So, back in the day, we used to go through the V&V rulebook looking at the artwork and speculating about the characters.

When one of my players had a solo adventure in DC, I quickly statted up a bunch of heroes and villains based on Jeff Dee's artwork. (The players helped with some of the heroes...)

Does anyone know if any of the characters in the pictures were actual characters (I know Gauntlet was, but we didn't use him)?

So, our characters we used for Public Trust (the heroes) and the Masters of Doom (evil)

COVER:
Windspan: (red and white) Flight, 3 ton carry, team leader- Public Trust
Master Magnet (Purple and Green) Magnetics and Strength -Team Leader- Masters of Doom
Soulstealer (red and yellow) steals skills and powers, can cause permenant memory loss (MOD)
Transfer: (Blue and Yellow) Short range teleportation and transformation (PT)

pg 17: Speed Queen Heightened Speed and illusions(PT)

pg 19: Multiblast: (guy with ponytail covered in snow): Powerblast, Light Control, Disintegration (MOD)

pg 21: Strongarm (Lifting weight) Big (20T) Str (MOD)
Thunderstorm: (Running Controls): Weather Control (MOD)

pg 23: Nimbus : (shooting villain with VOOM): Chemical powers and non-coporealness (PT)
Fireplace: (Character A): Flames (MOD)
Electric Eye: (Character B): Lightning Control fired from visor (MOD)
Fireplace, Multiblast, and Thunderstorm are brothers

pg 25: Golden Thunder: Flight and Powerblast (PT)

page 27: Demonhorn: (guy with horns) 15T Strength and natural weapons (MOD)
and Transfer (again)

page 31: Scalemale (big godzilla): Strength (100T) and invulnerability...and that was an illusion Speedqueen used to make him look larger than his 6'6" frame... (PT)

pg 32: Death Incarnate (skull head...I think every GM had Death Incarnate...what a great name!) Flight, Invulnerability, Strength (100T), flames, devitalization ray,  (Solo Villain)

pg 47: El Latigo (guy with whip): Jumping, armorsuit, whip (PT)
Blockhead (helmet): Strength (100 T), Invulnerability (MOD)

and from the cover of Opponents Unlimited:

Mane (Unicorn): Light Control and leaping
Free Bird (Skyhawk): TK
Married Solo Heroes.  For some reason, we never made the connection that Free Bird was Skyhawk...

But we staged that fight from the cover of Opponents Unlimited...It all started as what was supposed to be a solo game...The main hero team (Force of Good) had split into several teams and so the solo hero (Omegaman: Stretching, Vibro, and Regeneration) went to Washington, DC (he was an aide to a Senator who went from State Senate to US Senate).  At that time, the adventure was going to just be one player-one GM.  While there his first night, he encountered Mane and Free Bird being attacked by Zairobs, Cosmic Zoom, Kudebuck, Jovia, Hoopsnake, and Sir Lemur.  Omegaman and the Force of Good had already fought Sir Lemur twice before, so he immediately stepped in.  It was actually a cool fight.  Mane and Freebird went down quickly, but as GM, my dice hated the villains that day and Omegaman took out the rest of them...by himself!

By the time he met Public Trust, two of my other players showed up to watch.  We'd rolled up the heroes for Public Trust a few weeks before, just playing around with the rules and rolling dice.  (A late-night pasttime for us was watching re-runs of the original Battlestar Galactica and SCTV while rolling up heroes and villains while one player drew counters...)  So, when Omegaman showed up to help Windspan and Transfer against Master Magnet and Soulstealer (both villains escaped) the other players watched the battle and thought Public Trust was cool.

So, we ended up playing several adventures with those heroes, with Scott (our artist) playing his character Omegaman and the other players taking the roles of Public Trust. 

This happened a few times with "one-shot" NPC groups.  The players wanted to know more of the story so we would run some all-NPC adventures so that the players could play the NPCs as characters to learn more of their story..and flesh them out...

The only game system I've ever run where the players would sometimes want to run NPC characters instead of their own...

I love V&V!

Thanks

(I have the PDF, but haven't gotten time to read all of it yet.)

Just read the new V&V (I like it!) but I haven't seen reference to many of the characters from the first book, unless I'm missing some obvious descriptions.

Also, is anyone interested in the stats for the characters we did?

Mr. Man was a government stooge in my campaign...the public, "official" superhero who often was used to deal with "nosey superheroes".  It got worse after CHESS was compromised...

Yeah, he was Evil.

But one of the founding members of the Force of Good (FOG...yes, there was the FOG Plane, and the official communicator...the FOGhorn, etc.) was named Manman.  He had magnetics and heightened STR and END.

Manman and Mr. Man were arch enemies eventually...

Thanks for the clearup.

I always thought Titan was the guy earlier in the book with the Staff.