The Shadow Universe of Champions

The bizarre plot of an unfinished superhero MMORPG, for fans of The Wreck of the Titan and White Noise!

Shadow Destroyer

Once upon a time in 2013, years after City of Heroes shut down and before the Marvel Cinematic Universe really took off, I joined this game called Champions Online. It was actually kind of fun at the time despite the fact the graphics are not very good, the maps were clearly incomplete, and the story often went into parody too much, because they hadn’t ruined the gameplay and turned it into basically a World of Warcraft clone with a different setting and some controls that were designed for consoles and game controllers yet. You could still make a character concept that actually worked without having to read all these meta builds that might not be what you had in mind, you could make multiple characters without having to pay that ridiculous $279 or whatever lifetime subscription (which is ironically the only option now everyone thinks the game is dying, though there are rumors it’ll never die because it’s supposedly just stored on the Star Trek Online server’s extra space,) and you could run around soloing everything in the game if you wanted to.

Even though the game was underdeveloped and the graphics were bad, and there were these silly jokey plot lines in there, what was the actual Champions storyline was kind of really interesting and I want to write about what I learned from the game here. When you start off the city of Detroit was just destroyed and it was replaced with a city called Millenium City. This is almost accurate, since Detroit is destroyed, it just isn’t replaced by anything called Millenium City. The poor part of town, called Westside, is not even entirely rebuilt and it’s full of gangs. The gangs are all being united under something called the New Purple Gang. One person who complained about the Champions Online storyline on the Internet complained that a lot of the villains were just gangs with different colors but the thing is the Purple Gang (not New Purple Gang) is actually something real, it’s the Jewish mafia, seriously. The leader of the New Purple Gang is someone called Kevin Poe who uses some shadow powers, which are never explained in Champions Online, in addition to normal weapons and acrobatics. His goal is to fight PSI but you don’t learn that until later.

Kevin Poe

The epitome of the storyline is when you go to the shadow universe known as the Multifarian Realm or Multifaria. Multifaria is nearly the same as the regular universe except it was taken over by Shadow Destroyer. In the regular universe Doctor Destroyer was fought by someone called Defender. Defender’s real name is James Harmon. James Harmon is the owner of Harmon Industries. He created a high-tech suit like Iron Man and that became his identity. Someone called Doctor Destroyer blew up Millenium City and Defender/James Harmon created the Champions to rebuild the city and fight him off, but Doctor Destroyer sends an army of robots and his other minions, some of which are supervillains in their own right, to repeatedly attack it.

Defender aka James Harmon

In the Multifaria, you show up and it looks like basically George Orwell’s 1984 except it’s run by Shadow Destroyer and there are giant destroyer robots which are called mega destroids as well as tanks, smaller robots which are regular destroids, and various henchmen running around everywhere. You’re told not to draw too much attention to yourself and you run around seeing what happened to this alternate universe and you learn this is the universe Shadow Destroyer is from, and that it was turned into a dystopia through qliphothic sorcery (this plus the New Purple Gang has made me wonder if the author of the Champions TTRPG was Jewish before.) There are some people who are working with the resistance leader, whose identity must be kept secret, and trying to stop Shadow Destroyer.

Mutifarian Earth with a player character

Eventually you are taken to the prison and you have to do a jailbreak. In the jail you see various villain groups you met and you have to work with them. You are given a disguise which is the worst gameplay mechanics ever, because as soon as you use your powers the disguise turns off and it shows your character being escorted back to the starting room by guards. This is the worst gameplay mechanics ever because my character would knock out the guards using her powers and then it would show a bunch of knocked-out guards sliding along the floor while my character is walking back to the starting area of the prison for no discernable reason. Additionally, I’m not sure how much attention using psionic powers would get in the first place, especially when I literally had a power called mind wipe so if my invisible psychic powers were too obvious by accident you’d think I could just cover it up by mind wiping the enemies, but no, I’m being escorted via cutscene by knocked-out guards who are sliding across the floor while they’re unconscious due to terrible game design and the fact they really don’t want anyone to use their powers regardless of what they were, but they couldn’t just, you know, put people in anti-powers shackles or something. I dread to think of what it was like for the people who just made their character basically like Batman and can’t use just normal human abilities that have been trained up either, or had some other non-obvious power like regeneration and just fought with normal weapons and whatever.

Not all the gangs are there, the New Purple Gang is discernably absent and first you see the Vibora Bay gangs, such as Dogz, a gang of werewolves who runs around the Champions universe equivalent of New Orleans. Later you see PSI and you work with PSI. If you were like me and you did the whole PSI arc because fighting enemies in Champions Online means you get to take their stuff and if you’re a psychic character you want to take psychic stuff, you already know PSI was secretly a group of unfairly-maligned good guys and the person they “kidnapped” was a protopath they were protecting from being used by Argent, an evil corporation that just wants to take over the world. You will also find out that the New Purple Gang was trying to take them out as well since Kevin Poe was the son of one of the leaders in the organization and he was mad at him. So there’s not really much for saying that PSI is evil except people think they’re creepy because they’re psychic and act like one of those self-help psychoanalysis kinds of cults. This is another place where the game design is terrible, because it says Psimon has to mind control the prison, but I literally just did that on my character, seriously, my character was very well-designed, and I’m sure I’m not the first one to have done that, including people who made characters using sorcery or technology instead of psionics.

But never mind. After you get through the prison you see that Shadow Destroyer is actually someone called Citizen Harmon. Citizen Harmon is actually just Multifarian Earth’s version of James Harmon, aka Defender. The resistance leader who has been helping you all along is literally Doctor Destroyer from regular Champions Earth. Citizen Harmon starts trying to summon the Kings of Edom from the Qliphothic Realm, thereby making this the first post about a superhero game on Substack literally tagged with “kabbalah,” though you blow up all the portals and stop it, but smaller Qliphothic Horrors including a rather large monstrosity, but still not any of the Kings of Edom, pour through. Doctor Destroyer destroyed Detroit in the regular version of Earth to stop James Harmon from turning into the evil overlord of regular Earth and causing it to be taken over by the Kings of Edom. This is the secret, that the Champions were secretly the bad guys and the guy who looks like the bad guy has just been successfully stopping them from making a dystopian nightmare all along by draining their resources and waging constant war on them, and otherwise Earth would be turned into 1984 plus evil demonic beings and dark sorcery.

“The real Doctor Destroyer, not that shadow impostor”

Also, the guy who is identified as Iron Man secretly identifies as Doctor Strange but is evil. Where else have I heard this…

Here it is! This one is about you!

Also, just join me in City of Heroes if you want to play a superhero/villain game, don’t bother with this now nearly completely defunct one even if some of the lore is quite interesting. City of Heroes/City of Villains is completely free and runs on optional donations, you don’t have to do anything special if you just want to mess around.