I don’t know if I said this before, but I’m a big fan of Planetary. So much so, in fact, I ran two campaigns based on it (one of them is here). I find the whole idea of a secret super-hero history of the world fascinating. That’s why whenever I can I sneak Planetary-like elements in my campaigns.

Recently, I plundered an idea from StormWatch (it’s not Planetary, but it was written by Warren Ellis as well), where the High and other super-humans, while active in the 1930s and 40s, were thought of as urban legends and nobody remembered them in the present.

Since my Rio-based supers campaign didn’t have much of its continuity set down, aside from the basis I depicted in my fifth Superseeds, I decided to insert some ‘lost heroes’ to fill the super-heroic gap in the 60s and 70s, and build a secret super-hero history for the setting.

In this installment, I’ll explain how I did it, describing also the in-game backstory. Hopefully, it can be useful for your campaign or, at least, provide you with inspiration.

Finding Super-Mr./Ms. Right

Obviously, I could just make up a character to fill the niche of ‘lost hero’, but I wanted someone who could resonate not only with the PCs, but also with their players and make them share, in a way, the feeling of discovering a secret.

So I went searching for Brazilian super-hero characters. Luckily, there are quite a few of them, created by artists from all over the country. Some were born so that publishers could keep selling magazines that previously featured foreign characters that were cancelled; others, were more original; and some combined the two approaches.

After combing through the portfolio of fictional Brazilian metahumans, I settled on four characters:

Capitão 7 (Captain 7): Created in 1954 for a TV serial that lasted 12 years (later he had a comic book as well), Captain 7 was a regular kid named Carlos whose parents helped an alien. Thankful for the help, the alien offered to take Carlos with him to a distant planet to instruct him. Carlos returned as an adult with superpowers and used them to fight crime on his homeworld. He was superstrong, superintelligent and able to fly.

Judoka: Initially, this was the Brazilian name of Charlton Comics’ Judomaster, but when the original magazine in the US was cancelled, the editors in Brazil created a replacement character with the same name, which was published from 1969 to 1973. Carlos (a popular name, it seems) da Silva saves an old man from being run over by a car, only to find out he’s martial arts master Shiram Minamoto. Master Minamoto trains Carlos, who becomes an exceptional fighter and travels all over Brazil battling evil.

Raio Negro (Black Bolt): Created in 1965, Raio Negro is considered one of the more successful and famous Brazilian super-heroes. The character is very similar to Green Lantern, although his uniform resembles Cyclops’. During a secret Brazilian spaceflight, Air Force pilot Roberto Sales is kidnapped by an alien spacecraft, wherein he finds a wounded alien from Saturn. Sales helps to pilot the ship, that had been hit by a meteor, back to Saturn, where he receives a black light ring as reward. Back on Earth, Sales adopts the costumed identity of Raio Negro and uses his ring to fight crime.

Velta: When Kátia Lins helped a crashed alien, he used her as guinea pig of his invention and the girl gained superpowers. From them on she used her abilities to fight all sorts of menaces and help her in her day job as private detective. Velta was created in 1973.

Connecting the dots

Now I had to insert them into the story. Despite the more gonzo aspects of four-color super-hero worlds, I wanted to unify not only how they disappeared from the setting, but how they gained their abilities as well. Luckily, three of them have their origins connected to aliens (it seemed to be a thing at that time). Although these are three different beings, I thought I could weave them into one alien, without too much hassle.

So we start with Capitão 7’s alien, which becomes the basis for the others. Let’s call him Malagol (from Gedeone Malagola, the name of one of the writers). While researching Earth, Malagol crashes on the countryside of São Paulo, where he’s rescued by Carlos’ parents.

Malagol offers to take the boy back to his homeworld, the Seventh Planet (which will be Saturn, not Jupiter, because Raio Negro’s alien comes from Saturn, just assume the asteroid belt was a former planet). Twenty years later, in 1959, Carlos returns to Earth and starts his career as a super-hero. After four years, he disappears.

Unable to contact Carlos, but still intrigued by humankind, Malagol decides to empower another human. In 1965, while orbiting Earth, the alien monitors a secret space launch from Brazil that is using his technology.

Malagol fakes problems with his ship in order to test the mission’s pilot, Roberto Sales. When Sales helps him, he gives the pilot the black light ring. Sales becomes Raio Negro, but also goes missing two years later.

Finally, in 1973, Malagol simulates a crash in Minas Gerais. This time, Kátia Lins shows up and helps the alien, who grants her energy powers. That wraps up three origins. Judoka’s does not have Malagol’s participation, nor do I think it needs, since he’s a supernormal. He starts operating as a super-hero in 1969 and disappears four years later, putting him in between Raio Negro and Velta.

Enter Mário Guerra

If you recall the fifth installment, Mario Guerra was the head of the Brazilian metahuman agency and all around not-nice guy. He’s the one responsible for the disappearance of the four (and maybe more) heroes above.

In this version, he’s still with the Army, but works as a liaison to the Grupo Executivo de Atividades Paranormais (GEAP, Executive Group of Paranormal Activities). The GEAP-Army alliance has a far more sinister agenda than in that installment: suppressing super-heroes and other unsanctioned metahumans.

They collect intelligence and then strike against superpowered people. That’s how they zeroed in on Capitão 7. Following rumors and strange occurrences, they deducted that the point of origin for this mysterious super’s operations was Carlos’ hometown.

Guerra moved into the town with the Army and, under the guise of military games, investigated the population. He became friends with Carlos before knowing he was Capitão 7 and when he found out the man’s secret, felt doubly betrayed. Guerra mounted an ambush for Carlos, captured him and, later, got his hand on his spacecraft.

Carlos was sent to a lab to be studied in order to reproduce his powers and his ship was analyzed so as to back-engineer its technology. That’s how Brazil was able to secretly send a man – Roberto Sales -- into space in 1965.

It took two years, but Guerra found out Sales’ secret and got rid of him. The ring was sent to his black R&D department. Judoka and Velta suffered the same fate as Capitão 7 and Raio Negro. By the mid-80s, the redemocratization of the country, the wider reach of TV networks and the increasing numbers of metahumans made it very difficult for Guerra to keep his secret agenda secret, so he opted for other less obfuscated ways to keep super-humans under control.

Harpia

Now that I had my secret history all I had to do was dangle it in front of the characters. To do that, I resorted to another lost hero: Harpia (Harpy). He’s an original character created by a friend of mine for another supers campaign he used to run. That, in my mind, made Harpia a spiritual brother of the other characters I had chosen in that he existed prior to the campaign.

Harpia is a Batman-analogue that operated in Rio between 1964 and 1974. He also disappeared, but nobody knows why or how. Presumably, Guerra got to him as well. Anyway, Harpia’s base of operations was a secret cave complex beneath his alter ego’s mansion in Alto da Boa Vista, an upscale neighborhood on top of a hill in Rio. By now, the mansion is abandoned.

In one adventure, the PCs are staking out the place to catch an international thief (or some other reason you might devise). The idea is that during the conflict they get inside the mansion and find out the secret entrance to the Ninho do Harpia (Harpy’s Nest). Inside, they will discover his files on the missing heroes and, from then on, the adventure should flow easily.

This basic framework doesn’t exhaust itself – I can always introduce other lost heroes that weren’t in Harpia’s files. I can even extend the conspiracy to suppress metahumans to the early 50s or late 40s. Maybe Brazil did in fact have a Golden Age of heroes.

Inspiration

Comic books that have lost heroes as part of their stories.

Planetary: As I said at the beginning, this is a great book to mine for ideas of lost heroes.

Number of the Beast: The last of Wildstorm’s World’s End trilogy of mini-series, this book has lost heroes as one of its main concepts.

Miracle(Marvel)man: Initially, this is the story of a lost hero that is found again.

Sentry: Another ‘lost and found’ hero is Marvel’s Sentry. I don’t like the way he was shoehorned into the Marvel universe and I think he looks more like a DC character than a Marvel one. Still, you might some mileage out of his stories.

I hope you liked it. Feel free to share any comments, suggestion and criticisms on the forum. If you ever run this, let me know too.