Endurance

In one of his blog posts (https://adeptpress.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/a-hero-gets-tired/#more-871), Ron Edwards talks about have fighting is tiring, and how he doesn't see that in comic books after 1980. (Read the post. I found it interesting.)

Champions used to emulate that by having powers and Strength cost END, 1 END per 5 points of power or strength used. A normal person (hah!) had enough endurance to punch ten times, more when you counted recovery in. As a Champions player, I used to find ways to work around END cost, even if I couldn't buy it to zero, I had lots of things on charges or whatever.

Edwards' main argument seems to be that END is realistic--fighting is fatiguing, which I remember from Days of Yore, when I practiced karate. But while comic RPGs don't need to deal with realism (Hello? Flying guys and telekinetic women?), they do need to deal with verisimilitude.

Comics as they are today mostly ignore endurance. ICONS ignores endurance.

But...

If you would find the game more interesting if there were an Endurance kind of stat that made you tired in a linear way, rather than as an arbitrary "He gets away because you're exhausted, have a Determination Point" way--maybe you're playing an all martial artist game--here are some ideas. (This scenario is interesting to me only in an abstract way, so I can't guarantee that the ideas are good.)

Tiring by Default

All powers (including Strength) have the limitation "Tiring." Using a power costs two stamina. If you can fly with chi powers and punch, that's four stamina right there,

It's not linear, but it has the advantage of being right within the rules as written. It also means that fights are going to be short, unless everyone's going to be saving their determination to refresh stamina (or buying Healing or Stamina, if you allow that).

New Stat

The easiest way is to go for a new derived stat. ICONS has two, Stamina and Determination. We add Endurance to that, and make it five times your Stamina. So Dim Mak has a strength of 5 and a will of 6, he has a Stamina of 11 and an Endurance of 55. But the cost for a power has to switch. Instead, the cost is the point cost for that ability. So if Dim Mak is just punching (strength 5), that's 5 points of endurance. But if he's clearing out the room of mooks (strength with the Burst extra, to get all of them), that's 10 I points of endurance: 5 of strength, 5 of Burst. (Limitations would take away, but the minimum cost for using a power is 1.)

The extra "Zero End" might exist in this version of the system.

New Limitation

This combines them, and lets you roll dice, as well. It is not as linear as the new stat--I haven't worked out the math yet--but can be considerably more punishing than the "Tiring" limitation. You put a limitation--call it "Uncontrollably Tiring"--on the power. Whenever you use the power, roll 2D6 versus the number of ranks of power. If you roll over the number of ranks, you're fine. If you roll under, you lose that many ranks of Stamina, double that many ranks on an 11 or 12.

It behooves the GM not to allow this limitation for powers that have only 1-5 ranks, or to change it to 1d6 in that case.

Idea of the month

If you don't like world-building, set a superhero vigilante level game in the same place as the Grand Theft Auto games. That place looks lawless.

I haven't played, only overheard, because my son got GTA V for Christmas.

The Antaeus League

The heroes are opposed by a mysterious organization that seeks to nullify and capture the powers of each super-powered individual, and do with them...what? Create a super-powered army? Grant powers to their own members? Infiltrate governments?

Or save the world?

(Idea brought on by late night watching of The Librarians; name from The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.)

Not that the agents don't have powers: they do. The powers are oddly restricted, often earth-style powers: great strength, invulnerability, turning people to stone, growth, and more, but nothing that involves leaving contact with the ground: no flight, gliding, or teleport. They can stretch, but not throw.

Some very rare members know a little bit of magic (so they say) but that's always kept a low level, and those agents can be recognized by the chains hanging from their boots.

With luck, they'll stay in the background enough that the heroes won't have an opportunity to learn that the members of the League have no powers when not in contact with the earth, either through a chain or by standing directly on it. Asphalt is okay, but up in a building is not. (That means that their attacks always happen in open areas: on the field of a stadium, in a parking lot, a park, a nature reserve.

The heroes first come across them when they steal the powers of a fellow hero, rendering him normal, even though he didn't have the kind of powers you'd think of as removable: tech skills, perhaps, or something inborn. The next time, they might help, depowering one of their foes during a climactic battle that the heroes would have otherwise lost. The powers are imprisoned in a small urn with Egyptian hieroglyphics, most like a canopic jar.

Then the Antaeus League (still unnamed) comes after the heroes. (If you have a player who is going to be absent for a while, depower that character, but otherwise don't; it's not fun to be the unpowered hero in a superhero game.) There are close calls. Maybe the heroes manage to capture one of the League.

Why are they doing this? To save the world.

They have been responsible for thousands of years for keeping magic in check. Superpowers are nothing more than magic given a particular expression. If there is a clearly-defined start to the superpower age, someone got into their hideout and broke a thousand of the magic jars. (If there isn't, then the Antaeus League has its own enemies, who sometimes manage to free some of the magic.)

They are certain that if all the magic were freed, it wouldn't be superheroes any more; it would be a full-on Tolkienesque post-apocalyptic fantasy world.

And the Antaeus League member pleads with them to give up their powers.

Now, in your campaign, they might be deluded, or they might be right.

So try throwing that into your next superhero campaign.

A Brief Personal Note

Just quickly, and to practice saying it:

So about four weeks ago, they removed chunks of my stomach, small intestine, pancreas, and gall bladder in an operation called the Whipple procedure. Examination of the removed tissue showed cancer in the common bile duct. Today I went to see another oncologist--not the surgeon--to see what was next.

Well, what's next might or might not be chemo. Yes, the surgeon thinks he got it all, and the single clinical study shows that for people with my indicators chemo might not affect the five year survival rate. Except it wasn't described to me that clearly, so I need to see how they did the math, and what the sample size was (because I'm annoyingly fact-based). I was told simply that the lifespan of chemo patients was longer, but applying chemo to my particular situation had no statistical significance. So I want to compare the average lifespans of chemo patients with my indicators to the average lifespans of non-chemo patients with my indicators. That seems straightforward enough and will guide my decision.

So that's why I've been absent or flakey this last little while.

John

Idea of the month

Here's a weird thought that would make the relationships between the characters more flawed. (If the players want that.) If you don't want to play it in my original concept, there's easily a Comics Code Authority version.

About each other character on the team, decide on one bad thing that's a secret. It could be something very heroic and comic-book-y ("I saw you passing information to the government about our activities!"), it could be something that's only about the team relationships ("I've noticed you always give in to Silver Antenna even though you always start opposing her"), or totally non-sequitur ("I, uh, kinda slept with your fiance. After she became your fiance.").

The thing is, you can use it as a quality once, by making it public. In essence, it lets you take a Determination Point from that other person's supply (which is a nice way of thinking about it, but that's not how things work now).

You can control how accurate the statements are by how complete they are. Two of the examples I gave would be perfect examples for a later retcon ("Not in the field, not now.") The more precise they are, like the one about the affair...that might have to bring in shape-shifting aliens to fix.

(In fact, it occurs to me that you can do this right now with the Trouble mechanism; this is just a way of formalizing it and making the players come up with relationship bits about each other. The fact that I thought it might be different shows that I am loopy from drugs and that the Trouble mechanism is much more varied than I thought.)

Updated ICONS basics for your phone

I took the Basics chapter of ICONS: The Assembled Edition, reformatted it for your phone, and created a PDF that you can give to your players. I took out actual product identity (which really meant changing names in examples).

Here it is: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0KkM_vAe2HXU2t4MG56OFdlamc

Qualities and the Grizzled Gamer

While I lay here with Mystery Illness...

I've been thinking about Qualities lately, Advantages, and Maneuvers. It seems to me—and I hope I'm not repeating myself too often here—that the whole business of putting Qualities on things can just be a framework for interpreting what our group always did, back in the early days of Champions.

Again, if you're comfortable with the "I create the Choked and Can't Recover Quality with a Prowess maneuver and immediately pass the extra Activation to my teammate," then don't bother to read this. You don't need it. But among my group of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, we had trouble figuring out how to frame it in terms of things we know.

So I figured that I'd present a situation or two, how we would have handled it in the olden days, and how it might be handled in ICONS.

Situation: You want to create a patch of ice that's slippery, so the villain skids allong the floor and falls down.

Olden Days: Fine, you do that (the hex is DCV 3, remember). The villain will have to make a DEX roll to stay upright, modified by--how much Ice Blast do you have? 8d6? Sure, -5." (For stuff like that, I used to use -1 per 10 active points. House rule, I think, but few game systems that I used really handled that nicely until Champions got into the territory where it was so fiddly that I didn't want to touch it.)

ICONS: You have an Advantage? No? Okay, use a Maneuver to lay down a patch of ice. It's fine motor control to make it Treacherously Slippery, so make a Coordination roll against, oh, this isn't hard, 2 plus...I rolled a 3. Five, then. You have Coordination 3 and rolled a 5, so you have 8, so it's immediately activated. Sure, I'll call it Trouble that delays them for a page.

Essentially the same physical action (somebody rolls against Dex or Coordination), different explanation.

Situation: The jury-rigged electrical panel throws off a spark that sets the area ablaze.

Olden Days: Well, you just made the roll to re-wire that electrical panel to feed all the electricity to the Chronosyntastic Infundibulator, so I'm going to say that a spark leaps free from your jury-rigged wiring and sets the cheap indoor-outdoor carpet on fire. You try to put it out with your foot while aiming the Infundibulator, but you have to stand essentially still.

ICONS: You're out of Determination? A maneuver might..oh. Right. Your Intellect sucks. How about tactics? I'll give you the rewiring if you accept some Trouble. Fine. One more thing to deal with...a spark leaps off the rewiring job and sets the cheap carpet on fire.

So the big difference here is that in the old way, I just imposed the fire as a fun consequence (for some value of "fun"...I know there are nights when the players just joke about making their "Catch Villains" roll). Here it's actually a trade, where I suggest it, and the player gets to choose whether they want the advantage, want to roll the maneuver, or just want to take a different route.

Situation: You want to impress everyone in the room and get all the normals out.

Olden Days: Okay, you make a Presence Attack. Oooh. Sorry, man. The normals pause for a phase. Oh, Storm King, you're going to try, too? (or) Good roll on the Presence Attack, and the normals walk out in an orderly fashion.

ICONS: Impressing people is Willpower. You want to impose a Quality on them so they leave...call it Orderly Dismissal. We'll do will versus Will as a maneuver. You have a 5, they have a 3, but I rolled a 5 for them, so versus 8. You have to have a Moderate success for the Quality to be Activated, unless— Oh. A 3 is just a Marginal success. The Quality is there, but it isn't Activated. Oh, Storm King, you're doing to spend a Determination point and Activate it. Well, you're next, so you bark, "Now, people!" and they start filing out.

Yes, using the whole Qualities/Advantages thing means claiming a little extra number fiddling, but the end result is pretty much the same. The difference is that if the original player's attempt is Marginal, then some later player can spend a DP and activate this new Quality on the same page. We used to use cumulative Presence attacks in the same way.

Just looking at it now, it seems to me that in the old way, we accepted the rolls and made the narrative conform to the rolls without hiding anything ("His presence attack sucked, so we had to fight with the waitstaff in the kitchen") or consequences were imposed by the GM. In the ICONS way, there's more of an effort to create narrative as it's going on, and to barter about consequences.

Doesn't mean I'm any better at it. Old habits are, you know, old.

Adventure Aids from Dungeontown

So much of the adventure writing advice out there is for dungeons. Some people love dungeons. I get a GM advice thing and really, it’s a D&D/Pathfinder thing. It’s three-quarters full of “this is how to construct a dungeon fast” and “twenty-seven encounter types for the wilderness” and “six enchanted items.”

I prefer superheroes. But almost nobody is going to make a subsistence wage from selling to superhero GMs.

So let’s look at the dungeon advice and see how we can port things over. At worst, what can we steal?

But before I even start that, I gotta ask: why are you playing superheroes?

Because…

While there are many reasons to play any genre of roleplaying game, games with dungeons tend to be focused on different satisfactions than games with superheroes. If the itch you’re scratching is largely the same, hey, this might work for you. If it’s not, you’re going to be unsatisfied.

So if you want to satisfy your tactical ambitions, dungeon advice is going to work. If your interest is the encounters and you’re going to sift story out of it, dungeon advice is going to work. If you’re playing because friends are playing, dungeon advice is going to work. If you want to be fundamentally awesome from minute one in a way that the zero-to-hero fantasy progression doesn’t provide, then porting over dungeon advice might not work, but it might. If you want to tell morality tales with modern dressing, dungeon advice might not work. If you want soap opera with a genre dressing, dungeon advice will definitely not work.

Understand, I’m not saying that games with dungeons can’t satisfy these urges. They can. But what I’m saying is that the five-room dungeon and lists of encounters and drawing a dungeon map before any other planning, all of them presuppose a kind of narrative that isn't the superhero narrative.

But maybe it can satisfy you. Maybe the various dungeon things can help or inspire, though.

Dungeons

I forget who pointed it out, but dungeons are a kind of plot. Each room is a scene, and doors are a way to get from one scene to another. Things start off easy and get harder. Sometimes they just get harder relative to the characters’ current abilities, sometimes they expect the characters to get better as the dungeon progresses, but there is a kind of progression.

A five-room dungeon is an adventure. I don’t know if it was the original 5-room dungeon model, but this article over at strolen.com  suggests five rooms that map darned well to five stages of a story and different player satisfactions:

1. Room 1: Entrance and Guardian
2. Room 2: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
3. Room 3: Trick or Setback
4. Room 4: Climax or Big Battle
5. Room 5: Reward or Revelation

If you allow the fact that superhero games don’t have “reward” in a treasure sense, the first four rooms fit with some wiggling into the four stages that Steve Kenson suggests in ICONS: Threat, Investigation, Challenge, Comeback.

In that sense, great. And in fact, if you’re coming from a fantasy or F20 background, maybe that’s a useful way for you to think of superhero adventures. You grab a theme or central concept, have the players encounter the concept somehow, do a thematically-related puzzle or roleplaying challenge, plan a setback, and then have a fight. Here, let’s compare two. In a dungeon, the Entrance needs to explain why no one else has ever looted this dungeon before, while in a superhero story, “it’s new” is usually the reason.

Stage	5 Room Dungeon	Superheroes
Entrance The Threat	A giant spiderweb that hid a particular cave is now torn away and loathsome spiders are spilling out into the countryside. But don't worry: there are still plenty of spiders in the cave to fight, even in this room.	We'll assume (because the season opener of Supergirl is on my mind) one of the characters is vulnerable to Neonite. The players intercept the latest in a series of drone attacks on scientific R&D locations
Puzzle / The Investigation	The entrance to the next chamber is blocked by the dead body of a horrendous giant wasp. Gotta move it to find out.	Investigation shows that from this site, unlike all others, something was stolen: a solar power device unique in its range of radiations to absorb, and the more radiation it absorbs, the better. (It might turn out that the other attacks got rid of other places that might produce it with the plans.)
Setback / The Challenge	Inside the next chamber is a big mother of a spider, and after a battle that was tough but not as tough as they thought it would be, they win...	The next attack is easily stopped...but turns out to be a diversion because the bad guys have stolen a fist-sized sample of Neonite, the dangerously radioactive mineral that totally doesn't affect normals. The cyborg powered by the Neonite shows up on cue and kicks their butts by first defeating the character vulnerable to Neonite
The Big Battle / The Comeback	Which is when they discover that the giant wasp planted its young in the spider, and by killing the spider, they've hurried the hatching process. The big battle is against some number of newly-hatched deadly giant wasps.	With a daring plan, the heroes fight the cyborg again, this time winning
Reward	The spider has gold, gems and scrolls from the travellers it brought back to feed its children.	Technically, superheroes don't get rewards, but maybe they learn more about the creators of the cyborg

Now, aside from the fact that neither of these adventures is particularly good, they do have the same high points. The puzzle in the case of the supers adventure is a bit more investigation than figuring out how to move a dead bug, but I was making this up in both cases and we’re all just lucky that I managed not to make the supers one about cloning or the food of the gods, and therefore essentially the same adventure.

But articles like “How to make your next dungeon a Hallowe'en experience!” might be useful as a source of inspiration, rather than things you can take directly.

Encounters

Something I see often in my perambulation around the web is the list of encounters or ways to make encounters interesting. Something like “12 Tavern Encounters” or “Six Slippery Traveling Salemen” generally.

Tough to make them relevant. Again, there’s certainly nothing you can take directly, because the idea of the F20 encounter is baked right in, but sometimes you can steal attitudes or motivations. Heck, if you really want to, you can put these stolen attitudes in your own table. A table can certainly help when your players back you into a corner and you have no ideas.

Eleven Reasons to Pick a Fight With the Hero

Roll (2d6)	Reason
2	If I can get him to beat me up, then I'm in no shape to answer questions from him/the police/my spouse/go to work tomorrow.
3	Keep your attention on me, okay, so we can lift something—anything—from the only member of the Super Six with pockets.
4	If I can get video of him throwing just one punch I can sell it and pay for the operation that the kid needs.
5	My significant other just broke up with me, and it'll just show them if I get beaten to a bloody pulp.
6	Everyone knows that hero name doesn't randomly attack innocents, so I won't get hurt, and I'll look cool in front of that person I want to impress over there.
7	I am sooo drunk that I don't realize he's obviously more powerful, and he's blocking my way to the pinball machine. He's not so tough.
8	This hero always talks people down, right? I'll gain serious cred and not get hurt. Or am I thinking about the other guy?
9	I've been paid to do this, and I'm willing to do it because I am in desperate financial straits. (You as GM will have to figure out what the plan is for paying. Humiliation? Fact gathering?)
10	Hit me. Tricia at the nail place/the psychic/Dr. Seven says that will give me powers/cure my leukaemia/cancer.
11	Go ahead. Kill me. I can't do it myself.
12	Pain is kinda thrilling.

And you notice that for one of them, I had to pretty much say, “Hey, here’s a hook but you gotta figure out the rest.”

Sometimes the random encounter table is locations. You can make that work by transferring the attributes of the place to a modern or comic book location. Still, it’s one of those things where you should probably do it yourself ahead of time and have a handy table yourself.

Six Ways to Describe the Warehouse (Instead of Abandoned or Deserted) (roll 1d6)

Roll (1d6)	Description
1	Dilapidated, run-down, untended, rat-infested, broken skylights
2	Clean but stained, smelling heavily of bleach, windowless, industrial, many forklifts
3	Wooden, surprisingly large, sheet-metal-clad, double-sashed windows high up
4	New, concrete, equipped with floor drains, access to sewers, security system
5	Future tech, roboticized, computerized, automated, not obeying shutdown instructions
6	Dirty, busy, well-used, crowded, with a sign that says 4 Days Since An Accident and the 0 right beside it and numbers past 5 are missing.

And here, have one more:

Themes for a themed super (probably villain)

Roll (2d6)	Theme group	Specific examples
	Holidays	President's Day, Memorial Day, Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Labor Day
	Emotions or states of mind	Love, Hate, Fear, Madness, Ennui, Like, Prejudice, Greed, Jingoism, Lust, Unrequited love, Duty, Paranoia, Shock, Awe
	Elements, modern or classical	Earth, air, fire, water, wood, metal, diamond, gold, silver, platinum, uranium, phosphorus, sodium, neon, radium
	Elemental concepts or forces	fire, light, heat, shadow, magnetism, sleep, darkness, gravity, electricity, nuclear force, transmutation, cosmic radiation, X-rays
	Classic monsters or old monster names	Vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster or golem, ghost, cannibal spirit, Springheel Jack, revenant, Djinn or genie, kraken, ogre, giant, medusa, sphinx, cyclops
	Animals, usually hunters	Lion, puma, jaguar, wolf, wolverine, honey badger, weasel, myrmidon, ant lion, termite, cricket, grasshopper, wasp, hornet, stinger, crab, shark, hammerhead, mako, grizzly, cheetah
	Evocative things	Blood, sand, bone, hair, blob, rust, grass-roots, thunderstrike
	Things or acts of power	Genocide, slaughter, sniper, wrecking crew, demolition, groundswell, blitzkrieg
	Games or game pieces	Chess, Gammon, pawn, knight, rook, castle, king, queen, bishop, quarterback, draughtsman

No, Seriously, Like Dungeons

You can make the adventure take place in a dungeon-like environment. (I mean a place with restricted movement, not some BDSM club.)

Most superhero adventures are a bit more like a wilderness hexcrawl thing, but there are a couple of superhero tropes that can be treated like a dungeon.

The most common is the base. Most comics with a base have done an us-against-the-base issue. The Danger Room (Wreck Room, The Kitchen, whatever you want to call it) is a limited version of it. Another is the enemy base, often combined with the heroes-have-lost-their powers idea.

Dimension-hopping can provide something similar: each dimension is an encounter.

Something I’ve never tried is using some other fantasy system to represent the dream dimension and run an adventure on two parallel tracks.

The Supergirl TV show...characters in ICONS Part II

Note as of October 7, 2017: I just realized I double posted part 1 instead of posting both parts. I'm editing this to include the other characters, but won't change the title to say "Part 2" until I'm done.

• Previous caveats apply.
• I leave Maxwell Lord as an exercise for the reader
• Changes from the second season won't be here, though I might do a second season post that includes some of those characters.
• Characters get listed Determination only if they're heroes and player characters.

Catherine "Cat" Grant

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
3	3	3	4	4	4	7	6
Specialties						Qualities
Business: Expert (+1), Martial Arts (+1), Arts (Journalism) Expert (+2)						Queen of All Media Loves her boys Adores Clark, rivals with Lois
Powers
None

Okay, I snuck in one Season 2 thing in the Qualities, but feel free to replace it with Wealthy. At the end of Season 2, it's revealed that she does know Supergirl's secret identity.

Winslow "Winn" Schott, Jr.

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
3	3	3	5	3	3	6	6
Specialties						Qualities
Science Expert (+2), Technology Master (+3)						Self-taught in almost everything Bad name by association, and craves love Is this awkward?
Equipment
Cellphone, laptop, vintage toys. In the second season, the DEO sometimes makes him wear a tactical vest in the field.

Winn has a specific character arc in season one, which involves becoming not infatuated with Kara. In the second season, he became the go-to technobabble guy, but he also got a girlfriend and showed tremendous loyalty there.

James Bartholomew Olsen

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
4	4	4	3	4	4	8	6
Specialties				Qualities
Art (Journalism) (+2), Art (Photography) Master (+3)				Connected to Superman and Supergirl Make justice and the system better Infatuation has always made me do strange things
Equipment
Signal watch.
Cameras.

It's reasonable to assume that he actually has lots of specialties and obscure knowledge by virtue of having been Superman's pal and being shoved into things a lot. We don't see much evidence of it in the show.

In the second season, he gets an upgrade in specialties and powers (and probably a point of Coordination) through the Guardian identity.

Bizarro

Heat Breath (Blast) 7

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
4	4	9	2	5	2	11	–
Specialties				Qualities
None				Pliable and Unformed The Opposite of Supergirl Forming
Powers
Flight 7 Invulnerable (Damage Resistance) 7 Ice Vision (Blast) 8

You can justify higher levels for the powers to make her truly a mirror of Supergirl, but I figured she was in the ballpark but not quite the same.

Lobo

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
7	4	8	4	5	6	14	1
Specialties				Qualities
Power (Binding), Stealth, Wrestling				The Last Czarnian The Main Man, a Mostly Honorable Mercenary If There's No Collateral Damage, You're Not Doing It Right
Powers
Super-Sense 1 (Can track someone anywhere) Hook and Chain (Binding) 10 Bolter Gun (Blast) 7 Extra: Frag Grenades (Burst) Tough (Damage Resistance) 5 Regeneration 5 Extra: Immortality 5

We heard him alluded to on the show, so I did my version of Lobo for ICONS and for this setting. Though Lobo can clone himself (the Duplication power), it's not under his control, and it's best used as a GM fiat thing. If it happens while fighting the players, they get a Determination point.

Lobotomized Non

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	5	10	2	6	2	12	–
Specialties				Qualities
Martial Arts, Technology Expert (+2)				Last Son of Krypton Lobotomized Some Feelings Remain
Powers
Flight 8 Damage Resistance 7 Limit: Not vs. Magical Effects Heat Vision 8 Super Senses 4 (X-Ray, ultrasonic hearing, +1 range hearing, +1 rng sight) Freeze breath (Strike) 7 Extra: Burst

This Non is more like the Donner Non. Totally non-canon, but I started a Supergirl adventure, and he features in it. So does Lobo, for that matter.

Second season characters should probably include Miss Martian, Mon-El, Lena Luthor, Lillian Luthor, the Parasite, and more. Superman you can probably do by subbing Specialties and Qualities into the Supergirl writeup.

The Supergirl TV show...characters in ICONS

I did these a while ago...these are characters from the first season of the TV show. A couple of things to note...

• Supergirl is not as powerful as she is in the comics. Yes, she can lift a tremendous amount, but lightning and electricity (for example) can hurt her. 
• The quality "Last child of <planet>" encapsulates pretty much everything about their species strengths and weaknesses, so the quality would be used for extra powers or weaknesses to, say, Kryptonite.
• These characters traditionally have many many powers. Stunt like crazy if using.
• I have to admit that I made the Martian Manhunter's strength a 9 just because we're claiming that Kryptonians are at the top of the charts. Things like Supergirl flying faster than Superman might be a result of a quality or it might be an actual ranking thing. (Look at Non and Supergirl if you want to do any other Kryptonian.)

Supergirl

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
4	4	10	4	6	4	14	1
Specialties						Qualities
Business: Specialist (+1)						Last daughter of Krypton
Powers
Flight 8						A Mission to Accomplish
Damage Resistance 7 Limit: Not vs. Magical Effects
Heat Vision 8
Super Senses 4 (X-Ray, ultrasonic hearing, +1 range hearing, +1 rng sight)						Stronger Together
Freeze breath (Strike) 7 Extra: Burst

I just defined "Freeze Breath" as a Burst Strike, but the default use seems to be to freeze things, which might be Energy Control (cold) or Stunning (paralyzing a person) or telekinesis (as when she sucks in poison gas or could have saved Kelly, James, and Winn). Choose your base effect and stunt the rest.

Her powers grow over the season, or the writers are confused; in the encounter with the Toyman, quicksand holds her, but by the end she's lifting a hundred million tons.

By the end of the second season, she might have a specialty related to journalism.

Martian Manhunter

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	4	9	4	4	6	15	1
Specialties						Qualities
Athletics, Leadership, Mental Resistance Master (+3), Military, Stealth						Last son of Mars
Powers
Mental Awareness 1						Fire! My only weakness!
Telepathy 7 Extra: Rangeless Limit: not Kryptonians
Transformation (Humanoids) Extra: Effect Flight Limit: One or the other 7
Phasing 4						Moral compass for the DEO

He almost always flies as J'onn, but he does fly as Supergirl once. I choose to regard that once as a stunt that cost him an Advantage.

Alex Danvers

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
5	4	4	4	4	3	7	4
Specialties						Qualities
Athletics Expert (+2), Investigation, Martial Arts Expert (+2), Mental Resistance, Military, Stealth, Science Expert (+2), Technology Expert (+2), Vehicles						Agent Danvers of the DEO
Powers
Pistol (Blast 4)						Badass Sister of Supergirl (aka "She'd be the hero on any other show")
Body Armor (Damage Resistance) 3
						Loyal to Those Who Saved Her from Herself

She has lots of determination points to try and do cool things. By the rules, stunts off skills have to be based off a skill you're expert or better in, so she's an expert in lots of stuff. The downside to the "Badass Sister of Supergirl" quality is that she is protective and jealous, and you can bribe the player to do stupid things.

The funky ID card is part of being a DEO agent and is covered in the Quality.

Stuff like the kryptonite sword or the kryptonite battlesuit is a plot device, not a power or equipment.

White Martian

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	5	8	4	6	7	14	–
Specialties						Qualities
Power (Transformation), Stealth, Wrestling						Hates green Martians
Powers
Transformation (humanoids) 7 Limit: Concentration						Deceptive by nature
Wall-Crawling 4 Extra: Leaping
Super Senses 1 (Mental Awareness)
Telepathy 7 Extra: Rangeless Limit: not Kryptonians

In my imagination, every Martian has a suite of powers, and the ones represented on their character sheets are the ones they use most often. The Mental Awareness covers both the use of Martian abilities (both J'onn and the white martian track each other with it), and a general awareness of psychic abilities. We don't see the latter much, so a Limit might be reasonable...but it is reasonable. The Leaping might be Flight: it gets used as Leaping (mostly) in fights in enclosed spaces, but as Flight in open spaces. Either might be a stunt; Super-speed gets used twice, but I chose to regard that as a stunt. I also regard the weird breath thing and the mucous strands of binding as stunts or plot devices.

Indigo

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	5	7	7	6	8	15	1
Specialties						Qualities
Martial Arts, Technology Expert (+2)						Computer Program Made Flesh
Powers
Life Support 10						Revenge is a Dish Best Served
Computer Control Extra: Effect ESP (medium computers) 7
Teleport 7 Extra: Rangeless Limit: Medium of computers Extra: Phasing Extra: Selective						The Most Dangerous Prisoner in Fort Rozz
Malleable body: Shapeshift 4
Often stunts Slash (sharp nails) or Stretching or Regeneration

The Teleport is properly a part of Computer Control, but I added so many extras trying to get the one-handed choking thing that I kept it a separate line. I suppose "Dimensional Travel (Computers) Extra: Selective Extra: Choose where you come out 1" might have done as well: the Selective means part of her can come out and the Choose where you come out lets you emulate a slower Teleport.

Master Jailer

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
5	4	6	4	5	3	9	1
Specialties						Qualities
Athletics Expert (+2), Investigation, Martial Arts, Military, Stealth, Technology						Former Guard at Fort Rozz
Powers
Energy blast or thrown stick (Blast 6)						Finish Alura's mission with execution
Body Armor (Damage Resistance) 6
Binding (chains) 7
Stretching (chains) 3						Idolizes Alura
Gadgets 5

Okay, Supergirl is held with chains and she burns through them with heat vision instead of just breaking free. Instead of making the chains. I choose to treat the situation as four chains acting like +2 (four opponents), so she was effectively bound by Binding 9, and her first roll didn't succeed as a Strength maneuver. It being early in the game, she didn't want to spend Determination to beat the Bound Quality, so she used the easier heat vision.

In the same way, his body armor clearly handles DEO weapons, which are as good as rifles. I called the whole thing Damage Resistance 6, but you could be justified in saying Damage Resistance 7.

I threw the Gadgets in to cover things like the energy guillotine and the red sun light, but they could arguably be called plot devices. I suspect if he showed up again, though, he'd still have some kind of gadget. Military specialty could go, but I assumed that the guards were a paramilitary organization.

Lady Beast

(I just liked her, but I had to make up a lot.)

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	4	7	4	4	3	10	–
Specialties						Qualities
Vehicles						Former prisoner of Fort Rozz
Powers
Super-senses 3 (ultraviolet vision, enhanced smell, location sense)						Star pilot and smuggler
Tough Hide (Damage Resistance) 3						Big ugly monster

Just a note

The reason you're seeing anything from me is that I'm in the hospital with a mystery thing. I have been in an out for a week and all the obvious answers turned out to be wrong.

Now, you don't have to worry about my intestinal bleeding, but know that there will probably be a flurry of posts and then nothing.

Problem Powers 3: Astral Projection

Random power creation is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing when it forces you to think in new and creative ways. It's a curse when your particular mental well is more like a puddle.

Astral projection is one of those, for me. I see it, and it is itself, a much of a muchness, and what else is there to say?

Don't know. So let's look at it. Here's the power description for Astral Projection, from ICONS: The Assembled Edition.

Astral Projection can send your astral form (the vessel of the mind and spirit) out from your physical body, allowing it to travel elsewhere. Your astral form has Flight and Phasing at your power level and full Life Support. It can observe, but not affect, the physical world and cannot be detected by physical means, although Spirit Detection and Telepathy reveal it and you may choose to be seen and heard, when you wish. You can use mental powers against non-astral beings, but with +2 difficulty. Your powers work normally against other astral beings. Your body remains in a coma-like state, although you are aware of any harm befalling it. Should your body perish while your astral form is away, you remain trapped in astral form.

First thought: I didn't realize it, but Astral Projection is pretty good for a ghost, actually. (Kinda like it's made for them.) Flight and Full Life Support and Phasing? In a ghost, the fact that your body has perished away is taken for granted. Next time I have to actually design a ghost for ICONS, I'm heading for Astral Projection. I can still think of situations where it wouldn't work, but they're rare. (And add a possession power and you have Deadman.)

Second thought: It and ESP have a fair bit in common. If you have, say, Astral Projection and Mental Blast, you might well get a closely similar effect from ESP, Mental Blast, and Rangeless. The ESP version is easier but Astral Projection has more range, though: you are limited in how far your ESP goes, but not your Astral Projection. (It's a plot device if either ESP or Astral Projection goes to other worlds.)

So you could use Astral Projection as a gadget that places your "awareness" (not in the game sense) in a different place. That would be a non-mystical way of doing it.

You could also have a Dimensional Travel that teleports you to the Astral Plane. Anyone with Astral Projection can get there using the power, but the Dimensional Travel ability moves your body into the Astral Plane. (Presumably there's some doubletalk explanation why astral selves sent out via Astral Projection work with the real world, while the Astral Plane starts out looking like our world but gets weird as you need it to.)

In fact, maybe the Astral Plane and the Dream Realm are closely connected: dreams sometimes leak over into the Astral Plane and vice versa. Something like that would make Astral Projection a little more dangerous: the astral self is in danger of being attacked by a rogue nightmare.

Like decking, travels on the Astral Plane read great, but they can be a solo event that the others only take part in. Be wary of that.

Problematic Powers 2: Dream Control

Problematic Powers 2: Dream Control

When this power shows up in my rolled-up characters, my hope is that I can trade Dream Control for an Extra on something else.

Not because Dream Control isn't a cool power, or that I think that it shouldn't be there. Dr. Destiny has Dream Control, and the issues of Sandman where he appears are fearsome. He has a slightly different flavour of Dream Control than is in the ICONS rulebook, but it's pretty definitely Dream Control.

Here, this is what Dream Control is, according to the ICONS: Assembled Edition rulebook.

Dream Control is the ability to manipulate dreams. You can control your own dreams, choosing what you dream. More importantly, you can implant images into the mind of a sleeping individual, like the Illusion power, but rangeless.

Part of the problem, for me, is that Dream Control is a weirdly delayed power, not conducive to a lot of games. The power wielder enters the minds of sleeping individuals and can implant images. Useful if you have to get help and they don't know about the power, but not exactly something that makes for dramatic action:

"If only Deus Mex Anima knew where we are!"
"I'll put an image in his sleeping mind."
"You've been to his house?"
"We had a sleepover there once. You couldn't come; you're a girl and have cooties."

I digress.

So it's not that I think it's not a valid power, but rather that I think it's not a particularly interesting power as normally used by players. I don't recall Dream Girl doing much with it: as I dimly recall from my Legion-reading days, she was mostly about the precognition. Dream Control for players (not villains) is used for psychotherapy. It's a utility power.

Maybe the ability to control your own dreams is the key part. We invent some way for the villain to enter your sleeping mind, and the villain is trapped there. Some people use Telepathy for this (the battle between Psimon and Miss Martian on Young Justice is clearly a telepathic battle), but you could use Dream Control in the same way.

The hard part would be getting the opponents there.

Maybe you could have a Teleport that's thematically an Alteration ray: instead of phasing you or turning you invisible, it puts you in his head, or the Dream Realm. They get to act "normally" (given where they are) for the first panel because you're suffering from teleport shock. In my reading of ICONS and Great Power, there isn't an Extra that makes Teleport offensive, so it's thematically part of Alteration Ray, but get your GM's approval.

When heroes have it, it seems to me like either it's a secondary power ("MindMan can read minds, send tremendous blasts of mental energy, fly, and control dreams") or it's the whole point of the adventure. Characters trapped in some other person's head can use Dream Control to change the dreamstuff around them, or characters who have ventured into the aboriginal Dreamtime have unusual facilities that will help them control their environment.

I suppose you could also do a campaign like a superhero campaign, where the heroes venture into a head every week. In that realm, they're superheroes, but everyone has some degree of Dream Control. It would be risky to run because you don't want to make light of people with actual mental problems, but it might be a short campaign about dealing with the mental parasites from Dimension Xarg. Every week a new victim is brought in, but one of the powers these parasites have is to make the subject immune to sleep: they've walled off the subject's dream realm. There's a time limit to how long they can make the subject sleep. The heroes have to go in, and defeat the aliens. As the campaign progresses, they get to people who have been possessed longer, and their dream realms have been turned into factories for these parasites and the "tools" they use.

Conclusion

Not as useful an ending as the discussion of Aquatic, but I hope it has sparked some ideas for you.

Problem Powers 1: Aquatic Thoughts

Aquatic Thoughts

Problematic Powers I: Aquatic

I've got a certain amount of time to kill, because I suddenly got put in the hospital for a procedure and probably surgery. (Let's just say that if I get to go home after the procedure, it's bad news because they've discovered Awful Things.)

But nonetheless, I'm thinking about ICONS and certain powers that make my eyes roll up and my skin itch. Fair? Probably not. And heavily influenced by other games that I have played and where I live.

Aquatic... My first reaction

Man. What a sucky power, is what I used to think. I mean, sure, if your ability is to be in an enclosed life support system, or you can breathe air with your own miniature SCUBA rebreather...I mean, Batman and Iron Man both did that. That was cool, and in the Champions days, that was cheap. Heck, I could afford a gadget as a rebreather for my Batman ripoff...er, homage.

The thing is, I also live in a town which, while it has a river, was the last stop for river freight before the rocks made the thing impassible.

But in ICONS, well, getting the power Aquatic when you only have four to six powers total? What a huge chunk of your power budget (so to speak) spent on the ability to breathe underwater...and frankly, the survival rules in most superhero games are so geared to the heroic that the hero can dive into the lake, have the fight, and make it to the surface without much of a problem. (ICONS requires a strength test every panel after the first.)

So here's what Aquatic gives you.

Aquatic characters are equally able to function underwater and on land. You can breathe underwater and your Coordination and Awareness while submerged equal the higher of their normal levels +1 or this power’s level. You can swim at a speed based on your half your power level (rounded up) on the Benchmarks Table. As an extra, your Prowess and Strength also increase to your Aquatic level or gain 1 level (whichever is greater) while you are underwater.

Now, looking at that, it's pretty cool. It sounds like a good power. So clearly, my biggest problem is that the two models for Aquatic are really Aquaman and Namor. Both are rulers of Atlantis, and both live primarily under the sea.

Except here in land-locked MyTown, we don't have water.

So clearly, if I'm going to make Aquatic a relevant power for me, I have to think about putting water into an adventure.

Let's eliminate the idea that we're going to set this in the middle of the ocean. (We could, but that's a cheat.) We might set it in a shore town, but a bit off-shore is as foreign as the middle of the ocean, and a boat doesn't call for Aquatic, it calls for flight or swimming. Where is there water in my southern Ontario town, and maybe there'll be water in your town as well.

Rivers and Lakes

There are rivers and lakes in the area, but we've never made use of them for game purposes. The rivers are actually kind of pointless—if you got your head wet going across one, I'd be surprised—but the lakes...well, the lakes should be fine. We have an abandoned quarry that filled with water; we have several lakes; and we have a lake that's actually a city reservoir.

So what can a villain do with a lake that makes good use of Aquatic?

Well, he or she can hide things down there. Or might be looking for something there: maybe someone else stole the samples from the biotech lab and hid them in a lake. It's cold down there, and if the box is water-tight, dry inside. Yes, you could get the same result with Life Support (breathing), but the additional Awareness and movement differences make your Aquatic character better under water than most SCUBA divers.

The secret base or the missile launcher might be there. (I ignore its construction under water.)

One that I like is that there's some race of fish-men and Aquatic is essential to talk to them...because they can't talk out of water.

A variant is the swamp or bog. There's a long tradition of building your bad-guy secret HQ in a swamp, going back at least as far as Super Friends, and the guy with Aquatic can ignore half the dangers.

Sewers

Please note that I didn't say sewage. Cities have water sewers, too, and during a rainstorm those puppies might be full. Shame if that were the time they needed to get to the secret headquarters, or the enclave of outcasts who have taken the professor hostage, or the mutant human-alligator cross living in the sewer system and who guards the enclave.

Pools

Aside from some contrivance like in John Updike's "The Swimmer," there are a lot of swimming pools in this town. Some of the big ones (public outdoor pools) or the university pools (required to be Olympic sized) might hold something. There's chance that someone or something might be living in the secret chambers between the main pool and the hot pool.

But there's a second kind of pool that's in our town that I recognized while driving a few weeks ago: water reservoirs for factories. I don't know if these are private places to hold water before the manufacturing process, or hold some kind of toxic residue after the manufacturing process, but they're there. Imagine that they're toxic, so going into them dissolves SCUBA gear. Yet the Aztec idol for the mystic ceremony was dropped there. The hero with Aquatic goes. It's like voluntarily walking into a cloud of poison gas, and no one else could do it.

The Wet End

Yeah, to use these you'd certainly have to be thinking about the Aquatic power while putting the adventure together. But one of the reasons we play superhero games is so that our characters can look cool, and here's a venue where the character with Aquatic can look cool.

Bummer

I can't actually get to this site from any of the new places I go. 

Have to come up with some other mechanism for this blog's revival. 

Today's notion

A Tulpa -like monster called "The living cliché" -- it can't be killed and although it has infinite powers, they're limited and guided by its current cliché form. (It has the weaknesses of its cliché form, too.)

Perhaps it starts as a person who gets a wishing ring and who wants to be a, I dunno, vampire. The ring turns the host into one until the ring is removed. 

You can't store the ring: it melts into mist if it isn't worn for a week and it re-forms near someone with a hunger for a different (clichéd) form. 

Stopping it forever is left as an exercise for the players. 

Think of it as an excuse to run something classic as an opponent: vampires, kaiju, creatures from the black lagoon, pirates, gangsters, dragons...

Hey. Nice to see you.

I am back after an extended period of unemployment and mental problems. I have tons of apologies to make to people because I have missed deadlines, but in the meantime, you can use this, which is the open source parts of the The Basics chapter of the ICONS Assembled  rulebook. It is formatted for your phone, rather than anything else, and has a set of characters put into it, so that players can take the PDF and get started with one of the characters.

I think I've observed most of the legalities but I haven't asked Steve Kenson for his permission. If he asks me to, I will of course take this down.

ICONS OGL: The Basics (for your phone)

ICONS Template: Gadgeteer

SYSTEM: ICONS

If you want to be good at building gadgets, well, here's a starting point.

See http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Gadgeteer (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
3	4	4	6	3	4
Determination		3	Stamina		8
Specialties
Science, Technology (+2) Expert
Powers
Gadgets					6
Force Field [Device]					4
Flight [Device]					3

Addendum

Clearly this guy is still on the human side of things; you could spend your points on a higher intellect or on a higher Gadgets skill, or both; you could have the Force Field and Flight as Masteries of the Gadget power and then both could be at a higher level (but you're screwed if you lose the utility belt).

ICONS Template: Your basic blaster

SYSTEM: ICONS

There are so many variations on this. I figured the very basic character type is someone organized around a theme, so that often gets called an elemental controller or an energy controller. On the other hand, you could easily say that T'A'Shrin, the humanoid fox stranded on earth (character of a friend of mine) was a basic blaster whenever she had her pistol.

See http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Blaster (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
3	5	4	3	3	4
Determination		3	Stamina		8
Specialties
Power (whatever that blast is) Expert (+2)
Powers
Blast					6
Force Field					4
Flight					4

Addendum

Really, this is a versatile character type. I probably haven't narrowed down enough. This one could have lots of different changes rung on it, but as is, it's a good middle-of-the-road character. The character is good with the blaster and dextrous--not smart, but I haven't been concentrating on Intellect for any of these.

You could move that Specialty into Coordination directly.

A trick shooter: The Blast is actually a gun of some kind; swap out Flight for Super-Speed (some kind of vehicle), and change the Force Field to Damage Resistance.

An energy controller might look like this:

Blaster (Energy Controller Variant) (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
3	5	4	3	3	4
Determination		3	Stamina		8
Specialties
None
Powers
Energy Control (Blast)					5
Extra: Reflection (your kind of energy)					5
Extra: Flight					5
Regeneration (Limit: Source)					5

(Remember that a Limit gives you the option of raising the level of the power, essentially getting two ranks. That's what I've used here.)

ICONS Template: Psychic

SYSTEM: ICONS

This one turned out to be very bare bones, but I wanted to get all three powers in there, and that meant skimping on everything else....

See http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Psychic (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
3	3	3	3	3	7
Determination		1	Stamina		10
Specialties
Psychiatry Expert (+2)
Powers
Telepathy					5
Telekinesis					5
Extra: Force Field					5
Super senses (mental awareness)					1

Addendum

You have a different sort of character if the Telepathy isn't there, one more like an energy controller, but that gives you some extra points you can put into flight or another extra on the Telekinesis.

The Force Field or Telekinesis might be a stunt...instead, the character has something like Mental Blast. That's a character who is a bit more of a cannon than a psychic, but you could do it. Heck, Force Field doesn't even have to be an Extra...then it could have a different value than 5.

The extra 5 points could go toward Mental Resistance.

Traditional "helper" (NPC) psychics tend to have an Unreliable or Burnout limitation on their powers.

It might be fun for your GM if you have a Quality like "Blackouts while controlled by mentalists and extradimensional gods". (Or maybe not.)

ICONS Template: Speedster

SYSTEM: ICONS

This was actually the first one I did, after watching the Supergirl-Flash crossover on TV.

See http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Speedster (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
4	5	4	3	3	4
Determination		4	Stamina		8
Specialties
Power [Super speed stunts]
Powers
Super-speed					8
Extra: Surface movement					8

Addendum

This character runs at over Mach 1 (Mach 1 is Super-speed 7). If you want the Defensive extra (and I can see how that particular extra would be useful), you can spend all your points on it and drop Super-speed to 7. The power at 7 and two extras make 21, which is twice the power at 8 and 5 extra points.

Or swap Extras, and leave Surface Movement as a stunt.

Or you can drop Coordination to 3 ("That Ballistic Lad, such a klutz!") and drop the Specialty; then you have 8 extra points.

Any of the other powers that you might stunt you can throw in with your extra points. Maybe you have Regeneration or Phasing (or both at rank 2).

ICONS template: Crimefighter

SYSTEM: ICONS

You're saying you'd rather play somebody who has trained his or her body to physical perfection and has an array of gadgets to help? Got you covered.

For other instructions, see http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Crimefighter (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
6	5	4	3	4	4
Determination		3	Stamina		8
Specialties
Athletics Expert (+2), Investigation (+1), Martial Arts Expert (+2), Stealth (+1)
Powers
Swinging (grappling gun)					4
Choose either Blast (thrown weapon or grenade) or Strike					4
Extra: Burst (grenade, ricochet, fancy maneuver) Limit: Burnout (ran out or weapon broke)

Addendum

You can also use this for your basic weapons expert: your incredible marksman (markswoman?) or your person who throws things. In that case, you might want to swap Prowess and Coordination, and maybe change Martial Arts Expert to Weapons [expertise] Expert. Or you could spend your extra points on that.

If you are doing a straight up martial artist, I'd bump up the Prowess by one (leave Martial Arts at Expert because there always should be a tougher fight, even if it's the head of the martial art) and get rid of Investigation. The Swinging goes away, and the justification for the powers becomes chi control.

Remember to get an Advantage from the Athletics Expert (justification: Acrobatics) for a bonus to add to defense. This person is hard to hit.

Extra points could bump up Coordination or Strength, or provide some small mutant power such as Regeneration or the ability to make anything he throws explode.

Second Addendum

As an example, this would be a potential Crime Fighting Archer:

Crime Fighting Archer (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
5	6	4	3	4	4
Determination		3	Stamina		8
Specialties
Athletics Expert (+2), Weapons [Bows] Master (+3), Stealth (+1)
Powers
Super speed (motorcycle)					4
Blast (basic arrow)					4
Extra: Gadgets (trick arrows) Limit: Burnout (ran out of arrows or bow/bowstring broke)

ICONS Template: Battlesuit

SYSTEM: ICONS

Battlesuits in the comics have a bazillion powers; ICONS doesn't.  But here's a template anyway. Again, you get to write your own qualities. See http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Battlesuit (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
4	5	7	3	3	3
Determination		1	Stamina		10
Specialties
None, at this point.
Powers
Damage Resistance					7
Extra: Blast (missiles) Limit: Max only					7
Flight					6
Super senses (radar, radio)					2

Addendum

What can you do with a battlesuit? Really, the question should be, what can't you do with a battlesuit?

With only five extra points to spend, it's tough to put an extra on the Damage Resistance that provides another attack power, but if you lower Flight to 4, you could do it.

You could change the Super senses to Super sense 1 (radar) and Extra: Telepathy Extra: Link Limit Extra Only to represent an encrypted radio frequency. (I'd handwave the range and the fact that anyone with the correct encryption could listen in; that's a nice source of Trouble right there.)

What's an odder form of Battlesuit? What about the plant controller who grows bark and gets as strong as a tree; the Blast is an Affliction or Paralysis instead (pollen or sap).

Or instead of Damage Resistance, the story is that it's a force field. Your gadget guy is functionally a battlesuit but he looks totally different because he's festooned with devices.

Or something straight-up magical: this isn't a battlesuit per se, this is a statue animated by magical sympathy with someone. Like Astral Projection, the host body is still vulnerable somewhere, which might be a useful source of Trouble.

ICONS Template: Brick

SYSTEM: ICONS

Here's a brick template in ICONS.  Again, you get to write your own qualities. See http://jhmcmullen.blogspot.com/2016/04/icons-templates.html

Brick (40 point template)
Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower
4	3	8	3	3	5
Determination		3	Stamina		13
Specialties
Wrestling
Powers
Damage Resistance					8
Leaping					5

Addendum

Obviously, this is a starting point, a kind of a class. What else could you do with it?

Well, Specialties, obviously. Or bump up any of the abilities.

If you were looking for additional powers, maybe remove the Leaping and buy a Burst extra for Strength. (I don't think the rules say you can buy an Extra for Strength, but it doesn't say you can't.) Some kind of Life Support for the more outre damage sources, or a different kind of Resistance.

You could make it an exoskeleton character; replace the Leaping with Flight. You probably want to move a point or two from Willpower to Awareness. Add an Aura to represent electrifying the armor.

An interesting possibility I just thought of is to spend the 5 points on Extra: Affects Phased for Strength. Yes, it's lower than the Strength but the idea is that the character is at a reduced effectiveness to affect these phased items. (Get your GM's permission before you do this.)

Instead of being Strength 8, the character might have Density Increase or Alternate Form (some kinds of Alternate Form offer increased Strength).  It could be level 5, or you could take a bit from Damage Resistance or Leaping and make it level 8.

Thoughts on a conversion: Baron Blade

SYSTEM: ICONS

My CPAP machine is broken, and while I wait for the repairs I am in kind of a daze. My default activity is inactivity, and I play a lot of Sentinels of the Multiverse on my iPad.

I'm not good at it, you understand, and I don't own any expansions or anything. I just play it a lot.

I know that Cam Banks is working on an RPG version of the game, and I'm sure it will be wonderful. But I started wondering again how you'd do conversions of the characters. I'll use ICONS for this example.

The mechanics are very different between the two games. In the card game, you never know which of your powers is going to show up. You have the holding area of your hand, but you can't always guarantee that a particular power is going to show up. I have lost games because a power or the card that lets me get the power didn't show up.

So a straight translation isn't going to work. Whatever power is written on the character card, something equivalent should be the character's "power" but the rest, well, it's a suite of options. Stunts in ICONS seem to be a way of addressing that.

That means that we really have to think about what makes each character thematically different. Again, I'm not sure that I'm the best person for it, so I'm glad I'm not doing this for money. Instead, I'm trying to shoehorn that character concept into an existing game framework (which is not what Cam and his crew are doing).

That out of the way, let's think about villains. There are four villains, and you play against one of them. For those who don't play the game, they are:

• Baron Blade A mad scientist who has minions but not a huge number of them. Mostly he's about the gadgets and the time limit. You have to put down Blade before a certain amount of time passes. 
• Citizen Dawn Mutant leader with lots of "citizens" whose powers often build on each other. In certain forms, Dawn is nigh indestructible, and you have to recognize that as part of your strategy to defeat her.
• Grand Marshall Voss The space alien overlord with an armada. Lots of supporting cast who will whittle you down, and certain cards make it seem like an inexhaustible supply.
• Omnitron The robot factory gone mad. The trick there is that any other villain can leave mooks standing, but any minion or gadget is a potential Omnitron replacement.

Today I was thinking about Baron Blade. His other trick is that you think you've defeated him when he shows up at 3/4 hit points and then you have to do it all over again. That was what I was thinking about at first.

There are a few ways to simulate that kind of behaviour relatively directly.

1. Maybe it's a quality: "Comeback Kid" or "Never say die." You give the players a Determination point when it happens (having explained to them at the beginning of the session that it will happen). 
2. He has some kind of uncontrolled Alter Ego power. When his stamina goes to zero, it automatically triggers and the new armored Baron Blade shows up. That's not great, because I don't see that other than the hit points, the new Baron Blade doesn't seem much different. 
3. Maybe he has a huge Healing power, self only, with a Burnout limitation. (That can also simulate the self-repair nanites that he has.) We have to trigger this behaviour when he should be knocked out.
4. You model it as Probability Control level 1. It happens once, the villain gets a refresh, and off you go.

Because he also has those nanites, let's claim it's a big healing power with a burnout. If he foregoes his other actions in a turn, he has a big healing ability. We'll try Healing 8, Limit: Self Only, Limit: Burnout. If we need to, we can make it Healing 10; we'll see what his abilities look like.

His other cards/powers reduce damage on him, attack other people (reflection or maybe a ranged aura), or get rid of resources by removing equipment cards. The devices that do hurt players are things like, oh, remote turrets or toxic chemicals. The thing is that they affect everyone, which is easy to do in a card game but tougher in a roleplaying setting.

The other thing is that nobody misses in the card game, but they could well miss in an RPG. (In the card game, missing is modeled as doing reduced damage, such as Wraith's stealth.)

So let's make up some abilities:

• Prowess: 3 (He's not a big hand-to-hand combatant)
• Coordination: 6 (But really, we'll be using Burst a lot)
• Strength: 4 (Unless we want a powered exoskeleton, but that feels like something he gets later)
• Intellect: 7 (We're claiming he's insanely smart)
• Awareness: 4 
• Willpower: 6 (He needs the stamina points from somewhere)

That would give him a Stamina of 10. That's...not a lot. He'll need something else if he really is meant to be a significant threat. The kind of threat that lasts four heroes wailing (waling? Whaling?) on him.

 We can add energy drain as the aura and have him suck vril out of anyone who attacks him. (Nice idea; save it for my own use.)

Specialties are of course Technology and Science; make him +3 with both.

We want him as a character to last for a while. That means either some form of resistance or force field, regeneration or healing, or buttloads of Stamina. "Buttloads of Stamina" is hard to do in this system; there's no separate way to buy up Stamina, though I suppose you could do it as a Quality. The energy drain aura is not a bad idea, but it has to be ranged. (Okay, the first time your players meet him, it doesn't have to be. But it's an upgrade that he should invent.)

Let's give him a light force field rather than messing around with things like ranged energy drain auras. This is force field 4: enough to stop most small arms fire.

(Added in editing:)

Most of the powers will be stunts.

Gadgets sounds appropriate. We're going to leave the Intellect test in, as an incentive to the GM to make the level of the powers appropriate to the player characters. Known devices get a mastery, so that he can do them easily. (Devices such as a device to draw the moon near are plot devices.)

Force Field 4
Gadgets 8 Extra: Burst Masteries: Life Support 4; Blast (Remote Turret: autofire represented by the Burst extra) 5; Aura 3 (that darned backlash field)

I feel like for RPG play there should be some kind of movement power. Let's say that he's got a small amount of movement... We'll say that he's got a rocket pack hidden somewhere: Flight 4, Limit: Temporary

Oh, and when he switches into his incredible armor because he's really ticked (the Healing?), he's also got Masteries in Force Field Ability Increase 8 (Limit: Source); Strength Ability Increase 8 (Limit: Source). The extra strength gives him some reasonable leaping, too.

And for qualities... Maybe these:

Charming inventor or mad scientist (the charming part gets him minions galore: if he wants another Blade Battalion, he invokes the quality)
Always have gadgets in reserve
Archfoe of (player character, rather than Legacy)

ICONS Templates

SYSTEM: ICONS

ICONS is fast already, and I already provided one idea for faster character creation.

However, I was creating some characters for it recently for something else, and I ended up doing this, so I thought I'd share it.

It's the archetypes from SUPERS! or the templates from  Mutants & Masterminds done as 40 point characters.

To use:

1. Pick or roll an origin (because that gives a great deal more juiciness; if all the players are, "I'm going to pick Unearthly because it offers the advantages of two origins," they're gaming the system and next time origins are just descriptions).
2. Apply origin (if the origin calls for a new power, it's at level 5)
3. If the origin calls for a new power, it's at level 5; otherwise, they have 3 or 5 points to spend.
4. Adjust Stamina and Determination if necessary.
5. Write Qualities.

Obviously, if you know the system already, you don't need templates. Go. Adjust as you are interested.

Addendum

For some of them, I've added ideas on how you could change them up in a section called "Addendum."

I have specifically not done a "Construct" one because I think the Artificial origin does a great job on that. I feel like that "Construct" is less about what the character can do and more about the character's origin and qualities, and these templates are more about what the character can do. You add the personality and qualities.

Today's bizarre idea

Cannibal coke

A drug that you snort. Produced (so they say) by magically duplicating your target as a statue of some exotic materials, and then the statue is ground up. That doesn't kill the target. No, the target dies as you snort the ground-up powder. When the powder's gone, the target is.

There are probably side effects, like you becoming like the target, but those are manageable of you take a bit each day and let your self assert control.

If you want them to die fast, you have a blow orgy, where lots of people come over to help you snort it.

Used to cut cocaine.

Use for your urban fantasy game, or as a sideline in your dark superhero game.

Plot idea: The blow party got raided, and the last bit of cannibal cocaine that is needed to destroy the target (who is somehow affiliated with your heroes) is sitting in the evidence locker. The bad guy wants to get it out and use it up. The heroes want to retrieve it and somehow reverse the process. Merriment ensues.

The Villain's Backstory

Finally got to listen to one of the villain episodes of the BAMF podcast, and this grows from that. (If you don't listen to the BAMF podcast and you're reading this without being a close friend of mine, well, why not? I think it would overlap nicely with your interests.)

One of the problems with superhero games is that you don't get the backstory of the villain, and so the player interactions with the villains tend to be, "We beat'em up," and then the result is either "We won!" and they rarely think of the villain again, or "We lost!" and the players hate the villain and want to destroy him or her or it or them.

In superhero comics, however, the villains frequently have backstory that makes them more interesting characters with more complex relationships with the characters.

How to introduce the former into your game so they can  have the latter?

Well, first of all, recognize that not all villains are memorable. Lord knows there are certainly more than enough disposable villains in comic books (I have heard rumours that Grant Morrison brought back the Eraser, and I am frankly startled, because a more stupid villain I cannot imagine). If most of your villains are forgettable, that's totally okay. We tend to remember that the Joker and Catwoman had early appearances in Batman comics, but for every pair like that, there are a dozen or two dozen villains who are forgotten. I love the Monk and Dala, who appeared in a very early Batman story, but they didn't reappear until the 1980s, about fifty years later. Hugo Strange was largely forgotten until the 1970s. So villains don't need a backstory unless they tweak the interest of your players. Heck, Magneto (as Dr. Tondro mentioned on the podcast) didn't even get a backstory until issue 150 of the X-Men.

One way to make a villain memorable and known is to give them an existence before villainy. We feel about Terra's betrayal because we spent issues and issues getting to know her before she turned on the players. I was thinking that, because so many villains are failed super-soldier experiments, you could do an adventure where the heroes are tasked with getting a set of characters to the government labs. The characters become NPCs to interact with. When they are finally given superpowers, one or two or six sessions later (it's long and involved because they have to avoid the bad guy hit squads) and some of them turn eeeevil, well, the heroes already have an investment.

Another way is to give them a flashback (as I was talking about the other day). It's probably easiest to have the villain as a pre-villainous NPC and the other characters are playing people trying to help but failing, but you can go whatever way you think your group will like.

A third way is to have a character or loved one of the players find the information out, talking to eyewitnesses. "Oh, yeah, Harlene Quinnzel, we knew she was abused but there was never any proof. We couldn't do anything about it. So sad that she died working at Arkham."

But again, you don't have to do any of this unless your players have already evinced some interest in the character.

Energy sources

One of my hobby horses is that people have no idea how much energy it takes to do some things. They don't realize that Superman might be affected by sunlight but there just isn't enough power in sunlight to power his, uh, powers. Even if the Flash is hungry after each use of super speed, he doesn't get enough energy from the extra food to make up for it.

These things are nods to verisimilitude, not explanations. 

As such, you can't reasonably extrapolate from them and not have the whole thing collapse as an absurdist fantasy. You end up with the Flash or Superman on a hamster wheel, powering the US, or Storm putting rain in the Sahara, or Emma Frost ruling the US by taking over the Electoral College.

However, extrapolating from them is fun, so we do it anyway.

In one Flash story, he turns on every radio in the world and tunes it to the appropriate station in a matter of femtoseconds. A femtosecond is 10 to the -15 power seconds. That's a pretty small amount of time, but hey, he's the Flash, right? (Now, I'm going off hearsay with this: I haven't read the story. I recall being told it was one femtosecond, so that's where I'll start.)

I'm doing the math on my phone and in my head, so there will be errors. I'll come back later and fix them.

The speed of light is roughly 3.0 times 10 to the 9 meters per second (3E9). In a femtosecond, light travels 3E9/1E-15 meters, or 3E-6 meters. That is, three-thousandths of a millimeter. The Flash has traveled over the entire area of the Earth in that time.

I don't even know how to figure out the distance, so instead, we'll say that he traveled the equivalent of one circumference of the Earth, about 40,000 km, or 4E7 meters. So how fast was he traveling per second? Well, 4E7/1E-15 gives us 4E22 meters per second, or about about 10E13 times faster than the speed of light.

It takes infinite energy to get to that speed, but they break lightspeed all the time in comics, so clearly there's a way to do it in that cosmos. If we ignore relativity entirely and go with the old "more gas means you go faster" model, the energy is, at minimum E = mv²/2 (kinetic energy. I don't see how to insert exponents while I'm on my phone). Let's assume that the Flash weighs 80 kilograms, or 8E1 kg. That's 8E1*.5*4E22*4E22 = 4E1*16E44 = 6E46...hmm. That's kind of a big number.

Let's work backward from E=mcc rewritten as m=E/cc and figure out what equivalent mass that is to one significant digit, because this is back of the envelope stuff.

6E46/(3E9*3E9) = 6E46/9E18 = 6E28/9 = 6E27

About the mass of Saturn has to be destroyed to push the Flash that fast, even in a world without relativity. And that's just one stunt, one story. Flash has been published since the 1940s...

So my theory is that every superhero is connected to a star that powers them. Some are connected to dwarf stars, some to giants, but it's the star that powers them. And when the star goes out, the power is gone.

And if the star had an inhabited system, the hero gets the angst, too.