Afro Samurai

One Universe: World Of Heroes - A Marvel Comics / DC Comics Crossover RPG!

this hot let me get Blade

Good Ol' Boys

all good

Good Ol' Boys

_{FOR WHAT'S TO COME}

Sun digested the Harlow’s usual raucous. In its place was thick heat that burned the lungs and soggy towels atop heads that couldn’t stop sweating. Kids from around the neighborhood ran barefoot in red clay roads. With just a tanktop and boxers on, Alphonse stepped outside. He leaned on the wood railing of the front porch near the dilapidated steps and from behind him the screen door swung open. Out came a woman whose rollers were still in her hair and whose cigarette was already lit and in hand.

“Mama say call her soon.” Minnie revealed dry,
“Tell her call Walter.” Alphonse returned,
“She don’t want Walter. She want you.” a drag, a savor, then an exhale,
“She say what she want?” Al took the towel and wiped his face and neck,
“Something ab-” she was interrupted by her husband’s raised voice,
“Y’all be careful out there, na! I done told y’all bout bein so rough!” one of the older kids slung a lithe child many pounds smaller than himself face first in the dirt; there were no tears from the victim, only a continuation of play,
“Somethin about some white man come asking her for 20 percent.” Minnie, too, kept on unphased,
“White man or a white man?” Alphonse looked sideways at his love who had taken her position at the top of the stairs center on the porch,
“White man.” she met his eyes with prescience boding.

Country Al cussed under his breath.

“Want me to call Blood?” Minnie ashed her cigarette on the porch railing,
“Naw, this ain’t that. ‘Sides they ain’t comin this part of town no time soon. They go see Black Jack before they bother with us.”
“Seem like they botherin already.” Minnie began taking her rollers out unceremoniously,
“We worry when we got to worry.” Alphonse cast off. Minnie dug hazel orbs into her husband, quiet dissent lapsed into worry and then a made-up mind,
“You know how them men is, Al. You know what they do.” madam Harlow spoke, finally,
“We do the same thang.” pride marched fervent underneath his rebuttal,
“Not like them.” she met with a roadblock’s surety,

Maybe it was the heat or the borderline delirium of another slow day in a sloth city with nothing to offer anybody--especially not no damn twenty percent--anything, that made Al see light. Maybe it was Minnie’s always being right; either way, Al let an uncomfortable sigh pass through his lips,

“Call Walter, tell em put a line out to Hawkins.”
“She don’t strike me as the fightin type.”
“Be surprised what a white woman do when you tell her she gotta do somethin she don’t want.” Minnie smiled and let out a small laugh; Alphonse joined her,
“And what you gone do?”
“I’m bout to eat breakfast and take my ass to sleep.”
“Well I be damned! Since when I become your secretary?”
“Since you made me build this house and put all them nice clothes on you.” she didn’t find his boast funny and muffed his head with her hand,
“Keep playin they gone find yo black ass in one of them swamps.” Al couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, the hint of playfulness only indicative of how serious she was. She came from a line of women who, it was rumored, had killed their husbands with their brothers’ help and no one was the wiser,
“Reckon I’mma have a lot of talking to do come the next few days. Need my energy.”

“Mhm.” she was half-ignoring him now, her attention drawn to the kids whose numbers had grown significantly. The tensions between them had arisen and plateaued and rose again; they chased one another with sticks, and before long, the festivities had become another squabble between the older kid and the smaller one who still had clay on his face,
“Hey! Maurice Terell Jackson! If you don’t leave that boy alone, I’mma make you, hear? And then I’mma call yo mama! Is that what you want?” all the kids froze. Sticks dropped one after the other, some stopped breathing in hopes of turning invisibile,
N-no ma’m!”
“Pardon?” Minnie’s raised eyebrow accessorized the authoritative hand on her hip,
”I say no ma’am!”
“Alright then. Play nice or don’t play at all!” all the boys nodded slowly and out of tune, but the energy was gone. Groans and irritation reared,
“Y’all thirsty? Want some lemonade?” Minnie called out to them all. Faces lit up and cheers were abundant.

Alphonse mood lightened, he rose and threw the towel over his shoulder while the children rushed the porch,
“Ho, ho! One at a time. Act like y’all don’t got no home training.” Al’s reprimand made them slow to fast-walking; he watched the last of them traipse in and Minnie went to follow the last of them inside. Before she did, she paused and turned to her husband,
“Al. We gone be alright, hear?” Alphonse gave a limp nod, half-ignoring her with eyes focused on the treeline ahead. Minnie didn’t press, she had business to attend and she got to it.

Her words echoed and stuck. Their intended re-assurance did not.

Good Ol' Boys

the Outfit said the price of the brick going up

Good Ol' Boys

Boo Banjo Harlow

Name: Alphonse “Boo Banjo” Harlow.
Other Aliases: Country, Brother Al, Country Al.

Appearance:

Age: 51.

Occupation/ Cover: Alphonse follows in the footsteps of the Freedom’s Journal, the Colored American, the North Star, and many others as head of O’Connor County’s resident Black newspaper: the Crucible.

Racket: Boo Banjo and his salacious band have, through connections with black mobsters on the east coast--namely Harlem and Philadelphia--used laundered money to unite the city’s black poor working class populace under a single united front. While it has been near impossible to forge an official union, Banjo has amassed considerable power through this vast and still growing labor class communion. What little production takes place in the county can be halted with one word from the Dixie Mob’s resident country bumpkin.

He sends a little money back East and funnels the rest through gambling and numbers to sustain and employ the many black workers who rely on him.

Public Goals: Where Black Jack Rawlins seeks to integrate O’Connor County, Alphonse is a segregationist. He mimics Malcolm: the black dollar is power and Harlow believes that dollar and the power that comes with it must remain in their respective communities. He is remiss to dabble in anything that brings too much attention: drugs, moonshine, wet work.

Private Goals: His public goals and his private goals intermix. He wants black independence: black business, black universities, black public schools, higher wages for his people, better working conditions. Despite his public abhorrence of drugs and other violent aspects of the business, he is just as ruthless as the next gangster and has aligned himself with some of the biggest black drug dealers in the nation in service of his aims.

Supporting Cast

Minnie Harlow, 47: His “high yella” baby. Girlfriend, wife, mother to his two younger children. The one woman he’s loved since he was fifteen. His confidant, his everything. She is shrewd, speaks her mind when and wherever she wishes. Very close with many of the women throughout O’Connor county, especially those in Buck Nelly.

Walter “Shoeshine” Simmons, 43: Alphonse’s oldest friend and the closest thing he has to a right-hand man. Country Al might be the boss, but Simmons is the brains. A smooth talker, a sly diplomat, a former jazz musician from the Bronzeville area of Chicago who fell on hard times.

Terrence “Blood” Brown (age 39) and the Dogs of Redline County: Though Alphonse’s operation isn’t one that worries much about territory, he knows that he needs someone to protect what he’s built. Someone bold enough to tell the white folks hell no, and braver still to tell them to go back to wherever they came from. Blood is a former heavyweight boxer whose greatest achievement was being knocked out by George Foreman in 1967. Volatile, and his loyalty questionable, Harlow and Simmons work overtime to keep Brown’s leash tight and short.

Mama Fats, 64: A husky WWII era jazz debutante who fell out of favor, like so many others, with the rise of Doo Wop and Motown in the fifties and sixties. Boo, a long time fan of hers, supported her when she was penniless and she now heads Harlow’s gambling operation in return.

Personal History

---

Some aspire to be war heroes, doctors, lawyers, politicians. Alphonse Harlow believed the way out was through money, through education. He spent the first ten years of his life on the east coast where his mother and father eked livings for themselves. Illiterate and otherwise barred from meaningful institutional work because of discriminatory housing practices, his father found work in sanitation and his mother became a maid for several affluent white families in Harlem. After a fight with a white boy that saw Alphonse break the boy’s nose, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in Mississippi some time in 1931.

The Jim Crow south made many bitter, angry, or subservient to the quo. Alphonse’s arrogance made him reject his station. Saddled with aging grandparents who, though they tried, were ineffectual with the rod in their advanced age, Alphonse left home and roamed the streets. Always possessing a penchant for numbers, Alphonse landed a job as a runner for a group of black gangsters connected to Madame St. Clair and Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson up north in his hometown.

He learns the intricacies of number running and soon makes enough money to fulfill a dream of his: to learn to read. He teaches himself basic words and sounds first. With time and a steady rise through the numbers and later policy rackets, Alphonse completed his first book by age 28: W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk. This seminal work changed Alphonse’s perspective: Jim Crow be damned, there was a way to feed all these starving, poor black mouths. And it would take a certain kind of man to do it; the kind of man Alphonse had known for much of his life: the hoodlum.

By 1956, Alphonse had taken over the remnants of the fledgling black organized crime syndicates on the south side of O’Connor County. By 1967 he had consolidated his power and used the knowledge he’d gained from DuBois’ teachings to organize much--though not all--of the county’s black workforce under his control. He attempts to make contact with Black Jack Rawlins and establish an alliance sometime later.

In 1969 he used the money from his gambling operations to put into press the Crucible, newspaper which elevates black socialist voices and thinkers from around the nation. In 1971 he established contacts out east through an old mentor from his number running days and became tied in with the Philadelphia Black Mafia and one Leroy “Nicky” Barnes in Harlem.

Good Ol' Boys

Boo Banjo Harlow

Name: Alphonse “Boo Banjo” Harlow.
Other Aliases: Country, Brother Al, Country Al.

Appearance:

Age: 51.

Occupation/ Cover: Alphonse follows in the footsteps of the Freedom’s Journal, the Colored American, the North Star, and many others as head of O’Connor County’s resident Black newspaper: the Crucible.

Racket: Boo Banjo and his salacious band have, through connections with black mobsters on the east coast--namely Harlem and Philadelphia--used laundered money to unite the city’s black poor working class populace under a single united front. While it has been near impossible to forge an official union, Banjo has amassed considerable power through this vast and still growing labor class communion. What little production takes place in the county can be halted with one word from the Dixie Mob’s resident country bumpkin.

He sends a little money back East and funnels the rest through gambling and numbers to sustain and employ the many black workers who rely on him.

Public Goals: Where Black Jack Rawlins seeks to integrate O’Connor County, Alphonse is a segregationist. He mimics Malcolm: the black dollar is power and Harlow believes that dollar and the power that comes with it must remain in their respective communities. He is remiss to dabble in anything that brings too much attention: drugs, moonshine, wet work.

Private Goals: His public goals and his private goals intermix. He wants black independence: black business, black universities, black public schools, higher wages for his people, better working conditions. Despite his public abhorrence of drugs and other violent aspects of the business, he is just as ruthless as the next gangster and has aligned himself with some of the biggest black drug dealers in the nation in service of his aims.

Supporting Cast

Minnie Harlow, 47: His “high yella” baby. Girlfriend, wife, mother to his two younger children. The one woman he’s loved since he was fifteen. His confidant, his everything. She is shrewd, speaks her mind when and wherever she wishes. Very close with many of the women throughout O’Connor county, especially those in Buck Nelly.

Walter “Shoeshine” Simmons, 43: Alphonse’s oldest friend and the closest thing he has to a right-hand man. Country Al might be the boss, but Simmons is the brains. A smooth talker, a sly diplomat, a former jazz musician from the Bronzeville area of Chicago who fell on hard times.

Terrence “Blood” Brown (age 39) and the Dogs of Redline County: Though Alphonse’s operation isn’t one that worries much about territory, he knows that he needs someone to protect what he’s built. Someone bold enough to tell the white folks hell no, and braver still to tell them to go back to wherever they came from. Blood is a former heavyweight boxer whose greatest achievement was being knocked out by George Foreman in 1967. Volatile, and his loyalty questionable, Harlow and Simmons work overtime to keep Brown’s leash tight and short.

Mama Fats, 64: A husky WWII era jazz debutante who fell out of favor, like so many others, with the rise of Doo Wop and Motown in the fifties and sixties. Boo, a long time fan of hers, supported her when she was penniless and she now heads Harlow’s gambling operation in return.

Personal History

---

Some aspire to be war heroes, doctors, lawyers, politicians. Alphonse Harlow believed the way out was through money, through education. He spent the first ten years of his life on the east coast where his mother and father eked livings for themselves. Illiterate and otherwise barred from meaningful institutional work because of discriminatory housing practices, his father found work in sanitation and his mother became a maid for several affluent white families in Harlem. After a fight with a white boy that saw Alphonse break the boy’s nose, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in Mississippi some time in 1931.

The Jim Crow south made many bitter, angry, or subservient to the quo. Alphonse’s arrogance made him reject his station. Saddled with aging grandparents who, though they tried, were ineffectual with the rod in their advanced age, Alphonse left home and roamed the streets. Always possessing a penchant for numbers, Alphonse landed a job as a runner for a group of black gangsters connected to Madame St. Clair and Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson up north in his hometown.

He learns the intricacies of number running and soon makes enough money to fulfill a dream of his: to learn to read. He teaches himself basic words and sounds first. With time and a steady rise through the numbers and later policy rackets, Alphonse completed his first book by age 28: W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk. This seminal work changed Alphonse’s perspective: Jim Crow be damned, there was a way to feed all these starving, poor black mouths. And it would take a certain kind of man to do it; the kind of man Alphonse had known for much of his life: the hoodlum.

By 1956, Alphonse had taken over the remnants of the fledgling black organized crime syndicates on the south side of O’Connor County. By 1967 he had consolidated his power and used the knowledge he’d gained from DuBois’ teachings to organize much--though not all--of the county’s black workforce under his control. He attempts to make contact with Black Jack Rawlins and establish an alliance sometime later.

In 1969 he used the money from his gambling operations to put into press the Crucible, newspaper which elevates black socialist voices and thinkers from around the nation. In 1971 he established contacts out east through an old mentor from his number running days and became tied in with the Philadelphia Black Mafia and one Leroy “Nicky” Barnes in Harlem.

Good Ol' Boys

oh this hot

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 3- Shattered Dimensions

Runner V

_{PERSONAL INFORMATION}

---

Character you have created
Jamar Chambers

ALIAS: Runner V
SPEECH COLOR: Plum
CHARACTER ALIGNMENT: WTL
IDENTITY: Secret to all who are not part of the network of runners.

_{CHARACTER PERSONALITY}

---

Jamar is an optimist and an idealist. He believes in the good of all people but holds no reservations about the inconsistencies of that goodness. Unafraid to speak his mind and defiant of authority, Jamar finds himself at odds with villains and law-abiding heroes alike. Loyal to his causes and the immediate people around him, he prioritizes them above everyone and everything else.

When he was younger he was quite temperamental: prone to fighting, quick to anger, believing he was always right and distancing himself from those who disagreed. With age--though not much--and experiences few in similar positions possess, Jamar has what his callousness gets him. He’s seen how it hurts people and how what he once believed was brave: being the first to act, treating all tact and necessary caution with abandon, not listening to those wiser than himself, he now knows all these things make him not only a terrible hero but a terrible man.

He has not lost all his fire, but it has been tempered by the world and he is beginning to understand how to use his temper and his powers as tools instead of allowing them to devour him.

UNIFORM A collection of hoodies, makeshift masks--usually homemade half coverings that leave only the eyes exposed--bandanas, jeans, and whatever the newest shoes are. He mixes and matches according to the task at hand. Or--what is more likely--how well he feels his outfit coordinates.

visual

---

_ORIGIN

---

Santana and Shanice Chambers fled Apartheid in the early 80s and made their way to the United States in the mid 90s after staying with their grandparents in Cuba for much of the preceding decade. Relocating to St. Louis’ eastside not long after giving birth to Jamar and his sister Camille, the two became activists in the local community.

It is through their ground work they learn of their other history: they are both the children of former Runners: A worldwide syndicate of African, African-American, Native, and Indigenous couriers who, since some time in the 16th century, delivered food, weapons, money, and provided general protection to and for disenfranchised and disinvested marginal communities.

Their children, like so many others in their city and the nation at large, spend their childhoods in various parts of the world: Kaliningrad, Osaka, Benin, Beirut, Jaipur, Lampang. They are taught the intricacies of what their superiors term “the network”: when Jamar and Camille are of age--no later than their 21st birthday--they are inducted as official members and given a callsign, then stationed in a specific part of the U.S. Camille found herself in Chicago and Jamar, given recent events within the city, is tasked with building a new branch of runners in Lost Haven, Maine.

SEASON 1 & 2 SUMMARY None.
HERO TYPE Acrobat
POWER LEVEL Street/Cosmic

POWERS

---

AN OVERVIEW It is speculated all Runners are powered in some form. The specific origins of Jamal’s powers are unknown, but he tells the story in the mode of dream: while kids in Benin, Jamar and Camille were playing in the forests and wandered too deep. Bark turned black, etchings of a great spider embedded the face of every tree. The sky above pitched from day to dark, a brood swarm and a creature 80 feet tall with eyes white as clouds towered above them. He said his name was Anansi. He wanted to tell them a story about mischievous children and evil adults. A deep sleep came over them and when they woke, they were paralyzed, bitten, and the Great Spider said only this before he vanished: Ai ghi mi’eve kevb’obalọ. No one evil will prevail.

• PLANEWALKING: Jamar can transverse any surface--no matter its state--as though it is solid. Air, water, magic surfaces, low density surfaces, etc. This does not mean he is immune to the effects of said surface; lava would still eat his flesh, a primarily electric surface would still shock him, so on and so forth.
• DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL: Jamar can transition between interplanar spaces and return himself to this dimension. He usually only uses this ability only when he has to deliver something to interdimensional beings. He needs a physical tether for this ability and if something happened to this tether he would be trapped in whatever plane he was in forever unless he could establish another.
• FLOW: Anansi’s blessings give him supernatural dexterity. He can bend, twist, leap, flip, roll, dodge, slide, and contort his body in ways most humans and many superhumans cannot. This ability to chain his body’s mechanisms together so effortlessly makes him incredibly hard to hit, but does not give him supernatural speed.
• MARTIAL ARTS: He is a skilled combatant, though no master of any styles. Kickboxing, Muay Thai, Aikido, and freestyle wrestling comprise his martial ability and he is most practiced in kickboxing and aikido.

_ATTRIBUTES

---

HEIGHT: 6’3
WEIGHT: 210
STRENGTH He has above average strength for a human thanks to his profession but it does not allow him to perform abnormal feats of might. Most of his physical vigor is used to keep himself hanging onto or leaping across discordant surfaces without injuring himself.
MOBILITY Superhuman. His body’s muscular chain sequence is never rigid and he progresses through and connects movements well above the world’s greatest gymnasts or athletes.
INTELLIGENCE -1 INT modifier. He is far better at improvisation than he is at formal thinking skills like mathematics or physics.
FIGHTING SKILL Practiced. He has knowledge of many schools but is a steady practitioner of four and has profound skill in just two.
RESOURCES The Wreck: A collection of safehouses across the world where Runners can meet, exchange packages, rest, or resupply.
Twin katanas: Standard Japanese cutting swords.
Twin mambele: Curved blades from Central and Southern Africa designed to catch, pull, and parry opposing shields, swords, and chained weapons. Excellent at not only cutting but also controlling and disabling limbs with the curve of the sword.

WEAKNESSES Despite his gifts, he is still human. He can be injured or killed in any way a regular human can. He still has to eat, sleep, breathe, etc. The dangerous nature of his job means he is always in peril and a few broken bones in the right places could mean the end of his career.

_{SUPPORTING CHARACTERS}

---

Len “Uncle” Woo: An elderly Chinese man and one of the first American Runners; beloved in the local north Asian community in New York and Baltimore. He and several other elders form the unofficial leadership structure of the Runners’ American network. Stubborn, prone to much drunken storytelling, still believes he is 21 in body and mind.

Camille Chambers: Jamar’s older sister and closest confidant. Calm, confident, and always sure of herself, she and Jamar are opposites in this respect. She has garnered a reputation for herself as a Runner on Chicago’s west side and amassed a level of folklore around herself as her Parklawn neighborhood’s protector. It is a fame she accepts proudly and mentions whenever she can. With the recent passing of the Chambers’ parents, the two have grown much closer.

Quentin “Major” Simms: A middle aged Black American man who is Jamar’s op partner and field mentor. He was the first Runner to train Jamar and Camille in the conduct, tenets, and laws of the network and the first person to teach the siblings how to free run, proper stealth technique, and an untold number of other things. The closest thing to a father figure the two have had in the wake of their biological father’s death.

Mama St. Clair: A Hatian woman and successor to the fabled Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, Marie Leveau, she is the oldest Runner alive though few know her age. It is speculated she is just under three hundred years old. Secretive but no shadow, she presides over the supernatural affairs of the Runner network from her base of operations in New Orleans’ French Quarter and her connections span all 50 states. A supremely powerful mystic, she is feared by many, respected by all who know her, and revered with godlike reverence among Black communities nationwide.

Do you know how to post pictures on RPG boards?: yea

_{SAMPLE POST}

---

Steps silent, still pulsing violent against rooftop concrete. White and red shozoku leapt and rolled like water. Only feet ahead was a breathless kid, heart and head gongs against their cages, a butter baritone leaking from his left side,

“I told you this wasn’t what you thought it was, youngin!” the Major’s confidence buoyed his own settled fear,
”I damn sure didn’t think it was this!” one hand pressed down and his body horizontal when Jamar vaulted over a railing,
“Nobody does! Jump on three!”
”I know we not making it to three!”
“You’re right!” one gathering step, two, and both men pushed off the edge and soared across a crevice whose abyss below was concrete and likely worse than an actual void. Voids didn’t break bones, at least.
”They still ain’t stopping!” Jamar decried the obvious; Major craned his head around at their pursuers who moved as one. Like lilies and lilacs.

“Well, tired of running?” Major spoke through haunched breaths
”As hell!” he grabbed hold of Jamal’s shoulders,
“Time to make that thing you do, do what it does!” Major’s superior strength forced them both off the next ledge and then down--down so far in a fall so long Jamar wasn’t sure they would hit the ground. They bounced and rolled on pockets of solidified air; Major broke the landing without any recognizable injury. He pushed Jamal off and stood,
“Get up, rookie. We just got started!”
”Fuck you mean ‘just got started’? We been running for hours.”
“Uh huh.”
”Uh huh? UH HUH? Where is this thing supposed to go again?”
“Alaska.” he deadpanned,
”ALASKA? Nah, nah. Call Uncle Woo right now!”
“Relax, youngin, just to Chicago.”
”We in Baltimore!”
“Better get that ass to running then, huh?” Major smiled and snatched the package from Jamar’s hands. He took off into the night,
”Aye, hold up! You just gone leave me?”
“We’re going to the same place, so leaving is subjective. I like to think of it as you losing to an old man. Double time, young fella!” and Major bounded across a set of monkey bars in a park before his silhouette was awash in distant street lights.

Jamar followed suit, pulling the black bandana and black hood over his face and head respectively. Welcome to the show, Mr. Chambers. Your death certificate is on the left.

organization cs coming soon

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 3- Shattered Dimensions

hot

From Oubliette to Oublioth [R.I.P]

i might have to bow out