Allen Shock wrote on Jul 1^st, 2010 at 6:09pm:

For a good start I recommend Joe Littrell's excellent V&V timeline. Unfortunately his site was on geocities but here is the archive of his site.
http://web.archive.org/web/20091024012720/http://geocities.com/agent-13/canontim...

Cheers,
Tim

I have to admit that I'd not noticed the duplications mentioned here before (the ones in the FGU stuff).  We've had a bit of duplication (two PC heroes named Enigma, three villains named Death, etc.) in our campaign before, but it's been rare, and I could give you explanations for why.  I suppose it's possible for the same name to be used (in the same world), especially for lower level characters that aren't that well known outside of a geographical area.

Allen Shock wrote on Jul 2^nd, 2010 at 1:13am:


I've thought about doing that before, actually!   

We've had two PCs named Enigma.  One was a one-time player (so nothing was ever really done with the character after the single time he played), and then - years later - another player chose that name for a secondary/tertiary character.  I assume that the first one is Enigma and the second one is Enigma II.

About a year ago my brother-in-law talked me into rolling up some characters for his kids; I went ahead and ran them through a makeshift, impromput session while we were camping (good thing I had my rulebook with me!)  My brother-in-law had played a character named Spectre for years, and that famous and heroic hero had died at the end of the module Assassin (when the nuclear sub exploded).

So when his kid got some cool powers that were fairly close to Spectre, we decided to go with the same name.  So now his son plays a youngster named Spectre II (technically that would be his name, though to everyone he meets he will simply be Spectre).  That's a facet of comics (a new hero taking on the name of an old, retired or deceased hero) that you don't often see in gaming, and I thought it was pretty sweet.

For the characters of Death, I don't see them ever conflicting over the title.  One of them was one of the Four Horsemen (from Super Crooks & Criminals), another was a strange being from another dimension (that spent months possessing the body of a PC) that we'll supposedly never see again, and the third is a member of the Tarot Masters (who took that name to fit the names of the Major Arcana).

LOL

I have a universe full of heroes and villains (200+) and take no notice whatsoever of 'canon' in this setting (and especially not with fantasy settings).

Arguing over canon is for the creators/publishers, the players and GM's just use whatever they like without paying any attention to that, half of us must have run Marvel or DC games or integrated their characters as canon into ours.

In fact with the original game, that I played over twenty years ago, no one played themselves or paid any attention to 'official characters', we were far too busy converting the Avengers or the X-men to V&V stats 

As for characters with the same name, I had a new player recently make up a character with the same name as a Villain LOL

It was simply good fun as mistaken identities and the Villain trying to kill the hero to 'get his name back' were the order of the day!

I also tend to ignore established continuity and characters.  I have a character called The Phantom (no relation to the character in Charelton Comics).  He is in the mold of DC's The Specter -- a supernatural hero with ties to the "Netherworld".

Just curious...any other "Phantoms" out there?