[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-13.]

(This is actually scarier than her Halloween costume: She’s wearing eye shadow.)

First off, many thanks to those donated to me in the past day. A little financial encouragement goes a long long way towards keeping the beard growth full, and the vintage games coming. I’ll try to get a day in with two games at some point, just to make up for yesterday.

The fall leaves are just at about an end here, so we decided have some adventures outside. Unfortunately, the sun was setting, so we didn’t get to climb Occoneechee Mountain (more like a hill, really) so we went to the lake at Umstead State Park instead. No Isle of Apples there, though.

Day Eleven’s game is another multiple choice one, with the Champions RPG being one possibility, or maybe Superworld, but I was thinking of the original superhero game: Villains and Vigilantes, designed by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman and published in 1979 by Fantasy Games Unlimited. FGU was a significant force in the role-playing games industry in the early 1980s, with a large catalog of games. There was Bunnies and Burrows (think Watership Down), Chivalry and Sorcery (I think you know what this was responding to), Bushido! (feudal Japan) and Space Opera (obvious).

FGU eventually ran into hard times and was declared defunct by New York State in 1991. Dee and Herman decided to try to revive Villains and Vigilantes and are publishing it and its sequel Living Legends at Monkey House Games. In 2010, they were involved in a trademark dispute with FGU’s founder, Scott Bizar — I’m not sure if it was resolved or not. [It was in 2016: Dee and Herman maintain copyright, but Bizar controls the trademark, which they are licensing. – Ed.]

Villains and Vigilantes had an interesting wrinkle in that you were encouraged to treat your life as the secret identity of your hero. Also, while you could advance in levels, your powers didn’t really change, so Car Man will remain Car Man forever.