Rich McGee

Any particular reason why?  I'd never considered his sexuality, although I suspect having easy access to almost everyone else's minds (and bodies, if desired) probably gives him a unusual viewpoint, especially when it comes to non-mentalists and their personhood. 

The sexual assault element of his character is going to cross so many lines it'll never show up at all in most modern games, the ones where people respect hard boundaries and X cards are in use.  Using that kind of thing without discussion in advance and a full-table buy-in doesn't fly the way it did even ten years ago.  Good thing, too.  I don't roleplay so I can experience the worst parts of everyday news, and damn few stories in any medium are improved in any way by the inclusion of rape - especially when it's done solely to coerce a male character into doing something, as in the example.  Tone deaf in the extreme, that.
 
 

What are you on about?

What are you on about?

Wow.
 
 
Looks like our friend Rich "the lych" McGee has some competition, necromantically....
 
 

We had something vaguely similar with a shrinking/mind controller villain in V&V way back in the day.  We knew he'd "infected" the mayor and were standing in his office discussing potential "treatments" for getting him out when the mayor gets an odd look on his face and we hear him say (in the villain's voice) "You know I can hear you, right?"
 
 

A famous encounter from 25-30 years ago with our gaming group was a female player who had the equivalent of a giant tape worm inside of her. The party decided to cut her open to remove it and as soon as the player made the first incision the GM said, “Initiative!” 😅

Ascendant the game seems to get mid-to-good reviews depending on whether you mind charts.
 
It's hard to find reviews of the game through all the controversy swirling around Macris, though.  I have to say, getting yourself banned from rpgnet is something of an achievement.

I backed the first kickstarter but have never played it, honestly only skimmed it since it's a pretty thick tome with a lot of rules, and I'm getting lazy. Based on ACKS, Macris does a great job on solid bulletproof mechanics and I know he is an obsessive math and spreadsheet geek, and tends to attract similarly math-obsessive fans, so I don't doubt the Ascendant rules are well designed. I just haven't had the time or reason to really dig in.
 
He did do a second successful kickstarter for a "platinum edition" with some sourcebooks so it must have fans.
 
(Personally I am a Fantasy Hero fan, and was mostly interested in Ascendant from a fantasy/universal standpoint. It arrived during a long COVID induced lull in gaming, and these days everyone in my circle only wants to play OSR...)
 
Honestly the best place to ask is probably on the Autarch Discord, which is extremely active and has half a dozen ascendant channels. I don't know the rules for posting discord invites here, so if you want an invite PM me. (I'm not much of a Discord user either, just pointing you to a place you can get more info.)
 
Here's a superhero AP, run by the designer. It has some combat so you can maybe get a feel for how much dice and rules feel in play.
 
Edit: For what it's worth, if you just want the "takeways" from players new to the game (this was a demo), skip forward to 1:58:50

The other significant appeal to AS is that people with gigantic collections of minis can hope to play games that actually use a company or three of them without having to commit an entire day or more to the project.  Classic BT's still my preference as well, but pushing around more than a lance or two per side can get pretty draggy, while AS has a sweet spot that starts at a company and goes up from there once you're used to it.  I never let myself over-purchase figs for BT, but I know plenty of more dedicated fans who have multiple regiments in their collections.
 
Reminds me of the tradeoff between complexity and detail versus grand scale and abstraction that Task Force Games used to showcase with Star Fleet Battles compared to Starfire.  

Now that just sounds like a challenge.    I don't suppose you could post a sample for us to mull over?  Unless he used personalized shorthand or a non-English language to take notes in there's probably someone on the forum who could decipher at least part of it.

It's 118 pages of condensed delusion, raw plagiarism, clarified acting out, and distilled emotional trauma dressed up with Badaboom and Comic Sans. Largely a work in progress, it's a decent guide to Meta-Earth, but also of rather suspect quality. It's no Strike Force, I'll tell ya that. I might dress it up and put it in my OneDrive share.

It's actually made from old reels of Death Wish (1974) spun into fibers and cussed at for 10-12 hours a day for the better part of a month. We try for the whole 12 hours, but Dave gets tired and his throat sore.  The resulting fabric is driven around the seedier parts of Indianapolis in the trunk of a bullet-riddled 1974 Fleetwood before being dropped off a cliff. Then, we cut the patterns and fit the stuff to your hero, but always a bit snug so you get that Charles Bronson too-tight-in-the-crotch facial expression.

There was a GURPS Arthurian England book.  It had three versions of the era, including one where Guinevere was a Celtic warrior queen who could take lovers as she wished.

Massive subsurface frozen sea discovered on Mars

Maybe due to the chocolates?

Oh dear.  Sounds like time to dust off the Book of Erotic Fantasy there.
 
You remind me that one of the expendable magic items in 13th is enchanted oil, which turns mundane items briefly magical.  True magic items are frequently at least semi-aware and will also ask to be oiled up on occasion, which does nothing for them mechanically (as they're already magical all the time) but they can get sulky and uncooperative if you don't treat them now and then.  Given the situation above the lube jokes pretty much write themselves.
 
On a more general note, true (ie permanent) magic items (including swords) in 13th Age all come with quirks, which modify their user's behavior and thinking unless they deliberately suppress them.  This usually isn't a problem, but if you try to carry too many true items at once the quirks will overwhelm you and start manifesting whenever the GM wants - usually at inconvenient moments.  You can also get minor bennies from the GM if you choose to roleplay a quirk briefly bleeding through in an entertaining or dramatic fashion when you aren't being forced to.  A few oddball effects can amp up your quirks even when you would normally be able to restrain them, so magic items aren't ever entirely safe to use.
 
Most swords (and other items) aren't truly sentient and can't fully take you over even when their quirk is pushing hard, but a fair few are self-aware enough to have personalities and at least negotiate a bit about how they're used.  Think limited AI more than fully realized personality - most of the time.
 
Think I'm finally out of corner-case examples now.  Intelligent swords aren't as common as you'd expect - and I don't think the singing sword in that one Bugs Bunny cartoon really counts as intelligent as such. 

Unless you count Russia, of course. Three centuries under Mongol rule.
 
In a way we're all still paying for the Mongol conquest of Russia. That left a deep emotional scar in the Russian collective psyche, a fear of invaders that greatly contributed to their desire to expand, so as to create buffers protecting them.

Thoughts?
 
Mine?
 
Dude, following through on things the players _like_ in your game is, bar none, the best possible thing you can do.
 
If your players are sympathetic to his plight, they may very much enjoy seeing what changes this brings about in his behavior, personality, and life.
 
And if not- well, they will still know that you lead them through a story that they were interested in.
 
 
Go for it.
 
 
For what it'a worth, in our own games way back when, my co-GM used Hideous a bit, but on one particular occasion, a PC, attempting to distract him, removed his mask.  Turns out he was absolutely _gorgeous_ underneath.  So half the party stops and stares while he beats them senseless....
 
 
Turns out the chemicals that disfigured him also gave him regenerative powers, but made him dim-witted.  He had never noticed that hia face had completely healed.
 

 
 

Nope. Sandra Anderson, a graduate of the University of Toronto.

I recently decided I had to write something of an apology to a group member when I felt that I had to withdraw from his campaign.  Piece of that is over in NGD-land (here).  There were other reasons on top of the GM-foibles described in the link why I felt I had to bail, but those aren't in the snippet linked.
 
A monologue may happen to work in a game, but you have to be sure it's the character monologuing, not the GM.

Runequest has a somewhat well-known magical sword that goes by Nose-Biter (it tends to hit foes in the snout/snoot/proboscis more often than is should).  It's fully intelligent and self-aware with its own agenda, and prefers to find wielders who are "cooperative" in the sense of being weak-willed and generally dependent on the blade to survive.  By tradition these wielders are known only as Nose-Biter's Feet, which pretty much says everything that needs to be said about the relationship.  The current Feet in the published material is a trollkin, one of the runt troll-spawn created by a curse their fertility goddess is stuck with.
That first Indiana Jones film really did have a great ending, didn't it? 
 
"Top men."

I have long had a love of the Ars Magica version of Europe, but translating it into Hero System has always been too intimidating for me.

I'll mention an obscure but interesting setup.  Way back when The Space Gamer was still being published by Steve Jackson, it ran two short stories by Timothy Zahn about a wandering swordsman named Conaker and his magical sword Whehalken, which had a djinn bound into it providing its enchantment and a few other powers.  They ran in issue 43 and 48, and AFAIK Zahn never did anything else with the characters.  Both can be found online easily enough, and issue 48 also has an article with Aaron Alston talking champions as a bonus. 
 
The setting's magic rules mean that the easiest way to enchant something (weapons, armor, lamps, even architecture) is to summon and bind other-dimensional spirits into them, which is effectively slavery for the intelligent ones - and even minor elementals are semi-intelligent.  I won't spoil the stories beyond saying that, but it does mean that almost all magical swords are self-aware, and some are capable of speech and may have their own desires.  Well worth a read - both stories are very short, and the magazine includes some game mechanics for using this style of magic item in AD&D.  

I have a fellow player in one of our games whose secret ID is a plucky female reporter (her heroic ID being a luck-manipulating street fighter vigilante type) but I can't think of any NPC versions.  A different campaign has a rookie police officer who's pretty much doing the whole "in over her head" thing Lois Lane tended towards back in the day, but she's not technically a reporter, of course.   
 
There's a pair of recurring news crews in the campaign I run, which are a mix of male and female and spend as much time competing with each other (they're from different stations) as they do actually filming, but I don't think I'd call any of them plucky.  My players' collective opinion of the whole lot of them as potential romantic interests is Hell, No!  There's also a sleazy tabloid reporter gal who shows up now and then, but she's more of a menace to the PCs' public images than anything else.