Welcome to Hellenback!

Yes! Now you, too, can honestly say...

I've been to Hellenback!

Whether or not this will impress your friends and amuse your family rather depends on the pride and volume with which you make this announcement. Personally I recommend a wide, solid stance, with hands on hips and a loud, booming voice, but then, I may be biased.

Have questions? Read on.

What's New?

It's, um, been a while. I'm playing with the layout again, because it takes a different mental function than actually composing text. I have a very parenthetical thought process, so I pulled out a few notes and digressions from the main pages and popped 'em over as marginalia. Hero Games has come out with fifth edition, and I've converted most of my characters to it, but not loaded them to the web page yet.

I've made a few tweaks to the convention characters (mostly fixing typos). I really need to finish typing up The Roomie From Outer Space and The Custody Battle From Hellenback. Lower priority is getting the campus map spiffed up and the Hellenback bus system blocked in.

I have also been doing a little work on a Teen Champions setting - right now it's bloked in on a wiki. And I made a totally obsessive convention list, because I'll do anything to avoid work.

Whattheheck exactly is Hellenback, anyway?

Hellenback is a fictional city I created to use as a campaign setting for role-playing games -- mostly Champions™, which is a superheroic game. With a few cosmetic changes, I think it should actually work just fine for any modern day campaign, though. Most of the write-ups are rather tongue-in-cheek. This has more to do with my personal style than the actual content.

What will I find at this site?

Pretty much all of the supplementary materials I've generated over the years, as I have the time and energy to put them up. That includes locations descriptions, PCs both from my weekly game (on hiatus) and from the convention games I've run, plot synopses, handouts, maps, and just general information. Right now, the Characters section is pretty much complete, the Links section is pretty much complete, and I'm making headway in the Episodes (modules) section. The Places section needs work, but as soon as I have time to do some touch-ups, I do have some maps to put up. I'm doing my best to make this readable and printable from any system, but there remains a chance that it will look horrible to someone out there. If you have any kind of problems, let me know and I'll try to fix things. The content is text heavy and graphics light, largely due to technological limitations, but also because I'm a minimalist at heart.

Is there more?

Well, if you'd like to visit my personal page, you'll discover that I actually have more projects than I have hands. And I do try to have a social life.

Of course, some people might consider having a gaming page like this to be social (geeky, but social), so if there's anything I have place marked that you'd like to see soonest, go right on ahead and let me know about it. And keep checking back here, as you can see from the What's new? entry, I'm adding more stuff all the time!

Who wrote this?

My name is S A Rudy, and I've been a gamer since my freshman year in college and a writer since forever. I've run Hellenback games both as a regular campaign and at several gaming conventions. Mostly I stay local to NJ, but I do usually make the annual pilgrimage to GenCon. (see my upcoming page for the events I'm likely to show up at.

Who do I contact if I think this stuff is the coolest thing since sliced bread (or if there's a broken link or something)?

You can send me email at sarudy@hotmail.com. The hotmail account is a forwarding address that I use in the hopes of filtering spam. I've had better luck with this one that the last forwarding address I used, but if it does bounce, and you really want to talk to me, try doing a google search for S A Rudy and post to my livejournal.) Like anybody else foolhardy enough to post their email address wide open on the internet, I get a lot of spam, so I'd recommend putting "Hellenback" somewhere in the subject so I don't miss it.

Marginalia