My Pal Torgon

You might be wondering about my avatar, Torgon the Eviscerator. Several years ago (probably over a decade ago, in fact), my friend Tony was getting ready to run a RPG campaign using the Champions/ Star Hero system. Most of us in the group were interested in space opera along the lines of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The premise was to be that we were all to be former associates of a hero named Flash Rogers (get it?). Old Flashy was missing, it seems, and the Universe was in peril once more. We were to be ex-sidekicks, mad scientists, alien princesses. and others who Flash had helped over the years.

My character was Torgon the Eviscerator, who had once ruled over a decent chunk of the galaxy along the lines of Ming the Merciless. He was a thoroughly despicable type, lopping off heads and having people put to torture at the slightest whim. His was the ultimate toxic work environment (at tims, literally). But at some point, Flash finally led a rebellion against Torgon, nobly sparing the tyrant if he would give up the throne and go peacefully into exile. Facing a mob howling for his chitlins, Torgon had no choice. But idle hands are the devil's playthings; Torgon had to find another job. But what can a natural-born galactic overlord do when he has no empire?

He became a drama critic.
(http://torgon.blogspot.com/)

When Torgon hears that Flash Rogers, his old nemesis was missing, he did what any ex-space tyrant would do when asked to help out his greatest enemy: he dropped everything to rush to his rescue. Of course! Being an ex-villain himself, he knows the villainous mindset. He'd be a tremendous asset to the rescue effort. (Of course, Torgon was merely waiting for an opportunity to re-seize his galactic throne. After all, he had hidden fleets of ships and arsenals full of space-artillery over the galaxy before the masses rebelled against him. The only problem was that most of his lieutenants who knew where these stockpiles were, were either in prison, or dead, or fled to the far corners of the galaxy.)

Somehow, the campaign never really got started, and I never did much more with Torgon. Oh, yes; I wanted Torgon to rrview some movies, like the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Somehow, Torgon never got the idea that Christopher Lee was playing two different characters in those movies.

Back to the reason I was telling you about Torgon. I was getting the itch to run a new campaign, and I couldn't settle on one that I was happy with. I presented the other players with ideas like Mythic Greece (similar to the Mazes and Minotaurs RPG, or the Hercules and Xena TV shows; my other main suggestion was a space opera style game, "maybewith Torgon", or a few other suggestions like superheroes. A couple of people were encouraging about the Greek game, but somehowit didn't really gel with me. Then Sandy, who runs the RuneQuest game we've been playing for almost a couple of decades, made a suggestion:

"Torgon invades Earth with rayguns and rocket ships. Sadly, he has chosen to do so in the time of Heroic Greece, and so he is opposed by Hercules, Perseus, et al.
Who doesn't want to see space monsters face off against Greek mythic creatures? "

Phrased like that,whowouldn't? I started chugging out notes for Greekheroes and witchs and philosophers and such, but there was still an element missing. The missing piece didn't turn up until a couple of days ago, when somebody mentioned... "The Henchmen Campaign".

Which I'll tell you about in my next post.