Six Star Wars movies is not enough.

The Star Wars phenomenon exploded when the first trilogy came out. The problem was, you had this whole universe that people loved, filled with story possibilities and adventures, and there was, at the time, only six hours of material on it. People wanted more. And so, even before the prequel trilogy came to be, the Star Wars Expanded Universe began. It began with the Star Wars novels, which began, I'm sure, as just a marketing idea. But it grew. Novel after novel began to come out, along with comics that expanded on the universe and the characters. And the great thing about what the Lucas people did was trying to tie all of them together into one (mostly coherent) timeline. This went beyond books and comics, and into the videogames and animated series as well. Now there's a huge body of Star Wars work for fans to fall into, new tales to feed their lust for galactic adventure.

Similarly, eight years and 328 mostly weekly runs of Forte is not enough.

The Forte Champions campaign, which ran from 1987 to 1995, was a smashing success, not just for the players involved, but for other Champions fans who got to read about the hero team's exploits in the Clobberin' Times Champions APA. The gamemaster, K.C. Ryan, created epic stories for the players and their fascinating, loveable characters, and the adventure write-ups each week became almost fiction themselves.

But it turned out that was not enough. There was only so much you could cram into the four- to five-hour sessions each week. There was more character development, more side stories that just begged to be told. As such, some of the players began writing things on the side. There was fiction written about their characters, and other creative means to expand on the heroes (like Kaye Bellot's psychological profile on her character Cincoflex, or the fictional letters written between heroes). Works such as these started off existing only in Michael O'Connell's bulging Forte binder that he brought to each game, but eventually found their way into the pages of the Clobberin' Times for others to enjoy.

As players moved on with their lives and left the game, they would continue to write about their characters, continuing the tales of their heroes and their exploits after leaving the team. Michael O'Connell, for example, wrote up the adventures of "Pharaoh", the hero formerly known as Twostep, as he went undercover after the campaign to infiltrate the crime family he'd once been a part of. And there were still gaming opportunities as well. Each year, many of the Forte players would meet again at the annual Clobberin' Con in San Diego (taking place at the San Diego Comic-Con in San Diego), and games would be run there that would reunite the characters and catch everyone up on what had been happening with the heroes.

The game eventually ended, in September of 1995, but Forte, like Star Wars, was something that people wanted more of. There were more convention games, and even more fiction. There was even a sequel campaign--mostly a virtual campaign made up of fiction, but there were some runs when the players were able to get together--called Forte 2000, one that picked up the Forte timeline and continued it on. And there was more. Aaron Storck had taken a side hero team from the campaign called "Armor Security" and recreated it, and began detailing their adventures. Michael came up with a new incarnation of "The Paragons", the hero team that was K.C.'s first campaign in Sacramento that pre-dated Forte, and gave them new life as well. The campaign had ended, but the players were keeping it alive, expanding on the universe that K.C. had created for them.

And with the growth of the internet (which had just started to take off by the time Forte closed its doors), the opportunity came to start putting this body of work online for more people to enjoy, as well as providing a venue to create new material. This is where ForteUniverse.com began, a place to find everything related to Forte. It's still a work in progress, but the body of material continues to grow.

There are a number of pages that make up ForteUniverse (Forte 2000, Forte.com, Forte '05), but this one, The Forte Expanded Universe page, is a place to collect some of the material that doesn't fit in any of them--such as convention games, pages for other hero teams in the Forte universe, and the like. As time goes on, more of the existing works will be added, and new works will find their way here as well.

So we invite you to join us in the ongoing adventures of the heroes and villains that make up the Forte universe. We hope you enjoy them, and we hope they inspire you to read more, and to perhaps keep the roleplaying movement alive by starting a campaign of your own.

Welcome to Seattle. Welcome to Forte.

Michael O'Connell

Player--Dr. Jackal, Twostep, Seahawk, Nightsable

Gamemaster--Forte 2000