It seems that I missed the two-year anniversary of starting the Star Guard story on 1st July 2023. Not that the anniversary means anything, but it's an excuse to waffle about the Star Guard, and I've been very lax about waffling on this blog. Maybe I've said some of the following before, but if I can't remember then I'm sure my readers can't either, so I'm going to say it again.
I didn't invent the Star Guard. They were introduced in the original Golden Heroes rules, which I talked about in a previous post. The introduction gave a huge amount of detail:
(I've just noticed that somewhere down the line I changed Bolusci to Bolusca, probably because I simply misremembered how it was written in the book. I also just rediscovered that the Meg has a proper name, Torus, which I have never used because I completely forgot about it.)
But this was all the detail I needed to use the group as antagonists in a Strikeforce scenario in 1988. That episode has been written up as chapters 13 and 14 of the Strikeforce story, if you want to see how I used them.
They came back a couple more times in later Strikeforce stories, and I started adding the additional members that the original paragraph hinted at. This was fairly easy, because I could recognise a Legion of Super-Heroes homage when I saw it, and I can homage with the best of them.
But I didn't need to put much effort into fleshing out what the "Emissariate of Bolusca" actually was, or why it had such an unwieldy name. (I eventually figured that last part out: it's a Federal political system, with member planets being semi-autonomous self-governing states and each sending an "Emissary" (like a senator) to represent them on the "Emissariate Council" (Federal government). This works, because the Star Guard can then act like the FBI, with the power to operate across "state lines" and deal with incidents that the Planetary Police in isolation can't or won't. But the politics of this set-up is probably something that needs an entire article to itself.)
So two (and a bit) years ago I had to expand the Star Guard's setting beyond just having a few defined characters to having an entire, detailed, coherent universe for them inhabit. My last two years have been almost exclusively devoted to doing that (which is why documentation of the rest of the Heroes Universe has dwindled to almost nothing). It's nowhere near complete, as all I have time to do is scramble to keep ahead of where the players are travelling next, and to head off any annoying questions they may raise about it. A lot of stuff is in fragmentary notes in my plot book, some of it is only in my head, and a very small portion of it is actually properly documented on the Heroes Universe site. So if you want to read about some of the
- 184 characters (so far) who interact with the on-going Star Guard story,
- 44 planets in known space,
- 14 sentient species that inhabit those planets,
- or a variety of miscellaneous topics about how the galaxy works,
then you (now) know where to find them.
This week I've just been updating and improving the index pages linked above, but if you want to see what new pages have been added recently it's always listed on the home page.
There's some other stuff I was going to say, but I'll save it for a later post. Hopefully not too much later.
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