Superhero settings: SF vs “like here but—“

Icons

Traditionally, superhero comics have been "our world but with superpowers." In the big two, there's a more "our world but with superheroes" vibe, but the idea is that mostly, the world looks like ours on the outside.

On the other hand, anybody who's studied any world-building at all knows that one change begets another; it's the "For want of a nail" effect, and the earlier you introduce superpowers, the more things changes. Take a look at the differences between the Wild Cards world and your bog-standard superhero world.

(One of the nice things about Base Raiders as a game is that the setting fully embraces that: the whole intent is to change the world.)

But the more you change the world, the more background material there is for the players to learn, and frankly, I haven't that much patience any more. (Hey, I'm closing in on a signficant aging milestone.) So there's a tension between "Our world but" and "For want of a nail" (or, for Ray Bradbury fans, "The Sound of Thunder").

It seems to me that there are a couple of ways to deal with it.

• Ignore it. Lean full-tilt into either "Our world but" or "For want of a nail," and if that means ignoring the consequences/ease-of-introduction, so be it.
• Superheroes just happened. Some settings, like Green Ronin's Paragons, assume that the whole superpowers thing just came about. This ends up with you abandoning some aspects of comic book worlds because they made sense in 1940 or 1961 but not now, but it does give you a resolution of the tension. A subset of this is that there were so few super-powered people that things didn't really change, but now there's an explosion of them. An alternative is that superpowers have developed from pulp powers that were unreliable to the current set of superpowers, but that reliability has to be recent for this category.
• Superpowers stayed hidden. Yeah, there were superpowers but the people with them didn't put on gaudy costumes and fight in the open. There are certain powers that lend themselves to this, such as mind control.

Try this (Icons sword & sorcery)

Icons

This is for the Sword and Sorcery option in Icons Presents. It should work on a desktop or on an iPhone with PDF Expert by Readdle.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TU3p_KU7zjmn2ZjnY1K3yFDjQQsSyU4Z/view?usp=drivesdk

Setting and campaign idea

Icons

A whole campaign or set of stories occurred to me in the course of defending bad guy of the week campaigns, where there is no overarching evil bad guy...by giving me an overarching evil bad guy.

For now, let's call it Intro City. Better names are possible, but I'm scrambling to get this down before I forget (and before I have to rake the lawn). Intro City is a small city with a university and the main employer is the tech sector. The second-highest employer is probably the university itself. For some reason, I think Ithaca, New York, but that might be totally false because I know very little about Ithaca except that there's a university there.

Two heroes in mind that tie into this setting: Generic Hero and Bubblegumshoe. We'll start with Bubblegumshoe first.

She's at the university, though she's fifteen. Smart. Thinks of herself primarily as a detective because she was heavily influenced by Nancy Drew books of the 1930s (not the revised versions since then). Why did she have access to them? Her dad is high up in the city and her mom in the university. From a supers persepective, she's probably a gadgeteer of some kind. Less Adam Strange and more Tom Swift (also perferred the 1930s version of Stratemeyer Syndicate books).

Intro City has a superhero, the self-deprecatingly named Generic Hero. He's handsome, he's a flying brick, he's secretly six months old. He's a test tube child, produced by secret labs of...oh, we don't want to call them CADMUS but that's clearly the inspiration. Call it Myrmidon, Inc, a company that is transforming illegal clones into super-powered individuals. The process is not without its problems...

Now, I don't want to recapitulate the Superboy/Young Justice storyline, so we're not going to make Generic Hero a clone of somebody. (We'll call him Jason something or other, just to give us a bit more of a tie-in to Cadmus and the dragon's teeth.) No, he's his own person, but he has escaped from the secret labs of Myrmidon...or has he?

That will be one of his Qualities: that he doesn't actually know if he's doing things of his own free will or that he's been programmed to do them.

Our first adventure starts with Generic Hero already accepted by the citizens of Intro City; maybe at this point he's still working for Myrmidon, and it's his association with Bubblegumshoe (she's not particularly girly in civilian life, so she has gone all out on the pink bubblegum themes as a superhero, to divert attention) that makes him split from the organization. Maybe the first couple of adventures are him being sent out to recapture the latest mistake, and because there are superheroes, the citizens of the city take it in stride.

Bubblegumshoe's dad is actually working hard to secure benefits and bonuses for Myrmidon, because they're a major employer in town. "Do you know how many people would be out of work if they pulled up stakes?" Her mom is helping Myrmidon in another way, because they give people a place to work after graduation.

And eventually you can get into Generic Hero's liberation, and a big showdown where they have to deal with Myrmidon in a more definitive way.

So that gives you an arc that grows out of the concepts of the first adventure, and an excuse for a number of initial bad guys.

• Look, they've got to have some kind of mental-implanting thing to put the fake memories in. Let's say it's a machine—and it's essentially a telepathy/mind control machine. What if one of the techs has gotten in too deep in gambling? Convincing a bunch of bank tellers or bookies to transfer him money might seem like a way out, until Bubblegumshoe figures out what's being done and tries to stop it, with Generic Hero's help.
• At some point, they must have tried giving an adult superpowers. Did it work? Did it work but appear to fail because the powers don't actually show up until the next generation of cell replication? So someone cut loose from experimental programs at Myrmidon — maybe a student who volunteered for the “experiment” as a way of getting cash — starts to develop powers. Maybe they're good powers, maybe they're not...maybe the powers do out of control, or they have a tendency to flame out...but it's been months, so there's no obvious connection to Myrmidon.
• The current subject was in the creche with Jason; maybe they have a relationship. But the problem is that the power mimicry ability that showed up actually mimics the ability to give powers from the equipment. It's not really good to have an artificial life form that can give powers wandering around. Of course they locked her up, but something has gone wrong, and she's free....and everyone she touches gets powers briefly.

Just some ideas.

Adventure idea: the coyote’s after you

Icons

Based on ideas in a Facebook Mutants & Masterminds group...

The same nuclear testing that gave rise to the mighty Saguaro and Gila-Master also mutated a coyote and roadrunner. The roadrunner has speed 6 (extra: surface Movement, Phasing) and probability control 6 and the extra good luck.

The coyote is wily: he has Intellect 8, gadgets, Immortality 10 and maybe regeneration as an extra.

In his mind, the road runner is some avatar of the trickster god, who has taken from him what should be a coyote’s. However the roadrunner always wins because he has the essence of being a trickster (the probability control and the Quality); this is how he manages to make the coyote levitate until he sees that he should be falling and how he makes the gadgets misfire.

So the actual adventure is, the coyote has decided on a different tack, and is attacking other speedsters instead because they are symbolically linked to the Road Runner. By catching them he can catch the roadrunner and get back the trickster quality.

First your players laugh. And then the coyote’s gadgets work, and keep working....

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
4	6	3	8	4	8	11
Specialties		Technology (+1)
Powers		Amazing (8) Gadgets Supreme (10) Immortality Good (5) Regeneration
Qualities		Supergenius Get back the quality “Trickster” Planner

And his perpetual foe, who doesn't appear in this adventure except as backstory...

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
5	4	2	4	5	4	6
Specialties		Stealth (+1)
Powers		Great (6) Super-Speed Surface Movement Phasing Great (6) Probability Control Extra: Both Good & Bad Limit: Bad only versus the bigger opponent
Qualities		Unconcerned Trickster Always punches up

Edit after the fact: Actually, I'd probably get rid of Phasing and just make all occurrences of things like turning a painted tunnel into a real one or a train coming through be stunts invoked with the "Trickster" Quality.

Product idea

Icons

You should never produce a product without some idea of the market. However, I don't know if there's a market, so I'll just describe it here.

Most online gaming modules are done lovely PDF documents, with layout and page design and all of that. Expensive but fun to do. I can't do them well, but I can appreciate the work that goes into choosing the page layout, the background image, the font, the size, whether there are columns, the artwork, and all of that.

I can appreciate it, but I can't do it. Not that good.

So I'm willing to lean into the fact that I buy far more gaming supplements than I can actually play. I mine them for ideas.

With that in mind, a series of adventures and campaign modules for superhero games done as ebooks. They're in ePub format, they're searchable, they reformat when you change size, you can alter the text, and you can link them out the wazoo. Most phones have an ePub reader (or a .mobi reader) of some kind.

Yeah, there are still maps but they come in a sketch format so you can see where the important things are, and the rest is up to you. Because, dude, it's going to be on your phone. It's something you'll read when you have spare minutes.

And, yes, you could totally run a game off one of these if you wanted. Structurally, they'd steal a lot from the Ars Ludi discussions with a “Here's a summary, here's the basic setup, here's each scene complete with the interesting schticks you could do.”

And there's still artwork: the cover has to be nice, and there are still portraits of individuals, usually head and a bit of torso.

There'd be room for some kind of story in the back if you wanted.

Plus there should also be accommodation if you want to run it solitaire.

And, having said that, now I'll do some desultory market research.

This week’s supervillain: Palimpsest

Any supers

“So Count Crisis, he hires a lotta guys, right? And I got this bum leg but I'm pretty good at electronics and computers and stuff, so I'm working the Conquer Center when the Justice Four show up, right?

“Now I know that the Justice Four are bad news for guys like us, but Count Crisis, he doesn't want to hear it. I mean, he killed Lenny for suggesting maybe the Count shouldn't kill the guys on the beach by setting off the Rho Bomb. So when I saw that the Four had made it past the Rho Bomb and the Interrobanger, I booked it. Took the escape capsule, so later Count Crisis was kinda surprised it wasn't there when he went to escape. Anyway.

“The capsule doesn't go up, like I expected. It goes down. Down into a second secret base, one we didn't know about. I mean, it was guarded by that shape-changer lady, but I got the drop on her while she was being a cat. She's in the neural neutralizer room and mostly she's fine, but the Count wasn't big on labelling things so sometimes I hit the wrong button. I found a labeller so mostly that's fixed.

“There's a lotta stuff here, Ethan. I mean, a lot.

“Anyway, I'm making this offer. You get, what, eight other guys. We figure out enough of this stuff for a couple o' heists, enough so there's ten million for each of us. We pop it into secure bank accounts and live off the interest.

“Big score, but I gotta remind you: The stuff isn't labelled. We're probably gonna have some casualties before we do the heists. Still, we stick to a hundred million total, that's an annual of five hundred thousand each. I dunno about you but I could do a lot with five hundred thousand a year.

“Whadda ya say?”

Creating a cult?

Any superhero

A confluence of two things (needing to create background for Strange City, the four-part Friends of Jackson Elias podcast on cults, which I recommend) has me thinking about cults.

Now, from a story point of view, cults are often used to create hordes of nameless mooks who fight to the incapacitation. That's fine, but there could be other stories or other uses. For instance, in a superhero game you might want to have a significant NPC fall into the clutches of a cult, or you might want the Hunted to be a cult, or you might want the super-powered villain to be granted powers by a cult. But to do that, your cults need to be a little more nuanced.

What do cults do (narratively)?

Okay. So what do cults do, from a story point of view?

• They provide disposable mooks, as mentioned.
• They can pursue relentlessly (because it's their sense of self being threatened).
• They take members away from the characters.
• They enable the entrance of villains.

There might be more, but those are the ones that strike me immediately. Let's concentrate on that third one, because that one has the most to do with the cult.

Is there magic in this cult?

So the first thing I think of is, “Does the cult have real access or fake access to the supernatural?”

In most superhero game environments, there really is some kind of access to evil demons, spirits, other-dimensional entities, trapped gods, and so on. So: Does the cult have access to one of those? (And you can ring changes there, like this is the aftercult after the demon was exiled, this was a fake cult until the amnesiac joined who was actually the exiled demon Nialliv, or whatever.)

• If the cult has real access, then at some point, the players have to see it. The adventure is building to fighting the evil thing or stopping the ritual. The evil thing might be a bunch of misguided supers or maybe a freed demon or some kind of world-altering magic, but it exists.
• If the cult doesn't have access, then you have to decide what the real goal of the cult is. The adventure is building to freeing someone(s) from the cult. You can still introduce super-powered beings; most game worlds have those available for hire. But the cult as it is isn't about freeing Cthulhu or Ba'al or even Christ.

(Or not defeating the evil thing or not freeing the person. But you knew that, so I'm not going to mention that sort of thing again.)

This decision affects your adventure, not the design of the cult, but since this is a tool to an adventure, we do it now.

What do they say they want?

Look, relatively few people join a cult whose avowed goal is "release the evil world-destroying demon.' Even the Rapture fans who want to bring about Armageddon are doing it because they're sure that they will be on the side of good. (This is, I suppose, the equivalent of voting for the Leopards Eating Faces party, because you're sure that your face is safe.)

Whatever the thing is, that's what people are joining for. People tend to join at a time of confusion or uncertainty, and that's your goal. The supporting character wants protection from these eeeevil mentalists? The cult is an organization teaching useful mental protection techniques.

Real world things that have been used (and this isn't all of them, by a long shot, just a sampler).

• Tolerance and inclusivity (go ahead, look up Jim Jones)
• Ecological help
• Self-control
• Personal improvement generally
• Improve your money situation (this tends to be part of multilevel marketing scams instead, but "don't have financial worries" has certainly been used)
• A supportive community
• Personal fulfilment

What does the cult really want?

You probably want to specify this in two ways:

• The vague general goal, which could be “Make me money!” or “Free the voice in that book so it can give me money!”
• The specific, actionable goal, that your heroes are going to interfere with

I mean, if you only come up with one goal, great, but if it doesn't lead to a plan by the bad guys, then the good guys can't interfere. And if it's too specific, the cult doesn't return after your heroes interrupt the summoning. Now, sometimes that's okay, but sometimes you want the cult to hang around. “Oh, the Wave of Shimmering Light...those guys are bad news.”

(It occurs to me that you can use the same general step for creating an evil villain-based multi-level marketing campaign, too, but I digress.)

How do the heroes get involved?

So you have a vague idea of what the bad cult is doing, and you know why Feckless NPC joined. What does Feckless have to do that leads the heroes to the specific goal? Do the heroes find out about it because they're just researching the cult to find out if it's safe for Feckless? Or does Feckless have enough extradimensional energies in the body from various superhero-adjacent romps that it's specifically Feckless who has to be sacrificed for the incantation at midnight to work?

From those things, you should be able to generate a cult, have some idea of what they're doing as a recruiting tactic, and how the heroes get involved.

Nitrogen Transmutation

Any SHRPG

I've been thinking about nitrogen blooms and transmutation over the past few days, so here are some results.

I was reading about corn and nitrogen fixing (because what's lunchtime without thinking about where the tortilla came from?) and I suddenly realized that someone whose power is specific to nitrogen would be...powerful. Those algal blooms in rivers and ponds? Usually caused by excess nitrogen from fertilizer (there's also a phosphate problem but we'll set that aside). One river mouth had a de-oxygenated area the size of New Jersey, just from algae. So someone with control over nitrogen could just be cleaning up.

In a more traditional superhero setting, proteins require nitrogen...which means that your nitrogen controller can weaken the muscles instantly (or, controlled very specifically, cause erections: the effect of a nitrogen oxide on vascular tissues is used in erectile dysfunction drugs). Turn all the oxygen in an area into nitrous or nitric oxide, and they can't breathe and I believe one of those is acidic.

(This is almost as good as the ability to control poop (I cannot find the cartoon at the moment).)

Imagine somebody with transmutation at range...point at the battlesuit character with life support and turn all the oxygen inside to, oh, helium. Or just carbon monoxide. Suddenly, the character is choking and has a certain number of strength rolls to maintain consciousness.

At least one version of Firestorm tried to lessen the deity-level power by requiring Ronnie to know the chemical formula being changed, but there's still an awful lot that can be done with simple one, two, and three-molecule structures. All the oxygen in the air becomes carbon, and suddenly it's CH₂ looking for something to fill the extra two bonds. Not only does the person have serious problems if it happens in their body (hint: primary component of blood is H₂O), but I believe that the reaction of C-H₂ joining to whatever is available is exothermic (real chemists can correct me, because I haven't studied chemistry since 1982).

I was thinking about nitrogen-fixing the other day. A lot of pollution and anaerobic zones in rivers and ponds are from an oversupply of nitrogen in the water, from fertilizer. What if the character is an element transmuter, and the default unconscious thing is turning nitrogen to oxygen? The air has lots of nitrogen, so low-level conversion makes the air “better” and more interesting. This in turn might make other people want to be around the hero, just because they feel better. Of course, it’s visible to anybody tracking superpowers in action, and oxygen just feeds fires, so bad character to have around wildfires...or sparks of any kind.

Even limited to triatomic-or-less molecules to something else, transmuters can be vastly effective. Carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide is lethal; oxygen to nitrogen knocks out and eventually kills that opponent in the life-support suit. Oxygen in the blood to nitrogen in the blood could give the bends to someone even if they’re invulnerable. Water vapour in the air to nitrous oxide would be a way of throwing off the aim.

Element transmuters are sooo powerful. I never feel like I could do them justice.

Oh, the old evil duplicates thing

Any superhero RPG

So for various reasons I was thinking about evil duplicates, including an evil duplicates adventure I wrote but that never saw light. (Possibly the publisher was just being kind to buy it; I was exceedingly desperate. On the other hand, "kindness" to me tops out at fifty bucks. So probably it was shakeups and then the adventure wasn't useful. I digress.)

Evil duplicates are a lovely way to point up the differences between the characters and the bad guys: they are the characters who made different choices. So, with that in mind as an overall reason, here are as many ideas for evil duplicates that I can think of after too many beers.

(I will try to organize these so less specific terms come after more specific terms.)

1. Look, It's Just A Costume Get a bunch of people with roughly the same powers, dress'em in the heroes' costumes, and call them duplicates. It can be kind of interesting to see the changes that can be wrung on various powers. “What, being superb at throwing things makes you a pretty good archer?” (During Bendis' New Avengers run.)
2. The Imperfect Clone On the one hand, this can give you Bizarro. On the other, it can be a pretty deep look into what makes the heroes tick.
3. Bad Robot! These are robot duplicates but they've been programmed for EEEE-vil.
4. Mirror Image Some magic device makes copies of the heroes, but evil copies.
5. One Bad Day The Bad Heroes are from an alternate timeline where where the awful origin event was twisted, or from an alternate future where Something Bad has happened (Lois Love Interest died, for example).
6. From The Bad Place. The duplicates are from the alternate dimension where everyone is the same, but the switch is turned to EVIL. (Earth 3 and the Crime Syndicate is the first one that comes to mind, but it's been done elsewhere, like the episode of Star Trek called “Mirror Image”.)
7. Tweedledum, Tweedledee If all the heroes got their powers in the same incident, it's possible to have an alternate incident where things didn't go so well. I think of this as Batma and the Wrath writ for a group.

A slightly different version: Now I Have The Power The bad guy can take the hero's powers (or heroes' powers) and put them in someone else. This is technically power theft but maybe it just copies the powers, through Amazo's special doubletalk.

Happy anniversary to my wife!

Any Superhero

With today being my 30th wedding anniversary, I'm inspired to provide some adventure seeds (or, where there's a bit more, adventure sprouts) related to anniversaries. So, a quick d6 worth:

1. A bad supervillain has escaped from prison and the heroes have to find him. Why today of all days? It's a significant wedding anniversary. Now, maybe it's sweet: one of them is dying and this is the last time (significant) time they can be together. Maybe it's sour: they're divorced, and this is the time when he wants her to remember him, and that he has power over her. But either way, the heroes figure it out and have to decide what side they're on.
2. One of the heroes has an anniversary today, and intends to get to his/her/their/its spouse, but things keep interfering: an earthquake, which traps some miners, and causes a prison break, and there are fires, and... Maybe other heroes try to help so that the hero can have just some time. Or maybe one of the escaped prisoners is an archfoe who knows all the heroes' secrets and makes a beeline for the spouse.
3. One hero (maybe a PC) is getting married, so it's time for the bachelor or bachelorette party. A superhero event like this? There will probably be shenanigans (tip of the hat to Gail Simone for that term and the idea!)

   How do the other heroes in the party deal with or even prevent the shenanigans while helping the chauffeur, whose wedding anniversary it is, but he/she/they has to work. The shenanigans probably involve a villain who wants to profess love, because that's thematically appropriate, so maybe the heroes have to face off the bad guy who wants to confess that he's always loved the bride, or the villain coming out of the closet and he's always loved the groom, or some villain who is re-enacting another villain's plan to show the object-of-obsession that it can be done right.

4. The heroes might think everything's on the up-and-up as they prepare for their own anniversaries, but details slowly start to reveal that their true love, retirement, and marriages are all part of a mental illusion. (Tip of the hat to Alan Moore, because this is mostly "For The Man Who Has Everything.")
5. The North Star is a fabulous gem and Rick Harper is going to give it to his wife as part of their anniversary. The North Star only comes out of the vault on special occasions like this, so several people have lined up crews to steal it...and there's a possibility that Harper hired at least one of them in order to commit insurance fraud.

6. "Twoo wuv..." can bring the dead back to life, if their love was pure. As zombies, I'm afraid.

   A candidate for the title of Earth's Eldritchiest has brought someone back to life (because they were only mostly dead), but the knock on effect of the spell travels throughout the world: Anyone whose love was pure is dragged from death so that they can be with their loved ones.

   • If you've only been dead half an hour, it works fine.
   • If you've been dead months or years, you are a reanimated shambling monster with one goal: to kill your beloved so they can join you in death.

   The heroes most likely notice it because one of them is dating a widow or widower, and the zombie is noticeable.

   I know, you're thinking, "Shoot'em in the head!" But disassembling the zombie doesn't work; they just put themselves back together and try again. No, the spell has to be reversed, which means finding out which candidate cast it, and convincing them to undo it...which might well kill the person they resurrected in the first place.

Gah.

Okay, the recent format change has made this platform very difficult to use. Back to Dreamwidth it is. (Can you have multiple blogs under one account there, or do you need a separate account for each blog?)

A one-shot for ICONS

Icons

My wife is out of town for the night, so I was going to run a one-shot of Icons but that fell through. Still, here's the rough outline of what I would have run.

Design goals: It's a one-shot, it's simple, it uses minions for the first fight so that new players have something to try, and it uses only villains from Icons: The Assembled Edition.

Because of that, if you want to run it in another implied universe, you'll have to either create Ultra-Mind, Warbride, and Speed Demon or fill in the roles with an equivalent.

Usual caveat: I've never run this, I haven't tried it, it's never met actual players.

The Copycat Technology

What's the Premise?

Ultra-Mind wants to make his life-support body also wants to include powers so that he might properly subjugate people as part of his plan to make more evolved humans. Superheroes keep stopping him, so he clearly needs more abilities. He needs to get supers in place to copy and then put the copied powers in machines. So he has set up the copying technology in banks and has arranged for bank robberies. Clues lead to a second location, where robots with copied powers are waiting.

1: Bank Shots

For each player, there is a bank robbery. The robberies are simultaneous and are being committed by teams of five: four henchmen in each bank (use the Henchman archetype, pg 191), commanded by a boss (use the Soldier archetype, pg 192), wearing a bomb vest. In each case, the plan is this: two stand guard over hostages, one fetches actual money, and the Boss and a henchman take the manager into the safety deposit room, to get one particular safety deposit box’s contents.

For the henchmen, use the Minion rule (pg 42), but the boss is treated like normal.

If you have an ongoing campaign, each boss can have a personal agenda and can double-cross the mysterious stranger who hired him, but for a one-shot, that just adds time. Let each player have the confrontation with the boss, but for a one-shot, move to the investigation afterwards.

Start with the heroes on the scene. There are a couple of ways they might be there:

• They’re actually hostages.
• They have been monitoring the police.
• They have been asked by the police.
• They were in the area.

As a GM, rotate through each player in turn, but they’re all in different banks. When things go pear-shaped, the henchmen will first threaten the hostages, then the boss will threaten to blow up the place with the vest.

Although the bullets in the guns are real, the bomb in the vest is fake (PCs can’t easily tell; X-Ray vision won’t show it but Super-Smell might). The vest kills whomever is wearing it but probably no one else.

2: Investigation

Players investigating can discover the following:

• The henchmen’s boss was hired by a “mysterious stranger” but convinced of bona fides. Time and date were dictated but so long as they provided the papers in the safety deposit boxes, they could keep everything else. (If a PC uses Telepathy or Postcognition on the boss character, they could learn about the mysterious stranger. A character might recognize Warbride, but the action is out of character for Warbride; perhaps she is working for someone else?)
• The safety deposit boxes each contain papers that reveal shell corporations. (Bonus if someone has the Law or Business specialties.)
• Each bank had just had a new security system installed by JomCross Security Inc, a new company that had convinced various banks to try out their security system for free.
  • Some characters will be aware that Jommy Cross is the main character in the A. E. Van Vogt novel SLAN.
• If someone investigates the “new security system” it clearly scans the interior of the bank and sends the information somewhere. (Pyramid test to figure out where; insert tech doubletalk if needed, but it’s the JomCross Security office.)

The address for the shell corporations and JomCross Security is the same, and it’s in town.

Troubleshooting

If the player characters lose to the henchmen and don’t see the shell corporation papers and don’t discover about the security system, the bank manager reveals to the hero involved that “it was a mistake putting in the new security system! It didn’t neutralize their guns at all!”

3: In The Office

The office of JomCross Security is on the second-highest floor of a skyscraper. It takes up the entire floor.

(If they investigate, the top floor is owned by Evolution Investments, a private company about which little is known. It is also a front for Ultra-Mind.)

The secretary at the front desk is a gum-snapping 1940s stereotype come to life. She answers the phone, types desultorily on her keyboard, and stares at her cellphone. As if she’s waiting for something. A sign on the door behind her says M. O'Graf.

She is polite to the heroes. She knows nothing but is willing to summon Mr. O’Graf from his office. She does want to know the character names, so she can tell Mr. O’Graf who he’s going to see. She tries very hard to get names, but will eventually acquiesce if the players don’t want to give names.

Robots come out of O'Graf's office, one for each PC. The robots are dressed like the PCs, and by the time the players look back at the secretary, they see her standing outside the office, revealed as Warbride. She touches her cellphone, and metal walls slide over the glass office front.

If the players do something that makes it difficult to put her out of the office, either give a Determination point, or have her not leave: she stays in the office. Her job now is to keep the players in the fight: if they leave, they have to deal with her, and dealing with her takes long enough that the robot duplicates will catch up.

Again, the PCs will probably have to fight, but it isn't essential; for example, a power like Teleport (portal) will certainly get them out. If that happens, you'll have to wing it.

The robot duplicates have copies of their powers, including Extras and Limitations. They do not have copies of Qualities, or secret information about the heroes, or copies of specialties.

• If the heroes win, the back office contains an elevator to the upstairs office.
• If the heroes lose, they regain consciousness upstairs so that Ultra-Mind can gloat at them.

4: End-Game

Now that he has proved the viability of his power-copying technology and its ultracells, he plans to move the cells into his life-support body and be physically evolved as well as mentally evolved.

If the PCs defeated or escaped the robot duplicates...

Ultra-Mind monologues about what he was doing. Clearly (he says) the PCs have some other edge he has not taken into account&mdash/he must start again. In the meantime, Warbride will deal with them while he escapes!

Speed Demon appears. “You need to be transported?”

Warbride says, “This activates the clause where you pay me double.”

Big fight.

If the PCs lost to the robot duplicates...

The PCs wake in the offices of “Evolution Investments” without powers. They are wearing “power suckers” that neutralize their powers, rather than copy them. The power suckers are locked; it’s a difficulty 10 task to unlock and remove your own power sucker but only a difficulty 8 task to unlock someone else’s power sucker. (Ultra-Mind doesn’t worry much about locks; All-Star never used locks!)

In this case, Speed Demon probably doesn’t get called, but Ultra-Mind has the powers of one PC because the ultracells have been installed. (Pick a PC or roll randomly.)

Big fight, I presume.

An experiment with a TiddlyWiki

Icons, M&M

As an experiment, I have started putting the Strange City background in a TiddlyWiki, at: http://jhmcmullen.tiddlyspot.com/. Feel free to look at it there, although you can't get it in a neat package.

I want to use the setting for something on-going (The Flea Family), and the PDF article just got outdated too quickly as I added things. So I'm trying this.

If that's not the correct address, it might be http://jhmcmullen.tiddlyspot.com/index.html.

TiddlySpot is not up-to-date with the latest version of TiddlyWiki, nor is it secure, but it should be adequate for a small personal wiki.

If you can't see it, or if there's a problem, let me know so that I can try to fix it or go looking for a different answer.

EDIT: Alas, the tiddlyspot.com site suffered a catastrophic failure. At this point, one cannot update any information there, so that has paused. It might disappear; these things depend of the vagaries of the software gods.

Concept

D&D

So I'm doing the RPG Adventure Writer course in July (I'm about five days behind, thank you very much) and it costs money if you want to do something other than D&D5E and DM's Guild, so that's what I'm doing.

The concept is, uh, weird, but it might make a nice one-shot.

You're a group of first-level characters and you've just come back from the wars or hanging around with military service; the point is, you're back or conceivably new to the area.

And a tavern owner approaches you; the tavern owner is definitely just back, and he has discovered what I'm about to tell you, and doesn't know where to turn. His tavern has been overrun with Mysterious Strangers, who have sent everyone of an adventuring nature off to far-off lands. He's got no regulars, his bar staff have disappeared and replaced with simpletons, and they won't let him in.

Various avenues of investigation, but the PCs eventually learn that the Mysterious Strangers are members of a hive organism and they've taken over the tavern. Deep under the tavern, the queen is churning out Mysterious Strangers, workers (who look like barmaids), and owls (drones). Deeper down there are warriors, wizard-like things, and so on. They look like people, but they're something else....

Having found this out, the PCs must go in, possibly to rescue the tavern keeper and his family.

Followup about characters and roles

Any superhero

Later: Other thoughts

Thinking about it, and possibly this is too much about fiction and not about roleplaying, every character fulfils at least one role:

• plot, where they provide a necessary service, item, or obstacle
• setting, where they reinforce some aspect of the environment; this tends to be more about your choice of characters — you choose to use a cowboy to emphasize that the adventure takes place in rural Texas, or a hipster to display that we're in the trendy subcultures of New York
• emotional, where they draw out some emotional aspect of the character or conflict — someone who will be directly affected by the villain's evil plan, for example
• pacing, which is closely related to "emotional," above, but I admit that sometimes I have put in a character who will just be funny or tear-jerking or whatever just to change the mood at the table and speed things up or slow things down

(I've also thrown characters in because I've just had too much fun roleplaying them, like a certain character's mother kept showing up. Sometimes it pays off; she turned out to have had a dalliance with the Joker, and the hero turned out to be the Joker's kid, but it came from me having fun having her complain about his (at that point unnamed) father.)

Every character has this mechanical function, which is a union of one or more of those roles, often summarized with a job title, and a relationship to each character. Sometimes the relationship is really nebulous: "person in the crowd" or "bystander." Sometimes it's stronger and should inform the PC's actions: "love interest" or "arch-foe" or "guy who thinks he's the arch-foe but he really isn't."

Maybe you can more quickly define characters by specifying the mechanical role and the relationship. If you say a character is a "tech guru" and "friend" you've just opened up two sets of possibilities: One is that there's a place to go for plot coupons ("Where are we going to find a chronosynclastic infundibulator?" "Jeanine might have one!"), and the other is that range of story possibilities opened by the friend role: hostage, used as leverage by villains, possible betrayal for good or bad reasons, the friend comes to them because of blackmail (I'm sure it's deepfake ransomware), and so on.

I'll have to think about that one some more to see if it's a useful distinction or not. (I frequently make distinctions that aren't actually useful at the table.)

Tropes for superhero campaigns

Any Superhero

I'm in the process of assembling a campaign in M&M which will be a bog-standard superhero campaign. And part of it is that I have to come up with a metric fecal tonne of NPCs and their relationships to the characters....and I'm only coming up with the starting NPCs; the rest will be developed in play. The non-standard part here is that there are three different campaign levels because it's troupe play. So for each player there are three circles for them to move in: low-level, mid-level, and high. Because I'm starting with M&M, you can think of them as PL8, PL10, and PL12, but you could also think of it as neighbourhood, city, and global level.

Obviously, the characters can cross over. In my head, I think of it as writing the Batman family: some adventures deal with Robin; others deal with Nightwing or Batgirl; and yet others deal with Batman in either city mode or godglobal mode.

That's a fair bit to come up with, even if the troupe characters can mix and match.

So I asked the fine people at the Facebook group World of Supers for their favourite NPCs or tropes, and I'm hoping to use them directly or reverse-engineer them into classes that I can then use to build an instance of a campaign.

Some comic book things won't translate. This is a group activity, after all, and a set of stories about the brooding loner who's all alone and doesn't have anyone (and did I mention loner?) won't really work. But there are a lot of useful bits we can use, harvested from comics and campaigns.

Because of where my head is at these days, I'm thinking of them more in terms of what story possibilities they open up. That's not the only way to look at them, and in fact it's not a way I've looked at it in the past. But essentially, this is my version of Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations for superhero campaigns. (If you want the Polti list, Wikipedia has a reasonable summary.)

Obviously, in comics, characters can fill several roles, but I'm just starting to think of it this way, so I'm not going to stress if I only pick one.

In a sense, I'm looking for plot engines: roles that generate stories.

A role for each identity

A character who has one attitude to the public identity and another to the secret identity. Lois Lane for much of her history disdained Clark Kent but adored Superman; Aunt May loved Peter Parker but was afraid of Spider-Man. I feel like this is not so much a role you'd give an NPC but a layer you'd add to them, because really this is a way of pointing up the Secret ID. Examples: Lois Lane, Flash Thompson

Aide & assistant

Providing necessary assistance for lots of different things, and occasional counselling. Steve Kenson suggested Icons A to Z: Support, which has a number of roles around the headquarters, such as Handyman, Mechanic, and Pilot. They are more specialized versions of this (well, maybe not Handyman). Mechanically, they provide aid in some way; in a story sense, they usually provide commentary, such as "Go get'em" or "Are you sure this is a good thing to do?" or subtle nudging, such as "Perhaps if you investigated the Senator's parents; I find that evil is a fruit that does not often stray far from the root." Examples: Alfred, Jarvis, Wintergreen

Attractive crook

Love interest who does bad things but not too bad Examples: Catwoman, Black Cat

Crook who might not be reformed

The crook who looks like he's gone straight, but there's some question about it. Examples: Most "reformed" Batman villains; Lex Luthor; Norman Osborne after leaving the asylum (again)

Crook trying to go straight

This is slightly different: a crook with a good heart but he's always in danger of relapsing. In one case, we know that the heart is good but the situation might be bad; in the other we don't know the heart. And of course many crooks pass through this until we know that their motives are good. Examples: Sandman in Spider-Man

Cross Purposes

Usually someone acting against the hero but for good reasons; the character might act for the hero if convinced Examples: Amanda Waller

Demanding Overlord

The character who expects actions of the hero that interfere with hero-ing, such as the boss or sometimes the insistent love-interest. Though some characters have this written right into their role (when JJJ became Peter's market, it happened) it can also be something you layer on to an existing NPC Examples: J. Jonah Jameson, Gwen Stacy, Perry White

Duelling love interests

There are situations where the hero has one love interest in hero identity and another in secret identity and this challenges fidelity or obligations. Examples: Spider-Man with Mary Jane and the Black Cat

Friend on the inside

Someone in a position to help the hero, but who might be forced to act against them. Examples: Commissioner Gordon

Hostage

Unlike the millstone, this character is associated with the hero identity, so is often used by villains to blackmail the hero in hero identity. Examples: Robin, Rick Jones

Mad Inventor

Generally a source of things to fight, where we deal with his or her latest scheme gone wrong. Good intentions, bad follow-through. Examples: Emil Hamilton

Millstone

Your traditional dependant NPC, such as Aunt May, who provides a responsibility but no obvious benefits; the millstone is usually associated with the private/normal identity. If a character has obligations to someone but no apparent benefit, you probably have a millstone (most love interests as written are millstones). In these cases the benefit is just notional — "Oh, the shock will kill Aunt May" or "She's my fiancee!" You alleviate this by giving them some kind of benefit to the hero, either emotionally or tactically. Often you can do this by revealing the secret identity to them. Examples: Aunt May, Julie Madison

Nosy parker

Mostly obsolete now, but a staple in the Silver Age: the character whose investigations threaten to expose the hero's secret Examples: Lois Lane, Vicki Vale

Rival

The character who is competing with our hero, in either identity; a beginning or inept character is more often a Wannabe Examples: Various reporters

Villain with a Problem

This is the character who is really a nice (or acceptable) person, but when something happens, they become a villain. Examples: Man-Bat, the Lizard, Carol Ferris

Wannabe Hero

Like a rival, but less effective or sometimes even a supervillain/problem of the week. Examples: Frog-man, Man-Bat

Other ideas?

An odd idea

Any

There's an eruv bounding about four square miles of Manhattan. If I understand correctly (and I might not; apologies if I don't), it's a thin wire that symbolically separates "public" from "private" for Orthodox Jews, so that they can behave more or less normally on the Sabbath. That means that they can do things that would normally be considered work...like carrying things.

But it's not just Manhattan...other cities have eruvim. Cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and more.

New York has rules, such as the maximum thickness of the wire is a quarter-inch, and it must be at least fifteen feet above the ground.

It's inspected by rabbis every Thursday night, presumably so they have daylight Friday to fix it, if necessary. And Manhattan's costs about $100,000 a year to maintain.

Do they ever get broken in superhero fights? Especially fights on a Friday night? Are there Orthodox Jewish superheroes who protect the eruv because keeping all those people inside on the Sabbath has economic consequences? Do tech whiz superheroes invent stronger materials to compose the eruv? If it costs too much for the eruv to be replaced, do they quit?

Thoughts on a Wednesday afternoon. I have no answers, but you could probably make a scenario out of bad consequences.

Villains for the Family

While I'm waiting for the player to respond, let's think in general terms about villains.

I'm going to use Strange City as a setting, and I've established that villains exist in about a twenty:one ratio with heroes. While I think arch-villains should probably be specific to the hero and so I'm not going to create them yet, I can list a couple of tropes that I want to use or subvert.

The villain K-Osprey already exists and functions as my Joker analogue. I doubt he's specific to the OG hero, but certainly Adult Sidekick will know of K-Osprey aka Chaos-Prey aka KOS-Pray.

I probably want to do something with reformed villains, both those who have failed to reform and those who succeeded. Actually, making the Police Commissioner a former villain might be interesting. Because that isn't common knowledge (I only just thought of it), I could slide it in as ancient history or have it as ad adventure thread in itself.

(It might be an adventure thread: I'm sure that Revived Mystery Man would think that the reformed villain is only faking and should be put to death.)

The villain who has lapsed again... maybe someone with a kind of telekinesis such that locks can't actually stay shut around him or her? Bullet-proof, but regardless of intention, nothing stays locked if the character touches it. But the character is guilty of looking wrong and so gets arrested on a regular basis. And, of course, even if he or she works for a company, he or she cannot work late and lock up. Just can't; the lock comes undone.

Given that, how do you make money? Well, if money problems come along, you steal it. More accurately, you reach into the bin and take it because they've forgotten tho latch the ATM ((again). (Heh. A real job for that person involves working in an area without any actual cash, like in an investment firm.)

Idea for the triptych one-on-one campaign

I have not felt creative in weeks, but the other day I decided to revisit the idea of a single-player superhero game but with the person playing three different heroes...a “hero family” if you will.

Now, the actual fact is I asked a friend if he wanted to try it, and he said yes, and offered me a Mutants and Masterminds character as the nucleus. I don't have his permission to name him or the character, so I'll be a little evasive. For now, we'll call them the Solo family, but suffice it to say that they're all insect themed.

The original character is a transformed hero (actually transformed by the Silver Storm, I believe, in an abortive campaign that collapsed after two episodes). This hero is PL10 and I am helpfully informed that the character is consciously a legacy hero, named after an in-game hero from the 1970s.

So after thinking a bit, here's what I came up with.

Remember that the core idea is three characters, and in the M&M game system it makes sense for the characters to be different power levels. I picked PL10, PL12, and PL8.

The 1970s is like forty or fifty years ago, now, but it makes sense for the OG hero to have had a sidekick who is now grown up. I don't actually want to deal with an ex-hero, so my choices here are someone who ages slowly, some kind of construct or person with the sidekick's memories, or maybe an armored hero, where the armor handles the natural degradation due to age. (I'm sure there are other possibilities: the child of the OG hero, for instance, or the OG hero and some kind of time travel.)

What I proposed is a grown-up sidekick, some kind of mutant who ages slowly (she's now in her fifties and finally looks twenty; I imagine the antagathic effect kicked in at puberty and it has taken her 45 years to get from 12 to 20 in appearance. She has sidekick to a number of heroes (well, sometimes leading from behind. "Uh, that skylight's a pretty obvious trap, Green Alpaca. Maybe going through the window?") and is ready to strike out on her own. (And face it, having to ride the storms of adolescence for forty years is kinda painful.) She inherited the OG hero's wealth, so she has a place that, while not ostentatious, is large enough and well-situated.

But...PL8 makes me think of mystery men and high school students, so I went with the time travel aspect and mystery men. The PL8 hero I'm thinking of is some 1930s mystery man (or woman; we're assuming a full body costume) who has been caught in a Groundhog Day thing for nearly a hundred years. The hero has a good right hook, insect venom weaponized in a number of ways (sleep! paralysis! Death! Binding! Whatever!) and a cavalier attitude about what should happen to "the guilty."

And it makes sense for the sidekick to have taken that character in during the adjustment. In fact, the house might be a revolving door for various down-on-their-luck heroes.

Now, supporting cast.

The house needs a staff, and one that can be trusted. So there's a cook and a cleaning person and probably a maintenance person. Haven't but a lot of thought into them, but they need to be there.

The Golden Age mystery man needs a descendent of some kind, or the child of someone who was important to them back in the day. That person will be ancient because they're just normal.

The current hero has been defined as homeless, so I figure the plot of Annie will come up at some point.

That's what I've proposed. Once I have those nailed down, we can create arch- and recurring foes.

Improbable Tales Reviews: Dr. Warp

Icons

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 (after a long hiatus) we'll talk about the fifth adventure in the Improbable Tales series, Dr. Warp and his Golden Robots, written by Dan Houser, with art by Dan Houser.

I ran portions of this one on Roll20 a couple of years ago, incorporated into a different adventure. As usual, I kept parts of the body and changed the soul.

Precis

Dr. Warp comes from the groovy 1960s with his female-appearing robots (by accident, but that's backstory). He decides to threaten to launch a missile or two in the quest for world peace. He has a captive (Electric Dervish) and a pinnacle robotic achievement with her own agenda: threatening to end the world is not enough; she's like a Nike product and wants to just do it.

Comments

It's a nice self-contained adventure. There are pieces of a larger world right there to be picked up if you want to, or you can slot it into something bigger.

If you don't want to have time travel possible in your game, even by accident (I'm tempted to say, “What's wrong with you?” but everybody gets to choose), then Dr. Warp can be cryogenically frozen by accident: how he gets to the present is not as important as the idea that he gets here and for him, no time has passed.

As I said, I have swiped a number of things from this adventure. It probably counts as one of the most-stolen-from in my collection.

Likes

A grab-bag of items:

• Not that I don't like PATRIOT, but here the US military is involved, and it's quite reasonable, (it's their missile base, after all).
• Fully detailed missile base. You can use this again and again.
• An NPC hero who doesn't hog the spotlight.
• We have Dan Houser's unpatented Gluon technology to play with in the future.

I've gotten a lot of use out of this adventure. Even if you don't run it as written, there are a nice selection of parts to scavenge and re-purpose.

Dislikes

Editorially, the adventure feels like it goes on a bit about making this a groovy experience (with cake). In practice, that's only a paragraph or two and it's set aside so you could ignore the sidebar. That's a pretty small nitpick.

Changes and Consequences

One of the things I did was tie it into the Terrible Terror-Pin: Dr. Warp and he had been rivals for the same woman (the one the robots are modeled after, for the extra dose of creepiness). (It occurs to me the standard Dr. Warp robots can certainly be re-used elsewhere. If the plans became available on the Internet, no doubt every supervillain with buckets of money and even more megalomania would have them.) She married our professor instead of Dr. Warp, but Warp's reappearance and the looks of the robots push him over the edge and he dusts off the old unsafe tech to create a rival and destroy that Dr. Warp once and for all!

I should have done something with Platinum there (the ultimate villain of the piece), but I did throw in muck monsters (based on a cut-down of a writeup I did of Swamp Thing) to show that gluon technology had some disadvantages.

Assembled Updates

Part of the drill is that Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance; Life Drain becomes Energy Drain; Wizardry becomes Magic or Gadgets.

Platinum Bombshell

Powers

Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance; Wizardry becomes Gadgets; Blinding becomes Dazzle

Specialties

Computers, Electronics, and Mechanics all get folded into Technology Master.

Qualities

The seven challenges become three Qualities; my suggestions are:

• Clearly a robot (includes possibility of deactivation code)
• Eradicate humankind to bring about world peace!
• Weakness to EMP & electrical attacks shut down by EMP or a Major Success with electrical attacks.

Electric Dervish

Powers

Elemental Control (Electrical) becomes Electrical Control, with the base power of blast (the EMP pulse), and the extras Aura and Nullify (Limit: solid-state electronics only).

Specialties

The Computers and Electronics specialties become Technology.

Qualities

My suggestions are:

• “Electro-Magnificent!”
• Repair technician for the FBI
• Water! Why did it have to be water?

Dr. Warp

Specialties

Electronics, Computers, and Mechanics become Technology; the slightly higher mechanics we'll handle by invoking a Quality.

Qualities

My suggestions are:

• Mad Robotics Genius!
• Validate me and my creations!
• My beloved creations will help you

Golden Gyno-Droid

Specialties

Computers becomes Technology.

Qualities

My suggestions:

• Robot!
• Weakness to EMP & electrical attacks shut down by EMP or a Major Success with electrical attacks.
• Protect and obey Dr. Warp

General Franklin “Pitbull” Potter

Qualities

Only the Qualities need to be updated to Assembled. There are so many nice character bits, but we'll try these:

• General in US Army
• Hates superhumans of all kinds
• Gruff and Angry

Conclusion

I'd give this one an A. If you're not going to pick up the collection, you should certainly pick up this adventure.

Idea du jour: Family Business

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Idea du jour

Because we're all locked up, I suspect there are more one-on-one campaigns happening. This popped into my head.

The premise is that the player is playing one of the three heroes in the city. (Well, the player plays all three — one for each tier of play — but usually not concurrently.)

My current thinking is a family or pseudo-family; we're either talking three generations (or you can finesse it to two), or three siblings, something like that, one for each tier of play: Premier, Champion and Backup. For example:

• The eldest is the Premier hero. Although technically seventy years old, some doubletalk has kept this hero young, whether it was being frozen for fifty-five years, alien antagathic treatments, mutant metabolism, or a magic spell.
• The middle character is the Backup hero. He or she is rebelling against the absent parent and deliberately chose to do work at the local level instead of on the national or global stage.
• The Champion hero is the child of the Backup hero, or the grown-up sidekick. This character is ready to step out on the big stage, now.

The GM creates a supervillain for each one, but I'd produce it commercially with that setup in mind. Some of the universe creation stuff is already there (the villainous organization SKULL; the Association for Parareal Technology; the Sisters of the Sigilant; and so on) so the GM doesn't have to come up with it.

Provide character hooks galore, and the player characters are intertwined: Grandad just came out of suspended animation, Mom's taken over her husband's hero role because she thinks he's dead and has re-married, Junior is angry at Mom for betraying Dad's memory and ignoring Grandad, who seems cool, and is struggling with some romantic interest.

Provide half a dozen adventures and villains lightly sketched out, and provide twice as many seed.

Three campaign models immediately suggest themselves to me:

• You can play as the presented family or sub in your own characters for them
• Play as superhero rivals to them
• Play as their arch-foes and do a Romeo and Juliet thing

Silver Age weirdness

Any

Someone on Facebook was looking for Silver Age weirdness, like Batman and Robin on a giant typewriter or Superman going back in time and dating Marilyn Monroe on Krypton or something. (I think those are the examples he gave.)

So I put too much thought into this.

Adventures like that span both the Golden and Silver Ages, and to me it seems like they derive from a few things:

• First, they're mostly a DC thing, probably because Marvel was mostly doing monster and romance comics in the fifties. You can still find weirdness at every publisher, but we remember the DC ones.
• Apes and motorcycles always sold well; put them on the cover!
• They kind of come out of the idea that there aren't consequences. The audience for the stories is presumed to turn over in four years or less, so you don't get tied down in continuity. That's how you get some of those guano-crazy Bob Haney scripts, where Batman sells his soul to the devil or that Haney created Wonder Girl because he didn't realize that Kanigher had created Wonder Girl as the adventures of Wonder Girl when she was a teen.
• Some of it was just for the convenience of the artists. Giant props? They added visual interest while being things that might well be around the house, so it was easy for the artist to get it. None of this Harvey Kurtzman "No, Jack, the sulfa goes to the left of the gauze pad" business here.
• The comics were still trying to be “hip” and relevant to the kids today, so they would sprinkle in stuff like JFK or Marilyn Monroe, but often with slight changes to avoid legal problems.
• They weren't winking at the audience, who were presumably kids. If Superman fell in love with Lerilynlon-Roe on Krypton, he really did fall in love. The emotions were real, even if shallow, because the audience wasn't presumed to be ironic or sarcastic. They were kids.

Given all of that, you had to have what Orson Scott Card calls "event" stories and what Robin Laws calls "iconic" heroes. The characters didn't change because the characters couldn't change — you couldn't guarantee that a kid was going to get next month's issue or had bought last month's issue. (I've got a collected edition of Supergirl from the 1960s that's starting to get some continuity but in no way is it necessary for the stories...sometimes Supergirl uses something from another comic, and some things happen over two or three issues, but the changes are rarely permanent or are rarely personal.

Instead, you have more of a problem, attempt to solve, complication kind of structure.

Anyway, the original poster wanted some way of recreating the goofiness, and what occurred to me eventually was random tables. So we start with our premise, which is:

"An A gets powers but has to be pursued because he/she/it B, causing conflict, and there's this complication: D.

Use the appropriate die for each one; I'm just knocking this off, so I'm not striving for 6 or 10 or 20 of any of these.

A: the problem (apply 1. Giant or 2. Miniature if necessary)

#	This thing
1	Ape
2	A pet (cat, dog, something)
3	Insect
4	Robot/alien invader
5	Close friend of hero
6	Rival of the love interest

Changes in some way (gets powers, falls sick, is mutated, arrives on earth) but the heroes have to engage because it has:

1	Secret, like nuclear launch codes
2	Disease cure
3	Hero’s secret ID
4	Celebrity
5	Hero’s love/hate
6	Is actually a transformed friend of hero

So there's conflict. But there's a complication, which is part of what makes the story goofy.

Goofy complication

1	Hero is shrunk
2	Hero is grown
3	At place that makes giant working props
4	At historical period or mythical place of interest to readers
5	At historical period of interest to hero (Krypton, Crime Alley, etc)
6	Hero is altered some way (powerless, gender-swapped, obese, has head of ant, traded with subject of problem)

That gets you Superboy shrinking into a small engine (a Julie Schwarz joint, written by Kurt Busiek!), various Krypton adventures, probably goofy things with Atlantis, most Jimmy Olsen adventures... Get a motorcycle in there and you might be good.

Adventures versus fiction

I just noticed an interesting thing about roleplaying adventures versus fiction. They require different kinds of specificity.

What brought it to mind is that I'm writing a story built on the idea that an escape room gets suborned by a supervillain and the heroes have to solve the puzzles and defeat the supervillain while still hiding their secret identities.

In a roleplaying adventure, you probably have to come up with every puzzle in the escape room. Players can either solve the puzzles or bypass them, but the puzzles have to be there so that the players can choose whether or not to engage with them. The other stuff — the stuff about secret identities and figuring out the supervillain's plan and who (if anyone) is also a superhero in secret identity, and if there are others, who is the supervillain really after? That stuff gets set up but it emerges in play.

Like, if a player says, "Fuck it, I'm Hyperman!" that's a valid player choice. It's not in the spirit of the problem I put forth, but it's a valid choice.

In a story, however, the puzzles of the escape room are secondary — they're explained only to further some other concept, either showing who's really clever in the group, or that so-and-so really knows about locks, or whatever. The relationships turn out to be the important thing. So-and-so is a villain, or is probably a hero, or hates the person who makes their powers happen so didn't show up with that person tonight.

I have begun to think of this as putting a bathroom on the U. S. S. Enterprise:

In a story, it's not relevant to what you're doing. In a roleplaying adventure it has to be there. Someone might come up with a clever idea to fool the Klingons using the vanity mirror or something. Some player is going to ask about it, and having it helps their immersion.

Hope you're all taking care of yourselves

I'm not ignoring you, but I have to admit that right now I'm having a hard time forcing myself back to the computer when work hours are over. (Not that I don't spend too long obsessing over news from tweets and Facebook, but I'm trying to cut that down too.)

Game publishers are feeling the crunch, too. If you can, buy something from them; I just purchased one of the new adventures from Green Ronin for Mutants & Masterminds and one of the two missing Icons adventures from Ad Infinitum.

Be good to yourselves.

From Batman (1989)

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The 1989 Batman is on TV tonight, and I started wondering about it as a roleplaying session.

TL;DR: Not very good except as designed: for a single hero.

But let's try and figure it out anyway.

Structurally, it revolves around several people, but alas, for roleplaying we are primarily concerned about the scenes with the player(s). That makes it much shorter.

I missed the beginning of the movie (forgive me) and came in just after Joker kills Grissom. Still, let's try to piece it together. Some of this is from memory, so forgive me if it's not right.

• I missed the beginning but we get to have a sequence where the player gets to test out the system by beating up a mook.
• The next time that Batman shows up is at Ace Chemicals, where we get a fight sequence. Jack Napier then dies and Joker gets created.

Then Batman disappears from the story for quite a long time as we follow Jack Napier, Alexander Knox, and Vicki Vale. Now, that might be a good opportunity if you have some kind of a plot in mind, but it's got to be player-centric.

• Eventually we get to Bruce observing the Joker kill the mob boss. There's the seed of a good problem there: how do the players keep wanton murder from happening at the courthouse?
• The Smilex poison situation is a fine puzzle, but it could be resolved with a pyramid test as they try to find out the combinations of products.
• The encounter in the museum, rescuing Vicki Vale and the subsequent chase, relies heavily on Batman being outnumbered. Might not be true for a group of heroes.
• The encounter with the Joker in Vale's apartment is inconclusive, and is primarily a roleplaying event, with the realization of who Jack Napier is; don't know offhand how you'd make that sort of thing personal without knowing the heroes.
• Then there's the poison gas from the parade balloons. Batman just happens to have the equipment to deal with it (he blew a determination point or his Gadgets applies to the bat-thing as well), but a lot of people still die. (Bats gets lots of leeway because he is apparently the first person to dress up in a costume and fight crime.)
• And then the sequence in the church bell tower. Again, that's really a fight that's mano a mano, so it doesn't translate for a group of heroes.

That's not a bad number of encounters for an evening's adventure, so let's spitball for a moment.

We kinda want the villain created in the adventure. You could do a Fantastic Four or Challengers of the Unknown thing here, and have a group created.

Let's go over those encounters again, but try and make them really broad descriptions. Maybe we can pull enough out that they'd be good for a group.

1. Announcement that the heroes are there, and minion encounter.
2. Big fight that's really to trigger the creation of the villains.
3. The puzzle as the villains unleash some kind of crime.
4. The heroes and the bad guys meet in order to rescue someone who is the object of the villains' attentions (OotVA).
5. There's some encounter involving the OotVA which lets the heroes connect the villains to something personal.
6. The villains launch their Big Scheme and the heroes deal with it.
7. Final boss fight.

Okay, that's actually not a bad structure. Of course, putting flesh on that skeleton is the tough part.

I think we really need to hold to the idea that these are the first heroes, or the first in decades. That way, we have a reason that the heroes don't immediately march to the local branch of Heroes Anonymous and demand to be let in.

The heroes can be of any type, but they got their powers at the same event: the event triggered the mutation (for Birthright), transformed, caused the need for training, and so on.

The group of villains would heavily depend on what your player characters are. For our purposes we'll make all of the villains some kind of Transformed. And a chemical plant is not a bad place for the accident, so we'll keep that.

We could combine the first two, actually: the big Ace Chemical fight is mostly against minions anyway.

Characters for Egg of Monsters

The Egg of Monsters

Icons

Oh, I threw up a story (an apt way of putting it, I suppose), but I didn't put up the character write-ups for Icons.

• Mr. Verity Already written up; follow the link.
• Dr. Tavor
• Nora Stern of the CDC
• Dracula
• Various feral dogs standing in for wolves, where I just used the Wolf characteristics from the Icons Assembled rulebook.
• The Egg of the Moors I handle as a plot device; it has a Supreme (10) Alteration Ray (Dimensional Travel to pocket dimension) and a fussy ritual.

Doctor Tavor, or Dr. Acula

Doctor Wilhelm Tavor is a parahuman with vampire-like powers, and who suffers from occasional breaks in reality where he believes that he is actually Dracula, Lord of the vampires.

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
5	5	7	5	5	7	10
Specialties		Medicine, Mental Resistance, Athletics Master (+3)
Powers		Good Energy Drain (5) Extra:: Life Drain Extra: Ability Resistance Amazing Life Support (8) Mind Control Extra: Burst (Limit: Animals only) Limit: Hypnosis (Humans only) Extra: Regeneration Limit: Source (Energy Drain) Poor Gliding (2) Average Super--senses (3) (Darksight, +1 vision, +1 hearing)
Qualities:		Thinks he's Dracula in the wrong body Accepts vampiric weaknesses Can't recover Stamina except through Energy Drain

 

Nora Stern, CDC

Nora was a field operative for the CDC, investigating outbreaks of vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

Unfortunately, during a recent case, she was bitten by Dracula and became his thrall. She managed to hide it, and acted as though the subsequent banishment of Dracula meant that she was cured.

She began plotting to reverse the banishment and bring back her lord and master. It was a long and bloody campaign in which she was almost entirely successful, except for the part where Mynah showed up.

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
3	4	3	4	4	4	7
Specialties		Driving, Investigation, Martial Arts Expert (+2), Medicine, Occult
Equipment		Taser, hand crossbow, phone, pistol
Qualities		Dracula's thrall (wounds on neck never heal) Field operative Sly and devious

 

Dracula

Don't get excited: this is the Super Villain Handbook version of Dracula cut down to represent extreme hunger and fatigue.

CDC (Supernatural Threats)

If you've done the math, you might realize that vampires are extremely contagious. Worst case, they double in numbers every mumble-mumble days. Even if it takes three bites and vampires only feed every week, that's doubling every month. It's the population of the earth in about three years.

Obviously, we're not hip-deep in undead, and part of that reason is the CDC. (And part of it is that these threats are not 100% contagious, though they're still bad.)

A small group in the CDC works with its counterparts in other nations to prevent certain kinds of contagions—vampires and werewolves primarily—and some memetic infections. They don't deal with cryptids or extraterrestrials; they wouldn't handle the invasion of the body snatchers...but they'd know who to call.

Temp! (The temp)

SYSTEM: ICONS

Meet Temp (Tom Asamot). In some ways, he's just a worker in the gig economy—he temps for all sorts of office organizations. He's really good at accounting and Microsoft Office (and he can really organize files). He's fairly bright and he's quick, and he has his truck and limousine licenses.

Also, he has some superpowers.

So he temps for superhero groups and supervillain groups when they need a bit of muscle. He temps for both. (What, you think there are so many vacancies on hero groups that he can get make a living at it?)

Powers? Well, he heals like crazy and he can fly a little bit (but not so fast that taking the car or train isn't usually a better option). It's hard to read his mind. Oh, yeah, he can be crazy strong for about ten rounds.

He sometimes works for SuperUber, the hero transport company, so the heroes might run across him if they call a SuperUber to the crime scene, or he might be temping in the villain hideout. Or he could escape the raid on the villain hideout and then be hired in the hero hideout.

The two things to remember about Tom are that he knows everybody because he's been around and that he's strict about not spilling anybody's secrets. So even if he does know where the villain hideout is, he's not going to tell, because he might need a job from them someday.

That could be a scenario subplot: the heroes need some information, and Tom is the guy who knows. How do they get it from him?

TEMP (Tom Asamot - Birthright)
PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
6	6	4	4	5	5	9
Specialties		Business (+1), Drive (+1), Mental Resistance Expert (+2)
Powers		Great (6) Regeneration Average (3) Flight Supreme (10) Strength Increase Limit: Temporary
Qualities		Still a fill-in Works both sides of the street Knows everybody

Degrees instead of multiple attempts

SYSTEM: ICONS, M&M

It just occurred to me degrees of success are easier than multiple attempts to achieve something using a skill.

Now, that might seem evident, but let me blather on for a bit more. Let's assume a situation I'm stealing from the Angry DM (whose work I sort of agree with but not necessarily and I'm not crazy about the angry schtick):

A player is evading someone. They run across a door that's locked. They can double back, they can pick the lock and go in, they can keep moving. They decide to pick the lock and go in. In the Angry DM's example, it takes three successes to pick the lock. I have to wonder why. (Really it's because he has a different axe to grind, involving the superiority of binary systems but I'm going a different way.)

• By requiring three attempts you're doing two things: First, you're increasing the chance of failure. (If it's a 50% chance of success, then three successes are .5*.5*.5, or one eighth instead of one half, which means that suddenly the character is going to fail seven out of eight times instead of one out of two times.) You're vastly increasing the chance of failure.
• You're expending the player's resources, because each attempt takes time. So at best, the character takes whatever time it takes for three lockpicking attempts.

Let's say it's conscious that you know you want to do these two things. Why not set it up so that you're doing them with one roll?

Result	Effects
3+ success	You're in, having picked the lock, but it cost you (time)!
2 success	You're in, having picked the lock, but it cost you 2x(time)!
1 success	You're in, having finally picked the lock, but it cost you 3x(time) and the pursuer knows you're in there
1 failure	Can't quite get the lock, so you take off
2 failure	Can't get it, and the pursuer is so close when you take off
3+ failure	We're fightin' here, because PC is caught.

As I type this, I'm realizing that many of the qualifications that I have put on things as a player ("I'm going to try to pick the lock but if I'm not getting it, I'm taking off!") are attempts to do exactly this, or forestall the really bad dice roll.

But why not think about it? Why not decide if a situation is binary or not? Sometimes something works or it doesn't. "I attempt to persuade her that these are not swords, I am a traveling Ginzu knife salesman." (One of the joys of actual TTRPG is that the GM might decide at that point that she laughs and decides that she's not going to call the cops because I have amused her instead of trying to kill her. That's not binary, but it counts as a success in my book.)

If multiple skills are involved, do you want a success pyramid instead? As GM you happen to know that the door is to Crisolanthe's bedchambers, and Crisolanthe is kept isolated because she is a conduit to strange energies. (The bad guy was going to drain them from her when she was of age, which will be soon.) So maybe to evade the pursuers you need the player to roll lockpicking (to get in) and persuasion (to keep Crisolanthe from calling for the guard or from zapping you, whichever fits Crisolanthe's personality.)

I probably wouldn't in this particular case because I'm suddenly interested in the Crisolanthe story, but you aren't, so you deliberately set it up as a success pyramid, but there are only six attempts possible: The player has to get three cumulative degrees of success on lockpicking before a deadline, and then at least one success on persuasion.

This approach also depends on choosing possible actions that have degrees, and sometimes it's difficult to do that in the heat of play.

Let's say they've come up with a plan to substitute one doodad for their forged doodad that will do something different, so when the bad guy thinks he's triggering the bomb that will destroy Venice, he's actually opening the doors to the secret base.

The obvious to me thing is that you have a simple roll of sleight of hand to substitute the remote, and then maybe a notice check so the bad guy has a chance to discover the flaw.

You've just reduced the heroes' chance of success by requiring two checks for the bad guy to notice the switch (once for the substitution, once when bad guy looks at remote). I'm pretty sure you already made one of those tougher than normal because it seemed like it should be, so why have to make both of them? (To increase the suspense, I hear you say....but really? You can't do that with roleplaying?) (Worse, you probably made them make a forgery roll at some point, and they passed it. If they didn't pass it, I might give them the notice check, but really? They passed it, dude.)

Because there are two different things involved—the forgery check andthe sleight of hand check—I might think about doing it as a success pyramid...but I might do it in a different order:

• We don't roll for the forgery first. We assume they constructed the doodad to have it available. Not gonna roll at this point.
• We roll sleight of hand when the time comes. Take note of the degrees of success or failure, but the thing is it always gets placed. (This is similar to my earlier idea that attacks by named villains always hit or are narrow misses, but sometimes they don't matter.)
• Then, when Bad Guy picks up the remote, we check to see if he/she/it notices. This is really the crucial roll, so we make it a contested roll, good guy forgery versus bad guy notice...and every degree of success or failure on the sleight of hand roll counts as a bonus to the forgery roll. In the wrong place? The bad guy looks at it more closely. In the right place and looks great? Bad guy doesn't notice at all.

Forgery + degrees of sleight vs Notice	Effect
3+ success	The good guys are racing to get in
2	The good guys are in
1	The good guys are in but noticed
1 Failure	He notices and does not use the remote
2+	He has feinted and fooled you in some way.

In both cases degrees of success or failure involve some kind of retcon or behind-the-scenes planning: The forces of the good guys are in and have overwhelmed the guards vs the bad guy has secret signaled some kind of alternate punishment for the players. If you don't like that kind of thing, then you don't like this idea much.

But the idea is to minimize the number of dice rolls and have them happen when the effect is known, rather than as they happen in the course of events.