From a state-of-the-art mountaintop complex overlooking the Mile-High City of Denver, America's foremost hero team--Crusade--wages an ongoing war against crime, villainy and evil. Led by Tradition, the nation's patriotic icon and most beloved hero, these veteran champions keep vigil over the western United States, ready to launch into action at a moment's notice. They are: Blue Lion--multi-millionaire male model, movie star and strongman; Gatling--the armored arsenal and team technological wizard; The Covenant--the dark, vengeful scourge of the alleyways, unstoppable in his quest for justice...and vengeance; Silent Knight--the beautiful, sensational martial mistress and altruistic record industry magnate; Scorpion--the fun-loving, scene-stealing powerhouse; and Avalon--the mysterious mage that walks between worlds.

The Basics

Crusade, which began with the team name Pavilion, operates out of base called Crusade Citadel. With the change in name came a change in direction and purpose. Tradition organized the nation's hero teams into rough jurisdictions for maximum efficiency, and Crusade's aegis covers Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico, The Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska...and, of course, Colorado. Tradition has maximized communication and cooperation with local law enforcement--and local solo heroes--and sends his team out on specific missions. Often one member of Crusade will be sent, or a pair, their skills and powers matched for the situation. On more serious occasions, the entire team unites.

Crusade members get to their destinations either under their own powers or via Crusade Shuttles, small, high-tech craft designed to get them to the source of trouble as quickly as possible. When the team travels en masse, they do so in The Excalibur, Crusade's supersonic stealth jet.

Crusade, for the most part, is a high-profile, media-friendly hero team both loved and respected by the public at large. The noted exception is the always-controversial Covenant, who remains part of the team but out of the public light. Tradition lets critics say what they will, but he knows Crusade faces dangers of all varieties, and sometimes The Covenant is exactly what is needed to get the job done.

History

Year One: A metahuman hostage situation brings Tradition, Blue Lion, Covenant, Gatling, Silent Knight, Scorpion, and Charge together in the city of Denver. The city, anxious for its own hero team, invites them to form Pavilion--a team name taken from the name of the famous building complex, the Montgomery Parks Pavilion. The buildings are a memorial built for the famed former mayor and folk hero, Montgomery Parks, and seem a fitting place for a hero base. The heroes accept, and Pavilion is born.

The theft of an ancient crystal skull by a group of freelance super-thieves called The Untouchables and the mad schemes of wealthy occultist Quentin Saint lead the fledgling team into a battle to stop the extra-dimensional overlord Onslaught from opening a portal to our world. Onslaught and his minions are narrowly defeated, and the gate is destroyed.

A gang of skinheads takes on the cause of The Covenant, calling themselves Sons of The Covenant and taking harsh justice to the streets. The Covenant himself is irritated with this development, and the gang helps perpetuate his downward spiral of bad public opinion. He becomes, and remains, a controversial facet of the team.

Pavilion has its first encounter with a group of villain mercenaries that call themselves The Magnificent Several--a joke regarding their ever-changing roster size. Current members include Frag, Wildside, Redline and Deadzone. Deadzone, first appearing here as a minor villain with the power to open a door to another dimension that he calls "the Dead Zone", will become a major threat to the team in the years to come. Frag, on contract, blows up the penthouse home of Dominic Devereaux--Blue Lion--with the hero inside. Blue Lion barely survives. Tradition stumbles onto a link between the Several's mission, elements of the US Government, and a Russian colonel.

Pavilion travels to Washington DC, Tradition's old stomping grounds, to follow leads pertaining to the Russian incident. They happen, instead, onto a plot to assassinate a senator, and end up storming the underground base of megalomaniacal master villain Amerikhan, foiling, for the time being, his plans to take over the nation through assassination, chaos, financial instability, and force.

Pavilion meets Avalon, a teleporting, magic-wielding hero who can travel to other dimensions. He proves instrumental in helping the team stop the time-traveling soldiers of fortune called Nemesis from changing history and destroying their own future. Tradition invites Avalon to join the team, but he declines for now.

A man-made plague hits Denver--the city is quarantined, martial law is declared, a tactical strike against the city for containment purposes is considered by a frantic government. The military and two of the country's other major hero teams--The Centurions of New York and L.A.'s Legend--keep the citizens of Denver, Pavilion included, from leaving the city. Working with C.D.C. colonel Monica Webb, the team races against time to find the source of the plague, and trace it to one of Denver's many federal buildings. In a hidden sub-basement, the villain Dominion waits. Using information sold to him by the enigmatic cyberpirate/terrorist Hackmaster, he'd found out about a classified cold war project still stored here. Denver is his testing ground--after its destruction, he'll blackmail the world. Pavilion defeats him and releases the plague's airborne cure. Over five thousand people are dead before it's over, but a greater tragedy is averted. The intelligence community tries to convince Tradition to keep the plague's origins hidden for the sake of the nation. For the sake of the nation, Tradition goes public with it, bringing many government officials and agencies down in the process.

An attempt on the life of Frag in Denver brings the Russian mystery back to the forefront. Frag reveals that his group's former mission (the theft of classified military computer disks) and the attempt on Blue Lion's life were unrelated--he'd been under contract for both, and tried to fit both into one trip to Denver. Because this screw-up led the heroes to ask questions about the Russian affair, and because he knew too much, the Russians and certain American intel men now want him dead. With Covenant's "help", he agrees to spill the info--first, all he knows on Blue Lion's death contract was that someone named Journeyman hired him. Second, someone high up in the Russian military is planning to bring the Soviet Union back, and someone in the US government is helping him. Pavilion ends up in Russia, and right in the middle of a military coup--and on the brink of a third world war. With Moscow in flames and nuclear missiles primed to strike Europe and the United States, the team joins with former members of The People's Heroes--the Soviet super team--against a mad colonel's army and the remainder of the People's Heroes, including group leader Red Squared, the multiplying uberman. As the world holds its breath, Pavilion averts Armageddon by seconds, and helps return control of Russia to its people. A high ranking State Department director and his shadow cabinet are exposed as taking part in the intrigue in an attempt to restart the Cold War. Pavilion is firmly established as a world-class hero team, and the televised image of Tradition's final showdown with Red Squared cements him in the eyes of all Americans as the nation's hero.

Year Two: Pavilion members deal with their new-found ultra-celebrity status. Blue Lion's film career begins. Gatling becomes a U.S. military spokesman. Tradition deals with the ups and downs of idol worship, and is asked to run for office. Scorpion starts doing soft drink commercials. Charge is offered a job as the official city hero of San Diego and accepts, leaving the team. Covenant, wanting nothing to do with the media blitz, begins to distance himself from the team and work (even) more on his own. Silent Knight finds it harder and harder to divide herself between team activities and keeping up her duties at Wainwright Records.

The villain Deadzone returns to Denver, this time much more powerful. His magics have grown, as have his skills in using them. He's found breaking into the former mansion of Quentin Saint, stealing mystic tomes from a hidden library. He fights Pavilion to a standstill, and then Avalon shows up, claiming to have been drawn to the battle by unexplainable impulse. He and Deadzone face off, but before Deadzone can be defeated, he pulls his old trick and yanks Avalon through the Dead Zone portal with him...and Silent Knight leaps through before it closes as well. They find that Deadzone has become a conqueror in this dimension, no longer satisfied to simply use it as a personal battle ground. Avalon and Silent Knight are overwhelmed by an army of his minions, and Avalon uses his own dimensional powers and pulls them out and back to Earth before they're killed. When he tries to open a door to this world again, so the whole team can go through, he finds he can't...his powers keep him from entering this dimension on his own, and he has no idea why. The team invites Avalon to join again, and this time, he agrees.

A mob war erupts in Denver, and The Covenant is right in the middle of it. Having angered both sides, Covenant is set up and framed for the murder of an out-of-town boss. The evidence seems rock solid, and his past violent reputation seems to make his guilt sure. Pavilion is divided on the issue, half the team believing him innocent, the other half believing him guilty of the crime. Covenant breaks out of jail to clear his own name, with Pavilion and every law enforcement agency in the country on his trail. Not only does he prove his innocence, but finds a direct link between the mob and business giant John Charter. He's cleared of all charges and testifies, putting Charter and two mob family heads behind bars. A contract on his life remains to this day.

Pavilion faces the villain group Cadre for the first time as the deadly team attacks Denver International Airport in an attempt to retrieve drug lord Manuel Lobos from federal transport and return him to Brazil. Cadre members include Inferno, Shroud, Holocaust, Biohazard, Crew, Hysteria and Berg. The battle is frenzied and chaotic, with Hysteria causing terror and panic among the thousands of civilians at the airport, and Inferno setting everything in sight ablaze. The conflict ends in stalemate, and Cadre gets away with Lobos. Dozens of civilians are killed, several at the murderous hands of the homicidal Shroud. One of Crew's multiplied selves is inadvertently killed, and he vows vengeance. Scorpion is hospitalized and fights for his life against one of Biohazard's toxic attacks. Gatling's armor is damaged beyond repair, leading him to design and build the Gatling Mark II suit. Denver International is shut down for massive reconstruction. Cadre becomes Pavilion's arch enemy.

Gatling designs the Diablo armor for the Army. At a (supposedly) classified field test attended by top Pentagon officials, the suit is stolen by Damon Markoff, former cold war era spy and current freelance terrorist. Gatling's frantic search leads him on a world-wide quest with Military Intelligence expert Shannon Harper, and they discover Diablo's freelance assignment to assassinate the king of Jordan. Gatling and Diablo battle at the Royal Palace. The king is saved, but the palace is all but destroyed and Diablo manages to escape. Gatling vows to get the armor back, feeling responsibility for every act of terror it will be used for.

Dominic Devereaux, a.k.a. Blue Lion, becomes romantically involved with his British-born agent, Rachel Fallon.

John Charter wins his appeal and is released from prison, going into seclusion to escape the media frenzy surrounding him.

Wainwright Records is hit with a major lawsuit when a group of Kansas teens go on a killing spree and their parents claim their children were incited by the latest album from Rapture, a band on the Wainwright label. Wanda Wainwright, a.k.a. Silent Knight, initially defends the group and the company, but strange details begin to come to her attention. A personal investigation leads her to finding that the group is heavily involved with a cult called The Darkening, and with ancient black magic. She finds that an incantation buried within the music did cause the murders. Though unable to prove this, she pays the families' suit, pours money into the defense of the teens, has Rapture's albums pulled from the shelves, and tears up the band's contract. The company's board is enraged with her actions, the band sues the label, and Wainwright Records finds itself in deep financial turmoil.

Pavilion teams with the Texas-based hero team The Rangers to battle the cosmically-powerful Olmec in Mexico, a villain claiming to be a resurrected god returning to the Earth. At the end of the cataclysmic battle, Olmec is seemingly destroyed by angry spirit-forms thought to be gods of the sun and the moon. His temple collapses into the Earth, and Mexico is saved.

Year Three: An unidentified craft, drifting through space, nears Earth's orbit. A NASA team is sent up to investigate, and contact is lost with them. The government asks Pavilion to go on a rescue mission, and the team takes an experimental shuttle up to the massive, foreboding, silent alien craft. As Gatling and Scorpion, their suits modified for space EVA, try to find a way in, Scorpion seems to go mad, trying to take off his suit as claustrophobia overcomes him. He's sedated, and the rest of the team enters the ship, and a journey in to madness, for most of them, follows. An ancient alien creature with telepathic abilities is behind it. The creature, and her "workers", of a race called the Karnyss, were hunted by a another race called the Bedmarri, and their ship was damaged as they fled into hyperspace, throwing them thousands of light years off course and leaving them adrift. The creature feeds off psychic energies, and the NASA team woke her from hibernation and provided her the energies she needed to regain her strength (though they went insane and killed themselves). The Covenant and Gatling are the last of the team still functioning, and Covenant confronts the creature in the heart of the ship. The creature attempts to seduce him (though horrifying and grotesque, its telepathy makes it irresistible), promising him power beyond imagining if he'll take her down to Earth. Covenant overcomes, mortally wounds the creature and causes a chain reaction in the engines, snaps Gatling out of his catatonia, and the two heroes fight a running battle against the worker aliens back to the shuttle and the other heroes. The team blasts away from the ship just as it explodes. The creature is destroyed, but The Covenant's psychic linking with it revealed the truth...before the heroes had arrived, the revived creature had sent a distress beacon. More of them may be heading toward Earth.

Another attempt is made on Blue Lion's life, and this time his girlfriend Rachel in nearly killed in the attempt. Pavilion vows to find the mysterious Journeyman, and an investigation leads to revelation about Blue Lion's origins. A secret scientific group called Odyssey has been conducting genetic experiments for years, pledged to helping (forcing) mankind along its journey to the next stage of evolution. The title of "Journeyman" is given to the group's current leader. Blue Lion's father was the original Journeyman, and Dominic was his greatest achievement. This Journeyman used his own genetic material, altered to perfection, and used it to impregnate a genetically superior young woman the group had kidnapped. What he created was the perfect man. What he hadn't counted on was falling in love with the girl (who hated him) and the feelings he'd have for his own son. The girl found a way to escape and take the child with her, but the Journeyman was waiting just as she was about to be gone. He let her go, his love for the child that strong, not wanting the group to manipulate and control him. Dominic's mother died in his early teens from all the treatments she'd been given, having never told him the truth. His father, too, died, and the new Journeyman eventually found out who Blue Lion really was. This one hated the first (and, in fact, killed him, because the old guy was getting too liberal) and claimed to want Blue Lion dead because they couldn't afford to have one of their experiments running around loose. In fact, he really just hated what Blue Lion represented (the former Journeyman's scientific superiority). Pavilion faces the group's legacy...their metahuman offspring, most of them indoctrinated and waiting for their time to enter and (by guile and force) take over the world...and perpetuate nothing less than an eventual human genocide. But with the help of a small handful of genetic uberchildren with minds of their own, they defeat the group and end its works. Blue Lion helps his "brothers and sisters" ease into the outside world, and mourns for the imprisoned ones who still believe in the goals of Odyssey.

The terrorist group that originally owned the Scorpion armor finally figures out a way to get control, and they do so with Jack Nugent still in the suit! They send the suit, and its unwilling passenger, on its original mission...the overtaking and destruction of a Phoenix nuclear plant. Pavilion must fight the Scorpion armor without harming their friend inside. Before a nuclear disaster is caused, the team brings the armor down, with help from a computer virus inserted by Gatling. The armor melts down internally, beyond salvage. Pavilion, with an angry, unarmored (but with borrowed energy pistols) Jack Nugent, tracks down the terrorist base and defeats them. Gatling designs the newer, sleeker Scorpion suit for Jack.

A hostile takeover of Wainwright Records occurs. Due to the past financial crisis, Wanda had been forced to sell shares on the open market, and a group of investors has bought up the bulk of the stock...along with Wanda's own stock, thanks to the betrayal by her financial planner. A lengthy investigation leads Wanda to believe The Darkening is involved, and manipulated the financial parties responsible for stealing her company. She reluctantly enlists The Covenant's help, despite their differences. In the process, the Covenant is captured, tortured, and an occult brainwashing is attempted. Silent Knight frees him from this personal Hell, the two bring down the cult, and through careful maneuvering and the help of some of Wanda's corporate friends (and some of Blue Lion's money as well...and, to Wanda's surprise, a large sum from The Covenant?), she regains control of Wainwright Records and begins the slow crawl back to financial stability.

Deadzone returns to Earth with a vengeance, this time set on destroying Avalon's life. In an orchestrated strike, he and his forces attack the Pavilion base, damaging much of it and killing live-in maintenance man and team friend Oscar, attack the home of Wanda Wainwright (who Avalon has been growing closer to) and seriously injure her, burn the children's center where Avalon does a lot of volunteer and fundraising work to the ground, and blow up the hospital wing at Denver Memorial dedicated to Avalon. A message is left...Deadzone wants to face Avalon alone at an orphanage in Oklahoma, and after all this, Avalon is more than willing. They meet, and Deadzone reveals his discovery...that he and Avalon are brothers, both separated at this orphanage, and he hates him for having a life that went right...and he hints at a deeper connection, but does not explain. The two lock in mortal, magical combat, and both are nearly killed before Deadzone escapes through a portal, swearing he'll have his revenge on his brother.

A demon named Raze comes to Denver, encasing the whole of the city in a mystical field and transforming it into a Hellish nightmare. And he says it's his right...he paid for it. The truth about city hero Montgomery Parks finally comes out. Raze met with Parks when the folk legend was a young man living in the city of his birth. He made him an offer he'd made to many...power, riches, women, fame--all for a price. The price was not only his soul, but a particular piece of real estate. Denver. Raze had taken a liking to it, and claims Parks had the right to make such a deal, since was a direct descendant of John W. Denver, for whom the city was named. Parks gave in and took the deal, and got all he was promised--he was a war hero, a man of great wealth, led a Kennedy-like secret private life, rumors of which only seemed to widen his appeal, and seemed on a winning streak that couldn't end. No one understood his eventual suicide, which was, in actuality, the guilt finally catching up with him. Raze has decided the time is right to collect his property, and he sets up his throne in the most appropriate place...The Montgomery Parks Pavilion...the Pavilion base. The heroes finally beat the demon by force and with a contract technicality (Tradition, avid historian, proves that the Parks family lied about their heritage somewhere along the way), and he's sent back to Hell...but not before the Montgomery Parks Pavilion is blown all over the city. Learning the shaming truth about their hero, the citizens of Denver want nothing to do with his name any longer, and this becomes the perfect opportunity for a refocusing, and renaming, of the team (most of the team always hated the name "Pavilion" in the first place). After a great deal of discussion over a new team name (and after Gatling finally gives up on his suggestion of calling themselves "The Mile-High Club"), Pavilion is reborn as Crusade, and construction of Crusade Citadel begins.

Year Four: Tradition redefines Crusade into a more focused, mission-based unit, and coordinates with the nation's hero teams to create jurisdictional boundaries for maximum efficiency. Crusade takes many of the western states, save California, which is handled exclusively by Legend. Crusade Citadel is completed, a state-of-the-art complex overlooking the city instead of in the middle of it (so if it blows up again, it'll cause less damage this time).

Avalon disappears, and all evidence suggests that Deadzone is the one who took him. The team meets with Dr. Marsha Warren at Frontier Labs. Her department has been doing groundbreaking work in dimensional research and portals, and with great effort, she manages to locate the Dead Zone and open a doorway to it. The heroes find that Deadzone does have Avalon...and that Deadzone is now king of this whole dimension, and has a past with Avalon that even he didn't know until recently. He and Avalon aren't only brothers on Earth, but were actually brothers in a former incarnation, thirty years ago, here. They were "Walkers"--part of a group of holy men/warriors/ambassadors that used magics from a great mystical pool called The Nexus to protect their land and travel to other dimensions. When the two of them reached the age of ascension, and it was their time to complete the ceremony before The Nexus that would give them their magical powers, Avalon was found--to everyone's shock and amazement--to have been born with a part of the Nexus already in him. This made his brother even more jealous, and made him hate him all the more. Deadzone traveled the worlds like the others, gathering information for the order's great library of knowledge. But he forsook their law of keeping to their own ways and not learning the ways of other worlds. He learned magics wherever he went, and became powerful. When his acts were discovered, he was stripped of his dimensional traveling abilities, and all Nexus magics, and was banished to desolate outland of the Dead Zone--a dimension which, at this time, was a beautiful, living place, not the rocky, dark place Crusade has seen in their experience.

Deadzone gathered an army among the other outcasts in the wilderness, and returned to conquer the capitol city and get his vengeance. He and his forces killed many of the Walkers that remained, and Deadzone took control of the Nexus, blocking any of the traveling Walkers from ever returning. Avalon was in another part of the Dead Zone at the time, and Deadzone laid a trap for him when he returned. He battled his brother at the Nexus itself, using all the dark magics he'd gathered from other worlds, and stripped him of his ability to ever return to the Deadzone under his own power. He then intended to cast him to another world forever, but the trap backfired, and both brothers fell into the Nexus. Corrupted by Deadzone's magics, the Nexus transformed the whole dimension into a dead place--with dark skies and stars day and night, and land that fought savagely against attempts to cultivate it--before whisking the brothers through space and time. Their spirits were reborn on Earth, in a pair of twins waiting to be born. Their mother died giving birth to these boys, boys that would one day become the hero Avalon and the villain Deadzone.

Deadzone, sometime after his last encounter with Avalon, discovered the truth about their past lives, and vowed to finish what he started back then (though neither brother has any memory of these pre-pasts). He plans to re-energize The Nexus, which has been dormant since their fall into it, by mystically tearing the piece of The Nexus that is within Avalon out. The Nexus will then finally be his, and he'll be all-powerful and free to conquer world after world.

The ceremonies and incantations take time, though, and Crusade arrives several days before it can be accomplished. The team is beaten by Deadzone and his armies. Most of them are captured, but Blue Lion and The Covenant manage to escape...Blue Lion with the aid of the last remnants of the Walker religion, driven underground by Deadzone, and Covenant into the wilderness. Blue Lion works with these men and women to find a way to break into Deadzone's fortress and stop the ceremony, and Covenant meets with strange, outcast humanoids that were driven from the rest of the land long ago. Blue Lion and the walkers manage to free the team and they all fight their way to the Great Cavern where Deadzone is already beginning the ceremony. They look as though they're about to lose when Covenant and an army of outcasts storm in and join the battle. Avalon is freed, and he and his brother face each other one last time. Deadzone is defeated, and the Nexus is reborn with the help of its hidden essence within Avalon. The land is transformed back to its former glory, and the people are freed from Deadzone's armies. The Walkers are reborn, and new students will take up the old ways again. Deadzone, now powerless, is imprisoned in a high tower--a life sentence. Avalon is asked to stay, but he says he's a son of both Earth and this place. He'll return often to help the new ruling body and the Walkers along, but will still return with Crusade to Earth.

Flamboyant sports promoter Leonard Starr ("It takes a Starr to make a star, baby") conceives of and establishes the Super-Powered Wrestling Federation, taking the cheap theatrics and questionable authenticity of professional wrestling and putting heroes and former villains into it. He signs Scorpion, who begins a new and lucrative side career. These contests sell out all over the nation, and the sport becomes a new phenomenon.

Tradition is captured by a group run by his former intelligence contact, Randall Glover. Glover disappeared after the aftermath of the Dominion affair, disgraced and now a wanted man. He and a group of other ousted intel men have formed a shadow group dedicated to shaping world events to their own means. Tradition, we now discover, was part of a secret government program to create supers, and was their only success, and was monitored closely by Glover and the government after he turned his back on them to follow his own path. Crusade tracks down and rescues Tradition, and puts an end to the shadow group. Glover, however, escapes, and is still at large.

A starship approaches Earth, and a group of Earth's heroes, including members of Crusade, go out to meet it and investigate. It turns out to be the flagship for the Bedmarri race, and its warrior captain, Seeker, tells the group that the distress beacon did, in fact, make it to the Karnyss, and their fleet is on the way to Earth. And they plan on conquering it. Tradition organizes the Earth's hero teams...and governments. Half the heroes--and half of Crusade, including Gatling, Avalon and Blue Lion--head out into space to meet the Karnyss with the Bedmarri fleet. The rest remain on Earth to prepare for the invasion. The battle in space is an all-out galactic war, and the Legend member Arc is killed. The whole of the enemy is not stopped, however, and many ships make it to Earth. The world's militaries and heroes are united against them as the hideous aliens swarm into the Earth's major cities. In space, Avalon and Centurion telepath Insider end up on a Karnyss ship that the Queen Mother is on. It takes the combined psychic/mystical forces of these two heroes to overtake her, and both enter her mind. Severing her psychic link to all her "children", they cause the whole invading Karnyss force to lose their singularity of purpose. Without this cohesion, they become confused and lost, and easy to defeat. Avalon casts the Queen into an empty, desolate dimension forever. The Earth and Bedmarri forces conquer the Karnyss, and the Bedmarri round up the alien soldiers from Earth and take them back into space. Seeker credits the Earth heroes with finally defeating the evil race, and they'll all be remembered as great heroes throughout the outer worlds. The peoples of Earth get busy cleaning up after the invasion, and new spirit of cooperation in the world points toward a brighter future.

Year Five: The walls between alternate realities begin to break down, a phenomenon called the "Jericho Effect", and groups of heroes from other worlds--Forte, M.A.G.I.C., and the Questors--come to Crusade's Earth and join with them in an epic battle to save all of eternity.