Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
The Cockroach
Back in about '95 I played the only game of Golden Heroes that I've ever played. It was run by Mr Christopher-James (Pig Eyes) Leighton of Cheshire, who told me in response to my questions that the player characters didn't have to be heroic, and they could be reasonably silly. I created two characters: Derek Dick, alias The Cockroach (silly, non-heroic) and Sgt Joe Kowalski, alias Blue Thunder (silly, heroic). The Cockroach was the one I ended up playing.

Golden Heroes is a superheroes game in which you roll randomly to see what powers you get. I got flight, wallclimbing and skill (electronics). This was the character concept I came up with: Derek was an unemployable dosser with only one skill: he was a natural born electronics engineer. He loved to take electronic devices apart and put them back together (or use the bits to make something new).

Derek rented one room in a slum house, lived on benefit and made some undeclared money on the side by repairing electrical goods for people. He spent his days going around rubbish dumps looking for old TVs and the like that people had thrown out. He'd take them home and strip them for parts. Under his bed was a big box full of scavenged electronic components, which he used for fixing things.

Derek was not just some low-life waster dossing away his useless life; he had a vision. Derek believed that aliens were secretly running the show from behind the scenes. He wanted to tap into their cmmunications systems and get hold of their technology, then use this technology and information for his own ends. Derek had built himself an 'alien detector'. This was a machine that detected the presence of aliens. (Actually it just registered the strength of the local magnetic field.)

Derek lived on junk food. One day he ate a doner kebab that contained a cockroach which had crawled through some radioactive toxic waste. This gave him his cockroach powers - flight and wallcrawling. (Can roaches actually fly? I don't know. I just assumed they could.)

Pig Eyes ran a scenario out of a book. By some great fluke of chance, this scenario happened to involve aliens moving about secretly on earth. They wore camoulage suits which projected a hologram of a human over the wearer, so they looked like normal humans. These suits gave off strong magnetic fields.

When Derek heard of a seemingly innocuous event, he immediately suspected that it was the work of aliens. He went to investigate, and found what appeared to be humans, but the high reading on his alien detector gave away their true nature - they were aliens!

The thing about this game that fills me with a warm glow is that I just made up all this stuff about aliens to make a jokey background, but it all turned out to be true. And this was a pre-written scenario, not one written specifically for my character.

Although it wasn't a great experience of either high adventure or intense roleplaying, I do remember is as a really enjoyable game, mainly because things worked out so neatly around my character background.