The Forte Champions campaign had an amazing run, one that lasted from 1987 to 1995. If you've been in a Champions game before--or any roleplaying game, for that matter--you know already that this ain't bad at all. Long-term games are a bitch. Many GMs out there don't like to run things long-term, first off. They have an idea, run a couple of adventures within it, then want to start on this new campaign world they thought up after reading some new novel that inspired them (for the sake of the players, once hopes it wasn't Judy Bloom). Players, too, have the D&D version of ADD, and just want to kill some orcs shoot some stormtroopers over pizza on a Saturday night and move on. Or people come and go, or the people involved get into fights, or whatever. Point being, for a game to run weekly for that many years is a rare thing indeed.

You have to start with a great GM, of course, and K.C. Ryan was the greatest. Man knew how to tell a story (and knew how to tell story arcs, too, more importantly), how to create living, breathing NPCs and bad guys, and knew how to treat his players and their characters. And since no GM is an island (though I met one once who was a cove...), you need great players. And I think when you throw together me, Tim, Kaye, Jeff, Kevin, Randy, Jim K, Adam, Andrea, Jim M., Logan, Ben and Aaron, you're going to get a happy GM. We were players that loved the game, got into the stories, and even created our own stories, both within the game (a good GM knows when to throw his people a little sugar once in a while and give them some input) and in fiction. We loved the characters we'd created enough to want to explore them further, and some pretty darned good tales came out of the off-camera creations.

But people eventually tend to screw up a good game by getting jobs, getting married, having children...you know, all that crap. And so it went that Forte, that amazing campaign that had lasted so long, finally had to end.

Or did it?

See, along the way, this tradition had formed. Many of us from the game had started going to and meeting up at the San Diego Comic-Con (now called "Comic Con International", I suppose to appease the U.N. and further their attempts to subvert our sovereignty and herald the New World Order that will require us all the speak French put mayonnaise on our fries...but that's another essay...). This convention, biggest one of its kind on Earth, takes place every summer, and it's a blast to go to. But more fun than the Con is getting together with the old gang. And since we all used to get together for the purpose of gaming, it just seemed like a natural thing that we'd spend an evening (even sometimes two) of the convention holed up in someone's hotel room, doing a little Champions. And so it began that games started getting run with the Forte characters, and after the campaign ended, this became the chance to catch up with the world and characters of Forte, peek in on them and see what they've been up to.

As I tended to run a lot of these games (often with my partner in geeking, Aaron), I sort of became the de facto, annual GM of the campaign. They were one-night runs, sure, but I'd kind of let people know what their characters have been up to since the team ended. As such, I started becoming the Forte historian, too, keeping track of not only the characters but of dates. Forte was big on documentation in its day, thanks to K.C.'s weekend adventure reports. So I could keep track of things like how old the kids that the characters had in the game now were. I started a little web page on the side, too, (the Forte.com site), that, though only partially done, started expounding further on what was happening with the team, in such things as reports written about Vanguard's bachelor party and the like. Basically, the game was over, but none of us really wanted it to end. So, I took it upon myself to kind of keep it going.

Then came Forte 2000.

This idea came to me, and I got some former Forte players in on it with me. As time was passing along for the game, there was no "official" Forte team anymore, just the old heroes getting together once a year (and always in summer...odd, huh?) to fight some big cosmic menace. What if there were to be a new Forte team with new heroes on it? I asked the founding Forte players (Tim, Kaye and Jeff, along with myself) to imagine that we were all in the same town again, and K.C. had started up the Forte game again, and told us to make characters. What would we make? So the four of us made these new characters that I think were really cool. And we made them just to write stories about, mainly. I built a web page to collect all the character info and post all the stories and art on, and that was to be it.

But it turned out we had a chance to run this as a game. Aaron and I, former Forte players, were leaving in San Diego, only a couple of hours from Kaye and Ben, also Forte alumni that we now married (and to each other, I might add). We decided that since, in our tales, the original Forte 2000 team started their exploits in 2000, what if, two years later in 2002 (it was 2002 when this was going down), new characters joined them? Aaron and Ben made characters. Our pal and former Forte teammate Kevin was living in Sacramento, and he had meant to come down and visit us, so he made a character, too, and on one glorious Saturday, Aaron and Kev and I hopped in Aaron's Hyundai and drove to Orange County (and got in a wreck on the way...long story), hooked up at Kaye and Ben's place, and ran the first Forte 2000 game.

Now I officially WAS the Forte GM, running this new game in K.C.'s world. It was great, picking up with the city of Seattle again (where the original Forte did their thang), seeing what had changed since we all left it, and starting some new adventures in this familiar setting with new heroes...all really great characters, too. We had, and loved, the first run. We decided to try and make it a regular thing (at least those of us in So. Cal). We couldn't do it once a week like in the old days, but maybe, we thought, we could shoot for once a month.

Nice plan.

My goal for the game went like this--I wanted to do that monthly thing and be able to get in three or four runs in the new campaign before the summer convention rolled around. I could build up my first big story arc that way, and bring it to a climax with a big Con game that would guest-star old Forte characters (played by those who showed up who didn't HAVE Forte 2000 characters) to team up with the new. Problem was, the planned runs didn't happen. We did manage to get a little experimental and have one online game in a chat room, but it didn't look like that was to be a regular thing. I did run a game with old and new Forte folks that summer. It wasn't the big story I'd planned, but it happened and it was fun.

And it was also that last thing to happen in the Forte universe.

Up until then, time was able to flow along nicely in the Forte world, post-campaign. Every summer came the big adventure, and we'd learn that what characters had been doing all year, and then the characters would save the universe and go their separate ways, and after lathering and rinsing, we'd repeat the whole thing next year.

Problem was, I started a game...a regular campaign, one with set dates going on. And once that game started, time stopped when the game didn't go on. I had left things at a cliffhanger and was trying to get ready for the big story next time we ran, but I didn't get to run again. The following year at the convention, I didn't get to run any game at all, due to new commitments with publishing "The Nice Guy" and being there for more professional than vacational (is that a word?) reasons. And then Aaron moved to Seattle (Forte country!) and I moved back to Sacramento, so there was no more hooking up with Ben and Kaye (just a LITTLE bit longer of a drive...). And next thing I knew, it was 2005. And the Forte world had stopped on a cliffhanger in 2002. And it didn't look like there was going to be any chance to get back to that in the near (or far) future. So, for all intents and purposes? I had frozen the Forte universe in place.

Well, you just can't do that. Forte, like the Law and Order franchise or the Simpsons or the use of the word "extreme" to market products to young people, must go on.

As a GM, I've had to give up on the ultra-big story I had in mind and change it up and will have to just let the players know what happened to their characters in the end. We'll all have to deal with the fact even though some of those characters had just met and had known each other for a matter of hours? They've now known each other for three years. We'll have to fill on those years with fiction on the way, figuring out what kind of trouble they all get into between there and now, and there will be fun in that. The dream of regular continuity is going to have to go away again, but it was nice while it lasted. Any who knows? Maybe one of these days...

Anyway, the need to let the campaign catch up with real time is what this page is all about. I mentioned all that date-keeping before. I think the need to do all this really hit me when I was looking at the Forte birth dates sheet I have...and I realized with shock that my character Dr. Jackal's daughters are about to turn 15. 15?! They were born during the campaign! How can THAT be? Oh, wait...I'm old. That's right. I realized I wanted to let those poor kids grow up. I wanted to know how the parents of these and the other Forte kids were dealing with their kids turning into teenagers...and what kind of people these kids were turning into. And it wasn't just the kids...I realized Tim's main guy, Phantasm, is going to turn 50 this year! How is he dealing with that (Phantasm, not Tim...)? How is he dealing with fatherhood, aging, and has he ever resolved his issues with his brother Frank? And I wanted to know how Anvil's marriage was going. And what Lightsedge was doing with his new group of students out righting wrongs around the world. And did he ever hook up with Quiver? And how is Mist doing running that UNCLE office out of San Francisco, and raising her mystical prophecy son who's now a teen? And what's up with those Forte 2000 people? Did Seahawk and Nightsable stay together? Did Lucy hook up with Jack McNeal of UNCLE Seattle's STRIKE team, or was he not loser enough for her? How did Dr. Jackal deal with finding out Moonspider learned his secret identity, and did Moonspider ever find out who was trying to kill him?

Many questions, ones with no answers if time does not go on. So it has. And to PROVE it, I'm writing some Forte character fiction under the "Forte '05" banner. These are all tales starring one or more former or current Forte members (mostly former, because the Forte 2000 fiction should be staying on the Forte 2000 page, I think), and are just my way of looking in on them and saying hello. And, more importantly, to keep the Forte timeline rolling along, as it always has.

So time is now unfrozen once more. And I hope that Forte and non-Forte people alike get a kick out of these little stories. Enjoy. And Viva La Forte.

Michael O'Connell - Forte player, latter-day Forte GM, certified Forte geek for life.

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