Basic Action Super Heroes!

SHIELD BEARER - character built for BASHMAN's one-shot
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This might likely be better placed in the "Super Builds" section of the BASH! forum. However, since it was actually created for a bigger effort as a sample game/character I thought it would get more useful traffic in the General section. (feel free to see it moved if that's better)


Hey Gang,

These are the stats that BASHMAN worked up for a classic "Patriotic Shield Hero" that was a pre-gen in his on-line Narrated one-shot from a month or two ago.

The stats are NICE, and represent someone like a Captain America very well.

BASHMAN asked the group to come up with our own fiction, name and imagery for our character choice. My role-play of the Shield Bearer was fun.
The core idea (for the entire game actually) was to "test" to see how well a lower Character Point hero such as a Captain America could function practically in-game with your IronMans, Thors, GreenLanterns, etc... Overall, as the guy playing the lower Character Point hero I was impressed! The group also quickly chatted post-game and I think all were equally impressed, if not flat out surprised at how well I was able to get game-stats to play out and greatly help the story and group in a gang of 30-40+ heroes!


SHIELD BEARER is a character close to my heart. A fun idea that would likely be the CORE of my own personal "universe" if/when I create publications for my own brand of supers for the RPG.

In-game, we first "saw" SB working with the Boyscout 108th Troop in the team's DoomRoom training facility. Teaching the tour group of kids the ins-and-outs of how to lay down cover fire against a no-good superthug like CONCRETE SAVAGE (tm) when on a public street in downtown!
Soon the team was called to an emergency. Not a flyer, Shield Bearer would quickly be left behind right? No way! Leaping on his "ALLY-CYCLE"(tm) the team soon watched him keeping pace ramping the modified Indian Four from rooftop to rolling up steel bridge cables!
Arriving on-scene Bearer took control of the local city's finest with a quick-radio to the Commish, arranging them in column atop a city bus in fire-brigade if needed.

and the fun went on...
As for image and style, using BASHMAN's notes for statistics, this is what I designed:

BASH! Character Sheet wrote:

details and ideas wrote:

Note: SB's original name was "Ally". Since it might be hard to differentiate between the name Ally and the word "ally" in a combat BASHMAN asked that I change it. My solution: "Ally" is the code-name that any "like-minded friendlies" in the various agencies and armed forces use to identify one another. Like a secret code-name but it became more of a nickname for Shield Bearer for "his Nick Fury" type friend.

hero-shot with his own logo wrote:

And gotta illustrate his bike sometime!

sample bikes to modify wrote:

What do you think?
-kev-

Great looking Cap Am analog character. Who did the art work?

Samuraidad wrote:Great looking Cap Am analog character. Who did the art work?

Thanks!
Me. Heavy Photoshop work, I'm great at taking ideas and basic bits of "found objects" then manipulating them A LOT in PS to get what I want. So while I didn't illustrate from my hand, I illustrated the images using my Photoshop-fu. hehe

I'm more of a graphic designer with illustration skills.
-kev-

Nice!

Wow Kevin, that's fantastic work! I'm totally impressed. Also, I really like how you highlighted the power's name in the description in the red to let it stand out without jarring.

What's the name of the One Shot? What's it about. Details man... we want details....
Regards,
Walt

kroh wrote:What's the name of the One Shot? What's it about. Details man... we want details....
Regards,
Walt

I recorded it a while ago to put online. The problem is I don't know how / where to do that yet!

Here's the other thread regarding the actual play: http://bashtalk.org/modules.php?name=Fo ... opic&t=703

MrJupiter wrote:Wow Kevin, that's fantastic work! I'm totally impressed. Also, I really like how you highlighted the power's name in the description in the red to let it stand out without jarring.

Thanks Mr J.!
I really have fun building a "look" for things, setting up parts of the sheets that make an impact and fit the game flavor.

I was thinking of how I could offer a simple sheet like that. I thought, at the very least I can strip out all the details on a sheet like Shield Bearer - then not in what each section/line is for for a player to replace that text when making their own. Basically a template in Word. That's the super easy way.

I'd love to finish my excel character builder, but I still need a ton of help from an Excel guru (my buddy is hit-or-miss) but if I finished it, it would fill-in the sheet very much like I've done with Word on Shield Bearer's sheet.

Lastly. I have toyed with making a form-fillable PDF sheet that looks like this sheet. The only problem there is the image. It's very hard to add an image into a PDF without the "image space" on the character sheet being an empty rectangle/space. On the better looking sheets folks have done in this style (as with Shield Bearer) the image of the character form-wraps with the stats. That's what makes it look really fluid. And the only way (I've found) to add images to PDFs is through the "stamp" tool, it's a weird little "trick" to allow any viewer with the non-writable PDF viewers to add images and save/print.


Oh well. Nothing's perfect.
-kev-