Yes, I'm going to cover two pages today and three characters, because page 52 only has one character ana piece of art that doesn't even match that character. In fact, it looks more like I would expect Starburst to look. A flying guy in a dramatic pose with a cape? Yeah, if it wasn't for the fact that I've seen future editions that included a drawing of Starburst, I would peg this as being him.
However, the character on the page isn't Starburst; it's Howler, our very first female Champions character. Like Dragonfly, Howler isn't given a civilian name even though she has a Secret Identity. She's a sonic energy projector; she can fly, has a Sonic Scream and a Sonic Shield, and her powers come from an alien amulet, Green Lantern-style. She's hunted by the FBI and the police, and she's vulnerable to bullets. She's afraid of guns and of aliens and other strange creatures. Unlike Green Lantern, she isn't a hero; her mind was twisted by the encounter, so she became a supervillain. I don't know if she made it to the 6th edition, but she did make it into 5th and ever other edition prior to that.
On the next page, we get our second female Champions character: Icicle. She's built on only 185 points, and aside from her DEX and CON she's pretty average in terms of her characteristics. Again, no Secret ID name given. Her powers are basically Iceman's starting suite, built in an Elemental Control; her three powers are an Ice Ram (EB), an Ice Slide (Running), and Ice Armor. She's hunted by a New York supergroup, and is vulnerable to fire and lasers. She's a teenage runaway whose father nearly killed her for the crime of being a mutant. So, they're going with the X-Men background in the core game. Well, I suppose. It wasn't completely overdone in 1981 the way it is today.
Ah, here we go...Mechanon. The ultimate bad guy in many campaigns, Mechanon is a robot who was originally supposed to be an LA superteam's security system until his programming went haywire and he decided that his goal in life was to exterminate all organic beings. Oops. Someone rolled an 18 on their Computer Programming roll on that one. Mechanon is a megalomaniacal robot with extreme paranoia that has tons of contingency bodies hidden away in case his current one is destroyed. And every time he is rebuilt, he is given a defense against whatever destroyed him. That's inconvenient. Anyway, Mechanon is build on a whopping 345 points, which is a lot for this edition of the game. He's got a 60 STR, 40 CON, 65 STUN, fully resistant 30 PD and ED, a SPD of 7, a 10D6 EB, flight, flash defense, and 2 Overall Levels. He's hunted by UNTIL and the supergroup that built him, and he's both overconfident and, as mentioned before, a megalomaniac.
Mechanon is built to take on an entire team of heroes by himself. It's funny to see this now, since by 5th edition, 345 points is a beginning superhero's point total (actually 350), and this version of Mechanon is a pansy by comparison. Of course, in later editions he gets plenty more points (4th edition has him somewhere around 770, as I recall, and his 5th and 6th edition versions are even more ridiculous). Still, as it stands Mechanon is probably capable of taking on a full team of 1e characters, assuming they aren't overloaded with Disadvantages to give them stupid amounts of points. I will note that Mechanon is the only character thus far that is given a special 'Villain Bonus' of points to enable him to buy all those powers and abilities without having to take crippling Disads for points. So, that is a handy device. I know we'll see it in other characters in other products, but I doubt we'll see them on the last couple of pages.
And there you have it. Two distaff villains and an uber-villain for your pleasure. Take them on if you dare. Well, the first two should be manageable. But Mechanon...yikes. See you next time.
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