The Guardians of Justice

The Guardians of Justice was the super-team par excellence of the GOLDEN campaign. It was a super-team of necessity, in the out of game world because there had to be a framework for when the players all played together (although since I ran a comics and gaming store there were endless solo and "team-up" adventures too- it was incredibly fun!) and within the game because the heroes (and some villains) crossed paths in Gotham (1929 New York by any other name) all too often.

The Guardians of Justice had the charter, and eventually the government liaison of a classic frontline super-team, the involved dynastic arguments and family feuds of the world's greatest family super-team and the narky strange side issues of the greatest non-team of them all. But there was no conscious imitation of existing comics at all in most cases. It was more that the devoted comics fans amongst the players would smile knowingly at the antics of people who had never read a comicbook in their life, and yet ended up recreating, spontaneously, great moments from comics. It was a great campaign. It saw the birth of the rule system that we would eventually use in place of the deliberately crippled d20 "system"; it saw lives and loves come and go in real life and the game; and of course, it saw cameos by everyone from the Robotic Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy to the Scooby Gang all grown up and even anticipating the current recycled storylines of modern comics by several years, alien infiltration, government-sponsored heroes causing a hero war and many other things that have appeared in comics SINCE.

The Guardians were a team whose strict charter was imposed by a nervous Roosevelt administration after an initial more free wheeling period. The membership spanned all kinds of heroes and swashbucklers, from a werewolf to a fighting virginian, from a talking gorilla monarch from Virunga in the Congo to a mysterious Man from Another World. And of course the anima of the team, its perpetual heart and mind- She-Devil, a plucky adventuress dressed in racy (for the era) red motorcycle leathers and horned head dress. When her alter ego wasn't hobnobbing with Rockefellers and investigating their dark secrets she was leading the team on quests to slay Dracula deep beneath the Empire State Building, foiling plots to use super-mercenaries to carve kingdoms out of the colonial world, or looking for the crown jewels of Russia in the ancient tunnels beneath Manhattan. It was pulp, it was glorious, and it also had surprisingly tight continuity!

The Guardians as they appear in the animated episodes were never played, although they were referred to in both the timeline and the continuity of the final (so far) iteration, Zombienomicon. They are the Guardians of the post-WW2 years, leading into the revolutionary times of the 1960s. Different presidents, different outcomes... But broadly similar destinies for the heroes... And the world...


Guardians of Justice, all associated characters images and indicia TM & (c) Jonathan Nolan 1983, 2004-2005, 2009 and following all rights reserved.