This page is my one-shot tribute to Richard Gamble. He ran the best Champions campaign in Birmingham for many months. He let me play the wierdest character anyone had ever seen around here, and he tried every week to not have the adventure go as badly as it had the week before. His campaign had no name, nor any theme. I called it "Tales of the Unestablished", because that sounded like a good comic-book style name plus it reflected th chaos inherent in his GM style. Many of his villains had no names, even when you could meet them face to face. 90% of the time you fought minions and agents, never seeing a villain for weeks. Tantalizing clues would lead you only to a lab that had to be staked out for days before you sprang a trap and captured 2-3 thugs with no evidence and no conviction, and only sparse evidence of what you really wanted to capture: a super-villain. Don't get me wrong, I liked gaming with Richard. I wasn't the one who rebelled and committed a coup-d-etat and made someone else GM. Some of the players got ill with his chaotic non-concrete style and booted him from the GM's chair. This left an enormous vacuum. Several players with a lust for Champions, and I was the only one with GMing experience, and I was 3 years rusty, and had been running a Fantasy Hero campaign at that, so I hoisted the Jolly Roger and claimed rights of slavage on the open seas and I took over the campaign. I steered it from being a small-time gang of detectives in Miami to being a large metropolitan elite crime-fighting force in Birmingham called the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF ALABAMA. So I integrated (stole really ) as many of Richard's ideas as I could into my campaign. I could not have done it without him, he set up a bunch of ideas (loose ends really ) that I had to tie together into a sane whole. That's why there no coherent pre-quel or pre-history or prelude.
I can't remember all the loose ends he left, and he won't tell me. There was the Atlantean-Lemurian thing. There were the weapon smugglers. There was the aquatic armor problem. There was the HYDRA and gangs stuff going on. There was the kidnappings of young female paranormals. There was all kinds of crap happening when his campaign ended, and precious few clues to tie it all together. So I had the Miami Machine handle all that and had the heroes concentrate on the new Stronghold. Richard didn't leave the group, he reverted to the role of player and ran Magic Michael quite well, it was an amicable piracy, somehow. But that's how the JLA got established, kids.