Quote:All good questions. And they're deliberately not answered in the campaign world. Around 1988 I wrote up a history of Warriors' World to explain these and other issues that bothered me, but when I offered it to the triumvirate of GMs at the time, it was declined. A year or so later I turned that timeline into GURPS I.S.T., so if you can find a copy of I.S.T. (or GURPS Supers), you can see what I thought should probably have happened to get us to the point where we were. (For what's happened since 1990, check out the page The IST World in the 1990s on my website.)
Why, and how, is the U.N. able to have, basically, its own standing army? How did the U.N. get so powerful? Does the United States actually pay its dues in Doug's world?
As far as Drunkard's Walk is concerned, assume the book timeline is reasonably close, with DW winning any conflicts or contradictions. Don't pay attention to the 1990s timeline on my website for DW -- the campaign world has been far less contentious and dark.
Quote:Just like in I.S.T., metahumans are forbidden from serving in national militaries. Private teams, corporate teams, clubs and all manner of organizations are okay, but conventional forces must remain conventional. In the campaign world, France's attempt to defy the Security Council by establishing a (new) national superteam in the early 1990s was the cause of a great deal of international tension, and at the moment is being dealt with in that time-honored diplomatic way -- it's being ignored until they actually do something vaguely military. For the most part, they're simply a PR stunt, and have stayed that way for most of a decade.
And speaking of the ol' U.S., are there any metas attached exclusively to the United States military?
Quote:The Warriors are reserved for metahuman or metahuman-level threats (or worse), or for alien contact situations, or for outright illegal military action. (Case in point: if this were Warriors' World -- and the campaign wasn't stuck in 1998 at the moment -- I'd be expecting to see the Warriors deployed to Iraq any day now. Not to aid the US invasion, but to help repel it, if the US goes ahead without UN approval.)
And if so, where does the jurisdiction come in? When do you call in your own nation's metas or on the Warriors?
Anyway, this doesn't mean we sit in the Mansion twiddling our thumbs most of the time. Local affairs are usually handled locally (by those same private or corporate teams I mentioned above), and for London, we are one of the local teams. Simply to keep in fighting trim, we often respond to police requests for aid. And sometimes we vig for the fun of it.
Quote:Honestly, I don't know the full story -- the campaign started long before I joined (to the best of my knowledge none of the original players remain!), and while I remember hearing the history at least once, most of it didn't stick with me. I do remember that the Warriors started as a private team based in New Jersey. They branched out into two groups, with the new one on the west coast, I think -- the teams were named Warriors East and Warriors West. Then, around 1984 or 1985, the U.N. banned nuclear weapons and national superteams, and the Warriors won the contract to be their super police force to enforce these bans, among other tasks. East moved to London, West moved to Japan, if I'm remembering right, which prompted the name changes to Alpha and Beta respectively, since having Warriors West in Tokyo made no sense at all. (I don't know why those locations were chosen; this was before my time.) At the same time, Warriors, Inc., became Warriors International. Anyway, we've been successful enough over the past 20 years that we've had no real challenges to our contract when it has come up for renewal. We're funded directly by the Security Council.
And, say, how did the Warriors get founded anyway? Whose idea was it? How did it get a UN charter? Who funds it?
Quote:We have a hundred or so powered-armor infantrymen (UN peacekeeping troops from around the world) who act as guards, etc. around the Mansion.
And does Warriors have any regular troops as back-up, crowd control, etc
Quote:While we do have a jet -- loosely based on (ie ripped off from) the X-Men's old Blackbird, we rarely use it anymore. Instead, we have Skitz, his teleport gates, and access to a spy satellite network. Skits can open a gate to anywhere he can see, even if he only sees it via a TV screen. (He can also open a gate to any location he's got memorized -- and for a devastating attack in combat, he's got the bottom of the Marianas Trench memorized.)
Nearly every super-team has an iconic transport: the FF has the Fantasticar, the Avengers have the Quinjets, the Titans had their T-Jets, etc. How about the warriors?
Quote:A lot of this can be found in drips and drabs throughout DW2, but basically, Doug was born in 1962 in Hollywood, CA. His father is a major player in the film industry, his mother is a socialite and equestrian (former Olympic champion). Both are "old money". He was what he calls a "Beverly Hills Baby", growing up very, very rich among the very, very rich in the 1960s and 1970s. He is an only child, although he has several cousins, all of whom he hasn't seen in years. Since going public with his powers in the middle-late 1980s, he's been somewhat estranged from his parents, who see the kind of grandstanding and crazy behavior that marks his public persona as somewhat tacky; there are also political differences that have made for some tension.
What is Doug's family situation, anyway?
Quote:It's never come up in the game, but in the DW world it has -- note the passage in chapter 11 where Doug mentions that Madonna has sent him prerelease copies of her albums so he can see if he can use anything from them. He would not stop her from capitalizing on anything he happens to be able to use, which amounts to pretty much endorsing her music.
Speaking of Doug, does he ever endorse any musicians? Like, "I like his music. So should you."
Just about any "active" performer whose music he's used in a public situation has made a point of at least mentioning it somewhere. He does nothing to discourage this.
Quote:There were several. Do you know more about which on you're thinking of?
who remembers that someone mentioned a good AMV on this forum. What was the title again?
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.