So just what the heck ARE these things, anyway?

The “adventures” listed here—also called “issues”—are historical documents (yeah, I was thinking of “Galaxy Quest” when I just typed that…) that record the happenings of each “run” or “session” of the Forte “campaign” (a term for an ongoing role-playing game), a weekly game based around the Champions super-hero role-playing game. This campaign ran from 1987 to 1995, for a total of 328 runs.

After each run, the “gamemaster” (the person who runs the game, or creates the story for the players to participate in), K.C. Ryan, would type up the events that took place during that run—the story, what the characters did, all the detail. These write-ups, which came to be known as “Forte updates”, were copied off and handed out to the players at the beginning of the next run. That fit the original purpose of the updates, which was just to help remind the players what happened last time and where they left off. A little memory jog before starting the next weekly adventure.

But over time, the updates became much more. Where first they just listed broad strokes of what happened to help the players go, “Oh, yeah, I remember now”, they became more and more detailed as the campaign went along, and became both a historical record for the campaign and entertaining reading for others outside the campaign. Forte had became well-known in a Champions A.P.A. (or fanzine) called “The Clobberin’ Times”, and these updates, published there, let readers find out what had been happening to the Forte heroes and their world. Whereas they began as just reports of basic facts, the updates soon became exciting reading, almost stand-alone fiction in themselves.

Champions is meant to simulate comic books. With this in mind, the runs were all numbered, as though each was a comic book issue—Forte #1, Forte #2, etc., all the way up to Forte #328. So this campaign can be considered to be a comic book series…just without the art (though to be true to comic book form, we have managed to get quite a bit of comic art of the characters over the years, sometimes from big-name industry artists). It has all the elements…memorable, multi-dimensional heroes; ongoing story arcs, both small and long-term; big anniversary issue epic events; dastardly villains, a rich cast of supporting characters, and all the world- (and universe-) saving adventure you could ask for. In essence, it’s one eight-year long story…and a damned good one, if you’re asking me.

Each of these updates/issues is dated…by both the date of the run itself (real world date), and what the date was within the game world during that run. What this did was create a stable timeline. For example, if you wondered when your character’s wedding anniversary was, you could just look up the issue where that marriage happened (assuming it happened during the campaign) and check the date. And then you would know how long your character had been married. Now, after all those issues, having to go back and FIND the wedding issue could be a bit of a pain. This is why gamemaster K.C. created (mostly as a tool for himself to help create stories that drew on past issues) the Forte Index. This was a database, built well before your Excel-type software, that listed every character, big or small, that appeared in each and every Forte run…and which issue numbers they had been in. The list was alphabetical, and allowed him (or us players) to simply look up and find that character (or sometimes place), and then pull that particular update and read it to find out the info we were looking for.

While this was handy during the campaign itself, the biggest benefit of all this came in the latter-day post-campaign stories. Those of us writing Forte universe stories constantly need to reference what happened to an old villain, or how a previous story arc ended, or even just a date of a major event (wedding anniversary, etc.). The Index, and the issue binders (for those that have them), make this possible.

While there have been Forte stories (fiction) and other material available online for several years now, all these sites have been made up of new, post-campaign content. These original Forte updates have, until now, existed only in print format and in the possession of some of the Forte players (and many of them in the pages of the Clobberin’ Times as well). Now, finally, the task is being undertaken to get them all up on the web, where Forte fans can relive them all or reference them for writing purposes. And, hopefully, where new Forte readers who’ve only gotten pieces of this complicated and rich history can finally read it all for themselves.

So it begins now, and more issues will be added along the way, eventually leading to the complete collection being online. And, after that, the online Forte Index will be created, allowing for, like the old days, easy reference to find a particular character or event within them. I also hope to break down the whole campaign by timeline—showing how it progressed by major events, story arcs, definable periods or “ages” and character appearances. All in due time. But at least we’re getting it started.

Now, some things to keep in mind as you begin with the original Forte saga.

First…patience. As I noted, the early issue write-ups weren’t necessarily meant to tell every detail and tell the story to outsiders. They start comparatively short and give you a good feel for what happened. As they go on, they start being written in more detailed story-telling format, where, I guarantee, K.C.’s writing of them will start getting you addicted to keep on reading.

Second…get used to the format. These are written in present-tense format, describing what happened as it “happens” (as if you’re there). There are also, particularly early on, some in-jokes and shorthand used, as the original audience was only meant to be five people who were in on all of it. If you’re not getting the gag, don’t feel bad. Just roll with it and move on. As this “update” format was the standard story-telling style of the Forte campaign, you’ll note that it also got used later in some fictionalized “issues”. Though a couple of the Forte 2000 issues on that site, for example, were write-ups of actual games that got run, most of them are just made-up, written in the Forte Update style to pay homage to the original games, and to emulate Forte adventures similar to the way Champions was meant to emulate comic books. So this is the language of Forte, if you will.

Third…get used to saying “Wait a minute…did he just say ‘Batman’?!” The gaming world that Forte lived in was one created by K.C., and one that included, in addition to original characters and content, an amalgam of different existing published characters from D.C., Marvel and other sources. The super-spy organization of K.C.’s world, for example, is U.N.C.L.E., based on the classic TV show of the same name. So you’ll run across some familiar names from time to time, but you’ll be experiencing the Forte world version of these characters. For more information on K.C.’s world and its origins, try reading “The Forte Universe”, a history of that world and Forte, on the Forge site. But note!—spoilers abound! That article gives pretty much a summary of the whole history of the Forte game, so if you want to follow it in these updates, stop reading that article when the Forte stuff starts! And also note that I plan to create a section on this site (one day…) that breaks down the history of K.C.’s world and how all those published characters fit into it.

Fourth...hey, this is a comic, so what do all these characters look like? When this project is totally finished (holding breath...not recommended!), I plan on having each name in each of the updates link to a page of information on that character (if it's enough of a major character to warrant one), or at least a piece of art for that character. For now, if you're wanting to take a peek at what the Forte heroes all look like, you can go to the Team Files page at the Forte.com site, and click on a character's name to see either a page or some art. Hopefully we'll have shots for all the heroes and all the villains one day. Stay tuned.

So…let the classic Forte adventures come to life once more. As you read, try to keep in mind the context…a group of people sitting around a table, making all these adventures come to life, all of them having no idea that it would all still be going on over twenty years down the road. And enjoy the bit of time travel, too (it’s fun reading about a character pulling up some info on their Apple II computer, for example). Journey back with us to the 80s and 90s, and prepare to step into the world of Forte!

Michael O’Connell
Forte Universe Webmaster and Historian