A B O U T
FAQ:
"What the hell is this?"
Good question. Glad you asked.
Welcome to the Forte.com page.
This page is part of the ForteUniverse.com
sites, which all center around a fictional super-hero team called
"Forte". This team began as a Champions role-playing
game back in the late 1980s, a game run by gamemaster K.C. Ryan,
and continued as fiction after the campaign's close. And it continues
in this form to this day.
This page is different from
the others in its presentation. It's meant to simulate what the
actual online system for this hero team would look like, and is
meant to give you the feel of what it would be like to be one
of the Forte heroes and log on. This team has had a couple of
different eras. The original Forte began in 1987, and continued
as a group until 1995. Many heroes called themselves part of Forte
over the years. Some were there for a time and moved on, some
died, some lost their powers, some retired. There was an ever-changing
roster, but the team finally officially ended. For about five
years. In the year 2000, a new group of heroes appeared and ended
up taking over the Forte name and becoming part of the legacy,
and this team--referred to as "Forte 2000"--is the one
that's currently operating out of Forte's home city, Seattle.
The Forte team operated out
of a hidden hero base, one that had an advanced computer system
with a large database. The idea behind this page--fictionally
created by one of the former Forte heroes, Vanguard--was to let
members of Forte log in to the base computer and access the information
there as needed, to provide secure communications for them all
to keep in touch, and to allow them to access the systems of the
base itself without actually being present. The "Forte 2000"
team actually has their own separate base, so the original one
is normally unoccupied, but acts as sort of a Forte "clubhouse"
where the heroes still meet for various functions (or just stay
there when they're back in town visiting).
In actuality, this page is
similar to the other ForteUniverse pages in that its real purpose--beyond
giving you a "feel" for the Forte world--is just to
be a place to present more fictional tales of the characters.
The various features of the page are really just bells and whistles
for fun. The real content is in the emails, the database entries,
the message boards and the chat logs to be found within. These
are all "stories" starring various Forte characters,
just being presented in a unique (and hopefully entertaining)
format.
So you'll find that many of
the promised features of the site--video communications, access
to FBI databases, an interactive world map, a working chat room
and message board--are fictional themselves. In other words, they
don't actually work. They're really just window dressing. So keep
that in mind if you start getting frustrated when buttons don't
work, or if you're not able to actually place a video call to
the White House. Each page will have a "help" button
that will give you a "real world" explanation of the
page you're on, and tell you what's supposed to work and what
isn't. I hope you have fun with it for what it is.
As a historical note, this
was actually the very first ForteUniverse web page. Before there
was a ForteUniverse.com. I had created the first version as my
first experiment with continuing Forte adventures online, and
it was largely incomplete and under construction. And it also
quickly became outdated with the creation soon after of the Forte
2000 page, which began to really establish the post-campaign
timeline, and led to the creation of the other pages as well.
This page you're seeing now is version two, the one I finally
got back to and brought into line, continuity-wise, with all the
other pages.
So again, have fun with it,
and I do hope you enjoy this little experiment, and learning some
things about the Forte heroes and their adventures. If you haven't
already, I highly encourage you to take a look at all the other
pages in the constantly-growing ForteUniverse site, as they contain
much more information about this team and its characters, present
you with a great deal of exciting heroic fiction, and also give
you some really stunning hero art to look at. If this is your
first time discovering Forte, we welcome you to our world, and
hope you explore it all and keep coming back for more!
Michael O'Connell
ForteUniverse Webmaster
