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Welcome to a new feature I like to call "Enemies Revisited". What I'll be doing periodically is presenting villains from classic Champions supplements which I have liked so much that I've encorporated into my gameworld. As most of us GMs do, when we bring in published characters (be they from comics, gaming supplements, fiction, movies, cartoons or TV shows) we find ourselves doing a few tweaks here and there. This feature will allow me to show just such examples as well as outline what I changed and why. Hope you enjoy it.
First up is Grond, that multi-armed menace that first appeared in Enemies II, published by Hero Games in 1982. Grond was created by Steve Peterson and illustrated by Mark Williams. It is the later's art that in fact endured the character to me. As shown below on the sheet, how can you not love that rendering? It is perfect (IMHO)! The revised version in Classic Enemies just didn't work as well for me (I thought the later looked too fat - plus it didn't match my painted lead figure I had for Grond).
Anyway, I love the character image and love the concept (a multi-armed monster who is misunderstood and just wants to destroy things). What did I change from his original presentation? Okay, I bumped the strength down from 90 to 80. I just thought 90 was a bit too much for my gameworld. So, a couple other figured statistics dropped slightly too. Not a big big change.
Where I really went to town though is the origin. Steve's origin for the character never resonated with me. Yes, I get that all those various accidental inputs caused the mutation, but why? It just didn't feel right to me. How would all that cause the growth in size and extra arms. Also, just what is a "grond" anyway? Why that name? In Dutch, "grond" means land. That's about all I could find. And, since Grond was supposed to be sort of analogous to Marvel's Abomination (given that the original Champions universe from those first supplements had a lot of Marvel parallelism), I thought a more Hulk-like origin would be in order. So, check out the tweaks I made to the origin (as he appears in the World of Maenza) and let me know what you think.
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Background: Dr. Bruce Gruenweld was a research scientist in an isolated goverment facility, studying the properties of gamma radiation in an attempt to harness it for possible military uses. The long hours were causing him fatigue and the failure to get the formulas to align were frustrating. One of the MPs, Rick Bonds, was in the lab when Gruenweld made a fatal error. As the alarms sounded, the fail-safes on the containment units buckled, causing an explosion that destroyed the lab.
From the rubble emerged a hulking figure, nearly twice as tall as a normal man and with an extra set of arms. His skin was green and his muscles rippling from the exposure to the radiation. The rest of the MPs arrived on the scene and attempted to stop the behemoth with their guns. The bullets bounced off of his emerald hide. When called a monster by the men, the creature responded with "I am Gr..ond!" "Grond?" the men asked in surprise. "Grond!" the creature roared in reply, and thus he was christened. In confusion, Grond bound off into the desert thanks to his mighty legs. When the radioactive levels from the explosion subsided, the military combed the rubble but never found Gruenweld's or Bond's bodies. That was because the two men had been fused into the single form. The confused creature, if he had any memories of the two men who made it up, were quickly gone soon after the explosion. When he called himself "Gr..ond", he was barely recalling the names Gruenweld and Bond. Grond was soon tracked, thanks to a trail of destruction he left in his wake. The government, when it realized that tanks and soldiers were not enough to take him down, eventually enlisted the aid of noted super-heroes to help capture him. After a number of attempts to study the monster and the subsequent escapes and destructive rampages each time, the military decided it best that the creature, when captured again, be kept in the Stronghold facilities (which were better equipped to handle super-powered threats).
Motivation: Grond is really confused and frustrated since the accident. He just wants to be left alone, to sort things out. But, the world won't let him do that so, very much like a child, he responds with sudden emotional outbursts. Given his extreme strength level, those outbursts often lead to lots of destruction. When the authorities can't handle him (and they usually can't), heroes are called in to assist. |
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