Tropes N - R

  • Nanomachines: The other Applied Phlebotinum in the TASK FORCE universe
    • The Varanyi medical nanotech in Starforce and Ladyhawk post-'The Varanyi Civil War' enhances the human body in ways very similar to the Perseus process used by the American Super Soldier Program in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
    • Both Starforce and Doctor Destroyer use nanomachines extensively in their battlesuits. After 'The Destroyer Wars', so does Jocelyn
  • Nebulous Evil Organization: Both VIPER and DEMON
  • Newscaster Cameo: Then-CNN anchor Bernard Shaw makes two appearances:
    • Introducing Bob Richards' interview with Doctor Destroyer in the prologue to '72 Hours'
    • The special bulletin on Destruga's discovery near Hawaii in 'Operation Phoenix'.
  • Nice Job Breaking it, Hero: Julie's horror over her vision of Bob's ret gone in an alternate timeline contributes to something much worse happening in 'Leap Day'
  • Nonverbal Miscommunication: Played for laughs by Bob in 'Piranharecho' when Aida mutes Julie.

    (they enter the Manor. As they all head for the dining room, Julie tugs on Bob's sleeve and pantomimes her throat and Aida)
    Starforce: I'm sorry, I don't speak non-verbal."
    (Julie hits Bob and points at Aida. She looks angry)
    Starforce: "Perhaps if you phrased it in the form of a game of Charades?"

  • No One Could Survive That: Remember, TASK FORCE is a reconstruction of the superhero genre...
    • Lady Blue carrying the overloading VIPER heavy weapon off at the end of 'Escalation'
    • Baron Nihil twice by Starforce's choice of appendage, once each in 'Greatest Generation' and 'Fields of Saguenay'
    • Starforce, after using himself to power the anti-zombie maser in 'Heart of Darkness'
    • Union Jack's fate as described by Dr. Renton at the end of 'Greatest Generation'
    • Starforce (AGAIN) at the climax of 'The Varanyi Civil War'
    • Doctor Destroyer, Spiritual Warrior, and the original Golden Avenger in 'The Battle of Detroit'
  • Now It's My Turn: Doctor Destroyer has been using his Destroyer-Beam to kill superheroes all through the fight in 'The Battle of Detroit'. Attempting to end Starforce's life the same way only makes him hang this lampshade:

    Dr. Destroyer (aiming at Electron): "NO!"
    (He fires a 30d6 Destroyer-Beam. Starforce flash-steps in the way, shifting his forcefield entirely to ED, and takes the full blast)
    Ladyhawk (screaming): "NO!!"
    (The titanic flare of energy dies. Starforce is more or less unhurt [95 ED between allocatable forcefield and armor, and made a CON roll so he has 75% Energy Damage Reduction instead of 50% -- he *only* takes 1 STUN] and now has a snarl on his face)
    Starforce (coldly): "My turn."
    (28d6 TK Offensive Strike punches Dr. Destroyer through the back wall of the control room [21m knockback > DEF+BODY of wall]. Starforce flash-steps in pursuit)

  • Obstacle Exposition: Hilariously subverted by Rev. Kayami in 'Fields of Saguenay' to deflate Starforce's comparison of their impending attack on Schloss Unbesiegbar to the Battle of Amchitka in '72 Hours'. You'd think Starforce would have noticed that there was no interdiction field before it got pointed out to him...
  • Official Couple: Ladyhawk and Starforce
  • Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome: 'The City That VIPER Built', for Bob and Julie, natch.
    • 'The Varanyi Civil War', once Starforce and Ladyhawk are separated from the rest of TASK FORCE on the Varanyi homeworld
    • "The Jewel of Awad"
  • Open Door Opening: 'You All Meet in a Lab' -- and the entire series -- starts with Julie psyching herself up for opening the door into the Project STARFORCE lab at ProStar.
  • Outrun the Fireball: Starforce forcing Ladyhawk to eject from the exploding VTOL in '72 Hours'
  • Parody Episode: 'Piranharecho' (of Sharknado), 'Jurassic City' (of both Jurassic Park and American Intellectual Property Law)
    • bonus points to 'Jurassic City' for actually making Michael Crichton's writing of Jurassic Park a major plot point
  • Pre-Mortem One-Liner: A tie between Starforce and Ladyhawk for best one in the series.
    • Starforce to Tlokon in "The Varanyi Civil War" as he triggers an anti-psionic grenade while Tlokon is attempting to keep the Throne Room ceiling from collapsing:

      Starforce: "Give my regards to Hell, you bastard."

    • Ladyhawk to General McAdams in "Coup d'Etat" before their Single Stroke Battle in the Oval Office:

      Ladyhawk (voice ringing): "Monroe McAdams! As President, I find you guilty of the capital charge of Treason against the lawfully-elected government of the United States. Your sentence is death. Do you have any last requests before I execute sentence?"

  • Protect This House: Subverted in 'The Legacy of Doctor Destroyer'. The six-squad, multiple supervillain attack that VIPER mounts on Stately Dormyer Manor to steal Doctor Destroyer's technical database is driven off with VERY heavy casualties, but most of the manor is destroyed in the process.
    • Played straight in 'Cliques' when the Hawkins children are forced to improvise a defense of Dormyer Manor with both their parents and Shina gone
  • Psycho Serum: All variants of the Cyberline process make its recipient dependent on Cyberline while slowly killing them.
  • Pure Awesomeness: Since the stories are based on the Champions tabletop RPG, it's not uncommon for characters to throw Presence Attacks to gain an advantage of some sort. What is uncommon is the sheer power involved in some of these attacks in-universe...
    • Starforce. Dear God, Starforce...
      • scares David Sutherland off in 'The Strange Secret of Matthew Fuseli'. Unsuited, and after Julie had beaten him up
      • engages in a Presence Attack duel with VIPER's Nest Leader in 'The City That VIPER Built'. And wins.
      • The Presence Attack he throws on the GENOCIDE assault force on the eastern bank of White Rock Lake in "The Lady in the Lake," after he critically hits one of the Rook Agents. All the Pawn Agents start running for their lives, and the remaining higher powered Rook and Knight Agents are frozen long enough for the rest of TASK FORCE to deal with them immediately after they teleport in.
      • implied to have thrown one on the entire UN General Assembly during his speech to them in "The First Dimensional War"
      • Large Ham doesn't even begin to describe the Presence Attack he throws against Shadow Destroyer in "The Island of Shadow Destroyer"

        Narrator: Let's see... +4d6 for being the Son of Doctor Destroyer, +5d6 for apparently using his powers from surprise to do an incredibly violent action, +3d6 for an incredibly bizarre soliloquy... Aw, frak it. Starforce gets to add 16d6 of bonuses to his base PRE of 40, rolls a 24d6 PRE attack on Shadow Destroyer, and gets PRE+45 on him. For the first phase of combat, Shadow Destroyer is at DCV 0 and ALL of TASK FORCE will act before he does.

      • Scores another one unsuited against his old high school nemesis in "Cliques"
    • It wasn't just Shina's Desert Eagle that scared Nestor Castillo off in "Crowns of Krim". It was the Presence Attack she threw right after she emptied a full clip into him and was reloading
    • One of the standard features of Sage entering Angry God Mode ("The Varanyi Civil War", "The First Dimensional War") is to boost his Presence stat enough to throw a 20d6 Presence Attack just by speaking
    • Jillian Hawkins demonstrates in "The Prisoner of Doctor Destroyer" that she inherited her father's talent for staging -- and throwing -- massive Presence attacks when she literally scares Sennacherib into allowing itself to be reprogrammed by her.

      (epic Kirk Summation by Jillian deleted for brevity while boosting her Presence stat to 80)
      (Jillian now gets +3d6 on her PRE attack for an incredible soliloquy, plus +1d6 for displaying her cyberkinetic powers)
      Sennacherib (beat, sobbing): "Who ARE you?!?"
      Jillian (voice ringing while throwing a 20d6 PRE attack against Sennacherib): "I AM THE GRAND-DAUGHTER OF DOCTOR DESTROYER!" (beat) "And YOU. *WILL*. OBEY ME!!"

    • David 'Grandfather' Kayami has an entire suite of mental powers based on his Presence stat and not Ego. By simply talking to people, he can elicit a surprising amount of information from them (Telepathy) or calm them down (Mind Control)
  • Ramming Always Works: In 'International Treasure', Viperia (an evil distaff counterpart of Superman) and Starforce do this to each other at full speed. Starforce barely wins, and only because of his adaptive forcefield.
  • Rape is a Special Kind of Evil: Played straight every time it appears:
    • Invoked in the climax of 'The Varanyi Civil War'. Tlokon threatening to rape Julie is the trigger event for Bob killing him.
    • Played straight in "The Jewel of Awad". Julie is frantically trying to keep Bob from killing Kat in the climax -- until Bob reveals to Julie that Kat raped him. After that, Julie is only too happy to put a shuriken into Kat's leg to keep her from escaping.
    • Played straight in 'Cliques' with serial rapist and star high school football player Lucas Steele, and also exaggerated because of the retribution Clan Hawkins doles out physically and legally to everyone who attempted to cover up or codone Lucas' crimes.
    • Played straight in 'Force of Will'. Everyone, hero and villain, who participated in the assault on Alpenfestung or its aftermath was horrified to discover Menton had raped Lady Blue. Warlord even went out of his way to expedite her delivery to the Fuseli Clinic for follow-on treatment.
  • Reality-Breaking Paradox: What Doctor Destroyer inadvertantly triggers in 'Leap Day' when he kills the man who would become Shadow Destroyer. The reality-breaking enters because Shadow Destroyer was psychically linked to an eldritch abomination from a dead dimension, which kept him from being erased from history.
  • Reconstruction: Of the superhero genre.
  • Redemption Equals Death: The alternate-timeline Starforce deliberately shuts his forcefield down when he interposes himself between Istvatha V'Han's energy beam and his younger self at the climax/Point of Departure between timelines in "V'Han Returns", which all but guarantees that he will be killed by it.
  • Required Secondary Powers: Played humorously and painfully straight in 'Cliques' when James attempts to use a telekinetic gauntlet of his devising to remove a stray car from the Pierce house after the Wild Teen Party the previous night.
    • Justified in 'Mechanon Inc.', Starforce mentions that Mechanon's Humongous Mecha form in the climax can only be possible if there are electrogravitic forcefields operating within it to support its bulk and violate the Square/Cube law on its scale.
  • Ret Gone: What Ladyhawk kept Starforce from doing to himself when he was about to kill Albert Zerstoiten in 'Greatest Generation'
    • She actually sees it happen in a vision of an alternate-timeline version of that scene in the beginning of 'Leap Day'.
  • Rickroll: How Starforce gets the attention of Warlord's spaceship in 'Malva Awakens' so he and Biomaster can escape the Malvan world-ship on which they were stranded.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: The first draft of 'Street Level' was written after the 2015 Baltimore riots in real life, and takes place in-universe a month after the Ferguson riots of 2014.
    • 'North Tower' is 9/11, told from the viewpoint of a superhero attempting to save lives after the initial attack.
    • Most of the media articles snippeted throughout "Citizen Hawkins," especially in the first 3 chapters, are from real life media articles with only the names and some situations changed to fit the TASK FORCE universe.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Once Bob has his battlesuit in "The Jewel of Awad," he proceeds to eliminate Kat el-Hassan's fortress from the face of the Earth -- then for an encore is prepared to murder Kat in cold blood for her rape of him.
    • Starforce taking out both the supervillain and the company of VIPER grav-tanks and heavy shock troops protecting the White House in "Coup d'Etat", because he thinks they've killed his wife.
  • Robeast: Megaterak, from 'Megaterak Raids Again' and 'The Battle of Detroit'. An alien-built kaiju robot
  • Role-Playing Game Verse: The main characters in the first two seasons are (with the exception of Sage) loosely based on characters and NPCs for a shared Champions campaign the series creator played with friends from high school when back home from college or military duty in the 1980s. Instead of using that campaign's universe, the stories use a world which splits the difference between Real Life and the published Champions Universe timeline.
  • Running Gag: Several throughout the series, actually...