In February of 2005, I went on a trip to Seattle to spend a few days with my old roommate, Aaron. Well, when I say “old”, it wasn’t as though this was a long-awaited reunion. We had been roommates—for years—up until the summer before this, until we both left San Diego—Aaron for Seattle, me back to Sacramento. This was just my first chance to get up to Washington to visit him and his then-girlfriend (who would later become his now-wife). Yes, I was there to see them both, and do some tourist stuff and have some laughs. But this trip had a secret and decidedly dorky agenda as well.
       I was in Mecca.
       Forte country.
       Aaron and I had both been players in the long-running Champions role-playing campaign called “Forte”, one run by K.C. Ryan in Sacramento. It had begun in 1987, when I was one of the founding players. I left when I moved to Arizona in 1993, and when Aaron moved from New York to Sacramento, he joined the game for a time and became part of the storied history. The campaign finally ended in 1995 when K.C. relocated back east, and the Forte legend officially ended. But…it actually didn’t. Together, we had all built such an amazing story, with such rich characters full of possibilities, and there were so many tales left to be told. Aaron and I spearheaded the movement to keep it going, in whatever ways were possible. This initially took the form of pick-up Forte games at the annual San Diego Comic-Con most of us attended. In those games, we’d have a chance to find out what all these characters had been up to. Where they were. How old their children were. The timeline of Forte didn’t stop, you see, when the campaign ended. It kept right on going, and the fun we had was to fill in the blanks of what all these characters had been doing in the time between games. A post-campaign history began to form.
       In keeping with this idea, Aaron and I began co-creating something called “Forte 2000”. It was a series of tales, presented on a web page, that told the story of a new group of Forte heroes…a new Forte team, completely new characters, completely new adventures. The important part about this project was that it picked up the Forte timeline again, and started creating all-new events. And these tales would often involve original Forte characters in a guest-starring capacity, which let us explore further the details of their current lives. Which we wanted to do, because, frankly, we loved all these characters, and everyone loved seeing them come back to life and vitality, even if just in fiction form.
       Did I mention that the whole Forte campaign took place in Seattle?
       That was that whole “Mecca” thing.
       See, none of us, until Aaron moved there, had ever actually lived in Seattle. When K.C. started the Forte campaign, he just happened to choose that city as the game’s setting. And though we’d never lived there (some of us, like myself, had never even BEEN there), we FELT like we had. K.C. made it real for us. We learned all about it, both through the game and through our own fiction we wrote. In a bizarre, nerdy way, it was like a second home to all of us who were a part of Forte.
       So, you can imagine, being there for the first time, it was a bit of surreal experience. To you, it would be just another city. To me, it was a bit like reading every Stephen King novel, and then finally, one day, visiting Maine, and seeing all the places he’d written about, places where the stories I knew so well had taken place. Yeah. I knew it was dorky. But I let myself get caught up in it, in the energy, and soak in the fact that I was in Forte’s town. Fortunately, I was with another dork. That helped. And we planned to get all that dorking out of the way the first day so we didn’t have to subject his poor girlfriend to any of it.
       So we were in his car, on the freeway, heading downtown, and the skyline of the city was starting to loom large (one that included the Space Needle, which I was finally getting to see in real life). I had a clear agenda of some things I wanted to see. I had written a number of stories using actual Seattle locations—ones that I had researched via the web—and was looking forward to seeing if I got the details right. Was the parking garage where Seahawk parked his S.U.V. as close to the marina (and his boat he lived on) as I thought? What did the Seattle Post-Intelligencer building really look like, where Dr. Jackal, now retired, was editor-in-chief? What was the view like from Dyna Girl’s loft? We meant to have a good time finding out all these things.
       As we drove, naturally, we were talking about Forte, and about future stories we’d be writing for the site. Somewhere along the way, a strange question popped into my head. An interesting hypothetical. The current Forte team (“Forte 2000”) had eight members to it. But in total, there had been over thirty heroes involved in Forte over the years. Some of them had died. Some had retired and moved on. At least two had lost their powers. Some were still active, but in other cities besides Seattle. Dead and powerless characters aside, that still left quite a number of Forte heroes still around. And I asked him this: what if you were to put together a new hero team, one made up of former Forte characters? Which of these heroes would you put on the team?
       We started going over each character—first just to figure out which ones were “available”. By that time (February, 2005) we had pretty much established (though not completely) where each former Forte hero was and what they were doing with their lives. Certain characters had retired for good reasons, and would be unwilling to join up with a hero team again. Phantasm, for example, was now the head of a Canadian intelligence agency, and would have no desire, we knew, to go back to regular heroing. Cincoflex had suffered a very serious mental breakdown when the love of her life—the Forte hero Shrike—had died tragically, and would have no motivation to step back into the life that had caused her so much pain. We narrowed the list, and began to discuss the merits of those that remained on it—what we knew about them, what we liked about them, etc.
       At some point I realized that I hadn’t really been asking Aaron that question. I’d been asking myself. Though I hadn’t really realized it when I’d posed the question, it turned out that I had a project in mind. I wanted to bring some Forte heroes out of the campaign history and back into “real time”.
       So Aaron became my sounding board as this idea began to build for me, and he offered his knowledge and input as I worked it through. I realized a couple of things—one, that there were some wonderful old-school Forte heroes that hadn’t had anything to do in a very long time, ones that I’d love to see in “action” again, and two, that there were a few heroes that were only in Forte briefly (mostly due to players having to leave the game not too long after their introduction into the universe) that had never gotten a chance to shine, to be fully explored, to become the characters that they could have been. They still had stories to tell, these latter characters. And I, for one, wanted to hear them.
       I’d always been a big fan of Mist—one of the founding Forte heroes, created and played brilliantly by Kaye Bellot. Mist had had a fascinating post-game life. Kaye had switched characters (to Cincoflex), but, in the game, we’d occasionally check in on Mist. She had joined up with the sort of super-FBI of K.C.’s world, UNCLE (his game world was made up of elements of other favorite fiction of his from his life, and that show had been one of them). She had ended up leading the San Francisco branch of UNCLE, and it had been established that this branch had become sort of a dumping ground for problem agents. She got stuck with the rejects, in other words. And she had to work with what she had and whip these agents into shape.
       I ran with that idea when I started thinking of 1) where a new hero team would be in the Forte world and 2) why one would be started in the first place. I imagined a city—San Francisco—that had been all but abandoned by UNCLE. The least of the resources, the most questionable personnel, things like that. So you had a city with, basically, none of its own super-heroes, and you had an UNCLE branch (UNCLE being an organization that basically takes the place of super-heroes when there are none around, the only ones who can handle the escalated threats (villains, super-agents) that normal law enforcement can’t) that didn’t have the tools they needed to do their job. This, to me, sounded like a perfect recipe for a city that the bad guys could walk into and take over. Hey, if I was a super-villain, which city would I rather go to? I’d head for the Bay.
       So what if things, in the past few years since Mist (no longer Mist, actually, but now Commander Sydney Todd-Strange) took over, had gotten progressively worse? With no proper intervention to stop them, the criminals had staked a claim and moved in. And word got out. You could do what you wanted there, and there was, for all intents and purposes, no one there to stop you.
       So there was the dramatic premise. One woman—a former super-heroine—trying to keep control in a city that was OUT of control, and losing the fight more and more each day. Unable to get what she needed from her own agency, and unwilling to keep fighting a losing battle, she finally came up with a drastic idea. San Francisco needed heroes. And she happened to KNOW a lot of heroes. What if—seasoned heroine and law enforcement leader that she was—she formed and led her own new hero team?
       There was the reason. Now I needed a team. I knew I wanted it to start with Mist because of my affinity for her and because of this great drive and motivation she now had. Who else? I’d always loved Anvil, a character played by my good friend Randy Auer. Anvil was a super-strong hero with metal skin. But he was so much more than that, thanks to having a creator like Randy. Anvil had never seen himself as a super-hero, as any great and powerful protector. He was very down-to-Earth, very pragmatic (and sarcastic), and reacted to things as one of US would, not as a four-color hero would. In my post-campaign writings, I’d used him a good deal, and wanted to do so even more, and get him out of retirement. Not an easy sell, since he wasn’t a guy that missed his hero years, and was quite happy being a husband and father, and getting to finally spend as much time as he wanted with his daughter, whom he had neglected so much (due to being on the run from an evil government agency, but that’s a whole other story) when she was young.
       I’d also always had a fascination with some of the characters who came into the campaign AFTER I’d left it. K.C. would write up this “game updates”, or game reports, after each run, ones that summarized the events and details of what had happened, as both a reminder to the players for next time around, and for historical purposes. He would send these to me in Arizona, and they were great reads! They read almost like fiction themselves. And they let me experience the Forte game as though I was there.
       It was during my Arizona time that a couple of new characters came into the game, and neither of them were there for all that long (compared to some of the other long-term characters). One was a new Kaye character—Nightshift. This character intrigued me to no end because of her backstory. She was a sort-of villain (powered thief, really) that had been part of a group of criminals called the Night Fantastic. She had turned on them, and turned her back on that life in the process, and had to overcome an addiction to a powerful narcotic called “Nightmare” that the group’s evil leader used to keep all the members in control…and in servitude. After serving some time for her crimes, she had to, as a condition of her parole, do a form of “community service” by becoming a super-hero, and Forte ended up being the team asked to take her in. I loved that. I loved her story enough, but the character details that came out in the updates endeared her to me more—a smoker (heroes generally don’t smoke in K.C.’s world. I’d had the only other smoker in Forte in my character Twostep), someone unsure of herself and her powers, someone with major self-esteem issues who was forced to be a hero even through she definitely didn’t see herself as one in any way. I liked her immediately, and thinking about her—and where she ended up—as I was considering her led me to coming up with what she’d done with her life post-Forte. She started up a company, I decided, called Nightwatch Solutions, and hired herself and her collection of questionable and colorful employees with checkered pasts out to major companies and world governments. She took her thieving experience and turned it into a marketable and desirable asset. In short, she and her people would break into your company, royal palace, home, whatever, to test its security. Nightshift suddenly became even more interesting to me. The former thief with the life of abuse had not only spent her time as a hero, but turned her rehabilitation into a very lucrative career. I had to have her. But I also realized she, too, would have little desire to get back into heroing. She would very much AGAINST it, in fact.
       And there was Secundus, another Forte character who’d put in his time without me around to experience it. And he was even more of a mystery to me, because I didn’t even know his player. Logan Waterman joined the game after I left, a friend of some of the newer Forte players. Your feelings and memories about a particular character tend to be tied to the person that plays the character, but in this case, Secundus was all character to me…which made him intriguing. As did his background and personality. Secundus, a spiritual martial artist from the small country of Khanistan, a country he’d fled after it was overthrown by Russian dictator/super-villain Imperator, was a quiet and introspective man, shy by nature, and another character who hadn’t gotten to be in the game long enough to reach his potential. And, better yet, after the player left the game, it had been established that Secundus moved to San Francisco to be near his father and the small Khanistani community there. Perfect! Not only was he already in town, and, I surmised, probably had a friendship with Mist, but he was ripe for exploration and character growth. Just what I wanted.
       A tough decision came next. If this was to be a team made up of former Forte members, I wanted it to be a representation of all the different Forte eras. Mist represented the early days, Anvil the second era, Secundus and Nightshift the third. But there was one more era…the present one. That meant the “Forte 2000” team, as they’d come to be known. And that meant a character from that team, one that Aaron and I were still writing stories for, would have to leave. It made sense. By this time there were eight heroes on the team, clearly more than one city really needed. One leaving wouldn’t make a difference in the team’s effectiveness, but it would shift our storytelling dynamic. I didn’t want to lose ANY of them. But I felt it was necessary. And after running the idea around in my head and making some hard choices, I decided that Max—created for the Forte 2000 stories by Jeff Baumgardner (one of the Forte founders)—was the most logical choice. Max was the youngest member of the team, and tended to always see himself that way. Maybe a change of scenery would be just what he needed to come into his own and start seeing himself as the seasoned hero that he had become in the five years since the Forte 2000 inception. It made sense. Finally, I accepted that Max would have to be traded. And after I did, it started feeling like the right choice.
       I wanted a team of six, with an even split across gender lines. That meant I needed another female character. Cincoflex, as I said, wouldn’t do it. Moondancer? Maybe, but I had bigger plans for her and her future going on already, as she’d become a major supporting character in the Forte 2000 stories. Chill and Eclipse were both members of the New York team Angel Flight, and knowing their friendship, they wouldn’t want to split off to different sides of the country, so it would be both or neither. Phantashia was dead. Telesis had already finished her character arc and was fully in retirement, raising her son. Knightsabre had given up her powers, and would never leave her family behind in Seattle, besides. My choices weren’t looking too good.
       And then it occurred to me that if you were creating a new comic (Champions is, after all, supposed to simulate super-hero comic books), like a new X-book or JLA spinoff, you always wanted to add something new. Maybe the best idea was to pull in someone who hadn’t been a member of Forte, someone who could be used as a tool to show Forte history through new eyes. I started thinking back over all the independent solo heroines that existed in K.C.’s gaming universe. One that had always caught my attention was someone named Yellow Rose. She was actually born from Forte history. There were a group of college girls, back in the early Forte days, who idolized Mist, and got their hands on some power belts (something like hers, but much more limited) and started going out and doing good deeds as the “Mist Corps”. After their graduation, some of these girls went into law enforcement. And at least one went on to become a super-heroine, adopting the name Yellow Rose. This seemed to me to be a perfect fit. Here was a young woman (not so young anymore) that had become a hero because of her idol, Mist. It was a great set-up—Mist comes to her and asks her to join a team that Mist would be leading. How could Yellow Rose turn that down? It would be like her life was coming full circle. I didn’t know much about the character, as she only got brief mention in the Forte updates, but I started filling in the blanks myself, and pictured her as a very optimistic, positive, and (I decided) religious woman who was still doing her hero thing back home in Texas (after graduating from college in Washington). She would be my fish out of water character, a family-values kind of gal, somewhat naïve, suddenly thrust into life in San Francisco, of all places. Okay. That worked.
       So I had my team. And I loved the idea. And I couldn’t wait to get started with it.
       I had already finished the first chapter of “Things Change”, the origin tale of Forge, and was working on the second when I finally found time to get in touch with K.C. and ask some questions about Yellow Rose. You’re probably already thinking I should have done this first, and you would be correct. He had a lot more established with the heroine than I’d known. Turns out the original Yellow Rose, the Mist Corps member, got injured in the line of duty and quickly decided heroing was too dangerous and gave up, and her tougher-stuff sister took over the mantle. Hmmm. That kind of jacked up my whole Mist connection right there (something I had already written, actually, the part where her idol comes to her and asks her to make the tough choice to leave the city and state that loved her and come to San Francisco). I would have to start all over and get all the information on this new Yellow Rose. And frankly, I was looking for a character that I could have some freedom with, not someone who already had a backstory and personality and motivation.
       The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that the Yellow Rose I was creating wasn’t really working for me anyway. I liked the character. She had spunk. I liked her sweetness, and the idea of putting that sweetness, and her values, and her faith to the test in the situation and location Forge would be in. But when I stepped back and really looked at it? She was a bit on the boring side. And when you’re putting together a team of heroes, you have to think of the group dynamic. Something was still missing from the team as a whole, and when I stepped back and looked at it objectively, I realized that Yellow Rose wasn’t the one to fill that need.
       That need, and what was missing, was some mystery. Some friction. And an element of danger.
       I’d played City of Heroes online for a little while, before I ran out of time in my life to indulge in such things. One of my earliest characters I made for it was a heroine by the name of Heatspell. She was, as the name implies, a user of mystic fire. I just liked the name. This being City of Heroes, I hadn’t created any kind of background or anything for her (some people do, but really, when in the game is it going to come into play? You pretty much just hit stuff). And that name came back to me when I was back to filling that sixth Forge spot. And from that name, a character suddenly grew. Not a sweet and innocent girl who probably grew up on the farm. A violent girl. A haunted girl. One with a history with Sydney that would only be hinted at early on, only to be discovered later. She would be an enigma not only to her teammates, but also to the readers of the tales who already knew the Forte characters there.
       She was what I needed, and what Forge needed. Now, suddenly, already into the second chapter, I had all my team members, and everything felt RIGHT. Forge came together, completely, and the team was alive for me. And the story ideas just started flowing. There was now a new hero team in the Forte world.
       So this page was made (after the origin story was finally done…it took a LONG time) as a place to gather those stories…and the art I’d already started getting for the team. Speaking of art, I should mention that a big part of this coming to life for me were the character designs done by artist Eryck Webb. It occurred to me that Mist would want this new team to have new costumes, similar to but different from their old Forte ones, just to show that this was a new team with new ideas. I provided Eryck with references for the original costumes and gave him free reign to re-imagine them. And what he came back with blew my mind. There were a couple of rethinks needed along the way—as these were OTHER peoples characters, I had to get them to sign off on the new looks for their old heroes, and some corrections were requested—but ones that turned out so much better. And he also created Heatspell completely from scratch, with limited guidance from me. This was a great looking team. Forge really got its soul after I got all these designs from him, so thank you, Mr. Webb, for once again providing the Forte universe with some incredible art, and making it all so much more real for everyone, new fans and old.
       I want to make something else abundantly clear. The Forge team, its beginnings, its details, its stories, are my creation. But the wonderful, interesting and dynamic characters in it (save the one) were created by others—a group of daringly imaginative and boldly creative people that I’m blessed to call friends of mine, all of whom were kind enough to let me play with their beloved heroes (notice how I say that like I gave them much of a choice?). And all of us created them within the rich, detailed and exciting world imagined and brought into being by K.C. Ryan, the godfather of Forte. A world that we love so much that we still can’t let it go, twenty years after its Genesis. Our continuing efforts to keep it living and breathing are a testament—and tribute—to him.
       So I do hope you’ll enjoy this newest addition to the Forte world, and will get a kick out of the stories and stick around for the new ones to come. And I hope, too, if you’re unfamiliar with Forte, that you’ll check out some of our other sites, and also enjoy the adventures you’ll find there.
       But as for this universe’s latest adventure?
       You’ve found it. And it begins now.

Michael O'Connell
February, 2007