Icons
Apology
This one took a while, because there were a lot of characters to update to Icons Assembled and I made updating them part of this series. A couple of adventures in this series have a lot of NPC characters to change and think about (the third, fourth, and sixth, for instance). And I sometimes get hung up on things like, oh, the Servant power. The minions in the third, fourth, and sixth adventure should be called with the Servant power, but that power explicitly says that the summoned servants have no mental stats. I have chosen to interpret this as meaning that these are never characters who will decide not to fight, but it doesn't mean they have no mental stats. We could argue for a Minion power that does the exact same thing except the created characters have mental stats and aren't as loyal. Nertz to it.
Obligatory Warning
If you are spoiler-wary, this entry and this series is full of spoilers for a six-year-old product. If you don't want to know what's in one of Fainting Goat's first eleven Improbable Tales adventures, well, don't read this. Okay?
Okay.
Today we'll talk about the third adventure in the series, Aqua-Zombies of the Kriegsmarine, written by Mike Lafferty, John Post & Chris McGroarty, with art by Adrian Smith & Jon Gibbons.
I have run this one; I ran it on Roll20 a couple of years ago.
Another disclaimer
By the way, I just noticed something. I've re-read these adventures several times, but sometimes I need to find a specific reference and I use Adobe Acrobat's search feature. That doesn't always work: something about the early adventures means that the text isn't there to be searched. (I presume they were saved as images or something.) So I may make an assertion and be wrong because it didn't come up when I searched the PDF. Bear with me if that happens; I'll apologize and take your corrections.
Precis
A sunken Nazi U-boat from WW2 is being hauled out of the water for a museum, but it contained canisters of an alchemical serum. One of the things the serum does is raise the dead as zombies, and yes, a canister ruptured. And to make it better, a neo-Nazi group and mystics want the remaining serum.
This is the first appearance of the Dark Pharaoh (and the Necromancer), and the Dark Pharoah plays a bigger part in adventure 6, The Other Side.
It's probably worth noting that the Necromancer and Dark Pharaoh characters are specifically called out as being the property of John Post. That isn't noted elsewhere, but John Post is one of the people who provided the idea for adventure 6.
Likes
This adventure has something I don't see as often as I'd like: an optional scene at the end. Everything is complete at the end of Action Scene 2, but if you have time, you can go on to scene 3, storminng the base of the bad guys.
You get to stomp Nazi butt, which is certainly a comics thing to do, and it can be fun.
There's a robot squid. (The Improbable Tales adventures certainly bring the whacky without making it out of place, which I utterly admire...)I haven't decided if this is a thing I like or not: Adventures 3 through 6 in this adventure all provide minions you can use lethal force on. Zombies, vampires, robots, and extradimensional monsters: great foes for the hero with a gun. They're a lesson in providing minions who are not human. But this adventure also provides minions who are human. You might not like the neo-Nazi members of the Iron Hand, but they are people, and the players are due for trouble if their characters fold, stab, spindle, or mutilate them.
And you get a map of a German U-boat and an island headquarters.
It's nice to see zombies buffed up for this adventure. Your typical superhero can just walk through a bunch of Icons Assembled zombies, and these are a bit tougher.
Dislikes
You have at least one powerful NPC floating around, so the adventure gives you advice on how to keep that character from stealing fun from the main characters. (But at least it gives you that advice, so put the fact of that in the Likes section.)
Minor historical note: this adventure calls out the German Thule society. I might be incorrect, but although a number of high-ranking German officers were mystics or inclined that way, I think that the practice of magic was banned by the Nazis before the war. However, (WW2 Nazi = Magic!) is so ingrained in comics that I doubt it's worth arguing about. Anyway, it's trivial to create a hidden magical society if one of your players talks about this.
There are a lot of NPCs in this. It's not too difficult to keep track of them, but you'd be forgiven for skipping the third scene just to keep the number of NPCs under control. (The third scene is fun, though.)
If you don't want to spread out to other countries and dimensions, well, it's possible to reign that in...but the next one explicitly takes place in Russia, and there's one in Tokyo, and one on Mars...so there will be some travel in these adventures.
Changes and Consequences
The big one in this is the explicit mention of Nyarlathotep. This gives you access to all sorts of Cthulhu cults, gods, and mischief. >The Dark Pharoah is used again in The Other Side in a much more explicitly Lovecraftian way.
Be nice if the "celebrities" table on the beach were a throwback to the All-American. I mean, he is a weatherman in the area, and there's a loose continuity. If you want to bring him in, you can.
The next Improbable Tales adventure is Vampires of Red Square and I would think that elements from this one could well appear in that one. Perhaps the Iron Hand tries to recruit the bad guy from that (the Iron Squid sub can go up the Moskva River). Or perhaps the Iron Hand is using materials that were created by the Nazi magical society here, and there's future conflicts as the Red Square bad guys try to get them. Or the Iron Hand succeeds in recruiting that bad guy, but they offend his Aryan ideals with Cthulhoid apocalypses. Several possibilities.
The Lazarus Serum is also a useful MacGuffin. You can use it (with suitable changes) to bring some character back from the dead (“I see! They misinterpreted this code phrase in the works of Nicolas Flamel as this other code phrase, so they used Egyptian mummy dust instead of bitumen! Of course!”) By definition some of the ingredients in Lazarus Serum are so rare that the Iron Hand had to steal them, so when it's gone, it's gone.
One of the nice things here is the extra scene: if you don't attack the island base, some other evil organization might well have an island base you can attack.
Assembled Updates
In general:
- Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance
- Wizardry becomes Magic
- Fast Attack gets increased because it operates in a different way; upping it to the level of the most common attack attribute (Prowess, Coordination, or Willpower) seems the best way to go
The Dark Pharaoh
He has the power Minions, which was created by Fainting Goat Games. The best fit is the Servant power, with this caveat: the servants in the power are explicitly said to have no mental attributes, and these minions clearly do. So you have a couple of options:
- Ignore it. You're going to create the Minions using the "Avatar of Nyalathotep" quality anyway.
- Ignore the mental attributes of the minions listed. Some of them are other-worldly creations, and can't be expected to think like earthly creatures.
- Create the extra "Sapient" for Servant, which costs like all extras, but adds an additional four points per rank. You do have to buy mental attributes now, but you have extra points to do so. For some kinds of servants (a summoned demon, for instance) you might want to include the concept that it works against its master but obeys the letter of the command. I don't think that's worth an actual Limit, though I would throw the player a point of determination if it happened.
In practice, I'd probably just ignore it and use the Quality, but if you will be handing this power out to a PC, well, the extra is probably the way to go. I haven't tried it, so I don't know if it's overpowered.
Demonic Minions, Minions of Nyarlathotep, Elite Commandos
Just change Invulnerability to Damage Resistance.
Mystically Enhanced Zombies and Commandos
No changes needed.
Commander Draco
- Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance.
- His Qualities might be: Criminal leader of fascist terrorist group Iron Hand; Prone to rage; “Iron Hand—attack!”
Iron Hand Giant Squid Sub
This gets altered a fair bit to meet the rules for vehicles in Icons Assembled, and even this version doesn't meet them; it's a 41-point vehicle, which according should be a Speed 10 vehicle. It ain't; it might be better to go back to the original design and just have it as a full character...in which case, you can use the writeup in the adventure. (I suppose you could grant an Extra that just doubles the number of points, in which case this is the Vehicles power with that extra twice or three times, depending on whether the extra is geometric if applied multiple times or just additive.) Vehicles 3, Extras: Double pool points, double pool points, double pool points
| Handling | 2 | Speed | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | 8 | Armor | 3 |
| Extras |
| ||
Conclusion
This one is fun. There are some nice pieces you can use; it's reasonably self-contained. Grade: A.
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