Setting Material I'd Like To See

SYSTEM: Almost any superhero setting

Over on the ICONS Facebook group, I started listing setting material that I'd like to see for a superhero game. Obviously, these ideas might not apply to a game with a very different setting, but are assumed for a Big Two kind of environment.

Warning that this might be highly idiosyncratic and others won't care.

For this post, I've collated them and added reasons why they'd be player-facing, rather than just cool setting details...because if the players can't interact with them, they're better off as one-line descriptions that you can steal for your games.

I mean, I'm going to write these if no one else does, but it would be much easier for me to just buy them. :)

• The religious group that quite literally worships supers, though they've had a schism: most think that supers are blessed by God, and the others think that supers are gods.
• Nine Realms I picked nine out of a hat: the idea is multiple descriptions (somewhere between three and ten). None of these are huge descriptions—maybe a half-dozen pages, plus some npcs. They fall into two groups: The PCs might go there, or the realm might launch an invasion.

  Places the PCs might go:

  • So you'd have the three hells as one realm
  • the Astral Plane (if you can find a way to make it interesting: you can make the Astral Plane also the realm of the Lost Dead Souls)
  • the Dreamworld

  An invading force:

  • Urbtech, the realm of computers and logic, where magic doesn't work
  • a dimension that, like a shark, must conquer other worlds or fall to the rot within
  • Maybe an invading dimension random generation chart

• The Darwins is the organization that helps people who have just discovered their powers; it helps them get adjusted, learn to master them, and integrate back in the larger society. But some people suggest that they have a hidden agenda. Like maybe they're behind some accidents that cause superheroes? Maybe they're rooting for the mutants to take over. Maybe they're trying to foster human-mutant cooperation, but like the famous intervention experiment in the 1930s makes things worse.
  

• Hoodlums is a chain restaurant decorated with a superhero/supervillain motif, where all the waitresses wear skimpy versions of costumes, and which has a structure that leads to a certain number of them having supervillain groups on the payroll.

  The inspiration for Hoodlums is a friend of mine (James Nicoll), who included this gem in a bit of backstory for his character, a villain turned hero who at one point discovered that the heroes don't care if you've clearly labelled the porn featuring actors in their costumes as "a parody" and beat you up anyway. Which, combined with thoughts on sexism in comics, made me think of a restaurant that quite literally uses and institutionalizes that sexism.) The real question to me is how to make it player-facing. Oh, you can drop stuff in as a setting detail ("We went to Hoodlum's last night") but how do you make it personal for the players? Well, if their costumes are on display without their permission; if someone else is using their Hoodlums costume while committing crimes (I mean, no one is going to think the player did it, but it still looks bad). Maybe a particular restaurant is a front for, as James had, pornography using the player characters' costumes. (That could be very trigger-y or, with the right players, it could be funny: imagine playing out the discomfort when you discover that your cis hetero hero is a gay icon, and that the actor wearing your costume has starred in a successful series of films.)

• One Percent An action group that is trying to paint supers as being the actual privileged as opposed to people who just have most of the money. Clearly funded by a group of wealthy people whose private motto is, "Being rich is the best superpower."
• The place or person who handles medical needs for heroes/villains/vigilantes, which may or may not be the same as provides medical needs for mutants or aliens. This is mostly a practical need, but it might tie into the database mentioned under "Supers fight club," below.
  
• The Ark, a living facility for supers with special needs for living, started by some member when he or she realized that the available choices were a government institution. With help from some acquired lost Thulean gold, the Ark was built. If there are diplomatic relations with the Atlanteans, they might rent part of it out with water as living space. Other rooms contain red sunlight generators, maybe gravity generators if your tech is wobbly enough, atmospheric containment and such-like. The kitchens are a nightmare.
• Supers fight club, but I’m trying to think of an angle that isn’t Roulette or Unlimited Class Wrestling. The intent is to give players an excuse for fights and fight training. Tying it in with some kind of “heroes database” would be useful, because then you have a rationalization for bad guys who know your player character “tells”. If it's set up as coercive, maybe the players could rescue someone from it, or from an abusive manager. It might be where newcomers and has-beens go, the former to learn, the latter to recapture a bit of fading glory.
  
• A list of gigantic world-ending threats that the other (NPC) heroes in your setting have to deal with, so your players have to deal with the threat that's "only big."
  
• I have been thinking of a hero group. They're in a band. (This was partly inspired by seeing the Good Lovelies in concert last night.) Tickets sold with a disclaimer because there is a non-zero chance of a supervillain attack during the concert. I don't think they'd do a lot of superheroing, but they've done a bit, and accumulated some bad enemies. Heh—you could drop individuals into a campaign by introducing them after the band has broken up. And someone is trying to kill them...a celebrity stalker or a cape killer? (This might be better done as an adventure.)

No Drop-In this week

SYSTEM: ICONS

I have to go in to Toronto tomorrow so that eats up the time between 5:45 AM to7:00 PM. if I’ve just got home at 7:00, I can’t start a game at 7:00.

I migh have to find another night for this if Wednesday becomes a go-to—Toronto day.

That’s juicy

Reading about Fred King, the polygamous and abusive pastor of a fringe church near Chatsworth has me totally wanting to include an abusive cult in this adventure—should it be Fred King style, or Alison Mack style?

Decisions, decisions.

Side note: Dark vs Sparks adventure(s)

SYSTEM: ICONS

As I’ve mentioned before, I want to run a one-shot in the world of James Alan Gardner’s All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault. Now, almost any generic superhero plot will work,, but I want to use the unique features of the setting. (Which might be a good rule of thumb for setting adventures in any specific universe.)

Let’s say we have a dynasty of Darklings. They might be up to almost anything—a Darkling dynasty is probably the same as a LexCorp or a Kingpin, with evil things that have plausible deniability and nothing that will hold up in court. The heroes can’t get at them directly, so the question is, how do the players hear of it?

No game starts until the players get involved, whether it’s the time-honoured technique of the bad guys trying to take them out pre-emptively, or a discovery of some clue, or a remit from a mysterious figure in an inn. So you might have a spiffy plot but if the players never find out about it (or they don’t find out about it until too later), then you don’t have an adventure.

Now, I have a gimmick in mind that uses features of the universe (which I haven’t discussed with Jim, so there might be hidden details in the universe that invalidates it). I speak no more of it.

Anyway, the gimmick will result in the murder of several Darklings, so I think that a new Darkling, embraces by the shadow as a response to the murders, will approach the heroes about this: the murders have confounded the police and the Darklings’ own Dark Guard. (The PCs are not demonstrably not involved.) The bad guy who’s killing is probably a Spark or a Darkling (though an unusual group of mortals can’t be ruled out).

In my brain, it’s a story like (but simpler than) The Big Sleep, with family and business problems. Now, the reason for these twists is only to provide motivation, not to create a logic puzzle. I plan for this adventure to be a superhero adventure, not a mystery.

As upholders of the law and the weak, the heroes have to find out who is killing Darklings.

It wouldn’t be proper if the Darkling dynasty weren’t up to no good, so the dynasty is planning on doing something that’s probably a little more exciting than rigging zoning by-laws (though that might be interesting—something that looks innocuous on the surface but as a side effect would make superhero bases illegal—but I digress. The question is, can I come up with a dynasty plot that triggers the killer to start, and somehow gives a personal connection to the PCs and give us two or three knock-down drag-out battles?

Obviously the petitioning newbie-Darkling (Dusker? Dusker who, if you like wordplay on obscure rock bands) has to approach the PCs at some event where the heroes are known to be, which means that there might also be other overt antagonists there. That would give us a chance to start in media res.

Think think think. 

Fortunately, the Darklings can be from anyplace; it’s the heroes who are constrained in space. Although Jim’s book covers Waterloo and a bit north, I could set my adventure in nearby Kitchener (because I was born here and currently live here), in nearby Cambridge—still part of the Region of Waterloo, which replaced Waterloo County—or I could go farther afield. I’ll probably stay in Canada; except for Kitchener, the cities I have lived in are claimed in the book. 

I could go for London, Ontario; for Calgary or Edmonton, in Alberta; or for either Victoria or Vancouver in BC. 

Or—oddball choice—Owen Sound, Ontario, in the Bruce Peninsula. That has a number of good qualities, actually: there are vacation homes near, though not as many as the Muskokas; there’s a chance for some angst if there’s a young hero(es) who want to move away but declaring yourself a protector locks you into the location (though I suspect not permanently). Muskoka would be a better choice demographically—more of a history of vacation homes for the wealthy—but I know (sections of) the Bruce Peninsula better. 

(Aren’t you glad that you now know some of the waffling that goes on in my mind?)

Okay, next learning step: soap opera

SYSTEM: ICONS

I think the Drop-In went well. I think I'm at the point where I can reliably put forth a three hour game session, where there's enough combat that doesn't overwhelm the players and force us to go to another session.

But the sessions have been largely combat. So the next learning step is soap opera.

Not a huge amount of soap opera, but a chance to bring in supporting characters. To a certain extent, this has been organic in that the players get to be dramatic with the NPCs as they investigate or prepare to fight, which is good.

What I want to try now is creating opportunities with appropriate supporting characters, and that requires either knowing who is coming (sort of difficult for a Drop In game) or building something in, like the base staff. I deliberately went for an environment where the base is superfluous, so that option was out.

So my intent now is to provide opportunities to interact with NPCs: Find a logical reason to include an NPC, preferably one who triggers a Quality, and see how the players respond. If they seem interested in anything, expand that character's screen time to create modular subplots.

For instance, Gold Tiger has essentially the Tony Stark collection of Qualities. I could certainly include a session from the major domo or HR person about these people who get hired, or I could bring one of them back. Diriel as a Demon of Justice is a bit harder, but I could certainly do next session about some occult threat and introduce an occultist. New character Lum will need to have a counsellor developed, and there's an opportunity there.

Nothing big...my grasp on timing is still tenuous so I don't want to blow it out of the water.

And I want to respect the players' wishes, too: if they want it to be mostly tactical, or mostly soap opera, that's the direction I should go (at least so far as I'm comfortable; I count, too).

Dark vs Spark one-pager: a draft

SYSTEM: ICONS

Here's my one page world for players in the world of All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, including the ICONS rules that I suggested. Comments welcome (especially if it turns out you can't read it*).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=13nGPEDhhZefhPYQzaHIxGXD02byMEYwN

*Since I accidentally sent an empty zip file yesterday, mistakes are fresh in my mind.

That went...well

SYSTEM: D&D5E

Okay, ran the young'uns through part of the opening bit of Sky King's Thunder—you know, the free part. I made a couple of changes to the setup (I put the temple farther away so they had more opportunities to fight goblins before the bells were quieted). We didn't do nearly as much as I had expected, mostly because I had forgotten just how fragile first level characters are in D&D: I didn't fudge any die rolls but characters were dying left and right, due to fumbles and such-like. As a result, the goblins got even stupider and the pair of worgs behaved like my dogs: fierce one moment, timid the next.

Now, I intend for this to segue over to Temple of Elemental Evil (sort of; I found someone's conversion notes to fifth edition, and a description of the module elsewhere, and that's pretty much all I need to make stuff up). I'll have to gin up some connection between Nightstone (which now takes the place of Hommlet) and the abandoned moathouse in ToEE, but the presence of a festering ancient evil is all I need to make work most of the other plot threads I dropped in. So that was fine.

But after years of playing and running competent superheroes, I had forgotten that it can be a lot of fun with a group of characters who can't cross a drawbridge stealthily, are unable to hit the goblin up by the top of the windmill, who are >this close< to dying after a single arrow shot.

And it was, frankly, a joy to watch delight in the students' faces when they pulled off the impossible arrow shot to work the drawbridge mechanism at a distance (necessary to keep somebody from dying). I don't think I'd want to listen to somebody tell me about their campaign or character (so I'll shut up after this, unless there's a point to be made), but certainly we can have fun playing our own adventure.

From looking at the conversion notes for ToEE, the author of the conversion (I'll find the name and post it later) talks about some of the differences between D&D then and D&D now, not least of which is that it was originally written for 5-8 adventurers, and this group is four only because I have them an NPC meat shield. (Who I should have made second level, but at first, the barbarian is as bad as the rest of them. Still, in this group the barbarian takes the position of Character Who Will Press The Big Red Button.)

They say they want more, so I'm guessing this will continue for a bit.

Last minute cancellation of Drop-In

SYSTEM: ICONS

My wife's folks are staying with us for a few days before they do the snowbird thing and head to Phoenix for the winter. And they're going to take us out.

I can't refuse, and I know there's no way that I'll get back before 8:00 pm, so the only sane thing to do is cancel (or delay).

My apologies.

A possible change

So the perils of young love: my godson stopped dating the GM for his and my daughter's D&D group. She asked me to step in for a session or two (or three or just the one; depends on how we all like it: children can be fussy about parents being around). In the mean time I will be glad of the Drop-In on Wednesday, because I get to stop thinking about how the hell I'm supposed to run D&D5E. (I have never run D&D.)

So you might see more D&D content as I try to figure stuff out.

Superheroes don't miss

SYSTEM: ANY

Having watched Thor Ragnarok and Justice League on two successive days, this morning in the shower I came to a realization:

For the most part, superheroes and supervillains don't miss.

Oh, they fail to do damage...but they rarely miss. They catch the thickest part of the armor, or hit the magical bracelets, or hit the suddenly-manifested shield, or fail to hurt someone because they are invulnerable, or their omniforce field disintegrates the bullets before they hit.

When they do miss, it's part of the hero or villain's schtick or niche: lots of foes miss against the Flash or Quicksilver, because a big part of his thing is being so fast that he moves out of the way. Batman frequently can't be seen (but his foes tend to be more in the human range than the supervillain range.) Spider-Man is so agile that foes miss him.

This is just a narration thing, but I suspect it will give much more of a superhero feel to things. A failed roll doesn't mean a missed shot. For some heroes or villains it will, yes: figure out who that is. But for everyone else, figure out a list of reasons why the super's attack failed to do damage.

(I'm sure I've read this advice before, but coming to it myself makes it more powerful. I'm going to try it at the Drop-In on Wednesday. Of course, those who go to the Drop-In and read this will know I'm trying this, but that shouldn't matter.)

Various campaigns

Another reminiscence post. Skip if you want interesting.

I'm trying to remember the campaigns I've run. Some of them were short because they didn't work (the universe-hopping one seemed like a good idea, but it was flawed). Others were short because of gamer ADHD or because people got bored. Not in chronological order.

• The Concorde campaign, which I've talked about before. It was run in Champions, second printing to fourth edition.
• The Wellington campaign, which used DC Heroes 2nd edition and 3rd edition.
• The Patriot City campaign, which used 1st edition Mutants & Masterminds, and took place in Patriot City decades after the events in Freedom Force. 
• The Minotaur campaign, which used 2nd edition Mutants & Masterminds, and used both Freedom City and the city of Bedlam...though it was really more the one adventure.
• The Emerald Knights campaign, which tested out 3rd edition Mutants & Masterminds for us, and which I set in the Concorde universe's version of Detroit, Steel City.
• The Aegis campaign, which used Fantasy Hero (though later I revisited it with CORPS).
• The EABA playtest I did. It was set in the distant future of some other campaign I'd run, though I don't recall which one.
• The Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs campaign, which used Espionage and later Danger International, and took place in the far-off years of the 2130.
• The Alderson Disk campaign, which was set in the future of the BEFA campaign and ended when I painted myself into a corner.
• The various ICONS things I've run, set in Halifax, in Toronto (the Hope Prep stuff), in Vancouver, and now in Strange City.

I suspect more will come to me, but those are (I think) the biggies. I don't count the Marvel Heroic playtest or the Masks playtest or the Supers! adventures...they were never campaign-like.

And we just got back from Justice League...

SYSTEM: ICONS

And it wasn't bad. I certainly didn't feel like I was watching a polished turd (to refer back to Vanity Fair).

And for context, I was underwhelmed by Man of Steel and tolerated the theatre version of Batman v. Superman. But I caught MoS on TV a couple of years ago and found that it was much better than I remembered. What I wanted was something that heartened back to the original Superman film, and it wasn't that. It wasn't great, but it was not the thing I remembered. It was decent.

Was Justice League great? No. But it was, I think, better than the theatre version of Batman v. Superman. The jokes landed, for the most part. Everybody got a bit of character time, though it really wasn't a character movie. It's a group team-up movie, so the assumption is that a lot of the character stuff has happened elsewhere. The CGI for Steppenwolf missed the mark pretty consistently, which I thought was a problem. Some of the CGI on the running Flash seemed off but I didn't notice any problems from the moustache.

Both Barry Allen and Victor Stone are hampered by the fact that this is really their first movie; it would have been nicer if the' had a film each to develop, but I understand why they didn't. I look forward to the Aquaman film, and I'd watch a Cyborg-Flash film.

Visually, it's definitely a Zack Snyder film, and parts of it are gorgeous. And his Batman is fluid in motion, which was nice to see. It's very comic book.

Things I have to adjust in my Justice League writups.

• Superman has super-speed, at the same level as the Flash's or very close.
• Wonder Woman's bit of banging the bracers together to create a shock wave...that's got to be a thing.
• A single parademon has Batman on the ropes for a lengthy part of one scene—the parademons are still minions, but clearly they have to be upped a bit.
• Cyborg is smarter than I had him, and his data access abilities are pretty much "anything that ever got put into a computer or on a network"...not represented really by the Interface power; I might model it as postcognition.
• Aquaman's pitchfork (not a trident; it has five tines, so maybe a pentadent?) gets used a certain amount. He never uses talking to sea life, though he refers to the ability obliquely. There seems to be a bit of water control there, but it might be a stunt.
• Steppenwolf never uses his cable, but he spends time with the electro-axe. He's kinda a generic sort of bad guy, which is part of the reason the movie isn't great.

Atlantean terrorists

SYSTEM: Any

You know, hundreds of nuclear weapons have been lost at sea. (I believe it was hundreds, the New York Times did a story on it late in the 1980s, early in the 1990s.) Heck, whole nuclear submarines have been lost at sea.

You know who has the resources and abilities to fish out those nuclear weapons?

Yup, Atlanteans. People who breathe water and can swim and sense things down to the depths of the sea.

Is there some arrangement in your superhero world for them to fetch out the nuclear weapons? I'm sure that they retrieve them: when the casings corrode away, the bombs are a danger to local sea life. But do they just do it, saving the bombs in a storage compartment under the sea, or do they have an arrangement with a surface organization? Like, say, a government? Or Greenpeace?

And even if they do have such an agreement, what if there is a splinter group of Atlanteans who really want the bombs? Because surface dwellers, they do a lot to muck up the oceans, between plastic and chemical pollution and oil spills. They'd be perfectly justified, in their minds, in nuking us. It wouldn't take many nukes...and they probably think that they can eliminate the surface infestation and they'll be safe down in the sea.

Except, of course, let off one nuke and certain governments get antsy and toss other nukes around, and what what a surgical strike becomes a life-ending conflagration. The oceans become uninhabitable, even for Atlanteans.

The Atlanteans have another group that's against nuking the surface dwellers, even if their reason is self-preservation.

So how do you turn the concept into an adventure?

Well, it could be a one-off where everyone's an Atlantean or can travel underwater. Or it could be a situation where the Atlantean terrorist organization has to get the bomb to its proper place for a messy detonation. It's an old bomb, liable to fall apart in the very messiest way if treated the wrong way. A Good Atlantean discovers the plot but too late to stop it in the ocean. Instead, they know where it came out of the water and the name of one person who was acting as their surface contact. First you have to find that person (who has a bomb shelter and figures he or she will ride out the conflagration). Then you have to find the people he or she hired...who are supervillains, of course: maybe the type who don't know what's in the package, maybe the type who know and don't care.

Your players find them, but the bomb has already been set. Fight the bad guys, disarm the touchy bomb, and meanwhile warn all the nuclear-capable countries that there might be a tiny incident in the area...

In the meantime your players can argue the propriety of leaving unexploded nuclear weapons in the oceans, the state of diplomatic relations with the Atlanteans, and whatever eco-things they want.

Easy. Sounds like an evening's play to me.

Thor Ragnarok and being off the scale

SYSTEM: ICONS

Yes, Thor Ragnarok is a fun film that doesn't take itself seriously while demolishing huge swathes of the Thor mythos. There are spoilers galore ahead, as there will be when I finally write up the characters...even though this is mostly about writing up the characters.

This is a movie that moves the scale... so much of it is off the scale. Hela's Strength. Surtur (who is clearly a plot device with a weakness, which Thor takes advantage of at the beginning of the film).

See, when you have these characters in a movie with normal people, then you kinda have to fit them into the range of 8-9-10. Hulk is the strongest one there is, so he's a 10...except Thor generates lightning that knocks him on his butt, and Hela...well, Hela catches and crushes Mjolnir.

Maybe that will get retconned in a later movie as special power that she had over artifacts commissioned by Odin, or she's special because she was the original owner of Mjolnir. Maybe not. But on a normal 1-10 scale, she's probably strength 13 or more (the amped-up Thor is still less than she is). She is just off the scale, and when she gets into Asgard, her power grows (we're told). So Hela might have certain abilities that are just off the scale.

We could just redefine the scale, which you can certainly do: re-define Asgardian nobility as "normal humans" and suddenly Thor becomes a 6, so Hulk is an 8 and Hela is a 10 in Strength...except you don't do bunches of characters like this so they can't interact with characters from other movies...you want them to interact. So redefining the scale doesn't help our ultimate goal of putting all the toys in play. We have to say that she and Surtur are off the scale, or we give them numbers over 10.

For ease of play, I'd probably just say that her Strength is 10, and she has the Quality "Goddess of Death, First-born of Odin" that lets her accomplish things like catching Mjolnir and crushing it.

Her other powers—generating weapons from nowhere (a Slashing/Shooting pair of powers, plus the axe she gives poor Skurge) probably fit into the scale. The giant spike she generates to hold back the spaceship seems to me like a stunt, some kind of Quality like "She and the land are one" being activated and used.

Oddly enough, for a Goddess of Death, she has to use the Eternal Flame to bring the dead back as Minions—she can't just snap her fingers and do it. And I rather expected (with Christopher Yost as one of the scriptwriters) that there'd be some of "every warrior I kill becomes one for my side"...but no.

We probably have to put down a generic Asgardian warrior package, which we can then augment for the Warriors Three. In this movie, they're cannon fodder, but we've seen them in previous films and they're dang good. So your average Asgardian warrior is probably Prowess 5, Coordination 5, Strength 7: Captain America or some other member of the Avengers can out-do them, but they will mow through humans pretty easily. Asgardian nobility are incredibly long-lived, but that doesn't really affect gameplay except when you throw in someone with aging powers.

Whatever that package offers, we up it for Valkyrie: she's strong, her Prowess is high, as high as Thor's or higher, and she's within a point of his Strength, wherever you set it.

Thor swaps out Mjolnir (well, flight, really) for a kick-ass electrical control power that does not seem to include immunity to electricity. (I'm presuming the little control disks are effectively tasers; the jolt they deliver is pretty clearly electricity, so maybe there's a double-talk reason why it works. On the other hand, his lightning fries the Hulk in mid-air, so scientific accuracy isn't at the heart of this film.) When he decides to really be the God of Thunder (well, Lightning), he gets an Aura and some darned powerful Blast...it takes him a turn to re-set his multipower, as it were, but then he's good to go. But that power could be off the scale as well; I choose to believe it was a great roll by Thor's player,

Fenris is probably Growth 9. His main power is being big and intimidating; Growth 9 gives him that and a little space where Hulk can slowly beat him down. (Hmmm. I never thought of Hulk as having Fast Attack, but the thing he does in repeatedly whipping Asgardians around like rag dolls would certainly qualify. Maybe he can only use it when he's established a hold on someone.)

Anyway: when my Thor Ragnarok builds appear, there will be a number of items marked OTS. Hela's off-the-scale powers represent a 15, if you need a number, and Surtur's a 20.

Unless I change my mind by the time I actually write them down.

Thoughts on SuprTindr

SYSTEM: ANY

I saw a preview over on G+ for Green Lanterns that mentioned a dating app for superheroes. And I started thinking about an app for supervillains and superheroes. Not to date, but to have combats.

Actually, I'm not joking (though I'm sure it has been used as a joke).

Here's the thing: if you have a superhero world where there is a significant amount of celebrity to being a super, where the business of threatening the world and saving the world are objects of interest. Seanan Maquire's Velveteen stories are the kind of world involved.

Now, there probably isn't a market for such an app...but there would be a market for the generic hookup app you imagined first...and it could be a feature in the app. A dating app essentially lets you present a profile to people and it allows people to filter out candidates and choose from them. Really, the same app could be repurposed for a number of things. The pool of possible candidates is probably small.

You a hero looking for another hero to date or hook up with? Use the app. You can filter based on sexual preference. Heck, you can probably predefine whether you want someone who self-identifies as a hero, as a villain, or something else.

And if you were a person with a fixation on dating supers (or a particular super) wouldn't you really want the app so you could maybe meet your dream? Superheroes have to have groupies. Heck, supervillains probably have groupies, which might make for an interesting evening...trying to find the young man who wanted to date Ivory Toxin, the supervillain who sweats mind-altering chemicals before he succeeds and finds her).

And, just to bring us around to the idea of things you can use in your supers games, wouldn't that be exactly the kind of app you'd want to hack, so that the phone involved would always be telling you where a particular super is at any given time?

No Drop-In tonight, November 15

It turns out that tonight is the only night that my son can join his mother and me in seeing Thor: Ragnarok.

So a one-time family event trumps gaming.

Take care tonight, all, and I hope things are well.

Episodes 7 and 8 of the Drop-In: Interlude, and The Panopticon of Hell

SYSTEM: ICONS

Episode 7: Interlude and Episode 8: The Panopticon of Hell

I'm combining these two because, unfortunately, I wasn't running at my best and session 7 of the Drop-In was a largely improvised interlude getting the heroes from outside the security door to the hall.

So I apologize to the fellow who showed up for episode 7 and chose to play Longbow, because he didn't get much to do.

Interlude

Gold Tiger, George and Professor Jelinek were joined outside the security door by Diriel (a demon of justice, because Hell is all about justice and rules and maybe a bit of entrapment, if I think about it) and Longbow, who have seen the message that Gold Tiger left on various superhero boards and came to join them.

They got in and discovered (a) the moss is omnipresent and (b) they were at the level where the tau generators were, the repair bays were (and one unmentioned nuclear generator). The femmebot Liza was there, strapped to a repair dock and deactivated. Security robots came down, and there was a fight, during which the repair robot followed its protocol, which was to halt repairs and clean up, so pieces can't be used as weapons. Eventually, the heroes won and crept up the stairs.

The center of the building was circular, and by tapping into the security system, Gold Tiger could see that Dr. Warp was in the center part (which also had the elevator to the basement). He had three femmebots, a closeted mysterious platinum android, and improvised living quarters there. He looked rumpled, like he hadn't shaved for a week.

The moss had clumped itself up into a sort-of humanoid form as big as the ceilings and was walking a slow circle around the section where Dr. Warp was imprisoned. Professor Jelinek's tau-sucking gun was full.

As they were discussing plans, Professor Jelinek revealed that the big problem with tau radiation was that it's not properly radiation at all: it's energy moved from other dimensions. The liberal use of it weakens the extra spatial dimensions of ours (predicted by superstring theory) and essentially opens the doorway to Lovecraftian monsters.

(If we want to be nice to Professor Jelinek, he figured this out very recently. It involves the kind of maths they didn't have at the start of his career, and he has acquaintances in Moscow and Geneva who do the new math for him. It is totally in keeping with comic books for him to have known this for twenty years and be the roadblock that has kept people from implementing tau radiation generators.)

We were having technical difficulties, so we called it there.

The Panopticon of Hell

Alas, the extra player did not return, so we had Gold Tiger and Diriel and everyone else was a GM character.

The switch to turn off the tau generators was in another room and was largely non-functional. Diriel's teleportation only worked to places he could see (except Hell; he can always go to Hell, and my assumption is that there are a limited number of "landing zones" there that he has memorized). Using his control of the security system, Gold Tiger jury-rigged a projection of the image of the proper room, and Diriel opened a portal. The two of them left George, Professor Jelinek, and Dr. Warp behind while they went into The Room.

The Room was covered in moss, and the on/off switch was partially melted or corroded by the moss. Gold Tiger started to repair it, but the moss started to gather together and attack, so Diriel was holding it off as Gold Tiger was working. Fortunately, we had established that the moss was sensitive to flame and Diriel is aflame with the Fires of Justice, so... (I formalized this as having all attacks be one degree better against the moss: narrow misses were actually marginal successes, marginal successes were moderate successes, and so on.)

They defeated the moss, turned off the generators, and then portal'ed back to Dr. Warp, where they discovered the two new problems.

1. Using the miniaturization possible in the modern era, Dr. Warp had built a miniature tau generator inside the new platinum robot, which was tougher than the femmebots.
2. Dr. Warp wasn't actually forthcoming about helping, having sold the tau weapons to Russia and the CIA and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Diriel opened a portal to a cell in Hell, and Gold Tiger knocked him through. Diriel closed the portal.

But Diriel's "Injustice Sense" said that someone was still thinking evil thoughts. Yes, George was one of them, but there was someone else...

Yup, other-dimensional invaders had got access to the platinum robot, and it was in the process of becoming spidery-er, with the back at an improbable angle and extra joints having appeared in the arms and legs. (I called it a Cybershoggoth.)

Professor Jelinek discharged his tau weapon to power up a femmebot. Moss was trying to get to the tau generator. Longbow fired to no effect.

Gold Tiger asked Longbow if he had a magic nullification arrow somewhere in that quiver; Longbow replied that he did, because of a recent experience with a demon ("No offence," to Diriel). The Cybershoggoth half-melted the femmebot; Professor Jelinek missed the shot that would have sucked tau radiation out of the robot. George was knocked unconscious.

Eventually, the magic nuffication arrow was fired (and Longbow doesn't miss). A portal to another cell in Hell was opened up, and Gold Tiger pushed the robotic beast through.

Then Diriel and Gold Tiger went through a new portal to just outside the cell, in the panopticon of Hell.

A winged demon approached and said that (in Hell-speech) it was fine unless the auditors gave them guff, which would be when they'd have to release them. (The Cybershoggoth because it was extradimensional and they might not have jurisdiction, and Dr. Warp because he wasn't technically dead.

Through difficulties they discovered that the Cybershoggoth was the first invader of a force ("this world..." it hissed. "It needs conjugation." The PC characters assumed that was bad.)

With Diriel's help, Gold Tiger managed to turn off the robot, and they reached an agreement about under what conditions they would retrieve the robot.

Lights down.

Some GMing Thoughts

SYSTEM: Any

I'm hit and miss on Johnn Four's GMing newsletter. A lot of it is very D&D-focused, which doesn't mean anything to me. But today he had a couple of pieces of advice that I'd like to re-spin in my own way. And this is basic stuff, because I don't seem to grok advice from Robin Laws and Ken Hite on designing choices into adventures. (I suspect it's terminology, and I feel like there's an insight on the opposite side of the advice, but I'm not getting there.)

Anyway, restated tidbit #1: If there's no interesting results for both making and not making the roll, don't make the roll. I'm not saying there's no point to randomness. (Hey, I play ICONS—of course there's a place for randomness.) Some details are totally fine left to chance. "Do we have Fainting Goat Snack Cakes to distract the demon cow?" "I dunno, you have the Gadgets power; roll on it to see if you can scrounge together a tasty non-meaty treat."

But if you just assumed they'd find the clue about Thutmoses III, don't make them roll to find the book on Egyptology was open. Say, "And the book on Egyptology is open with a passage about Thutmoses III underlined." Or you're pretty sure the bad guys will just execute them if the minions actually defeat them in battle? Use a pyramid test, and instead of determining if they get into the secret base, the pyramid test determines when they get to the headquarters. They get in early, they get some tidbit that makes things easier (they might prevent the launch of the nuclear missile, even though they'll still have to beat the bad guys) or if they get in late, something else has happened that makes it tougher (every time it takes them three pages to eliminate the pyramid test, they have to face another batch of minions...and every pyramid test after the first means another missile readied for launch, for example).

And if someone has an appropriate Specialty or Quality or background, maybe they just get the information or do the task. They can ask to roll if they want more.

Restated tidbit #2: Doing something is better than debating about doing something. Sometimes a dilemma is a part of your hook or your climax. I understand. As a player, I've sometimes had characters had to make tough choices, and they didn't always decide the way the GM thought they would. A scene with the character's romantic interest is doing something. This isn't about that. This is about the entire group waffling about what to do.

"Well, if we go after Dr. Mind-nought directly, we get at the root of the problem, but if we do that, innocent people might die while we're attacking him...but if we stop the people, then Dr. Mind-nought will have a chance to get his hooks into more people and then innocent people might die..."

I'm not suggesting railroading here. But no matter which way they go, the characters do something, and while they're debating it, nothing is happening. And I'm also not suggesting there be no debate. But gaming time is limited. One of three things is probably going to happen:

• They go after the mind-controlled thralls.
• They go after Dr. Mind-nought.
• They split up and go after both.

(In my example, they're not going to ignore the problem and catch a movie.)

Given that one of those three things is going to happen, give them a chance to state the pro and con of each choice, give them a couple of minutes to talk about it, and then force the issue. Ask each player what the character does, and they'll split up or attack one or the other. If they split up, you'll have to interweave the two scenes to keep both groups engaged, but at least they're doing something.

Is one choice optimal? Sometimes. Are they going to get to do both things anyway? Maybe. Obviously, they get to go after Dr. Mind-nought whether they go after the thralls or not. If the choice is between Bank robbery by Cashflow or Hostage situation by Strongarm, maybe they're choosing which adventure to play tonight, and this will eventually lead to the discovery that the villains are tallying up their villain Q scores, to figure out who can be used as a distraction by the others.

Anyway, two thoughts for designing and running your adventures.

Yes, there will be a Drop-In this week

SYSTEM: ICONS

I haven't made the decision to go bi-weekly yet, and we gotta get out of Dr. Warp's base first.

Sheesh.

I was not particularly happy with last week's session (totally aside from the technical snafus). Problems happen if I don't prepare correctly: we get sort of aimless sessions without enough for everyone to do. I hate that. It's not a great experience for me, and I'm sure it's not a great experience for the players.

A guess at the Justice League

SYSTEM: ICONS

I'm planning to see Thor: Ragnarok this week, so I'll put off writeups of those characters until after then. Instead, have pure guesswork on how the heroes of the Justice League move will be presented.

Aquaman

Aquaman (Arthur Curry)
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
6	6	7	3	5	6	13	1
Specialties Leadership (+1); Underwater Combat Master (+3), Weapons (Trident) Master (+3)
Powers
Aquatic (Swimming speed ~400 mph)							10
Trident (Blast)							7
Command all sea life (Mind Control Extra: Telepathy; Limit: Sea life only)							8
Survive in the ocean (Life Support 3: Breathe underwater, pressure, cold)							3
Qualities
Half man, half Antlantean
Rightful heir to Atlantis
Badass

Stunts I imagine include:

• Stunting Burst with the trident (hitting everyone in the area)
• Mental blast (stunting off "Commands all sea life" to affect the piscine portion of the brain)
• Acrobatics of various kinds (stunting off Underwater combat)

At this point, I don't see evidence of an above-average intelligence, but there certainly is in the comics.

Batman

Batman (Bruce Wayne)
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
6	5	5	6	5	5	12	1
Specialties Acrobatics Master (+3), Investigation Master (+3), Leadership (+1), Martial Arts Master (+3), Stealth Master (+3)
Powers
Gadgets							5
Extra: Armory (Exploding grenades: Burst Strike 5, Grappling Gun: Swinging 3, Glide Cape: Flight 1)							5
Fast Attack							6
Qualities
Secret ID: Billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne
Justice instead of vengeance
Not as easy as it was ten years ago

Heh. I had Investigation Maser there for a day. Kinda makes me want to invent an investigation maser (Postcognition 5).

Cyborg

Cyborg (Victor Stone)
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
5	5	7	4	5	4	11	1
Specialties Athletics, Technology Master (+3)
Powers
Gadgets							6
Extra: Armory (Blast 7, Interface 7, Dimensional Teleport Extra: Portal Limit: Extra Only 7)							7
Damage Resistance							5
Flight							5
Super Senses (IR, UV, various scans)							5
Qualities
Alien technology is now part of him
Public ID: Victor Stone, son of scientist Dr. Stone
"I didn't choose this identity."

The New 52 version has flight; the original had Leaping. I don't know which they'll go for in the movie. I have the ability to create Boom Tubes (a New 52 thing) as Dimensional Teleport, but I'm not sure it will show up in the movie. It might be cool if he had the ability to take over Parademon armor; I can totally see a player using that ability.

The Flash

The Flash (Barry Allen)
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
3	5	3	5	3	4	7	2
Specialties Investigation (+1)
Powers
Super Speed							8
Extra: Surface Movement							8
Extra: Fast Attack							8
Extra: Defensive							8
Qualities
The fastest man alive
"I've never done battle. I push people and run away."
The geeky enthusiast: "I need...friends."

Even though I love the TV Flash, I'm looking forward to Ezra Miller's version. Since he's clearly a beginner at this, I expect a number of stunts as he discovers his powers.

Green Lantern

I'm guessing that he shows up at the end, because Zack Snyder did say, "Unite the Seven" at one point. However, there are no clues, so this is a comic writeup.

Green Lantern (?)
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
4	5	4	4	4	7	11	1
Specialties Pilot or Architect Expert (+2), Aerial Combat (+1), Military (+1), Power (Force Constructs) (+1)
Powers
Power Ring (Force Control, default of Force Field)							8
Extra: Flight							8
Extra: FTL							8
Extra: Blast							8
Extra: Life Support							8
Qualities
Green Lantern, interstellar cop
Prejudiced against because he's human
Unresolved issues on earth

If he shows up, which will it be? I'm hoping for the JLU John Stewart, myself, but DC might have insisted on Hal Jordan. It probably won't be Guy Gardner or any of the newer Green Lanterns.

Superman

We assume he's going to come back from the end. That feels like it might be a three-quarters of the way through the film kinda thing, suitably foreshadowed.

Superman (Clark Kent)
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
4	5	9	4	7	5	14	1
Specialties Art (Journalism) (+1), Aerial Combat (+1)
Powers
Kryptonian physiology (Damage Resistance)							8
Extra: Flight							8
Extra: Fast Attack							8
Regeneration (Limit: only 1 without sunlight)							5
Heat vision (Shooting)							8
Qualities
Last survivor of Krypton, but raised as a human
Love for Lois Lane
Willing to die for justice

For me, it was a tremendous light bulb when I realized that Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman presented a Superman who hadn't been trained—who was sort of mediocre at his job. Now, I suspect that the events of the earlier films will represent a training period and we'll get a Superman closer to the one we expect...but I might be wrong.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
8	7	8	4	5	6	14	1
Specialties Aerial Combat (+1), Leadership (+1), Military Expert (+2), Wrestling (+1)
Powers
Flight							6
Lasso (Entangle Secondary effect Mind Control Limit: Tell the Truth)							8
Bracers (Damage Resistance Limit: Performance)							6
Qualities
Amazon daughter of Zeus
Emissary to Man's World
Secret ID Diana Prince, Art historian

Mostly this is my comic book writeup, though I lowered the flight speed slightly (she learns to fly at the end of the Wonder Woman movie, I believe)

Parademons

Edited to add parademons, because you have to have a villain, and I just don't have enough to speculate on Steppenwolf.

Parademons
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
5	3	5	2	3	2	7	–
Specialties Military (+1), Power (Power Staff) (+1), Psychology (+1)
Powers
Armor (Flight)							3
Armor (Damage Reduction)							4
Armor (Life Support Pressure, breathing)							2
See in the dark, radio communication (Super-Senses)							2
Power Staff (Blast)							7
Qualities
Apokolips shock troops
Minion

The Psychology specialty is for intimidation only. The Power Staff specialty could be replaced by Aerial Combat; I remember a number of instances in the comics where they swoop down and pick people up.

"Be the worst version of yourself"

SYSTEM: ICONS

Have an urge to do a game with someone granting powers that create villains. The concept I think I'll go with is a villain who can turn people (and areas) into the worst versions of themselves...the nice guy succumbs to those internal urges to take the things that don't belong to him, the tidy woman turns out to be tidy and punctual only to keep herself from being wild and violent and explosive, the town that becomes the dark and broken cesspit or ghetto that it looks to the outsider.

Even though ICONS has a power that grants powers, I don't think I'd design the big bad with that in mind; instead, the big bad would be defined with qualities. The other people get changed just because they get changed, rather than worrying about a particular power.

The adventure structure would be something like...

1. Riot in a small area. This is probably where the access to the big bad actually is, or contains a clue to his location, if they go back to look at it.
2. Interlude while we figure out who these people are, and what happened to them. These people probably don't have superpowers. The players figure out what's going on, and there is some indication that the bad guy grows in power through the events in the first scene. The players end by finding evidence that the bad guy has gotten to some other place that he finds a bunch of people who can be really converted... The question is where?
   • Yes, a local asylum is the first thing that popped into my mind, but I don't actually want to do an adventure that stigmatizes people with mental problems.
   • In the same sense, picking some place like a church feels like it's making fun of the religious, and I don't actually want to do that.
   • Business people might be fair game. A convention of some kind?
3. So we're at the convention, and we face the powered-up people in the worst version of the building. The thing is, there's a nearly endless supply of people who can be converted, so even winning here doesn't really solve the problem.
4. Which is why the confrontation that matters is against the big bad, trying to outwit him.

A Bad Guys Campaign

SYSTEM: ICONS

I know that Steve Kenson has said that Determination is for heroes only. And in general I'm against the idea of a villains campaign. Morally ambiguous, sure, but out and out villains...? Even though there have been good villain things (like Necessary Evil), they tend to be about bad guys being forced to be good guys.

And this weekend I read the first volume of Gail Simone's Secret Six. And a bunch of more broken but still functioning individuals will be hard for you to find. I immediately thought of doing it as a roleplaying campaign, with a similar setup: All the bad guys are forming a coalition. You don't want to. That puts you in their bad books.

Trivial to do in Hero, but I haven't run Hero for a long time. You could do it in Mutants & Masterminds but there's be fluctuating power levels to contend with. You could do it in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying but my guys don't like MHR. Savage Worlds, of course, but I don't have the super powers supplement.

And then I circled back to ICONS, even though I'd dismissed it. Because Steve said that bad guys don't have Determination; he didn't say that they can't get Advantages or Trouble.

So if you were going to use ICONS for a villain campaign, you just don't give them Determination. Any time they need an Advantage, the players have to use a Maneuver or a Tactic.

I haen't thought about how that would affect a campaign, but I'm willing to accept suggestions.

It's something to think about, anyway.

"There are too...many...of them..."

SYSTEM: ICONS

Over in the G+ ICONS community, Hallam Rickett asks about overwhelming numbers, such as Captain America attacking a Hydra base, where there are too many and the heroes end up captured. Steve Kenson already answered but I get to be both more orthodox and less orthodox, so I'll repeat and expand on my answer here.

First of all, what do you want narratively? (I don't think you should dictate everything that happens to your players, but sometimes you want to skip over some non-essential stuff or avoid having it send you into the weeds.) If you really want to do an adventure about how resourceful the heroes are without their gadgets or whatever, then you essentially set the terms and let them go.

In ICONS terms, you narrate the capture ("There are too many of them. When you wake up...") and give them each a Determination point to sweeten it. This sort of thing is (in my experience, as a person who has made many many of the mistakes that gamemasters can make) best done to begin the session or end it. You're framing this session or next session.

However, sometimes you're okay with them winning ("There's only like 200 agents on the island...") but you want it to be unlikely.

The fastest way is to use a pyramid test or two. If you're trying to model the experience of it being tougher after the alarm is sounded, maybe you use two pyramid tests, one representing before the alarm and one representing after. You figure the average difficulty of hitting an agent is 3 or 4, so that's the difficulty of the first test. The second test is harder—the agents are fighting smarter now, so the difficulty is 6 or 7. Everybody can contribute to the pyramid tests, so each one is probably a page or two.

But as variations:

• Use a single long test (requires two massive successes) but it escalates: the difficulty goes up by one every time failure, or every attempt.
• Use a long pyramid test for each player character, rather than having everyone contribute to one pyramid test.
• Use a pyramid test for each area they want to clear out, difficulty determined by the level of the opposition and whether the alarm has been raised.

Another way is to model the agents as a character that represents a horde. Fights take longer than tests, however, so this eats up more of your session.

Look at your individual agent, and fold any weapons or Martial Arts skills into Coordination and Prowess, because we're going for something like speed here even though we've decided to use a fight. Ignore body armor, which you might have lovingly crafted for individual agents, because we're going to abstract it all into Alternate Form Fluid, using the Damage Resistance in that to represent both body armor and that there are many agents.

A horde of agents might be:

Horde of Agents
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA
4	5	4	3	3	4	8
Powers
Blaster Rifles or whatever they have to attack						6
Alternate Form Fluid Represents that there are lots of agents. Brings Damage Resistance 6, Stretching 6 to represent agents being in lots of places and how destroying some of them doesn't get all of them. Adjust level based on strength of hero attacks and number of agents.						6
Fast Attack, because there are lots of these agents. Assume they can attack twice more; that's a compromise between lots of attacks and time spent rolling dice						8
Regeneration Every 10 pages, the number of agents replenishes because more agents show up						10
Qualities
Horde of agents; every part is a minion but the whole isn't The "Alternate Form Fluid" attribute can be nullified for a page by smart tactics or moves Some quality reflecting the nature of the agents or a special ability

First, unlike what it says in the rules, in this case the Fast Attack doesn't have to be used to Coordinate attacks. You can, maybe you should, but I would say that in this case it doesn't have to be a Coordinated attack.

Second, maybe they have some equivalent to Growth or Wrestling when they get down to grappling with the heroes...individually they might not be strong, but if you get twenty agents hanging off you, well, it might get treated as a much stronger foe.

Third, if you want the agents to be unbeatable unless something smart is done, you say that the PCs have to use Advantages to neutralize the Alternate Form Fluid...the heroes do something smart, it counteracts the damage resistance of the Alternate Form, and the attack can do Stamina damage. Otherwise, the agents are nearly unbeatable if the Alternate Form is set at the same level as the highest PC attack or higher. (I might not count Combining attacks to increase effort as smart on the part of the PCs...depends on the players.)

Again, you might vary it by having each area of the base as a "horde" character, so you have the Lab horde, the Living Quarters horde, the Airfield horde, and so on. And this has the advantage that if some player does something clever, like using the security system to lock various agents in place, you aren't forcing yourself to a fiction that if the one horde character is defeated, they all drop unconscious. Really, you'd claim that the other agents surrendered or something in that case, but this way lets you have them if you need another fight later.

So, what else to do?

SYSTEM: ICONS

As I've said repeatedly, I'm thinking of a second campaign, one that isn't on Wednesday nights and isn't on Roll20. And while probably it will be the same sort of thing, that does deserve thinking about.

For instance, if I make it an actual group and an actual campaign and think less about the casual drop-in aspect (though not abandoning that entirely), other possibilities become available.

Here are the things I've been thinking that I could do. Let me know if you have a particular interest or distaste for any of these ideas. (And forcing the campaign into a particular model might require some tweaking of ICONS, but we'll see.

• Teenage Mystic Heroes There's some kind of threat that affects anyone over 21, so Merlin (yeah, that one) has gathered some heroes to train them. He hopes they'll be ready in time. All the characters would have the Quality "Youth" in addition to their regular three, and there'd be a bit more soap opera.
• The Nexus League At the Crossroads of Dimensions, a team of heroes stands ready to right wrongs that might threaten the multiverse. Usually the threat is in our dimension, but sometimes it isn't. The heroes are more in the Justice League/Avengers model...they're not averse to calling in the local heroes, but usually they are the biggest good guys on the block.
• Better to Burn Out Street-level scope, the group are the heroes of a large cohort that suddenly got powers. This is probably not connected to Strange City. The catch is that every use of powers hastens your eventual demise. (You still don't know when you were going to die; powers mean it will be sooner.) Now, other members of the cohort don't care about the never-ending battle...they figure they're doomed, so why not have a good time until then, and those are largely your supervillains.
• Reddin Klah A sword-and-sorcery use of ICONS, rather like the Warlord's Skartaris or the Forgotten Land. This is the least superhero-y of them all, but still allows for superpowers as magic or ancient technology or mutant abilities.
• Trying To Get Out This is a nebulous idea, but it would follow some heroes who are trying to retire, the heroes who want to be their replacements, the villains who don't believe it, and the normals associated with them. Very soapy, and I'm not sure that it isn't a bunch of email exchanges instead.

As I say, the end result might be a standard sort of hero campaign, but I have been considering those other ideas and trying to figure out if I'd have enough stories.

Episode 6: The Saga of the Swamp Things

SYSTEM: ICONS

Only one player, but it had been so long since I ran that, well, we went ahead. I didn't want to do the whole session I had planned so the exterior portion, which would have been half of the original session plan, took up the whole thing. We got more experience in stunting powers, which is good... The session is sort of serialized because of this, though, which I regret.

This account is long, because it's kinda a brain vomit. There's a chance I'll come back to it later and do a shorter, more readable version.

When last we left off, our heroes had captured the thief from the strip club robberies and discovered that it was a repaired robot, robot that was giving off tau radiation. While Nathan, the owner of the robot, was easily dealt with by hiring him and paying back the money he had stolen ($586.00 in mostly singles), the teenagers who then attacked were slightly more difficult. They were George Turner (age 13), Lily Gloom (age 15), and Landslide (no identity yet, but turned into a 16 year-old boy when they put the power neutralizers on him). Still, those three were arrested and we open in the police station, where Gold Tiger is interrogating Gerorge Turner.

(Credit where it's due: George, Lily, and Landslide are part of the Young Anarchists, created by Ade Smith in the Fainting Goat adventure, Lair of the Wrathmaster. Most of the Improbable Tales adventures are excellent, and the ones I don't regard as excellent just are not to my taste. Anyway, aside from names and powers, I've invented some backstory for them that isn't too different from the one in the module but is, shall we say, congruent to the backstory in the module.)

TL;DR summary of events:

• Gold Tiger offers George a job
• Dr. Warp is from the 1960s
• His hideout is an abandoned laboratory in a swamp
• The liberal and casual use of tau radiation has caused the muck to become human-like swamp things
• PCs fought them before getting in to the secret base
• They now have Professor Jelinek and a device that sucks up tau radiation with them
• They might have shut down all the robots, or they might have shut down just one—they don't know yet

The Long Version

George apparently knew where the robot came from and needed the robot, nicknamed "Liza," to get into the base's security. The robot was implicated in a number of thefts (though legally the robot has no culpability: it's a tool). Gold Tiger used Spectre and his crazy-high Willpower score to intimidate George and get information. He did this not-on-the-record: Gold Tiger got the police to shut off the recording equipment (well, they turned off the audio, and George hides his mouth from the cameras).

George was not willing to reveal the location, but he would show it to them. Gold Tiger counter-offered: he'll hire George, George will get to work with cool stuff, and George stops this life of crime.

Basically, the police weren't going to charge George, Landslide, and Lily with anything related to the fight at Nathan's place unless Nathan pressed charges (and Nathan was waiting for a hint from Gold Tiger on whether he should). Landslide was being held until they figured out what his identity was, and Lily was wanted because she went all Carrie on a school dance back in June. All three are minors but they probably wouldn't be tried as adults; Lily didn't kill anyone in her school dance thing, but some people were hurt. So Gold Tiger could take George, because there won't be any charges. The others had to stay.

George agreed to the terms, got Gold Tiger's number because he had to text it to his mom, who works nights.

Gold Tiger, Spectre, George, and Liza flew out to the location of the secret base, which was in the swamp on one side of town. (So far, Strange City has nearby deer hunting and a swamp; the uranium mine is at the edge of the swamp.) There was an abandoned lab there, which was researching ways to improve crop yields, in our nod to Alec Holland. (Spectre created a hard light platform for himself and George, and Liza or Gold Tiger was flying it. Although George had a bag of parts, he had no overt assembled equipment: that had been taken from him.)

On a scan of the area, Gold Tiger found the security perimeter—all recent off-the-shelf equipment, which communicated wirelessly with the security center. It took Gold Tiger about thirty seconds to exploit a known flaw and he had access and control of the security sensors. Because the swamp has alligators in the swamp that have managed to survive the winters (invasive species are a problem here, too), the sensors ignored anything smaller than about 40 kilograms. George, Lily, and Landslide wouldn't even be noticed.

Gold Tiger also found a secret entrance in a dead tree about half a mile (about 800 meters) from the abandoned lab. He prepped Liza (stunting ESP) so that he can see through her eyes. In conversation with her while he's doing this, it became aware that Liza sort-of recognized the area. She was having some cognitive dissonance because she had associated Nathan's house as the place where the Master lived, but being in the swamp activated subsystems George hadn't known about.

Liza went in the secret entrance. The shaft went straight down: it was clearly meant for fliers, because there was no elevator. There was a ladder, which George got on. The inside of the dead tree was metal, and covered with moss and fungi. They began descending the tunnel after Liza, but they were going much slower, hampered by George and Spectre on the ladder.

Spectre asked if anyone else could hear the sound—a kind of rhythmic thrumming that crackled. Gold Tiger scanned the airwaves and didn't find anything.

Liza entered the base via a big metallic door. Gold Tiger saw her be scanned by some device; the word "Anomaly" appeared on an old-fashioned CRT screen, and two other Lizas (femmebots?) showed up and escorted her to a mechanical bay, strapping her to the robot equivalent of a car hoist.

Gold Tiger issued a shutdown command, hoping to shut down all femmebots in the area. He did not know if it worked, because it shut down Liza, and his remote sensing experiment ended.

This was about the point when they noticed that Spectre was not himself, as tendrils of moss and fungus started growing out of his nose and mouth. The Affliction attack quickly knocked him unconscious. Gold Tiger noticed that the moss on the walls was following them.

There were two skeletons at the bottom of the shaft. The moss flowed onto them, creating a pair of moss men, or if you prefer, Swamp Things. (This was the week before Halloween, so maybe things had an eldritch bent.)

George was willing to help, but he blew the Intellect roll for Gadgeteering (both gadgeteers had this problem, that night). Gold Tiger alternated between attacking one, which was fighting him, and attacking the other one, which was wrapping itself around Spectre and sucking the life out of him.

Eventually Gold Tiger jury-rigged some of his missiles into a light-based attack that we modelled as an Affliction, and it worked reasonably well. It destroyed them.

That was the point when Gold Tiger got a faint scratchy phone call from Professor Jelinek, who was outside. "I knew that uncontrolled Tau radiation would have this effect! There's a ruined car here and the tau-powered moss is using the skeletons near it for a endostructure!"

Gold Tiger flew out and located the flare that Professor Jelinek had sent up. He didn't see Professor Jelinek, but he did see a 12-foot-high pile of writhing and undulating moss; it turned out that the Professor was at the bottom of it. (The moss was treated as a muck monster with Growth 2.)

Professor Jelinek failed his gadgeteering roll, what with being under a huge pile of sapient moss, but Gold Tiger managed to distract it. It budded some small duplicates, but Gold Tiger was whittling it down. Then Professor Jelinek finally made his Intellect test and his gun sucked up residual tau radiation in the pile.

Yes, because tau radiation was involved, Professor Jelinek had been contacted by the police. He saw pictures of Liza and recognized her as being modelled after his late wife, Maria. Given that, he knew who had to be behind the spate of tau-powered weapons: Hieronymous Warkstein, known as Dr. Warp, who disappeared in the 1960s, shortly after Professor Jelinek won the hand of grad student Maria Slavicek. Professor Jelinek put together what he could from the apartment and followed the trail of tau radiation out to the swamp.

And as we left the session, Gold Tiger, George, Spectre, and Professor Jelinek were standing in that underground access corridor in front of a giant metal door, the same one that Liza went through.

Your muck monster:

Muck Monster
PRO	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STAMINA	Determ.
4	2	7	2	3	5	12	–
Specialties Stealth Master (+3)
Powers
Plant Control (Plant Control)							6
Extra: Fast Growth
Plant Body: Alternate Form (Fluid: Brings Damage Resistance 5, Stretching 5)							5
Extra: Detect through plants (ESP; medium of plants)							5
Qualities
Striving for eternal rest by eliminating tau radiation
He's a Plant (includes extra degree of damage from herbicides, fungicides, light, etc)

Yes. The ICONS Drop-In

SYSTEM: ICONS I'm reasonably healthy. I have spoken to the boy about not having a rehearsal in our space. My wife is occupied. Yes. We can have ICONS Drop-In tomorrow night on Roll20, at 7:00 pm Eastern. Just so folks recall (and for anyone new...) The heroes were trying to track down the distributors of new weapons that are essentially super powers and work of radiated energy. (For your Nikola Tesla moment.) They have a clue: a fembot from the creator, who can get into the secret base, according to another miscreant caught in the last session. We'll begin wherever necessary to get the characters involved.

Mystery Men...in ICONS

SYSTEM: ICONS

Someone over in the World of Supers group on Facebook, someone asked for a suggestion on how to do a Mystery Men style campaign, and what system you'd use. I spent some time thinking about what a Mystery Men campaign is. Here's my description, because it bears on how you bend ICONS (or Supers or Mutants & Masterminds) to it:

Heroes with only one or no powers, who strive to do good anyway.

If we look at the movie Mystery Men (who I dimly remember), they were something like:

• The Shoveler, who had a weapon, and probably some skill and a low Super-Speed or Fast Attack related to, uh, shovelling.
• The Bowler, who had one blast that wouldn't miss, but just the one
• The Blue Raja, who could throw silverware
• Mr. Furious, who had super-strength (maybe), keyed on being angry
• The Spleen, who could create, as I recall, a noxious smell
• Invisible Boy, who could become invisible, but I don't recall what made it useless

(I have to work from the movie; I never read the comic.)

In most cases, there's a single power or no power, and some kind of personality defect that makes them, well, largely useless. (A step up from Mystery Men would be the Awesomes, who would be characters with more powers...and personality defects that make them, well, largely useless.) So requirement one is that one of the character's qualities has to describe some personality defect that turns what might be a useful ability or super power into something less useful. I think that's the most important part: it doesn't matter what the powers are, if the personality isn't actually, well, heroic.

Now, those are not particularly strong powers on that list. The strongest is The Bowler's bowling ball, and that's probably at best a level 6 blast. It might be lower, because most or all of the people it knocks out are minions, but we'll say that it's a 6. It has a number of limitations (it's a device, so that might be the Source limitation; she doesn't seem to get Determination for it, so it might be a limitation).

It's relatively easy to say, oh, only zero to one powers; additional powers have to be extras on the first power. (It's kind of like a theme, which is an idea I explored earlier.) You have to change the character creation process, but that was pretty much a given as soon as we tightened the kind of campaign it was. So most characters have zero or one power. If you need extras, you take limits. A limit can offset an extra or add 2 to the level or offset the power's "cost" when figuring determination. There are two possibilities on power level: the power level is restricted in the game, or it isn't, but the benchmarks have been changed.

If there's a limit on power level, the limit seems like it might be level 4, and there's only one power. Higher levels are possible by taking limitations. So the limitation Source turns a level 4 into level 6. The super-speed that the Shoveler has is level 1, but the limitation might raise it to level 3. (Or maybe it's Fast Attack level 3.) Or maybe the benchmarks have been changed...each level does, oh, half of what it normally does.

The last thing that might need to be changed is Determination. In regular ICONS, Determination plays a large part in letting characters with fewer powers be as effective as characters with more powers...you figure your Determination by subtracting the number of powers from 6. Well, since these characters are actually less effective, you have at best one power. Instead of figuring the determination as the result of a subtraction from 6, what you subtract from is 2. You never have less than 1 Determination, so it's not awful if you have an extra. (Well, I suppose for a true loser experience, you could have less than 1 Determination, but I'm not going to play with that rule today.) Instead, if you have extras, maybe you have to think about limitations that offset the Determination cost.

What I might do in ICONS, then, is:

• The character requires a quality that makes them ludicrous
• Powers are limited to 4 at best, though higher levels are possible by applying limits
• A character has only one power, though additional powers are possible as extras to the main power
• Determination is changed.

Yes, there will be a drop-in tonight.

SYSTEM: ICONS It is, uh, quarter to six as I write this, and I should have let people know earlier...but. Yesterday I went in to work for the first time in a year, and that was a looooong day, and it kind of ruined me today. But back on the horse... If we can. Tonight at 7:00 Eastern, Roll20.

A thought

I don't think I've ever done a session where the bad guy is attacking because he or she has a crush on one of the heroes. (I have been watching the web episodes of Justice League Action Shorts and that came to mind during the Lasso of Truth short.)

Something found

SYSTEM: ICONS So, uh, I have a confession to make. My copy of Microsoft Word stopped working about a year ago. There was an update, and it stopped. And I didn't tell anyone. (And it's Word 2010, so Microsoft just kept saying, "Not supported any more. Buy a new one.") Anything I was working on, however, was lost if it was in Word. Well, yesterday it started working again. Another update that corrects whatever Microsoft did with the first one. I have a certain amount of stuff to look through, but in the meantime, here's an adventure I was toying with involving the Supergirl TV show. It takes place after the first season, and some of the sections have nothing more than a title and an introductory paragraph. But you can see what I was doing, way back when.

The Lobo Adventure

“If there's no collateral damage, you're not doing it right”

You know how some stories have a deeper emotional resonance? This ain't one of those. This is a story of fighting, revenge, and property damage, and the heroes caught in the middle.

My theory is that the players will be fans of Supergirl, not roleplaying, so I've been more instructive than an adventure might usually be. If you're an experienced roleplayer, you might be able to get by with the scene summaries.

This adventure is for two to three players and a game master. Players take the roles of Supergirl, Hank Henshaw/J'onn J'onzz, orz Alex Danvers. I haven't had anyone playtest this, so I have no idea how it will work in play.

If there are only two players and one chooses to play Alex Danvers, you might need to adjust some of the fights to make them slightly easier. If the players are losing, then the GM should remember that hero points and determination points are meant to overcome this kind of imbalance. Find excuses to give out more points, and encourage them to spend the points.

Adventure Summary for the Players

This adventure starts with the arrival of Lobo.

The DEO already knows about Lobo, but Supergirl does not. The standard package given to DEO agents who might encounter Lobo is in section 1.3. It’s up to the players (if any) of Hank, Alex, and Supergirl if Supergirl knows this information at the beginning of the adventure.

The adventure assumes that all of the events of season 1 have taken place, except the arrival of the Kryptonian pod. (We ignore that.)

Scene 1: The Threat

This introductory scene takes place in two locations: it's the brief introduction where the player characters learn that there's a problem. Each exchange is a little setup to show where the characters are coming from. Make them fast so that the player who is not involved is not sitting for long, or give the non-involved player an NPC to play.

1.1 Al's Diner Parking Lot

(Players: Hank, Alex, or both. Obviously, skip this scene if no player is portraying Hank or Alex.)

Hank and Alex are in the parking lot of Al's Diner, talking to a waitress and the owner. Hank and Alex are dressed in suits as FBI agents.

This is the parking lot of Stan’s Diner, and it’s certainly an incident scene.  There are ten chalk outlines of bodies, small folded cardboards from clue examinations, and one ambulance, whose attendants are checking out the last person. (No one died, but the other nine people are in hospital or custody.)

A gang of ten local toughs objected to their coffee in an attempt to leave without paying for it, Al and Darlene objected that the coffee was fresh, and the toughs left. The man followed them outside and fought them. The last one is being checked out by ambulance attendants.

Sample Al and Darlene conversation

Al says, "We seen him before, big guy, gravelly voice. Way he dresses, I figure he's a what do you call it, Darlene?"

Darlene: "Goth. Eye makeup, wild hair, vest. He always orders pie. He likes the apple pie."

Al: "I make it myself. Secret is the cardamom."

Darlene: "This guy, he usually tips well, but sometimes it's foreign money." She smiles, showing dimples. “He likes me.”

If asked, she has some of the coins.  To the DEO agents, they are clearly extraterrestrial in origin.

Hank and Alex realize that Lobo is back in town. They automatically know everything in the DEO handout, but succeeding at the skill roll gives them extra information.

Hero Point and Determination Point opportunities

If the player or players do any roleplaying at all, getting into character when talking to Al and Darlene, provide a point. If you add a brief combat where the remaining thug surges from the ambulance and rushes Al or Darlene and the player stops them, provide a point.

If you want to try the skill system

ICONS

Roll a d6 and add INT; the GM rolls a d6 and adds the difficulty of 3. Higher roll wins.

 

Result	Information
Failure	No additional information.
One degree of success	Lobo knows where the DEO is because they tried to arrest him once. Before the remodelling.
Two degrees	Lobo hasn't done anything yet—other information from Darlene and Al indicates that he gets pie before and after a job.
Three or more degrees	Lobo is probably alone, because he dislikes sharing a job. He will work with other people, but he doesn't split the pay.

If there is no Supergirl player, and you want to try the combat system

The remaining thug surges from the ambulance where he' seeing treated to attack either Darlene or Al, and the players have to stop him non-lethally. You don't need full stats for him, and use the minion rules: one hit that does any damage, and he goes down. (Warn the players that real opponents are tougher.)

THUG

ICONS

Prw 3 Crd 3 Str 4 Int 2 Awe 3 Will 2 Stamina 6

The End of the Scene

The phone rings. It is Vasquez. "Sir? Lobo is standing here. He's not doing anything. He's just waiting."

If there is a Supergirl player and they haven't already called Kara, she says, "I've already called Supergirl." If pressed, Vasquez says, "Sir, he's fought Superman to a draw. It seemed prudent."

1.2 CatCo WorldWide Media

(Players: Kara Danvers Obviously, skip this scene if there is no Supergirl playing.)

Kara has just come out of a meeting when her phone rings. Vasquez briefly outlines the problem and requests her help. As she's hanging up, Cat Grant is looking for her.

She can choose to leave or to make an excuse to Cat Grant, or to ask for help covering from either Winn or James.

Give the flavor of CatCo, but don't make it difficult for Supergirl to get to the DEO. If the player chooses to do something idiotic, it has consequences later but for now Kara simply has to get to the DEO.

Hero Point and Determination Point opportunities

Again, if the player attempts any kind of roleplaying, reward him or her with a point. There aren’t many opportunities for a point here, but one might show up.

If the player decides to spend a point, Kara avoids failing at generating the excuse.

If the player wants to try the skill system

ICONS

Roll a D6 and add Kara's Willpower. The GM rolls a D6 and adds Cat Grant's willpower of 4.

If Kara fails, Cat requests that Kara keep her phone handy and will phone her at some awkward moment, but lets Kara go. If Kara succeeds, Cat waves her off.

1.3 The DEO Informational Summary About Lobo

Anyone associated with the DEO knows the following information, which is given to agents who might encounter Lobo.

The player for Supergirl can decide whether Alex has already told her this information, or whether Alex phones her and tells her while they're both heading to the DEO.

THREAT LEVEL T SUMMARY: LOBO
NAME	Lobo	RACE	Czarnian
OCCUPATION	Bounty Hunter/Mercenary	ARMED	Usually. Known weapons: Restraining chain Bolter rifle Frag grenades
SPECIES TRAITS	Strength, resilience, regeneration, self-cloning	INDIVIDUAL TRAITS	Concerned with completing mission. Relishes violence and collateral damage.
OTHER	Fond of Al's Diner. Likes the pie. Claims to be last Czarnian because he killed rest.
WARNINGS	DO NOT WOUND! Each separated body fragment grows into a clone of Lobo.
Threat range is A: Carggite - T: Kryptonian

2.0 At the DEO

Adjust this scene as necessary if either Hank or Kara is missing. For the purposes of this scene, any non-player DEO agent other than Alex is a minion, and is knocked out by any damage at all.

By the kind of coincidence that happens in roleplaying games, all of the player characters arrive at the same time. Lobo is still standing there, staring at the DEO staff. He is in the main room, positioned so that he can see the main screens. He is fully armed. (Really, who was going to take his weapons?)

In the background, DEO agents are clearing the lab of expensive equipment. They have not removed much, and the carts of equipment might be used later for throwing and hitting.

Lobo is in the middle of explaining his “ideal date” with Vasquez. It involves a bar brawl in a place he knows in the Omega system…

Vasquez breaks off to tell the players that Lobo has resisted all approaches by DEO personnel. They didn't try to arrest him because the director hadn't given them orders and because he hadn't made any moves. Vasquez is not the first person to have an ideal date described.

Lobo frequently looks at the prisoner screens, which show each prisoner in sequence. Notable prisoners that show up are the White Martian, the K'hund, Jemm, and Non. (If a player asks, the DEO has the parts of Indigo in a drawer in the morgue, and the inside of the drawer is not visible by camera.)

Lobo addresses the player characters. “Yer here. Good. I wuz gettin’ bored. These nerfs are not competition. But a Martian?” Substitute a Kryptonian if no one is playing Hank. “That could be a fight. And I wants a fight.” He cracks his knuckles.

Give the players a moment or two. Really, Lobo is waiting for the computer systems to go offline, which can happen as soon as you want, but from a play standpoint, we want this fight.

If Hank's player tries, he cannot read Lobo's mind. There is a small beeping and Lobo says, "You're trying to read my mind, ya bastich. The main man is prepared f'r ya. A Lonothian whipped up a little mental shield for me. When we fight, it'll be the way I like it, bloody and brutal."

Don't give the players time to do much, but let them do something.

Now the cameras go offline. All the screens displaying the prisoners go blue and display the text OFFLINE. Lobo grabs a frag grenade and says, "It's playtime!" He tosses frag grenades into the middle of the DEO agents. For the convenience of the GM, they are knocked unconscious. He also throws a grenade into the Armory, and all the guns go off. That knocks unconscious any other DEO agents who aren't Alex or Hank.

The noise of all those guns shatters the glass walls of both the armory and the lab.

If both Hank and Kara are player characters, one of the shots hits Lobo and breaks a piece off him.  (Give the players a Hero point or a Determination point.)

If the players spend a turn or two getting innocent unconscious DEO agents to safety, that's being heroic, and deserves another Hero point or Determination point.

The piece quickly grows into a clone of Lobo, so now there are two Lobos. He looks at the first Lobo and says, "I know the plan, ya dumb bastich." The clone is naked, so he takes a pair of pants from an unconscious DEO agent. "What? I gotta keep my PG rating," he says to no one in particular. Because that takes a little bit of time, this Lobo enters the combat at the third round.

Now there's no one left but the player characters, one or two Lobos, and Alex (if she is there, whether she is a player character or not). Combat officially begins. Roll Initiative to determine the combat order. The clone Lobo enters at the third round of combat, but for convenience is at the Initiative of the original Lobo.

If there are two heroes and if possible, the Lobo with the hook and chain begins by restraining the hero he is not fighting, so that he can concentrate on just one target. (If Alex is a player character, he mostly ignores her.) If he manages to restrain Kara, she can still use her heat vision or her freeze breath while restrained, and try to get free. Her Extraordinary Effort advantage means that she can do two extra actions if she chooses to use Extra Effort. To restrain her flying, Lobo will hook the chain to something so she can't fly after him. If she chooses to try, she can demolish anything she is hooked to.

After five rounds, lights in the corridor to the isolation chambers start flashing. "Yeah, I remember your fraggin' plan," says Lobo. "I'm comin' ya (unmentionable)." He takes off down the corridor.

Hero Point and Determination Point opportunities

The players each get a point if Lobo gets wounded by the Armory going off.

A clever use of powers gets a point.

Any hero who tries to protect or make safe the fallen DEO agents gets a hero point for being heroic.

Hints

Lots of property damage. Punch people through walls and computer screens. Use consoles as clubs. When Lobo fights, things get broken.

If the Lobo characters look like they're going to win, they'll fight until they actually win, and the game continues with scene 3.0. If the Lobo characters look like they're going to lose, and there are still unconscious DEO agents there, they'll split up: one Lobo tries to create a situation where the roof will cave in and endanger the unconscious agents.  The other heads down the lit corridor. (If there is only one hero, Lobo heads down the corridor while causing maximum property damage.)

If the Lobo clone is the only one to stay conscious, he fulfils the mission, running down the corridor to help the other Lobo. If the other Lobo has already left, the Lobo clone will leave.

2.1 The Fraggin’ Plan

One or both heroes should follow. If no hero follows, Lobo gets away with Non, and you don’t need to play this scene.

Any character following the fleeing Lobo sees that all corridors are dark except the one that Lobo is supposed to use. Because of the layout, J'onn or Supergirl cannot fly at full speed and catch up with Lobo. (The Flash could, but he’s not here.)

The original Lobo finally goes into an isolation room with Non, who is doing push-ups in his isolation chamber. Non is noticeably more muscular than previous appearances.* When Lobo enters the room, any player following him can see the kryptonite radiation lights turn off.

The door to Non's chamber is open. "Come on, ya bastich," growls Lobo. "I been hired to get you out of here."

Non does not move unless J’onn or Supergirl comes into the room. Then he attacks, attacking Supergirl if he has a choice.

Astra appears on a computer screen and tells Non to follow Lobo. (Indigo is imitating her on-screen.)

*Non has essentially been lobotomized. DEO characters know that his primary entertainment has been isometric exercise, and the kryptonite lights have made it possible for him to bulk up, because there really is resistance.

Lobo encourages Non to fly straight up, to the outside. He then follows.

2.2 Following Lobo

Non is as fast as Supergirl, and Lobo is perfectly willing to jump off Non and onto Supergirl or Hank for a fight. Following Lobo won’t be particularly successful: he’ll willingly quit traveling with Non to have a fight with J’onn or Kara.

2.3 Following Lobo’s Clone

If there is a remaining Lobo clone, they can bring him down or track him to his new destination--the place where Lobo parks his Space Bike.

The DEO can attempt to bring him in, but Hank suspects that the clone will re-stock and then decide to kill the other Lobo so that only he is the Main Man.

Which is, in fact, what he does. Following Lobo’s clone takes them to scene 4.0. You can still play scene 3.0, but it provides an alternative way to get to 4.0.

2.4 The Heroes Win

If the heroes win, they’ve made an enemy of Lobo, who is presumably locked up in a cage.

You can end the adventure here (and if they won, maybe you should). However, there are still questions to be answered. Who took control of the computer system? It can’t be Indigo or Livewire--one is in the DEO “morgue” and the other is in an isolation chamber.

3.0 For the Winn

If the computer system has been compromised, Winn gets to deal with it. He works at it all day. (If you’re in the first season, you can play a scene where Kara covers for him at work; she gets a Determination point for it. Or you can play a scene where J’onn imitates him, or where J’onn as Hank as an FBI guy goes and “commandeers” him from Cat, because of something that Toyman did. What, he can’t say. But he needs Winn.)

At the end of that time, Winn gets Kara, Hank, and Alex together to give his report at Kara’s apartment. For reasons that will become evident, he doesn’t want to do this in the DEO headquarters.

Read this as Winn’s report.

“You’re screwed. I don’t see any other way to say this. You have three different computer systems checking each other here and they’re all compromised. The hacker left so many holes and security breaches that a twelve-year-old with a Gameboy can get access to your system now. I’d blame Indigo but she’s in the morgue. The only bright side is that the damage was done in the last two weeks. It re-establishes itself very cleverly, but a full system restore should clean it.” He chews his knuckle. “I mean, I’ll check that version too because maybe I’m wrong about when it was compromised, but that looks like it’ll work.”

The DEO is vulnerable while it’s being done. Physical backups have to be brought in from the secret place in New Mexico where they are stored, and each computer system takes eight hours to restore.

3.1 The Obvious Clue

After Winn restores from backups, the system responds by taunting him and letting him know that he made a mistake: he's given Indigo what she wanted.

3.2 The Breakout

The various isolation chambers are opening one by one. In this case, it's not being done remotely—Winn has taken the whole place off line so that the restore can be done—but the "broken" Indigo is on the base. They've got to find her and knock her out, and for every few turns they take to track her down, someone else is freed from confinement.

Don't make this too long: we don't have write-ups for too many characters. If you let characters escape, they'll probably leave to create problems for future scenarios. Otherwise, have them encounter Indigo just as she's about to release the first one.

4.0 The Indigo Warehouse

Once there was a working Indigo copy, Indigo told it what it needed to know. The copy then left and created more backups but its ego is such that Indigo can't activate them unless there's a need. Attacking Indigo would be such a need. The heroes show up, several Indigos get activated, big fight ensues.