Musings: Borrowing. or, the ending credits

With the presentation of the Universal Comics movies finished I need to run some closing credits for where I stole ideas.

Phoenix first appeared as Rebecca's PC in David Utter's Four Winds PbEM, a V&V campaign where people got powers at the turn of the millennium. She had said once she wanted to do more with the character so I grafted on a new, campaign specific origin story and went nuts when I was prepping to pitch this idea to my players some time ago. For the movie write ups I raided the Four Winds archive for villain concepts. It was a fun little campaign, and if you follow the link you'll be surprised to learn that Tripod is still hosting pages out in webspace.

The original concepts in Captain Nostalgia first came from Dr. Nostalgia, a Champions character created by Scott K. Jamison and described in Alarums & Excursions #400. He got a new background and a change from Doctor to Captain since the UCU was swarming with Doctors already, but the but the idea of the eternally optimistic jetpack and raygun wielding detective came from Scott. Nostalgia's secret id is a nod to Forrest Ackerman, to whom all of us in fandom are indebted. The character's look is directly modeled on Ackerman's costume, seen in the picture accompanying this article.

David Twiddy came up with a lot of the ideas on Aeaea (which he informed me is actually written Aeaeae, but I was too far gone in the posts to try to go back and change it). While take full responsibility for Potemkin Villager and Matryoshka, Mr. Alphabet's original design came from Adam Star Ruvola's V&V campaign for David in the 80's, of which David is still exceedingly fond.

James Cambias obviously came up with Doc Toltec, but I think the link made that clear.

The Chilean Mandrinate's master plan from the second crossover movie was drawn from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence. I have other master plans for them if I ever get to use them.

I think that's everything. Now, what have you been stealing for your games, and from whom?