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Blackhawk: Blitzkrieg at North Texas RPG Con

Jerry Stratton, March 28, 2020

Blackhawk (DC Heroes): Howard Chaykin’s Blackhawk X-F5F Skyrocket sketch from the DC Heroes RPG adventure Blitzkrieg.; DC Heroes; Howard Chaykin

Update April 13: signup is now live.

If you’ve ever wanted to play DC Heroes, or play in DC Comics’s World War II setting, I’ll be running a Blackhawk game at North Texas on Thursday, June 4.

They are the subject of legend, the Blackhawk Squadron… a heroic group of fighter aces sworn to protect the Allied nations against the insidious Axis powers.

Now, the Squadron must penetrate Nazi-occupied territory for a crucial rescue and reconnaissance mission. The outcome of World War II hangs in the balance as the Blackhawks struggle against time to rescue American prisoners-of-war from a German factory… and discover what mad weapon the factory produces.

DC Heroes is an easy game to play. A little more difficult to run, but I’ll be handling that end of things. There is little in the way of powers among these characters, of course, as they’re all human pilots. Characters such as Stanislaus and Weng, and to a lesser extent Hendy, stray into superhero-level attributes or skills, but they’re still standard human skills, just amped up.

Of course the Blackhawks often face Nazi super-science—from the war wheel to flying tanks, to giant mechanical insects. But they defeat it with genuine human ingenuity, the killer instinct, as historian Victor Davis Hanson might say, of free men in the defense of liberty. What Epaminondas did to the Spartans, and Sherman to the Confederacy, Blackhawk and his pilots do to Nazi Germany: penetrate its tough outer shell to expose the weakness inherent in any slave society, any society that denies free speech and free expression.

Which is a lot deeper than this adventure gets, fortunately. There will be fist fights, gun fights, and, if you play your hand right, an aerial duel against an unbeatable and deadly foe.

  1. <- House on Crane Hill
  2. Kolchak: The Big Creep ->