There's an old, old RPG character of mine that I think about fairly regularly. Henry Francis Boyd. If it's a name that doesn't sound particularly inspiring or evocative, more's the point. I'd like to share some reminiscing about him, what lead to his creation and some of his origins in-universe. I don't imagine there'll actually be a point to this story beyond the sort of fond warmth that'd come of sitting around a table with a glass in one's hand, shooting the shit and getting misty-eyed over past glories. In a funny sort of way, that's quite emblematic of him.
So let me tell you about Hank.
It was 2007, I think. I was working at Games Workshop, and my friends and peers were creative writing students, university literature lecturers, actually-been-on-stage-alongside-Ian-McKellan actors and the like. It was an amazing confluence of coincidences and friends-of-friends that lead to a pretty awesome few years together where we were a near non-stop creative house, bouncing ideas around one another and pumping up the energy for projects and productions. It was awesome. Best time of my life, bar none, and it's not even close. The year is important because we were a little way behind the arrival of the movie version of 'Watchmen.'
More or less as a group, we'd read the comic and spent ages discussing and disseminating its themes and concepts, and though we'd all enjoyed it thoroughly, there was a shared sense that it was ultimately more hopless than we'd like. Obviously it was telling a very specific story, but we were fascinated by the deconstruction of the superhero genre (gaining traction at the time) without delving into morose helplessness and pity porn tragedy that was prevalent in most of the stories, fanfiction, thinkpieces and such that you'd find around the time. I don't mean to imply that anybody else had missed the point, but having grasped the message we were instead inspired in a different direction by it.
What would it be like to break down superheroes and the world they must live in while still allowing for them to be functional, relatable human beings? In a way we were groping blindly toward some of the TV shows and movies that were coming in the next decade without really realising it at the time, but it was a fun creative challenge. How does being 'super' fuck you up? How do you live in a world as a god? What kind of person are you when nobody knows whether or not to define you as human?
Naturally, as a bunch of writers and theater kids that lived within walking distance of one another, there were usually 2-3 RPGs being run each week. This idea definitely had to have a chance to be explored through play. One of our group picked up the core book for 'Mutants and Masterminds' and we went to work...
Unfortunately, I don't remember the other heroes with all that much detail. There was Minmax whose power was, quite literally, the fact that they were so hyper-attuned toward luck in any given moment that they could nudge the universe into reconsidering the result of any chance outcome they faced. There was Titanius, our indestructible powerhouse Colossus-alike with the thick Gloucestershire accent. We had a Tony Stark/Lex Luthor dude who'd reformed from a life of crime who, bald as a plucked chicken, wore a powered suit and fought bad guys under the name Chrome Dome who I fucking loved. The rest filled some of the niches that a balanced roleplaying team requires and while I struggle to remember the other heroes that were created, the gap left by most of the choices being made was the skill jockey.
If you're familiar with or played a lot of RPGs, you'll probably know the type. The character that has the ability to tackle any skill check imaginable. They ordinarily don't possess any special powers or one-off abilities, but they make up for it by being able to pick any lock, drive any car, hack any computer, identify any scroll - skill jockey was the name the archetype had in our group, and I knew that's what was missing. So I leaned into it as hard as I could, thinking on the theme and tone we'd been trying to strike with our creations.
Henry 'Frank' (call him Francis and he'd end you) Boyd was the end result. Originally he was going to be called Henry Alan Boyd, but someone pointed out that was almost Hank Venture's full name, and yeah. Not quite the angle I was looking to play! I was studying the rulebook and looking over the powers for superheroes available versus those that a 'normal' human had access to, and as I was reading I noticed that... if I played an older character, I got more skill points. My physical statistics would be lowered for balance, but I'd know more, be more skilled, adapt better to changing situations. I also noticed that old injuries and debilitating effects permanently assigned a character gave you even more skill points. Aha-ha, said I, and got to writing.
Hank was, in some ways, what'd happen if you put Fox Mulder, Harry DuBois, and Brock Samson in a blender, and poured the warm, psychotic slurry that oozed out of that union into a navy blue suit with an American flag pin on his lapel. Hank was a college football hero that signed up for the Air Force to 'do his bit' just before Vietnam kicked off. He was a pilot to be reckoned with, untouched in the sky, and capable of almost pinpoint precision when flying ground attack missions. His career was aided by the fact he didn't question anything; napalm went where napalm was ordered, targets identified were engaged and destroyed (recurring nightmares, plagued by guilt, and dubious moral backgrounds all included more mechanical bonuses in-system, funnily enough). It didn't take long for the 'us or them' mentality encouraged by the higher-ups to crack, though, eventually resulting in an event that'd get him sectioned out of USAF entirely.
While en-route to bomb the shit out of some hapless Vietnamese village with white phosphorous - y'know, as one does - Lieutenant Boyd was engaged by an unidentified contact and shot down in enemy territory. Though he would eventually be recovered, injuries suffered during the crash would remain with him permanently (hello, more system points to play with!) and he'd spend the rest of his life walking with a cane. It wasn't this which saw him dumped from military service entirely, though. No matter how often he was grilled on the encounter or how thoroughly equipment and instrumentation would contradict him, Hank insisted in front of every inquiry, during every debrief and interrogation, that what shot him out of his F4 Phantom and permanently put an end to his days in the sky was a silver, disc-shaped object which maneuvered with an agility and speed impossible for any living pilot to endure. He described a blinding flash, his instrumentation bubbling in his cockpit, searing heat scorching his flight suit-...
...and coming to while plummeting to the earth, triggering his chute too late to stop him from landing with a shattering crunch.
It was widely accepted that the stress had gotten to him and he'd cracked. Hank was rubber stamped as psychologically unfit and dismissed. Unsurprisingly, a dependency on the pain medication for his injuries quickly became a chemical need (hello, tasty skill points), but this didn't stop Hank from coming to the attention of players within interested communities who'd had their interest drawn by the steadfast and repeated testimony that Hank had made during his debriefing. Unknown enemy aircraft? Bogies that looked like flying saucers? Hank was plucked abruptly from the civilian life he'd been dropped into and put to work, ironically within spitting distance of the Air Force structure that'd railroaded him in the first place.
Projects SIGN, GRUDGE, and BLUE BOOK had limited success in identifying any of the various ephemera that the government had insisted the Air Force take interest in, if only to debunk a growing civilian interest in little green men and alien contacts. Nonsense, of course, but when you have to be seen to be doing something, presentable men in sharp suits with stern voices and a commanding presence are often just what you need to prevent a panic - or an unhealthy interest in government overreach in progressing any further than it ought to... Hank was put to work on a sister project alongside BLUE BOOK, codenamed REDCAP. Wherever he went, he carried a visitor's badge with a barcode which would invariably possess absolutely watertight credentials and all-access authorization. His clearance was Noble; he reported to nobody but the Majestic. He might have worn blue, but he was a Man in Black.
For a time, anyway. Knowing full well that his exposure to this life and the vast, dangerous knowledge that came with it was a one-way ticket out of anything approaching normal, Hank stewed on how to put any of this to positive use. REDCAP wasn't the aggressive program of silencing questions that BLUE BOOK had been, and some of the recoveries made during his tenure were... bizarre, to put it lightly. But it wasn't until the early 80s when the first super-powered individuals began to be known publicly that his talents found a new home.
It turned out that the arrival on the scene of 'supers' was related in some way to humanity's tampering with the atom. Though not fully understood, most of the first handful of supers had avoided notice by living lives as close to normal as they could manage... and some simply had powers that were, to put it bluntly, utter crap. Some were blessed with the power of flight, or invulnerability; some could alter their hair or eye colour with a thought; some could eat cilantro without it tasting like soap. Those that knew to avoid detection were smart enough to evade the notice of the authorities for a while... but eventually, as more nuclear power plants, atomic weapons and similar devices were built around the world, the birth rate of supers increased to the point where hiding was no longer possible, and governments around the world scrambled with how to deal with this emergent problem.
Hank's contacts took convincing, but he finally had a purpose he could put himself toward without the crushing weight of guilt on his broad shoulders. These talented individuals were an opportunity to do some good - to give the people something remarkable to look up to, and to hope for. A beacon; a symbol. Goodness, righteousness, the proud American lifestyle - it could be harnessed and trained, and it could be marketed. Hank went to work with the energy of a man possessed, and after deftly avoiding a handful of congressional hearings and oversight committees formed to question his credentials, a new organization answerable to the United States government was born. The Homeland Extraordinary Response Oversight - HERO - came to life by executive order and a few murmurs of support from the back channels that Hank had been nurturing for years. Naturally, who better to helm this new security branch? While not considered a uniformed service, HERO agents would nonetheless be granted powers roughly on par with US Marshals, deemed a necessity for them to act swiftly and with appropriate force against those supers that instead put their powers to nefarious ends.
If there was any sinister intent behind HERO's creation, Hank deemed it an acceptable price to pay for the strength of the organization's reach and remit. It wasn't just superpowered crime fighting that he had in mind, either; controlling wildfires, disaster relief, civilian evacuation, response to foreign threat, and some of that friendly neighborhood superhuman touch to make people feel at ease around their new, near-otherworldly neighbors. Because if the super population was on the rise, Hank knew there'd be a reckoning at some point; better to sow the seeds of peaceful coexistence now than be on the front lines of another war that'd see civilian bodies piling up.
So that was Hank, and HERO that he built - the GM was delighted when I put forward the idea of the organization itself, liking the potential for all manner of government overreach and backroom politics (we'd also not long gotten back into the X-Files). But what did all those points I'd garnered along the character creation procress actually lead to? Hank isn't someone I think I'd create in this day and age, to put it lightly; though I still remember the character fondly, there's no denying he was probably the most heavy-handed of the Good? Guys in the team, but it was an entertaining thought exercise at the time. In a world of superheroes and ubermensch, all those negative features, all the dread and chemical dependency and guilt and crippling injuries of his background went into one thing.
Trinitite.
If you're not familiar with the first atomic test that split the atom and changed the world forever, trinitite was the name given to fused glass found at the epicenter of the blasted wreckage of the testing tower. Trinitite was mildly radioactive - big surprise - but in the variation of the Mutants and Masterminds setting we were cooking up, trinitite was basically our answer to Kryptonite. The atom giveth, the atom taketh away... Hank was in his 60s, walked with a cane, and had basically consigned himself to a life of atonement for the things he'd allowed himself to do and become - in his own way, of course. The radioactivity of the small chunk of trinitite he wore around his neck would kill him slowly, but slowly enough that he would have years left to put the world on the right path for cooperation between supers and homo sapiens. The right path which he, of course, knew was best (okay, so there's a little Gene Roddenberry in him, too).
In game terms, Hank was a void. He was a null space where superpowers simply didn't work. Get within ten feet of Hank - or sixty feet if he unshielded the trinitite - and whatever it was that made you special, or dangerous? Ended. You were human, or at least as human as your biology would allow, but with none of the special effects and invulnerabilities that your powers would ordinarily bestow. The only way that most villains had to actually harm him would be to pick something up and throw it at him; trinitite still answers to the laws of physics if someone hurls a truck at its bearer... but that was his role. The skill jockey. The expert. The Alfred, always working to make sure the party had what it needed and was prepared for the challenges ahead, while remaining back from the front lines and conducting the great orchestra of armed response and public relations.
Because if Hank showed up in person? If you were someone that the team couldn't take down, and this broad, slightly stooped gentleman with the graying hair and the limp approached you slowly, cane clicking ominously on the floor? He had a superpower you didn't. A Colt M1911 .45 ACP.
Unfortunately, we never really got to play with our Mutants and Masterminds world that we'd created for as long as it deserved; various unfortunate circumstances arose and our group was scattered rather suddenly - though amicably, I should add, it's just the way that things unfolded. Like I said, I don't know that there's really any point to this beyond a fond memory and a desire to share a classic who's dated in a way strangely similar to how 'Watchmen' that inspired him has - heavy-handed and overwrought, bordering on the satirical. But it was fun to take apart an idea in someone else's world and put it back together with what we were trying to do at the time.
Anyway. That's all I have to say about that. <3 If you're still here, thanks for reading!
