouring the world in search of Intercrime’s members, going after one crimelord after the next, swearing vengeance and an end to the organization.

Phantasm came out of retirement at Jack’s request to aid them, still not knowing that the fallen Shrike was actually his own son from the future (something the others couldn’t bear to tell him). Another new hero, one named Thresher (Kevin’s latest) fell in with the team and became part of the hunt. Things got dark. The heroes faced one tragedy after another in their lives. And more loss was forthcoming. Thresher died violently in the jungles of South America, another victim of Intercrime (though this was one planned by K.C., as Kevin was leaving for the Marine Corps and was leaving the game). The powerless and pregnant Knightsabre was kidnapped by one of the crimelords, and the hunt to find her ended with her giving birth to twins in the jungle (twins delivered by a super-villain, in an interesting twist). Another new face appeared. During a time when Dr. Jackal suffered a major head injury which led to a memory loss (and the belief that Cincoflex was his wife and the woman he loved, which led to some very emotional fiction written by Kaye and myself about that situation), Nick Fury, head of SHIELD, decided to assist Forte and “loan” them one of his organization’s super-powered operatives, a Texan savate expert called Twostep. Twostep was a character I’d been building to replace Dr. Jackal when I finally retired him, and Jackal’s sudden convalescence seemed like the perfect time to introduce the character, so that he’d be established in Forte continuity in preparation for his eventual return and full-time joining of the team. Just as he joined up with the group, Forte had to face one of the crimelords, a dark mage called Lucifer D’Arque (a man who had taken “Lucifer” as his confirmation name). He was finally taken down and killed in the battle, but Forte did not know then that his threat to the team was far from over, and that he would become one of their greatest and most long-lasting enemies.

With more twists and shocks along the way (such as Cincoflex’s vengeance murder of the villainess who had killed Shrike, an act that no one else on the team had witnessed or could prove, and one that her own fractured mind quickly blocked out), the Intercrime Affair built up to a staggering climax, with the discovery that Phantasm’s own brother—Frank Clayton, the former Forte hero Dash—was the actual mastermind behind Intercrime and was pulling all the strings as the villain called Octave. Driven mad during his dimensional travels, he returned to Earth a different and dangerous man, and, as the final revelation revealed, was actually the puppet of the dark lord Tellezar, the mystic evil warlord from Forte past that had overthrown Phantashia’s dimension, who was now using Intercrime to set up his sacrifice of every soul on Earth. Tellezar and Intercrime were defeated, but Dash was left a mental vegetable and placed in a home, seemingly lost to the world forever (still to this day). The Intercrime story was the defining era for Forte, where the stakes went to all-time highs, the stories became epic and dramatic, the character development was far beyond what was normally found in most role-playing games. And it wasn’t just people involved in Forte who knew it. A Champions A.PA. (Amateur Press Alliance) called "The Clobberin’ Times" had been started by Tim during Forte’s earlier times, and members from around the nation got to follow the write-ups and Forte’s adventures. The game now had a following. It had fans. It had moved, in many ways, to another level.

THE D’ARQUE ERA

Forte began to put its collective life back together, and Phantasm once again hung up the cowl and returned to his life commanding BRAND. A new hero would quickly take his place (imagine that?). Forte met up with a new hero named Hammer (Tim’s new character, in case you didn’t guess) who soon became one of the team. Forte was back to four members again, and Dr. Jackal, Hammer, Cincoflex and Vanguard became the team of this era. They dealt with a variety of villains and threats (included Los Champeons de Brazil, a very powerful hero team that Forte had exposed as corrupt during Intercrime, who thereafter gave up the pretense and went villain), and challenges to their personal lives (including Hammer’s wife in a constant state of panic of him being a super-hero, and Cincoflex putting her own shattered psyche slowly back together and moving on with her life).

But former Forte heroes did reappear, as Forte had become about continuity, with old characters and plotlines returning. Phantashia began to appear in a spectral form, having been stripped of her magics and corporeal form for using forbidden magics to defend her homeworld in the great war she had returned there to fight. Mist returned in an unexpected way—in fiction. Kaye began writing tales about what Mist was up to, and that story involved a group of powerful otherworldly mages called the Omnicron choosing both Mist and Stephen Strange to be the parents to a child yet to be born, a soul they had somehow rescued (before birth) that needed to be protected, as he was a special child of destiny. She and Strange actually had to conceive the child…a fact that started off rather awkwardly but soon blossomed into love.

This era saw its earth-shattering conclusion in a multi-part storyline called “D’Arque Bloodlines”. Things began to go very wrong in the personal lives of the heroes. There was infighting. There was doubt. There were triggers that pushed some of them over the emotional edge, like mysterious calls and letters that were slowly taking Cinco’s mind back apart. Her snapping led to one of the more unusual and shocking moments in Forte history (one that was written as fiction by Kaye) where the buried feelings between her and Jack exploded when she held a gun to her head and threatened suicide if he did not make love to her. Driven by both the need to stop her and his own passions (which seemed dramatically heightened), Dr. Jackal cheated on his wife, bringing their marriage to the brink and driving a wedge between him and his teammate, Cinco, perhaps forever. Though the fact that neither anguished heroes seemed to be able be out of each other’s presence for long without headaches and illness cast suspicions on what was happening…to some, but not to the scorned Knightsabre. The dark times for Forte, including a violent rift between Vanguard and Hammer (who had recently lost his powers, perhaps forever), started to reek of manipulation. Cincoflex’s following suicide attempt brought things to the breaking point, when revelations began to descend and lead them to a mystery that rocked the team to its core.

Lucifer D’Arque was behind it all, with the mystical villainess, Helliquin, as his pawn on Earth (he, of course, was still in Hell). Various storylines drew together. Clues from past events suddenly were found connected. And Lucifer D’Arque’s great plan was revealed. Before his death, he had planned for his own demise and plotted his return…not just to life, but to godhood. The heroes were stunned to discover that Dr. Jackal and Knightsabre had not actually had twins, but triplets. The third daughter was taken by D’Arque from the womb, taken to another hellish dimension and raised there in agony and torture, until she had matured to the point where he could “rescue” her, send her back in time and take her as his lover. Through the Scion bloodlines of both Jackal and Knightsabre, this third daughter had the legacy of godhood in her, and a remarkable potential for power. The child born to them would be D’Arque’s vessel, and his spirit would be reborn in his own son’s body to enter into eternal and darkly divine power. But having foreseen this, the Omnicron had stolen the child’s soul away at conception, and gave it, instead, to their chosen protectors…Mist and Stephen Strange. So it was revealed that not only was Caleb, the son of Mist, Lucifer D’Arque’s son, but genetically, the grandson of Dr. Jackal and Knightsabre.

This was all discovered in the midst of the kidnapping of Caleb by Helliquin, and a mad chase to find her, save the child and stop the ceremony that would return D’Arque to all-powerful life ended at, of all place, the McKinley Observatory, the very place where Forte had first begun. To place a sense of time on that, that was in Forte #1, the first run. It was now Forte #150. A fierce battle raged inside, with Forte heroes past and present joining together (the former (living) Forte heroes had returned for this crisis) to save both the child Caleb and Prime—the teleporting heroine who had been part of Forte’s tales for some time, but was later discovered to be Phantasm’s daughter from the future, and the sister of Shrike. Forte’s 150th issue ended with Dr. Jackal facing his own lost daughter that he’d never known, and her death at the hands of Hammer as he attempted to stop her from killing the fleeing Mist and Caleb (an accidental killing, as Hammer’s powers had just recently returned in a newly mutated form, making him much stronger than before). As the Observatory burned and collapsed around them, heroes rushed outside, but the last of them was Dr. Jackal, carrying the broken, lifeless body of Helliquin…who not only was revealed to be his daughter, but also to be Black Rose, a villainess Forte had fought in their earliest adventures, one who had mysteriously told Dr. Jackal he would pay for something he would do to her in the future. Finally, it was revealed that this something he did was father her.

After all this, the heroes tried to put their lives back together as best they could. Cincoflex’s seven-minute clinical death after her suicide attempt seemed to have made her (mostly) sane again, and she started moving on. Dr. Jackal and Knightsabre had to try to put their marriage back together while dealing with the tragedy of losing a daughter they never knew they had (and knowing what her life had been like after she’d been taken from them, that they hadn’t been able to be there for her). Hammer had to deal with both his new mutated form (which came with some nasty facial disfigurement, necessitating his new full-face metal mask) and that fact that he’d killed his friends’ daughter, even if it was to save another friend’s son. And Vanguard suddenly became a target for multiple assassins, when his oldest nemesis (and the man who had, in essence, given him his powers), Baron Kromatis, came gunning for him. And in the middle there was a nasty bit of business where Jack and Sabrina were kidnapped by…well, by Jack. An other-dimensional doppelganger Dr. Jackal going by the name of Blackjack (who had overthrown his own Earth) captured them and imprisoned (and tortured) them on his world while he returned and took Jack’s place on Forte and fooled the other heroes into helping him find a device that he needed. He was discovered when Thresher (remember, the dead guy?) suddenly showed up…from Blackjack’s world, and a member of the underground hero resistance movement called the Paragons. Blackjack managed to escape back, and the living Thresher took the Forte heroes back with him to defeat his world’s dictator and rescue their own teammates. Fighting alongside familiar and not-so familiar faces (like a cybernetic Sydney Todd going by the name Dr. Cyber), and with many casualties on the Paragons’ side, the heroes defeated Blackjack and freed that world, bringing Jack and Sabrina home to recover from the physical and psychological scars. With more villains and challenges along the way, the era at least ended on a happy note, with a Christmas party up on the satellite home of Prime that many of the world’s heroes attended, where she announced her engagement to Johnny Quest. It was a moment of peace and joy before the Forte world changed forever. In many ways.

THE INVASION ERA

This new era began with a couple of major changes. The first was Tim’s leaving the game to go off to college, and Kaye would follow not long after (leaving the game, that is. She didn’t follow Tim to college…). This was going to leave a team of me and Jeff, which wasn’t much of a team. K.C. discussed the idea of bringing in a new player, and Jeff had suggested a friend of his named Randy. I was reluctant. Knowing what had happened between the Paragons and Forte games, I didn’t want a repeat of the experience, and would have preferred to see Forte go out on a high note rather than die a slow death by messing with the trusted-players-only format. But Randy was brought in, and turned out to be one of the best things to ever happen to the game. A daring and inventive player—and a great guy besides—he quickly fit right in and took the game to a whole new level with his unique and contagious gaming style.

The new hero he brought in was named Anvil, a mysterious metal-skinned strongman who seemed to be on the run from something (to the point of not even using his real name at first. The heroes first met him as Aaron Baize instead of his real identity, Mark Spires). Anvil was traveling through Seattle and ending up meeting and joining Forte, but wasn’t hanging out with the team very long at all before the world of Forte saw perhaps its darkest hour descend. In the form of a mass alien invasion. On New Year’s Eve, ships began to descend to Earth, and warrior-priests known as the Saoshyant unleashed a massive EMP that wiped out technology across most of the globe. Serving an all-powerful being they referred to as The Almighty, the Saoshyant attacked and invaded Earth and began “assimilating” the human race. This was a global crisis on an unprecedented scale. The world’s militaries and heroes scrambled to fight the invasion. Members of Forte ended up aboard a Saoshyant living ship and out into deep space, where they managed to defeat the Almighty and the Saoshyant. After returning many captured beings from other alien races (others “assimilated” over the decades) back to their homeworlds, the Forte heroes returned home, three months after their disappearance, to find the battle had been won there as well (their defeat of the Almighty’s brain of course helping that happen). But Earth was in shambles. Technology was all but gone and just starting to get pieced back together. Whole towns were gone that were assimilated. Communications were down and thousands were scrambling to locate loved ones. The death toll was staggering, and included several well-known heroes. Some villains had received Presidential pardons for helping in the war for Earth and were now rethinking their lives. It was a humanitarian disaster unlike any the world had ever known, but it somehow brought the peoples of Earth closer together as they struggled together to rebuild their world and their lives.

Vanguard got the Forte base back in order, and several members moved in, including Jackal, Sabrina and their children, as they felt a hidden base was a safer place, at the time, for the family in the dangerous post-invasion Seattle. And an old face returned. Twostep resigned from SHIELD and decided to go private sector and look for a place on Forte (I was finally going to be retiring Jack and trying something new). But just as he arrived, and as he met Anvil for the first time, the Almighty suddenly returned. Sort of. The hive-mind that made up the Almighty had agreed to destroy itself by flying its ship into the Earth’s sun, but some of the minds in it didn’t agree with this ultimate surrender, and reached out and latched on to the nearest vessel they could inhabit…which turned out to be the Synergy force, the force that was released from the dead Forte hero of the same name and had inhabited three other people…a grandfather and his two grandchildren. Suddenly a giant mostly-humanoid being looking like a giant Synergy (all black energy with a glowing nimbus) was stomping through Seattle, and the Forte heroes had to find a way to outthink and defeat it. Having to enter the being itself, the heroes discovered a young woman there, someone the Almighty was protecting/imprisoning and referring to as the “soul child”, who ended up being Megan Graham, the main inheritor of the Synergy force (of the “good side”). Freeing her drove what was left of the Almighty into an insane and vengeful rage, and what remained—embodied in Megan’s now-mad grandfather (her brother had already died, so there were only two Grahams left), Walt Graham, inheritor of the “evil side” of the Synergy force—attempted to destroy Earth’s sun with a cannon on the satellite they all ended up on. The coordinated efforts of Anvil, Vanguard and Dr. Jackal destroyed the Almighty forever before it could carry out its final plans.

After the Almighty’s final defeat (Forte #175), Dr. Jackal’s retirement, as well as Cincoflex’s (who returned to her native Brazil to help with the rebuilding there), and Hammer’s due to his being afraid to change into his new form and find himself stuck that way permanently, left Vanguard, Anvil and Twostep as the only active members of Forte to carry on in post-invasion Seattle as the world started its slow return to normalcy. They helped keep the city in order and its citizens safe, fought villains attempting to take advantage of the global situation for their own gain, had their paths cross Erin O’Day a number of times, and Vanguard began a romance with a New York heroine—Telestar, the armless telekinetic member of the all-female hero team Angel Flight—but feared to commit to it for fear of letting anyone get close to him and be targeted by his enemies. And speaking of Vanguard’s enemies, the trio of remaining Forte heroes found themselves up against Vanguard’s old nemesis, Baron Kromatis, and his Euro-terrorist army FORCE Command. They were captured and taken out to sea by ship, where Vanguard underwent forced brain surgery (and a “downloading” of his brain), and barely escaped, wounded and hunted across post-invasion Europe. Against seemingly impossible odds, they managed to stop FORCE Command’s plans for an overthrow of Europe and deal a major blow to the organization. But their world travels weren’t over yet. The disappearance of Cincoflex in Brazil led the team to a prolonged South American adventure (a story titled “Desperately Seeking Cinco”) trying to find her, where they teamed up briefly with Night Warrior, one of the founding Aegis members (whose player was in town visiting K.C.). They managed her rescue, through another showdown with Los Champeons de Brazil, and also found out that Cincoflex was seven months pregnant, carrying the child of her on-and-off billionaire boyfriend Bruce Wayne.

This era ended with a multi-part story that led up to Forte #200, a milestone anniversary that both Tim and the recently-departed Kaye returned for. A series of sudden and violent kidnappings (including Dr. Jackal, one of Jackal’s twins, Cincoflex, Mist, Phantasm and Dr. Cyber…and one of those kidnappings led to the destruction of most of the famed Forte base) led to the discovery of the return of several of Forte’s deadliest—and dead—villains, including Lucifer D’Arque, the Dummy (who died in Forte #75), Blackjack (put to death for his crimes on his world), and Sein Glace (killed by Cincoflex). A gateway to Hell was opening, something masterminded by the dark king Tellezar. This breach happened at NRG labs, one of the companies owned by Maxwell Ravenscroft (who was, at the time, running for Vice President on the ticket of Gore/Ravenscroft), and the destruction there led to one explosion in a lab that coated a young woman there named Kyra Walker in some kind of blue liquid that nearly killed her and left her seemingly frozen. Twostep, Vanguard, Anvil, Hammer and Phantashia entered the portal and fought their way across the planes of Hell itself to find and rescue their friends and stop Tellezar’s latest bid to reap all the souls of Earth. Part of his plan with the kidnappings, beyond vengeance, was to blackmail the heroes into bringing Mist’s child, Caleb, to him. But in the end, Phantashia made the choice to sacrifice herself to rid reality of him once and for all. In her final act of heroism, both she and Tellezar ceased to exist, and without the time to mourn, the other heroes raced to get back through the portal to Earth before it closed, with an army of the dead and damned looking to follow them through and escape Hell. They made it back home and sealed the rift. Tellezar was gone forever, but at great cost. Phantashia, one of the founding heroes of Forte, had given her life to save the world.

THE “NEW FORTE” ERA

The passing of a Forte founder, and her memorial service atop Washington’s Mt. Rainier (attended by many of the world’s heroes and, surprisingly, a few villains), heralded the beginning of a new era for both the campaign and the team. Tim and Kaye were now gone from the game, leaving myself and Jeff as the two remaining original players (but not for much longer), and now another new player, in addition to Randy, was now added . Jeff and Randy’s friend Jim Kletzing had been invited to join the game to make up for the drop in players. When Forte returned from Hell they found that two new heroes had shown up and been involved in the battle to save lives at NRG—an African telekinetic named Armature (Jim’s character) and a young woman (also a telekinetic) named Telesis…a new character of Jeff’s. While Vanguard would not be leaving Forte completely, an idea to mix things up a little led to some players having more than one character. Randy himself had created Chill (the aforementioned Kyra Walker), who would slowly become a part of the Forte team as she recovered from her transformation and dealt with her new form. Twostep remained as my sole character (I already had two with Jack still being in town, though retired). And Jim would create himself a second hero soon enough.

With Vanguard taking a sabbatical, leaving Twostep as the most experienced hero on a relatively green new Forte team, the heroes faced villains both new and old, more encounters with both Maxwell Ravenscroft (who dropped out of the Presidential race) and the trouble-prone Erin O’Day, organized crime, and a number of shocking revelations. They also, during this time, began to encounter Eclipse more and more—Megan Graham, inheritor of the Synergy force, now starting to use her abilities to help others. She became an ally to Forte, while not officially joining, and a close friend to Chill. Eclipse, I should note, was not any player’s character, but an NPC of K.C.’s. But she would become an official member further down the road.

But soon into this new age of Forte, Jeff suddenly found out he was being moved by the Air Force, out of state, and would therefore have to leave the game he helped found. This culminated in the final Vanguard story arc, and Forte’s final showdown FORCE Command. Forte discovered that the Vanguard they knew might not be the ACTUAL Vanguard, but something of a clone, and their investigation (which had to be conducted with this maybe-fake Vanguard in their midst) led to the discovery of Vanguard’s origin, his “creation” by Baron Kromatis, and the fact that the Baron had a planted control word in Vanguard that could turn him into an assassin doing the Baron’s bidding at any time. The trail led to Germany, and to the final staging of FORCE Command’s “Operation Omega”, where the real Vanguard was found to have been captured by Kromatis during his vacation and was now under his control (leading Forte’s heroes to fight both the “fake” Vanguard—a.k.a. “Attentader”—and the real one until Vanguard was able to reassert control). In the end, Forte stopped the destruction of London and took Kromatis down once and for all (with Vanguard, poetically, dealing the final blow). With his oldest (and original) enemy vanquished, Vanguard chose to retire from Forte and step into a new life—perhaps a new one with Telestar. And with this, Jeff said his good-byes to the game he’d been a part of, weekly, for five years.

I would be the next to leave, not long after, suddenly needing to move to Arizona. This led to the secrets of Twostep being revealed, the catalyst for which was Twostep’s killing of several gang members during a martial fight, seemingly having lost control. Suddenly wanted by police, UNCLE and, it seemed, SHIELD, Twostep disappeared, contacting Anvil and Armature soon after. They found out a pair of shocking truths about the man they’d known as Nathaniel Pharaoh. First, that his name wasn’t actually Nathaniel Pharaoh, but instead James Caleb Bane, a son of the very powerful Texas Bane crime family. As a young man, he had turned on his father and the other Bane brothers and meant to testify against them, but was “killed” during an attack on an UNCLE convoy that was carrying him to a new safehouse. Near death but not actually dead, he was taken in by SHIELD, an organization largely made up of “dead” men, and was offered a chance at a new life. One that came with a new face (wonderful plastic surgery work they do at SHIELD). He became an agent of SHIELD for a number of years, but his friendship with a Dr. Carson there led to his taking part in genetic experiments the doctor was performing—ones that created super-beings, something specifically forbidden by the SHIELD charter. He became stronger and tougher, and used this with his savate training to become a nearly unstoppable fighter. With Carson’s disappearance, Nick Fury, Supreme Commander of SHIELD, decided to look the other way and make Pharaoh a part of THUNDER Division, SHIELD’s hero team. As Twostep, Nathaniel did great things for the team, but other super-beings “created” by Carson began to go bad and turn villain.

Now it seemed the instability was starting in Twostep. And while he planned to answer for his crimes, there was one more thing he had sworn to do in his life that he couldn’t accomplish from behind bars—take the Bane family down. He needed Anvil and Armature to help him find Carson, which the trio did, and the broken and suicidal Carson put Twostep through the reversal process before taking his own life. Now wanted as Twostep for murder (and hunted by SHIELD as well, who were protecting the secret that one of their own scientists had created a number of villains), Nathaniel Pharaoh, once more a normal man, counted on his friends to keep his whereabouts a secret and swore to them he would return to stand trial when his business was done.

So as Twostep snuck off into the sunset and left Forte behind him, so did I. That was April 8, 1993…and Forte issue number 221. Nearly five and a half years for me as a Forte hero. Dr. Jackal, mostly as his alter-ago Jack Parker, would remain a part of the ongoing Forte history as an NPC, as he and his family remained in Seattle and he became editor-in-chief of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and a best-selling author). With the departure of Jeff and me, the last of the starting Forte players was gone, leaving K.C. with his newer players, and newer heroes, to carry on the Forte world and its ongoing story. This was mainly just Randy and Jim for a time. But for a while, another player named Jim Monday joined the game with the Russian strongman and acrobat Tripwire. Jim Kletzing, meanwhile, created his second Forte character in the mystical, intelligent polar bear named Tomarssuk. Only the brain of Jim Kletzing could bring a polar bear to a super-hero game. And you know what? Tomarssuk, or “Tommy”, ended up becoming one of the best-known and most-loved Forte characters—played brilliantly by Jim—an unlikely hero with a contagious positive attitude and unique perspective on life and the world.

Telesis remained on-and-off with Forte as an NPC until her exit happened with the multi-part “The Jennifer Chase” storyline. It was discovered that the young girl whose real name was Jennifer Chase, one with a baby (that lived at the base with her and was part of the Forte family), who had always been secretive about her past, was on the run from an abusive and powerful husband…one who ended up being Twostep’s brother and part of the Bane family. When the Banes’ operatives got too close, she fled again, and her Forte friends rushed to find her before the hunters did. In the end, she was found, but would always be in danger as long as the Banes thought she was alive. Her and her baby’s deaths were faked by Forte, and the two of them started a new life through an organization called WEAVE, something of an underground railroad for abused and stalked women.

The remaining Forte heroes—Anvil, Chill, Armature, Tomarssuk…and occasionally Eclipse—carried on the Forte name, and fought dark racist organizations, had more dealings with Ravenscroft (which were made more interesting in that a couple of the heroes actually thought he was a good man), had run-ins with Armor Security—Ravenscroft’s personal hero team that had butted heads with Forte for years—fought an island full of cybernetic dinosaurs, faced a new and deadly threat in an organization called the Web (founded by Dr. Spider, a former member of Los Champeons, made up of spider-themed villains and many agents), and tangled with a powerful Chinese gang called the Moon Dragons.

The secrets of Anvil’s background were also revealed during this time. A scientist and co-founder of a company called Orion Inc., Mark Spires was a brilliant innovator and the mind behind a revolutionary solar collector that many wanted to get their hands on. However, dealing with their financial partners and things that were happening began to make Mark and his partner paranoid, and that paranoia was realized when an explosion rocked and destroyed Orion…the explosion that gave Mark Spires the powers of Anvil. But he now found himself on the run, inexplicably, by a shadowy government organization called CHESS. Only in these later years did he discover that he had been framed for the murder of a CHESS agent (by someone impersonating him…perfectly) and branded a traitor for attempting to sell technology secrets the Chinese. He also found that his partner and supposed-friend was under the control of the powerful Saturn Cartel and had sold him out. Anvil, with the help of his Forte friends, uncovered all the facts, cleared his name (mostly), and found the man who had been impersonating him, a shapeshifter named Anybody. Anvil was now finally able to stop running (and hiding) and consider getting on with his life.

This era ended, largely, in Forte #250, in Seattle’s Chinatown, where an ancient mage named the Emperor of the Sun was hatching a mystical plan to wipe out Seattle (long story, but it involved feng shui, and Seattle being in the way of it), held many of Seattle’s citizens in a mindless thrall of zombie-like terror, and planned to start a new empire on Earth from the city’s ashes. This anniversary issue guest-starred Mist and Hammer (Kaye and Tim returned to town for it…Jeff and I were in different states so couldn’t make it), and mainly took place in an abandoned Chinese theater in Seattle’s International District, with a desperate fight against the Emperor’s legions and a race to stop the city from going up in mystic flame. The Emperor was stopped, as were his plans, and a captured and tortured Erin O’Day was rescued (getting captured and tortured being kind of a bad habit of hers). This time her injuries were so bad that Forte’s doubts about her got put aside, and they helped see to her recovery. And she and Anvil slowly (and cautiously) began a relationship together.

THE “FINAL FORTE” ERA

It was time for the team—and the game—to have new heroes once more (if for no other reason than to keep Jim and Randy from having to be the only players). The first was a martial artist, an immigrant from the nation of Khanistan, who went by the name Secundus. He was played by another friend of Jim and Randy named Logan Waterman. After he and Anvil met at a bank robbery, the two became friends. Soon after, Secundus was invited to join a very secret (and illegal) martial arts tournament called “Terminus”, where wealthy audience members (wearing masks to protect their identities) would wager on the outcome. Secundus, however, didn’t find out until being taken there that these were fights to the death, and had to escape the island he’d been taken to, only to have his apartment blown up the next day. The Terminus organizers now wanted him dead to keep him quiet, and Secundus sought Forte’s aid to find the island and shut down Terminus once and for all…after a very brutal fight for the heroes in the ring.

Anvil, no longer having to stay away from his family for their own safety, traveled to Minneapolis try and patch thing up with his ex-wife Kelly and his young daughter, Bree. During his drive home from the journey (a trip that had resulted in him dying (briefly) during a fight with the crazed anti-alien scientist named Gabriel Freeman (no, Anvil’s not alien…long story), and his daughter discovering that he’s a super-hero), he ended up picking up a native-American woman named Chelsea Wildheart who had recently fallen into her family destiny as a mage and warrior. She would end up joining Forte as Moondancer, a character played by the game’s second female player, Andrea Roscoe. Anvil was now officially (as little as he liked the title) the leader of this new team…a team that would face its share of deadly challenges, such as more battles with the Web, a fight with Europe’s feared villain team known as the Marauders (Forte’s victory over them ended up as much a surprise them as everyone else), and even a desperate fight at the Rock of Eternity against a mage who planned to use the Primordican to unleash the Prime Evil on the universe. Surprising themselves again, this new team managed to save all reality, and get a major victory party thrown for them by the actual gods themselves.

Circumstances put Kaye back in Sacramento, which meant a chance to return to the Forte game. Creating a new heroine for a new Forte, Kaye brought Nightshift to the Forte world…a super-powered teleporting thief, part of a group of likewise-super thieves called the Night Fantastic. Nightshift had turned on that team, and its evil leader, a mysterious woman named Professor Night, and turned herself over to authorities. In consideration of her actions and assistance, UNCLE put her on something of a “probation”, and made part of her requirements becoming part of a hero team. So UNCLE asked Forte to be that team. Kaye’s move back to town also brought with her her husband, Ben, a friend of the Forte folks whom she’d met through the game, and someone who had gamed with them before. His character, Hologram (part of another campaign called “MAGIC” that had crossed over with Forte during convention games and his occasional visits to Sacramento), suddenly showed up in Forte’s world again, now seemingly cast there from his own Earth and unable to return. But things seemed different. His memories seemed a little jumbled, his powers slightly different. But Forte took in their old friend (even though most of the new people had never met him) and he became a part of the team.

This new arrangement of heroes faced a baptism of fire when they had to visit the super-villain prison in Pocantico Point, New Mexico, only to find themselves trapped inside during an attempt by the Web to break Dr. Spider out. With Web agents wreaking havoc in cities around the country—keeping UNCLE reinforcements and other supers busy—the Forte team of Anvil, Moondancer, Tommy, Nightshift and Hologram were on their own, in a prison filled with some of the deadliest villains alive suddenly released from their cells. The team managed to win the day, barely making it out with their lives, and stop an attempted forced meltdown of the prison’s thermonuclear plant. For her actions as part of it, Nightshift found herself the recipient of a full Presidential pardon for her past crimes…and suddenly an honest-to-goodness hero.

But Nightshift’s origins were soon revealed to have a devastating link to Forte. In the team’s attempts to find Professor Night, they not only did so, but found that she was, in fact, Sabrina Knight-Parker…Knightsabre. How this could be was a mystery to all, and she was taken into UNCLE custody and Dr. Jackal was brought in to confirm that it was really his wife. Further investigation—some mystical—revealed that the “good part” of her soul was stolen from her, leaving the base, evil part. It was further discovered that it was Lucifer D’Arque who did this, likely when he broke into the Forte base and severely injured her when kidnapping one of her babies. The remaining evil part of her became Professor Night, founded the Night Fantastic, hooked them all on a synthetic drug of her creation (Sabrina being a scientist and all) to keep them in line, and even committed a couple of murders. The Forte heroes followed a trail that led them to something called the Shadowzone (an area in Mexico that was cast into impenetrable darkness during the invasion, and one left alone by the Mexican army after soldiers going in never returned), and into a deep cavern where a ceremony was nearly completed—a ceremony put together by Lucifer D’Arque, trapped in the ‘Zone between Hell and Earth after his near-escape from Hell at the end of Forte #200, one that would open a rift and allow him to return to Earth fully. Forte fought him and his minions and destroyed the Shadowzone itself, freeing the trapped souls D’Arque was using for the ceremony (including Sabrina’s) and watching as D’Arque was sucked back through into Hell. UNCLE was left to figure out what to do with Sabrina for her crimes, and settled on a prolonged and monitored house arrest, while the former Forte heroine dealt with the knowledge of what she had done, and her and Jack’s marriage faced yet another daunting challenge. And it was right after this that Kaye and Ben had to leave the game again, and therefore Nightshift and Hologram ended their regular membership on the team.

After tracking down and capturing the East River Killer (a serial killer that ended up specializing in supers, and Forte discovered the remains of three known heroes), Forte began a prolonged investigation into Aquarius, an organization run by a woman called Sea Wasp, who ended up being the older sister of the deceased Forte hero Thresher. During their search, they came upon a new hero also looking for Aquarius, a robed man with some kind of energy sword named Lightsedge. This was the introduction of another new Forte player, Adam Johnson, debuting his character. Unfortunately, he and Forte ended up soundly defeated and captured on an Aquarius submarine. Waking up bound, they got the obligatory villain speech from the triumphant Sea Wasp, who then told them how she was going to dispose of them. Happening to have the Timelash in her possession (the same device D’Arque once (will?) used (use?) to cast both Shrike and Prime into the past), she decided to use it to hurl the heroes into the timestream and be done with them forever. Which she did. And Anvil, Moondancer, Tommy and Lightsedge ended up back in 1869, in the old west, and began a journey toward California to find the means to return home—along the way bumping into just about every fictional western hero ever on television, from the Lone Ranger to Maverick to the Rifleman to Brisco County Jr. to James West and Artemus Gordon. And Moondancer also got to meet her own grandmother (who apparently is much older than she’d thought), Moon Chases Stars, her predecessor in the mystical family legacy, who assisted the heroes. A journey to San Francisco and a retroactive reunion with the Emperor of the Sun, and a mystical orb, finally got the heroes back to their own time, but months after they had disappeared.

But while they were gone, another Forte milestone was reached. Forte #300. For this big occasion, most of the old gang appeared. I flew in from Arizona. Kevin, now back in Sacramento, showed up. Ben and Kaye made it. The regulars were there, too, of course (though Adam was unable to attend…and his only character was stuck in the old west anyway). And there was another sort-of newcomer in attendance. Aaron Storck, a friend of the group, had guest-starred in the Forte game on several occasions over the years when he visited from San Diego, playing Grav of Armor Security. But now he was living in Sacramento, and on this anniversary, debuted his own Forte character—Electro Man, a silver age hero coming out of retirement. This game’s main focus (besides trying to figure out where the missing current Forte was) was a recent decline in crime nationwide, and the discovery that people posing as Forte (a group that Forte had run into before) were making super-powered criminals pay for a “license” to commit crimes, or face very violent consequences. There were several fights against familiar villains, at least one big revelation (Dr. Spider appeared to still be alive, though she had been seen being killed in the big prison break attempt), the discovery that Web was behind it all, and a great time had by all, reliving all the Forte memories from over the years. Considering most role-playing games were lucky to last a handful of runs, having one reach three hundred runs was quite a reason to celebrate.

But though no one involved knew it at the time, this would be the last milestone anniversary for the Forte campaign. The end was near. During this final time, the remaining heroes of Forte dealt with some personal challenges, and some major events. Anvil remained for a time, but tragedy struck in his life when his ex-wife was involved in a head-on auto collision that put her in a coma, and he left the team to move to Minneapolis and take care of his daughter. Chill and Eclipse were on-and-off with Forte, taking a lot of their time away from Washington doing their very successful school tour, speaking to kids—and young girls especially—and teaching optimism, responsibility and personal heroism (and that whole “drugs are bad” thing). And Eclipse was also busy with her growing relationship with the Justice Squadron’s Captain Thunder. Electro Man did most of his Forte heroing while Forte was off in the old west for all those months, but did team up with the returned heroes from time to time (and found himself the unwitting vessel for a sentient super-computer intelligence called Omegabyte that planned to end all human life and let silicon intelligence reign). Armature spent a good deal of his time mobile, traveling with the Reverend Gabriel Guyder (whom he had befriended over the years) and provided security for the Reverend’s evangelical crusade.

This mainly left Moondancer, Tommy and Lightsedge as the active Forte team. There were difficult times. Moondancer had to deal with and face her growing rage (which often resulted in excessively violent and irrational behavior), and got assistance from her grandmother, Moon Chases Stars, in this…and also found out more about her coming destiny. Lightsedge’s alter-ego, Jeremy Talix, was a very wealthy man, and ended up in a dangerous bidding war with Maxwell Ravenscroft over Calantha Air, a company founded by Max. He also, during a Forte mission, ended up killing a thug in the heat of the moment, mainly for seeing his real face. This was something he would have to live with and would have a profound effect on his life down the road. Tommy continued to do his best to fit in with humanity, and started some romantic relationships (in his human form, that is), but faced roadblocks when the women found out that he was actually a polar bear that turned INTO a human. Though the Canadian heroine Vector, whose life Tommy saved, seemed to have no such concerns…

This Forte team faced a number of serious threats, including a horrifying night at a vintage movie theater where the trail of a large number of kidnapped children led to the discovery that they’d been transformed by a mad magician called Devian into half-beast creatures called the Kindread. They also dealt with a coven and a group of Cajun werewolves called Group LaRoux. But their most heralded achievement, the one that really put this incarnation of Forte on the public map, was their final defeat of Aquarius and Sea Wasp.

But the end came quickly. Suddenly, K.C., the gamemaster, had to leave California and move back to New York. A final story arc was wrapped up quickly, where the heroes (Chill, Eclipse, Tommy, Moondancer and Lightsedge) faced a number of old enemies and a few new. The final run—Forte #328—took place on September 28, 1995, the night before K.C. left town…just a month and change shy of eight years since the campaign began in that same condo in Roseville. The game had had a total of thirteen players and twenty-six Forte heroes. The team had gone from a loose hero club that stopped crime on the streets of Seattle to one of the most renowned and revered hero teams in their world’s history. One that had saved the world, and the universe, many times over. One that had changed the world K.C. created all those years ago forever, causing it to evermore be called “The Forte Universe”. It was one of the most successful and long-lived Champions games ever created, beating all the odds and keeping together longer than any of those involved could have imagined. But finally, it was through.

Or was it?

T H E  P O S T - C A M P A I G N  Y E A R S
( T H E  F O R T E  E X P A N D E D  U N I V E R S E )

All of us who were involved loved Forte and all the good times and memories, and the creative outlet, it had brought us. We invested a lot in it…in our characters, in the stories. We really didn’t want to see it go, but having the game’s G.M. and its players scattered across the nation made reviving it a logistical impossibility. So we appreciated what we had gotten from it, and the lifelong friendships (still to this day) and one marriage that had come from it.

But there were so many wonderful stories and plots contained within the game, and so much that was left unexplored with the team and its characters. And we could refer back to such things at will. K.C. had decided from the start that this campaign would be different from his others in that he would keep it recorded. He wrote up “game updates” after each run, summarizing what had happened and who was involved, and keeping track of both the date that the run happened and what the date was in the game. With this, a timeline was created. And mainly as an assist to him as a GM, he started The Forte Index, an alphabetical listing of each character—good, bad, and otherwise, anyone in the updates mentioned by name—and which issues they appeared in. This allowed for easy research. If he wanted to bring Summer Silversmith back as a villain for a run, for example, he could quickly find out which issues she’d appeared in before and read them over to remind himself what had happened. This would later allow for other historical research, since all the updates were date-coded. Several children were born to Forte members during the campaign. If one wanted to find out how old that child was currently, it was a simple matter of looking up that child in the index and looking up the issue where they were born, and then doing the math. This index also allowed players—who all had copies of both the updates and the index—to go back and read over updates of favorite storylines or events with ease. The way K.C. wrote these updates made them great reading, almost fiction in themselves, and a pleasure to go back and go over again.

THE CLOBBERIN’ TIMES

Forte had some continued life outside of, and after, the campaign. I mentioned the Clobberin’ Times. There was an annual event that started in 1990 called the “Clobberin’ Con”, where as many members of the ‘Times who could make it would show up each summer at Comic-Con International in San Diego (a group which consisted mainly of west coast ‘Times members, for obvious reasons). It was an excuse to get together and hang out and enjoy the world’s biggest comic convention together, but since this was a group based around Champions, it was a perfect opportunity to get some gaming in as well. An idea for a game came together before that first Clobberin’ Con, where each ‘Times member who attended would play their best-known hero from whatever game they were in (generally that was a hero read about and known by other members in the ‘Times), and these heroes would be drawn from their varied worlds and brought together and teamed up to face some cosmic menace. The game was called “Clobberin’ On Infinite Earths”, and it was run, the first year, by Aaron Storck, and was a huge success. That first year Forte heroes Phantasm and Dr. Jackal teamed up with K.C.’s Hornet (a long-time character from his gaming world), Ben Bellot’s Hologram from the MAGIC world, Joel B. Levy’s Vice Grip from the Questor’s world, Greg Johnson’s Radium from—okay, Radium never actually HAD a world to be played in, and that was an ongoing ‘Times joke—and Scott Burnham’s Psiren from the latter-day Aegis game. Not only great fun, these games took place in actual continuity of the games involved, so instead of being just imaginary fun (okay, they were still imaginary, but you get what I’m saying), teams like MAGIC got to be written into Forte continuity, which then allowed for crossovers later when, say, Aaron (with his MAGIC character Wingboy), Ben, or Joel (who also played Whiplash in the MAGIC game) would come to Sacramento to visit.

Where they were just good times during the first five years, later games became something more important to Forte folks. These games were now the ONLY Forte games, the place where Forte continuity continued. These were a wonderful opportunity to find out what Forte characters were up to. They continued the timeline. We would have to figure out what our characters had been doing with their lives in the year since the previous COIE convention game. The Forte clock was still, in effect, ticking, the world still going on, even without us getting together every week like we once had. As most Forte characters had a set date of birth, we knew how old our characters were at the time of each new game. And since we knew the birth dates of the children of Forte, we also knew how old they were and how much they’d grown. And while it was great just to see the characters interact again, these games also provided a chance for some major events in Forte history to happen, such as Vanguard’s wedding.

The Clobberin’ Times didn’t just provide the annual games for us, either. Many of the Forte members were Clobberin’ Times members, and used their submissions to write out-of-campaign material about their characters. Kaye, for example, published her Sydney Todd journals there, telling the story of the conception and birth of Caleb, and the growing relationship between her and Stephen Strange. Jeff would write Vanguard stories, both untold past tales and new ones. Tim, being an artist, wrote and drew a couple of comic stories, starring both Hammer and Phantasm, respectively. K.C. wrote a series of multi-part fiction pieces involving the Four Aces, the Portland, Oregon hero team that interacted often with Forte, as well as historical information on other hero teams of the Forte world. I wrote fiction as well, including a (way too) long tale called “Dead of Winter” that saw Dr. Jackal and Phantasm and a team of BRAND agents fighting for their lives in the wilds of Canada against an alien menace, and also a series of “Pharaoh” write-ups, detailing the gritty adventures of the former Twostep infiltrating his own Texas crime family. Randy, while not a ‘Times member, wrote Anvil and Chill stories that I published in my section, and he joined with me to write a tale (that never quite got finished) called “The Jennifer Sanction” that sent Anvil and Pharaoh on a cross-country quest to find Telesis and her son before the Bane family did. Before that, Randy and I also worked together on a tale that took place right around Forte #300, where Twostep returned to Seattle for the first time since leaving (now a dark and changed man, and missing a couple of fingers, to boot) and confronted Anvil for letting Telesis and the boy die (only to find out from Anvil that the deaths had been faked). These additional writings supplemented the campaign while it was going on, but added to and continued it after it was over.

Perhaps the most pivotal post-campaign moment took place in 1998, at that year’s Clobberin’ game in San Diego (at a time when I was living in San Diego, rooming with Aaron). Aaron and I ran it together, and decided we wanted to do something unique. We wanted to take four different gaming worlds (Forte, MAGIC, Questors, and Crusade) and permanently join them. As the usual formula for the games—some cosmic something or other yanks a certain set of heroes (whichever one’s players were at the game that year) out of their reality—was running a little thin, we wanted to establish a means for these heroes to cross over to each other’s worlds whenever they pleased. And since all these campaign worlds were now defunct, we wanted to go out of our way to really use the history and feel of these games and make it feel like a real campaign run for each of them, and make them matter by resolving some major plotlines that remained in each. The game ended up being called “The Jericho Effect”, and dealt with a breakdown of the walls between alternate Earths. The resolution of which would be the creation of stable, permanent portals between the four worlds.

We did a great deal of research crafting the story, and I focused heavily on the Forte end. And in doing so, I really had to knock out what had been happening in the game world between ’95 and ’98. I had a blast doing so. I got to figure out what Forte characters had been doing. And I wanted to establish certain things of my own in the world that had been going on. Such as the fact that a new Paragons team had formed (started up by surviving original members Knightmare and Starman, and made up of four all-new heroes as well (ones created by myself and Kevin a couple of years before, just for fun)). And that Armor Security had regrouped and started over as its own company in L.A., something Aaron and I had been knocking around for fun in our spare time as we sat around our apartment smoking cigars and geeking. And I also wanted to resolve the long-standing question mark about Hologram’s time on the Forte team, and why his memories seemed jumbled and his powers different (in reality, the power difference was because K.C. had restrictions on power levels in his game, and Ben had to tone Hologram down to be a part of it). Part of the story was a villain called Lord Kromatis, the alleged son of Vanguard’s nemesis, Baron Kromatis. It was revealed in this game that the Hologram that had joined Forte was actually a light construct, a plant by Kromatis to spy on and gather information on Forte. Lord Kromatis, himself, in the end, was revealed to be a light construct, a fact even he didn’t know until his destruction. The game was a rousing success, and succeeded in both its “continuity” feel for each game and its final establishment of the portals. And the epilogue involved the real Hologram and Vanguard going to Kromatis’ hidden lair and destroying all the gathered Forte secrets, as well as the last of the information that was “downloaded” from Vanguard’s brain during the campaign.

There was another resolution I’d wanted, but the game we'd planned had gotten too big, and there was no room for it, so I wrote it as a story instead, and established it in continuity as part of the game’s backstory. I felt after all the bad things that had happened to Dr. Jackal and Knightsabre in their marriage, they deserved some kind of happy ending. I had also always hoped there would be a final resolution to the Lucifer D’Arque situation (he was still hanging out in Hell waiting for his next chance to get back at the Parker family and/or escape). I had come up with a story for this a few years before but never did anything with it, but now I had my chance. So, as a prologue to this game, “D’Arque Dominion, The Final Conflict” was written. In it, I established that D’Arque’s taking of the third Parker daughter was for more reasons that we’d known. Her potential for incredible dimensional power was staggering, and she was so unique that in all the alternate realities, only one of her had existed. Or so D’Arque had thought. He discovered the existence (while in Hell) of one other copy of her. Using his control over his until-now-unknown wife, a woman named Ellen Folsom, he took over her body and began searching across the limitless Earths, on each one drawing to him his self from that world to join him. His plan was to complete the ceremony he’d begun, but in using this Parker daughter, would draw all his selves together in one all-powerful godlike being and rule all realities. Discovering this, original Forte members Dr. Jackal, Mist and Phantasm joined together to chase and stop him, along the way joining with an alternate-Earth Phantashia. Three of these heroes had their own reasons to stop him once and for all. Phantasm knew that D’Arque may, one day, send his and Bluejay's son, Shrike, back into the past to die. Mist lived with the constant threat of D’Arque and/or his followers coming for her son, Caleb. And Dr. Jackal, aside from the ongoing threat to his family and more reason than anyone to want to villain dead (kidnapping his daughter (which led to her death), the Professor Night incident), now knew that the daughter he’d never known was still out there, somewhere, and needed him. He would not lose her to D’Arque a second time. The chase ended on an Earth slightly out of time with Forte’s world (about eleven years in the future), and the original Forte teamed up with their own grown children to face D’Arque (and all the OTHER D’Arques). And they also found, bound and with her energies already being drained in the ceremony, Samantha Parker, the third Parker daughter that, on Forte’s world, had become the tragic and deadly Helliquin. Here, she was just a nineteen-year old college student who thought, unlike her two sisters, she had no super-powers. But D’Arque drew her latent powers out in the ceremony and was readying to use them to bring his black immortality into being. The heroes, in the end, defeated D’Arque and destroyed him once and for all—him, and his evil selves from all worlds. And Samantha Parker, reunited with her father (her actual father, this world’s Dr. Jackal, had died some years before), chose to return with him to Forte’s world to give them the second chance at a relationship they’d been denied. And she would go on to become the heroine Nightsable in Seattle not long after.

FORTE 2000 AND FORTEUNIVERSE.COM

That Con game relit the fires of Forte continuity, and the passion to continue its tales. I started a web page, soon after, that never quite got off the ground, one that was supposed to look like the actual web site of the Forte heroes, linked up to the Forte base computer, and was meant to be a place where all past and future Forte information and tales would be contained. I got a couple of things done on it. But something else got in the way. That something was Forte 2000.

I got an idea one day, just thinking about Forte. It was a little “what if?” question, one I decided to pose, by email, to my fellow Forte founding players—Tim, Kaye and Jeff. What if we—the four of us and K.C.—were somehow all living in the same city again. What if K.C. decided to start up the Forte game again with us as his players? It would be the same Forte world, and the same city (Seattle), but we would all be creating new characters to start a new version of Forte. What character, I asked, would they make? My friends obliged my curiosity, and each created wonderful and amazing characters, worthy of both them and the Forte tradition. Tim created Rainier, the mammoth and rocky monolith with the brain of a quiet archeologist. Kaye created Tinker, a Chinese gadgeteer who specialized in very creative non-lethal weapons (and poor choices in relationships). Jeff created Max, a powerful and noble young hero just out of high school and just starting his career. To complete the new foursome, I created Seahawk, an armored martial artist and ex-cop. Interestingly, we all created Seattle natives (a couple of us characters with Seattle-themed identities). They were a perfect and fantastic team, rich with backstory and possibilities. What a waste! As fun as they were to make, what good would they do us, since this magical rejoining of the old gaming gang was never likely to happen?

I loved the characters so much—and the idea of a current Forte team carrying on the tradition—that I just couldn’t let them go, and I started thinking up the origin story of the team. And from there, I kept going, and decided to create this new group as a fiction project. But just as I was getting started with it, a new possibility came up. Suddenly it seemed we might actually get a live game together. Not with the whole gang, but Aaron and I were in San Diego, just a couple of hours away from Kaye and Ben in Orange County. And Kevin was interested in making it down for the occasional game. So three more Forte players—Kevin, Ben and Aaron—had a chance to become part of this “Forte 2000”. I decided that the original four had a good couple of years of adventures on their own, but that (like Forte) new heroes would join up with them later. I posed the same creation question to these three. Aaron decided to go the legacy route, and created Dyna Girl, the daughter of Electro Man (giving you some idea of Aaron's sense of humor...), and a former member of Armor Security’s new L.A. team (a team that Aaron had taken over and made his own). Kevin took his love of the Flash character and created his own speedster, Vortex, a former bomb squad cop turned high school science teacher. Ben stepped up with Moonspider, one of my favorite creations of his—a lawyer with a firm specializing in defending super-villains, but who was secretly a super-hero (a martial artist with a mystical mask that gave him speed, strength, and other abilities). Like the other characters, these were fantastic, and perfect for the Forte world. So I decided (since I was kind of taking over Forte continuity anyway) that I would run the game, and I decided that (to keep the male/female ratio from getting too skewed) that I would bring Nightsable onto the team as a “GMPC” (as K.C. had done with Eclipse in the latter Forte campaign years). So one summer afternoon, Aaron and I drove down to Orange County with Kevin in the back seat (he’d flown down to San Diego to drive with us) and hooked up at Kaye and Ben’s place and ran the first ever Forte 2000 game. Which, in continuity, was actually Forte 2000 #140. A good start. But unfortunately, further runs were not forthcoming. We had one online game, and then had one Clobberin’ Con run that was a Forte 2000 issue guest-starring past Forte members. But that was about it for the games (seeing as how I’m back in Sacramento, Kevin’s in Florida, and Aaron’s in Seattle, probably going to stay that way).

Forte 2000 went back to the realm of fiction, and, as crafted by myself and Aaron (who could be considered co-GMs of an imaginary game), grew immensely. We both began writing one story after another, jumping around the Forte 2000 timeline and filling in holes as we went. I also continued the “issues”, written in the format of K.C.’s game updates, as a different kind of fiction, writing them as though they had actually happened as games. These stories would often involve guest-starring roles from classic Forte characters, continuing their histories. We started up an art gallery and soon filled it to overflowing with Forte art from eBay commission artists. It became the biggest thing to happen to Forte since…well, since Forte.

As this web site was really getting underway, something else happened. The Clobberin’ Times, as a publication, finally ended in the year 2000. APAs were just a thing of the past with the rising of the web, and there was just no place any longer for printing and copying and stapling things for endless hours and sending them out to members. Who had that kind of patience anymore in the internet age? Ongoing discussions of reforming the ‘Times online finally saw fruition in the spring of 2005. Now there was, once more, a bi-monthly outlet for new Forte material. These deadlines helped create regular Forte 2000 contributions from Aaron and me. Plus, they inspired me to look in on the old Forte characters, and start to put up some of the post-campaign materials that had previously been available in the old Clobberin’ Times. I created a new inclusive web site called ForteUniverse.com. It linked to the Forte 2000 site, the “Forte.com” site I had started with, and new pages like the Forte Expanded Universe page (containing such things as Con game write-ups and other Forte-related fiction) and Forte ’05, a collection of stories starring old Forte characters set in the year 2005. This site has become the new home of Forte, and has unleashed the possibility for continuing Forte adventures, with old faces and new, new tales, new challenges, new drama and the old Forte excitement. It continues to grow, with new additions such as this Forge team and page. And one day, it will be the means to present ALL the Forte material to the world. All the original updates, all the old art and stories, everything.

Most campaigns, no matter how long they last (which usually isn’t long), come to an end and simply end. Forte has not. The world that K.C. created all those years ago, this living, breathing universe with epic tales rivaling any run of comics out there, continues. This summer (2007), Forte will celebrate its 20-year anniversary, and many of the players (and the GM) will be getting together for a long weekend in Seattle to mark the occasion. This is a testament to how much this seemingly simple game changed all of our lives, and speaks to its endearing appeal and its place in our hearts. Forte goes on. For all of us lucky enough to have been a part of it.

I encourage you to explore ForteUniverse.com and check out the tales and characters and art there. To read the Forte Post-Campaign timeline on the Expanded Universe page and discover what’s happening to the Forte heroes and world since the campaign closed its doors. To read the Forte ’05 stories and see what life is like for a number of the familiar heroes (such as what finally happened with both Telesis and Twostep), and read the “Where Are They Now?” page and see what happened to each member after the campaign. And to wade into the new and exciting world of Forte 2000, the official continuation of the Forte legend. If you’re discovering Forge for the first time, this will all enrich your reading experience and help you understand where (most of) these Forge characters came from. Discover the history that’s created twenty years of super-heroic continuity. And I can promise you one hell of a ride. Guaranteed.

Welcome to the Forte Universe. Your great adventure awaits.

Michael O’Connell
March, 2007