Meet a hero: Crimson Lightning

This week I’ll be looking at the different pregenerated heroes who appear in the Amazing Heroes book. You’ll recognise them from the cover.

Jack Talon / Crimson Lightning

Jack Talon is the starting quarterback for Storm City’s NFL team, the Storm City Thunder. When one of his friends went missing, and neither the police nor the detectives he hired could find her, he decided to do the job himself. That summer Jack had tried out for a role on a new TV show called Ultraball, a hi-tech sport played in armoured suits. The TV show never caught on, but Jack reacquired his suit and set about freeing his friend with his armoured fists.

Jack’s the kind of hero whose early adventures might put him up against ‘ordinary’ criminals in Storm City. The gangsters and organised criminals who terrorise the neighbourhood where he grew up, and ruin the lives of ordinary people.

Design Notes

Crimson Lightning is a classic vigilante hero, who solves problems with his fists. He doesn’t have innate super-powers, just a reliance on his suit to keep him alive. He’s also upgraded it to deliver electric shocks through the armoured gauntlets.

Like all the pregenerated characters in the book Crimson Lightning is presented here as an ‘end of season one’ character. He’s upgraded his suit a few times and defeated his first villains. If you played him as a starter character your super-suit would be good – but not great at protecting you from harm. If you played Jack as an origin story, you wouldn’t even have the suit to begin with, as you set out to rescue Jamie.

Being the quarterback of the football team lets Jack’s player make use of a whole variety of related benefits and story hooks. Jack is a celebrity, with fans throughout the city, and is famous through the country. He’s a multi-millionaire, who lives in a gated, secure mansion. Of course these things also make maintaining his secret identity essential, he’d be recognised in an instant without his helmet on. He also has a lot of commitments during football season, which a GM could use to build a public life / private life story around him.

Want to know more about Amazing Heroes? Watch the video below, or check out the Kickstarter today!

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