Betweeen Kane & The Granbretan Empire - The Stormbringer rpg, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane & Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon

 "“The Eternal Champion is a mystical hero who lives upon all planes of existence, in all ages and times. Whenever the greatest need arises, the Eternal Champion awakens to ensure mankind’s survival. His names are many: Elric, Corum, Erekose, Urlik, Hawkmoon, and a multitude of others. Into the thick of the fray he strides, heroic companions at his side." 

This is going to pick right up from yesterday's blog here. Today is one of those days that I seriously need to recharge the batteries. For the moment I've handed off both my Castles & Crusade campaign & my Wretchedverse campaign. Russ Nicholson's passing has effected me more then I thought. However I wanted to take a few moments to discuss the Hawkmoon box set by Chaosium. This is especially true after reading through Wayne's Books article on the Hawkmoon box set available here. 

One element of Hawkmoon's era that stood out to us as players were the Mantis scientist/priest/ magus who were Emperor Huron's personal bodyguards. These guys were whom we were captured by and tortured. It took a renagade Mantis priest to get us out of the dungeon and onto  ship. Then we had a cabal of six Mantis on our party's asses. 
And let me tell you these guys were a pain in the ass. The Mantis priests are highly formitable, highly motivated, and filled with forbidden occult knowledge. We managed to make it out of Londra and out into the Atlantic. This was after getting acid filled globes hurdled at our PCs, dodging Wolf patrols, killing a bunch of animal masked assassins, and then digging out the surgical tracker/controller implants that had been implanted by the Mantis. 
Did I mention that we did recover the 'Super Science' artifact?! And this is what kicked off this mahunt in the first place. And one of our number killed one of the Mantis priests to get it. And this indebted the Mantis priest/scienctist absolutely wanted revenge against our party with the orders of Emperor's Houn. Even through 5 editions the Mantis continued hunting our party! This has been a major plot point to our games. Families have been generationally targetted by the Mantis through the super science of the burgeoning Tragic Millenium time travel projects. We did get paid for our efforts and almost double crossed by Kane. We got tired of the double crosses and what not so we simply told him that we wanted get paid. This earned a bit of respect from Kane. 

Kane's got a great video overview right here. 

Here's the thing our party of scoundrels and rogues were not good guys. We were really in a mercenary and band it mold. We did five jobs in the world of Hawkmoon and eventually had several mutants among our ranks. Curiously we haven't heard from the Mantis in a very long time. This doesn't mean that there not out there.