Weird idea o’ the day

Any

It's tough to come up with a vampire-Renfield relationship that doesn't devolve into Arte Johnson scuttling around for George Hamilton's Dracula, but one that occurred to me this morning (thanks to the Facebook group Comics Out Of Context) is Batman and Alfred.

(I might have read it before but I don't remember it, and I'm more concerned about portraying it in a roleplaying game anyway.)

Anyway, the servant who is quite competent (unlike early Alfred, but his modern incarnation), and who is doing it not because of some spell or mind-control or because he hopes to be gifted with eternal life, but rather because he owes the vampire, and worked for him before the change, and continues to work for him after.

That might work in the context of a mob family, too, where the capo becomes vampirized.

What an off-beat Icons scenario: Gang war, but one side is headed by Octofather and the other by the vampire capo. ...I might scribble some notes down on that...

What are superhero campaigns about, anyhow?

Any

I've seen the accusation leveled that, because superhero stories are essentially about returning the world to the status quo, superhero stories are essentially about supporting “The Man” and they are therefore a bad thing.

Not surprisingly, I disagree, but it took me a long time to figure out why, and as usual someone else said it first and better, and I'm riding on their coattails.

Alas, I do not remember who said it first and better (when I find out, I'll try to amend this post), so let me say it later and worse:

Yes, superhero stories are power fantasies, but the central conceit of those fantasies is that the powerful use their powers to make the world a better place. Yes, Batman is clearly a white guy with old money, but he is that thing that's all too rare in the real world, the billionaire who cares. Superman dealt with slumlords and wife beaters in his early days, and I think it's telling that his principal foe is a wealthy capitalist.

Given that, it occurs to me that you can put that front and center in a role-playing campaign. Superhero stories and campaigns can be about righting a wrong. The adventures are less about “Oh no Dr. Badness has unleashed his BadMadCad ray on the world!” and more about dealing with the ills of the world as personified by various villains.

That sounds a bit preachy, and that's not what I mean. We're not talking about the Social Justice Warriors here, even if the characters deal with issues that social justice warriors deal with.

In retrospect, I dislike most of the Iron Age (“We're gritty! We have pain and awfulness up front!”) but one of the tropes that shows up a lot is that the heroes become heroes because they have suffered a social injustice.

That's not a bad reason....though it was frequently done in a ham-fisted way.

I see a couple of factors as important here.

• Addressing wrongs The characters are dealing with problems that are in some way representative of actual problems. This doesn't have to be resolving the problems (superheroes are essentially a serial form) but dealing with them, in the same way that the X-Men deal with hatred and mistrust. (Side note: in some ways, I see the decline of secret identities as being representative of a more accepting nature to LGBTQ+ lifestyles, that being super isn;t necessarily the issue...but that's not well-supported; I just now thought of it and might dcide I am wrong.)
• Costumes and codenames This one is perhaps less essential than the others, but the use of costumes and codenames actually lifts the characters to the symbolic level. It's not just Barbara dealing with the wife-beater, it's Batgirl.
• Doing it because it's right Look, there's an interesting conflict between the guy who stops crimes as a 9-to-5 job and the guy who does it just because it's right. It's kind of like the conflict that was introduced when Spidey and others deal with the Punisher...because the Punisher is a serial killer, and Spidey is not.

(There are probably others that I haven't thought of.)

Now, none of these are essential, but the more you don't do these, the more you get away from superheroes and the more you get toward people with powers.

And there is a difference, to my mind.

So doing a vigilante campaign is entirely possible and even a vigilante superhero campaign. Doing a weird mystic campaign is tougher, but I can imagine ways to pull it off. And, to my mind, the important thing is that it would feel like a superhero campaign.

Ripping off something current

DC Heroes

A couple of thoughts converged with some events today: A friend found his copy of DC Heroes 3rd edition; I have often thought that being in a super team in the DC universe is like being in a garage band; and I have been watching Stargirl.

With a suggestion from that same friend, here's the rip-off idea:

• Kids find a hidden supervillain lair with foci, and decide to become superheroes, but they are pretty obviously using supervillain gimmickry. So the villains get mad at them for stealing their tech and the heroes come to beat on them because they are obviously Villainy The Next Generation.

The first thought is that this should have a Millennium vs Boomer kind of vibe. I don't know how much that will come across because, uh, my friends are boomers. But we'll try.

Now, the Stargirl influence provides a couple of things: there aren't a lot of heroes in the area (it's the Ontario, Canada equivalent of Blue Valley), the age of the protagonists, and the legacy vs originals kind of conflict

The setting is easy; I ran a DC Heroes adventure in which the player characters where former teen heroes who had been given hero-ing jobs in a JobsOntario grant; fast forward that by forty years or so and make at least some of the kids children of the original heroes.

All of the heroes seem to be gimmick based, but it doesn't have to be so. I think you can get by with only some of the heroes being gimmick based. Try it this way:

For various reasons, Amber wishes she was a superhero, especially when she discovers that her dad put on a costume and fought crime for a couple of years. But (a) dad refuses to let her and (b) she has no powers. She's friends with Evelyn, who has the power to come back to life. (“Immortality like this isn't really a crime-fighting kind of power. It just means I keep returning, and that my folks are a lot more careless about their safety precautions.”) Evelyn probably has additional super powers, but she's not passionate about the crime-fighting thing like Amber is; she might go along, though.

And then they meet Christopher. Christopher is an alien (it's an exchange program with Saturn; we needn't go into the details) but he can phase through items. To impress Amber, whom he has a bit of a crush on, he points them to a lair filled with supervillain gadgets. In fact, someone stole all of these from the warehouse where they keep the belongings of incarcerated supervillains, and is planning to ransom them back to the supervillains when they get out, but the kids don't know that.

What Amber knows is that here's her chance to be a superhero.

Then we get into conflicts. The guy who stole the gimmicks is after them. The supervillains are after them. Heroes think they're obviously villains.

Now, that's a nice setup for a story or a comic series. What it has is an awful lot of arm-twisting in order for the players to create characters, so it's not a general setting.

I'll keep thinking about it.

The Fenwick Story

Champions

This is a Champions story from long ago, but I figured I'd set down what I remember of it, so I could point to it. I've referred to this several times over the years, and I want to again.

Preface: I regard combat as integral to superhero roleplaying games. At the point where this story happened, I tried for combat in every session, even if it was "You see a mugger, so you deal with him." In Champions, however, combat can take a long time to play out. (That's why I eventually dumped Champions though I find that combat with my gang often takes a long time to play out, regardless of the system.) The other thing you need to know is that the players are much brighter than I am, so by necessity I evolved to a gamemastering system where I set up a premise and let them go. Though I tried to be railroad-y and present the story, I had to let it go because I couldn't out-think them. This was an important step in that process.

As I recall the setting for the adventure, one or more people were held captive in a RAVEN headquarters. At that time, the concept was that RAVEN funded any number of take-over-the-world schemes, and each one became a RAVEN operation. The intent was, I think, to model spy and superhero stories where there's no consistency between schemes.

Knowing this, the players decided to infiltrate the base as auditors. They made up fake IDs, got clipboards, put on suits, and showed up at the front door of the base. (I believe James Nicoll's character was drafted to play the head auditor, and I'm pretty sure he came up with the name Fenwick.)

“This is Fenwick. From Accounting.”

This tickled me.

“Right. Just a sec while we get the locks and you can come in.”

Sound of muffled, worried consultation. The doors eventually open, and the supreme base leader is there, nervously.

“We'll start at the top and work down. Head office is concerned about how you're spending their money. I'd like a tour of the entire facility.”

At this point, the players have asked them to reveal that everything is on the up-and-up, so the obvious response is that it isn't. I improvise various details, like the laundry room being full because all the sheets are being washed (to hide that they're silk) or that someone had faultily changed the menu in the cafeteria from "TODAY'S SPECIAL: LOBSTER BISQUE" to "TODAY'S SPECIAL: CAMPBELL'S SOUP." The warning “It's Fenwick! From Accounting!” being passed down the corridors.

Frankly, I was having too much fun improvising ways in which this group of bad guys had been ripping off the RAVEN Supreme Command to find a way to shoe-horn combat in there.

Eventually, they found the hostages, and there might maybe have been a bit of combat in getting the hostages out, but I don't think so; I think the players came up with a plan and executed it and the hostages were freed.

Aftermath: Well, someone (I don't remember if it was me or James or maybe someone else) played Fenwick in an adventure later. In Hero games, that means you put all your points into Presence. The line, “It's Fenwick! From Accounting!” happened in our group for a while.

Anyway, that was a session without combat, and it was a ton of fun.

Even though it was a superhero game.

Random Tables You Didn't Know You Needed (superheroes)

Superheroes

I have lately been suffering from a creative slump, so I of course decided that what the world needs is more random tables...so that people in a creative slump can randomly roll for an idea that they can then refuse in favour of something else they just thought up. (Well, that's how it works for me.)

My goal is eventually to provide 36 options on each of these tables (2d6 worth) but in no way will I be providing that many now. (See above re: "creative slump".) But I'll try to provide at least six for each one.

Where an h is specified, it means the number of heroes, so if the gang is 2h and there are three heroes, it's a gang of six.

Look, you can come up with "Mugging" yourself. Here are some others.

Random street crimes

1D6	The Crime, Of Course
1	Guys damaging a building (extortion or hate crime against occupants) with h+3 crooks
2	Gang fight (because group B is infringing on group A's territory) with 2h each side.
3	Getaway vehicle from crime, with h+1 guys in vehicle
4	Robbery, man, with h+1 bad guys and h victims
5	Train robbery: 4 folks moving through a commuter train or subway robbing people and with someone waiting to get them away before next stop.
6	A person threatening to take own life, either as a distressed person or as a suicide bomber.

Sometimes a hero has to make a choice between hero-ing and personal obligations like these; this assumes, of course, that the hero has a secret identity.

Personal Obligations

1D6	Obligation
1	My beloved fill-in-the-blank is sick and I must be by the bedside!
2	Birthday or anniversary party. Big deal for them, so don't miss it.
3	Interview (job? journalistic subject?) or sitting for an exam, and it's been postponed once already.
4	My beloved has a doctor's appointment and I promised to be there in case it's bad news.
5	First date. Gonna blow them off because Dr. Demolition is blowing up the neighbourhood?
6	Pet needs to go to vet, stat.

And remember, at any time the player can decide that the personal obligation takes precedence: prepare for that.

Of course, you might want a random table of random things, as Dan Swanson has suggested:

Random Random Stuff

D6, D6	Random Stuff
1, 1	A cow.
1, 2	An old computer
1, 3	True love, available in a bottle.
1, 4	A portable trailer full of paper tapes recording the weather patterns of the 1960s.
1, 5	A paper bag containing a dog turd, suitable for putting on a porch and setting on fire.
1, 6	Magical amulet that looks like a snazzy brooch.
2, 1	A disabled gun.
2, 2	An old catalog.
2, 3	Leftover gear from a supervillain.
2, 4	An old digital recording medium (cassette tape, wire reel, record, wax cylinder, etc.) that might be useless or it might have valuable secrets on it.
2, 5	Designer clothes that are out of fashion.
2, 6	How-To book.
3, 1	Alien weapon.
3, 2	Crossword puzzle.
3, 3	Protest placard.
3, 4	$100,000 in large bills in a woman's clutch purse but no identification.
3, 5	Lyrics to a sea shanty but altered to contain a clue.
3, 6	Roller blades.
4-5, 1	Uniform of a decorated armed forces officer.
4-5, 2	Black book containing a stunning number of celebrity and politician numbers.
4-5, 3	A shard from a glass knife that killed a witch.
4-5, 4	Hair clippings from a famous super, during the time they had lost their powers.
4-5, 5	Lost flip phone.
4-5, 6	Musical instrument once played by a celebrity (i.e., glockenspiel once played by Buddy Holly; sawblade used as a cymbal by Gene Krupa)
6, 1	Ring from a candy box that grants the wearer great strength but also great rage.
6, 2	Page from an old bible with family records, written in some kind of red-brown ink (or possibly blod).
6, 3	Stack of Post-It™ notes.
6, 4	Box of chocolates.
6, 5	Replica of a particular medieval weapon.
6, 6	Pencil once owned by a celebrity.

And ICONS needs benchmarks for area and probably volume.

Level	Distance	Area	Volume
1	A couple of yards	A quilt for a king-size bed.	An elevator.
2	Across a street.	A city block.	A two-storey suburban home or hot air balloon.
3	A city block.	Several city blocks.	A small office building or a blimp.
4	Several city blocks.	Square mile.	A stadium.
5	Ten to twenty city blocks.	Area of a small city.	City block of skyscrapers.
6	A few miles.	A county or a small state or province.	Lake Erie.
7	Tens of miles.	A North American state or province (but not one of the really small ones).	Lake Superior.
8	Hundreds of miles.	A country.	Atlantic Ocean.
9	Thousands of miles.	A continent.	Volume of the moon.
10	Virtually anywhere.	Surface of the earth.	Volume of the earth.

Or maybe the personal life; roll 1D3 for the number of pets:

Pets

2D6	Pet
2	Rare and normally illegal (panther, orangutan, genetically engineered lynx, etc.)
3	Farm animal (pig, chicken, goat, sheep)
4	Rare tropical fish
5	Rabbit
6	Dog(s)
7	Cat
8	Rodent (mouse, rat, gerbil, guinea pig, capybara, etc.)
9	Bird (budgie, parakeet, canary, parrot, mynah, etc.)
10	Reptile (chameleon, bearded dragon, boa constrictor, turtle, etc.)
11	Spider or insect
12	Person who pretends to be a pet because owner is allergic.

Day Off — A Mynah Story

This writing forum has prompts, so I wrote this.

Day Off

I hid the leash (the dog’s not allowed), fed the dog and refilled the water dish, shut him in the office with his bed, and then flopped onto my bed — a futon I hadn’t re-set as a couch. I was supposed to be a supervillain, dammit, or at least I was trying to be, but in the last week I’d dealt with an alien invasion, a misplaced attempt to resurrect the dead, and a graduation test for superheroes.

Whatever happened to just stealing things?

There was a knock at the door.

Nope, I thought. Not gonna get it. Gonna lie here in my sweaty running clothes and ignore it.

I knew it wasn’t someone important. Betsy and Shelley had keys and would walk in. The rent wasn’t due for a week, and the landlord communicated with notes under the door. Business used email. So it was someone going through the building selling something or offering salvation, and I wasn’t interested.

I lay there, sweating. My heart rate came back to normal. The dog was silent. (I have trained him not to make sounds when someone comes to the door.) So the apartment appeared empty.

The door creaked open. (There’s a way to open it silently, which my friends and I use. But why not know someone has opened your door?)

I rolled off the bed and landed silently because this had just gotten real. Quick layout of my hideously expensive apartment: Enter through the kitchen/dining room; the bedroom-turned-office is straight ahead and is where the dog eats; the washroom is behind the kitchen (shower, no bath), and the living room which I have as a bedroom fills out the square. There’s a lock on the office door but I hadn’t used it; I was home, right?

In violation of fire codes, there is no fire escape. It’s only the second floor; better than even odds I survive the jump.

For those of you saying, “Use your super powers” I remind you that (a) I don’t use them out of costume and (b) they’re actually Crappy Sonic Powers™. Strictly by powers, I’m not much of a supervillain.

I mean, seriously. Back when I was trying to find a nemesis, the guy I approached thought it was actually a date and then a former co-worker in an android body tried to attack. I’ve had a few successes but a lot of stuff has been side quests just to stay alive.

But hey, at least I don’t work at Faceless Corporation any more. You work with what you got.

There was a sound of disgust that sounded male. At a guess, he’d seen the dishes in the sink. (I’d been busy, okay?)

If he went into the office, he was going to have to deal with the dog. Slobberkin is an eight-month-old St. Bernard puppy and he’s getting kind of large.

With luck, Slobberkin would lick the burglar to death. Of course, then I’d have to figure out a way to dispose of the body.

Best move was to attack him from behind as he went into the office and hope that the two attacks (one licking, one hitting) would give me the edge.

The fight, quote-unquote, was over in three seconds. While Slobberkin was sitting on him, licking, I got the leather leash and tied his hands and feet.

He was a young guy in a polo shirt with a proselytizing look and a briefcase. No gun, no knife, not even a utility tool in his pocket. He had a burner phone and a screwdriver for bumping locks (so he was never going to get into my office if it was locked). I popped the briefcase open and found Shelley’s grandmother’s silver (Shelley lives down the hall) and a couple of other items that looked fence-able and probably came from this building.

He had come to steal from me.

I mean, he didn’t know who I was — that is the whole point behind the secret identity thing — but I found it terribly funny.

And I couldn’t even explain to him why, which made it funnier.

Shelley was working, Betsy was working, so I had to deal with this on my own.

The straight citizen thing to do would have been to call the cops, but I didn’t want them poking around my place. The less they knew about me, the better.

Also, I didn’t want them mentioning Slobberkin.

This guy knew where I lived, so showing up as the Mynah wasn’t going to work — see earlier re: secret identities.

So I lied. It’s getting to be second nature to me now.

“Anyone take vig off you?” I asked him. This was old movie mob talk; goodness knows what real mobsters say. I did know the names of three criminal groups in the city, because that’s the kind of info you have to know if you’re planning to be a thief-slash-supervillain.

“What?”

“Independent?”

“What?”

“Just trying to save you some trouble.” I tried to be nonchalant.

“What?” he asked for the third time. This whole situation seemed to be beyond him. I don’t think he’d ever make it as a supervillain.

While his mouth was open, Slobberkin licked inside it. He’s an affectionate dog. I pulled him back a bit.

“I’m an accountant,” I told the man. Which was true; that was my pre-supervillainy occupation.

“Whoopee,” he said.

“For an organization that feels that robbing from their employees is…disrespectful.” I had his attention, if not his comprehension. I took my phone out of its running sleeve. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t call them and and have someone encourage respect in a direct and forceful way?” Please let there be a reason. I actually had no one to call.

Well, I suppose I could call Faceless Corporation, my former employer, but they didn’t know they’d given me powers, and probably wouldn’t care that this guy had stolen from me.

“You’ve got my loot.”

Well, at least “loot” was current slang. “I mean, are you giving vig to someone for protection? Because calling uses up a certain amount of my capital.”

He looked at me sullenly. It was like he was too stupid to scare.

“Okay.” I hauled him into the kitchen, locked the office door with Slobberkin inside, and checked the knots so he could escape, and I carried his “loot” with me into the bathroom to make my “phone call.” The bathroom, you see, had a door that I could shut and lock.

I made up a long conversation, about fifteen minutes’ worth. Given his smarts, I figured he wouldn’t be able to get into the office and it’s not like I had any weapons in there. Maybe he could try to brain me with the paperweight, but he knew the dog was in there.

There were three possibilities:

1. He escaped and left; that was the outcome I was counting on.
2. Or, he escaped but was lurking by the bathroom door when I exited. (My plan was to leave the bathroom as if that were true, because some men get so angry when beaten by a woman.)
3. He was too stupid to escape. But nobody was so dumb that they’d pick that.

When I left the bathroom, he was still lying there on the kitchen floor.

Aw, hell.

#

I carefully approached him and checked the knots. No, he hadn’t even tried to get out. I re-fastened them securely.

“I was thinking,” he said. “Paying—what did you call it? Vig?—to somebody for protection would help me. I mean, I don’t make a lot—” I stared at him in disbelief.

He took it as doubt. “I mean, I do okay ‘cause more people than you’d think forget to lock their doors, and sometimes I really score, but a neighbourhood like this, I mean, who knew?”

“I plan on moving,” I lied to him. I might have to move if he knew where I lived. “I need a bit more seniority.”

“Lotta crooks in this area,” he said, apparently without irony. “So I’m thinking, I could ask your boss for protection.”

“Now?” I said. “Now that I’ve called him you want to change the terms?”

“Is now not a good time? I mean, it’s a better time than when the guy comes to break my knees.”

I swore internally. I didn’t have anybody coming to break his knees, but it looked like a good option.

I wished Slobberkin had licked him to death. At least I could figure out how to dispose of a dead body.

“I gotta call him,” I said. Already I was talking like I was in Wise Guys or something.

In the bathroom, I was furiously trying to think of big men I could call to come over. It had to be someone in the supers life, because how was I going to explain this to anyone else?

#

“I dunno if he’ll say yes,” I told the burglar. “Here’s the address.” I gave him the address, then made him repeat it, because I had no faith in this guy’s memory. “Tell them Jane sent you.”

I was prepared to tell him it was a sublet if he asked about the different name on the mailbox, but he never asked; he had the curiosity of a park bench. I kept Shelley’s silver out of the briefcase but gave the rest back to him. “You’ll need to be able to prove you have income.”

I was ready for him to attack me when I untied him, but he didn’t. He shook my hand and headed off, sure that he had made the best deal of his life.

#

You remember the guy who thought I was dating him? Not the one with the android body, the other one. We had deleted each other’s address, but—

I knew he had set up a SendMeCash account to become a superhero, because he was worried about said android body co-worker. (Why, I don’t know. It was me the co-worker had come for.)

He goes by Tangent now, and he was a beginner, so an easy target was good. At the least, the guy would get beat up, and possibly he’d be arrested. I mean, he did have stolen property on him.

It was possible Tangent would get my address from him, so I’d have to move anyway.

Maybe I’ll find a place that allows dogs.

Theme as lodestone

Any

Yesterday I mentioned theme as lodestone, and in some ways the idea of “theme” in a roleplaying game is ludicrous. If the players can do anything how can you enforce a theme?

And frankly, the discussion of theme is so confused in English classes and writing books throughout the English-speaking world that it's totally understandable if someone says, “Man versus Nature? What does that mean? ‘Love makes you do stupid things’? What noise is this?”

Okay. Here are thoughts from an unsuccessful author and game writer.

Most statements of themes given in English classes are banal and trite statements. If they summarized the novel or story, there wouldn't be a reason to write the novel or story. So in that sense, &lquo;theme” is a pile of crap. I strongly suspect that theme is of little use as a post mortem thing. Nobody has ever finished a novel and said, “Wow. What a great statement of ‘Man versus the world!’”

However, I think that it's undeniable that well-crafted fiction has a mood. That mood can be supported by the setting, by the characters, and by the events.

• A story that takes place in Edge City is very different from a story that takes place Utopia Village, British Columbia.
• A story where all the men are crap to the female protagonist is different from a story where some of the men are helping the female protagonist.
• A story that starts with a bus jumping the sidewalk and killing the protagonist's spouse is different from a story that begins with the first evidence of a years-long plan.

(In a sense this part of the trend in fiction of piling on small details. It does require an educated audience, but that's a discussion for a different day.)

I think that “lodestone” or “shibboleth” is perhaps a better metaphor but I think of it as the wall of a handball court. (Why, I dunno; I don't even play handball.) You're a writer; you have a billion ideas. You throw ideas at the wall of theme and the ones that bounce back in the right direction are the ones you take.

In this sense, “theme” is a creative tool, not an analytic tool. Your statement of theme might be as focused as “Bob is an abusive dad and his kids can’t escape” or as broad as “Men are crap.” It's a sieve; it's a measuring stick (ldquo;You must be this tall to sack the city”).

By picking a theme or mood early in the creation of a story or adventure, you can discard ideas that don't fit. By calling it something separate than setting or character, we also make it larger and more influential.

I hope that helps in using theme. I'll expand this later, but now it's time to go to work.

Random Adventure Structures

Any

I'm reading through the Covetous Poet's Adventure Creator (that's not the full name, but it will do), and they're strongly influenced by story structures, so the point where when creating a pre-written adventure, he divides it up into overall, act 1, act 2, and act 3.

In one way, this resonates with me because I've also absorbed so much of those articles about structure (without fully believing them: those structures are not the only way to write a story, and there's a lovely article in the Guardian, I think, exposing the lifework of the late Blake Snyder, the author of Save The Cat...I'll try to find the link again and append it. Edit: here it is, someplace else: less a scholarly article and more of a rant.)

So recognizing that these structures are not the only way to write a story and it shouldn't be a straitjacket, Covertous Poet organizes things so you have an overarching idea (who's my villain? What's he or she or it trying to do? What theme am I using as a lodestone when I have ideas?), a set of events in the first act, and a set of problems or challenges in the second act. In the third act, you try and bring it all together, and I haven't yet run across much guidance on that.

Caveat: As I've gotten older, it is much more difficult for me to absorb information from PDFs and that's the only way I have Adventure Creator. PDFs are far superior if I'm searching for a specific bit of information...they have a search function, with all the good and bad that entails...but for initially absorbing it, not so good. Soon I will provide a review of PGC 1: The Blood Saga, an adventure the author asked me to review years ago and I couldn't get into it because it was PDF. It took me literally years to realize I could print it out and read it. Apologies to the author.

Anyway, CP has broken it down into three acts: beginning, middle, end. But one of the things I've noticed with random roll adventures is that they can go on forever: in Mythic GME for instance you might not roll the scene setup that says "Close a thread" and you keep adding stuff and adding stuff, and you've got this unwieldy mess.

Here's the four parts as devised by Syd Field, I think, and modified by others, such as Larry Brooks:

1. We get involved. This is the part where we see what “normal” is and have some kind of event that sucks the characters in. In a movie or a book, this can be quite protracted, but for other things, like TV shows where we know what normal is, it can be quite short. Also, stories that are mostly about people meddling in the affairs of others (cop shows, doctor shows, superhero series) can get by with a brief description in a scene: “He was fine this morning, doc, and then this afternoon he complained of some vague pain in his abdomen and fell over!” In these schemes, this usually ends when your hero is committed to helping.
2. We react or investigate. The heroes flail around, discovering that everything they know is wrong. Well, maybe not everything, but this is the “Yes, but” stage of improv: If they do something right, it gets them in bigger trouble. This part typically ends when they figure out what they're up against and are correct, and traditionally it's a bigger problem than they thought.
3. We give it our best shot and fail Well, now they know what to do, but something stops them, either in fiction because they haven't resolved some inner problem or in adventures because they aren't in the right place or haven't collected enough plot coupons or something. This ends when they lose catastrophically, about three-quarters of the way through the adventure. This is the last place where you can introduce new characters.
4. We resolve the problem and win. The obstacle is removed and the heroes achieve victory. Nothing new gets introduced here; it's all re-incorporation and re-interpretation. Because there was a mention back in part 2 that Super Secret Spy Agency is interested, it's okay to discover that the hero's sweetie is actually a spy operating under deep cover, but if you don't have that mention, it's iffy. A new device? Did you mention that somebody was working on it in an earlier part?

(My summary is snarky, but this works. I just want to emphasize that it's not the only way that works. Still, if what you want (as most roleplaying adventures want) is something that feels complete, this is a good model. Heck, it's in one of the Star Trek narrator guides, though I don't remember which one.)

So let's say you add a roll to see if you're ending the first half. Is this the end of the half? You don't start rolling for this until after your heroes have become involved; you put some target value that gets more and more achievable as you go on. And the point of the scene becomes reveal the actual problem. You might do the other things your solo system requests, but you definitely do that.

Once you've done that, you've established the length of your last three parts: all of them will be roughly the same as this part. (The first part might vary a lot.)

In fact, if you could do something similar with all three of the closing parts: This is the thing that ends the quarter; is this the scene where I introduce it?

I'll have to play with it and see if it works.

A solo adventure done with Mythic...excerpt

Icons

I'm doing a solo adventure with Mythic, trying to see what it does in a larger adventure. (I'm at scene 7 now.) Then I'll do with with the third system I have, and we'll compare.

Anyway, I'm tickled by the latest scene, and it's short, so I'm putting it here without some of the dice rolling. All you need to know is that Screech Owl is a hero and that Mynah has been forced by circumstances to work with him.

Scene start: NPC Action. Activity Expectations. Interrupt. CF 8

I left the fence’s through the alley door and did the whole coat/mask/bathroom thing again. Nobody even looked at me when I left the bathroom, which I thought was odd, considering I had gone in two hours earlier, but it was Progressive Euchre Tournament night, whatever that is.[Mythic: Does she notice she’s being followed? Unlikely, CF 8: 81% No.]

I stood at the bus stop with a seedy guy who needed a hair and chin transplant. The glamorous life of a supervillain. It started to rain, big fat drops of rain.

I sighed. “How long to the next bus?”

The seedy guy looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

We were quiet for a minute, and then he said, “You work in an office?”

“Yes,” I said, because it used to be true. Truth is easier to remember.

He nodded. “You must make money,” he said.

Surveys show that’s a sure sign this encounter was going nowhere good.

“Nope,” I said. “Still paying off student loans.”

“But you’re dressed nice.”

“Thrift store coat,” I said, because it was. I have to hide it every time I go out as the Mynah, and some day it won’t be there when I return for it. “Remember, I’m taking the bus. No planes, no bikes, no motorcars, not a single luxury.”

In costume, I’m okay. Out of costume, I babble.

“Give me your purse,” he said.

“Really?” I asked him.

“Even your walking around money’s better than what I got.” He pointed a gun at me.

“You know there’s a fence for supervillains about two blocks from here.”

“Uh?”

“So like, anyone you hold up could actually be a supervillain in disguise.”

He shook his head. “Supervillains got, like, ray guns and stuff.”

I didn’t want to go all sonic on him because I wasn’t wearing a mask. I was hoping we could resolve this peacefully…but it had not escaped my attention that I had over two hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds in the messenger bag inside my big purse.

He was not getting the bonds.

“And real supervillains ain’t women.” He held up a hand before I could say more. “Yeah, yeah, but those are sidekicks.”

“Really?” I said again. Dodge in on the side without the pistol, knock his arm sideways, kick him— I really had to learn some martial arts. I tensed.

His eyes widened and he backed off and started to run. “See? A sidekick!” he shouted.

I didn’t even have to turn around. “I will have no rep and no cred by the time this is done.”

“You were late,” said Screech Owl. “Of course I came looking for you.”

I didn’t turn around. “Could you look away? So I can at least get the mask on? I feel naked without it.” I fumbled in my purse and found the mask, but it was stuck under the envelope of bonds and I was pulling very carefully.

“I know your build and hair colour.”

“All the more reason for me to wear the damned mask!” There! It was free.

“He might have shot you!”

“I had it under control!”

“You did not.”

I hooked the purse on one arm and got the mask on. “We can’t talk here.” Before I could turn around to face him he had grabbed me under the armpits and we were in the air.

“Really?” I said, for the third time.

Actual play of some solo ICONS adventures

Icons

No, haven't been around much.

Have been playing some Icons adventures and have come up with some characters I like. I haven't come up with a nice way of presenting them, but here's one I've tried, anyway: I write it as text in Word and the dice rolls and mechanics are done as footnotes. I haven't gone back to try and re-read it, but you can take a look at it if you want.:

Quickstep (so far)

Be aware that there are adventure spoilers in there.

The first three adventures are a comparison of Heroic Icons and Mythic using random adventures from the same source, and a conversion of the old D&D adventure Tomb of Horrors.

The other adventures are, in no particular order:

• Day of the Swarm
, by Fainting Goat Games
• Danger in Dunsmouth
by Ad Infinitum. It mostly features a different character (Professor Destiny) but Quickstep comes in to bat clean-up
• Gangbusters by Ad Infinitum.

(I have also done Whiteout! and Jailbreak as solos, but I think I'll wait until I've added The Aotearoa Gambit to the list. Those three pretty much cry out for a JLA/Avengers level team, and my sort-of-Legion-of-Substitute-Heroes work well there.)

Powers that break your game

Any SHRPG

Recently I read an article and twenty years ago, I would have agreed with it...but now? Not so much

Here's the article: https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-superpowers-that-will-break-your-story/

For those of you who can't be arsed to read it, here are the five:

1. Super Tech Because, like, people can share tech.
2. Mind Reading Because then you can't have mysteries.
3. Precognition Because then they have an in-universe reason to know what's coming.
4. Super Speed Because there are decades of stories telling them what they can do and how they can get out of that trap.
5. Power Stealing Because all those powers! They build on each other! Limitation builds character!

(Okay, I'm getting a little tongue in cheek there.)

I don't want to get into a huge point-by-point refutation because I think this is missing the point (and yes, I have written entries are powers that are hard to deal with)

There's a distinction here between "This power is hard to write for" and "This power will break your story."

First of all, what kind of person are you that you are coming to the table with a story? Do you expect players to act out roles instead of making choices? Uh, no, not any players that I have known. Look, at best you are presenting a situation, and they react to it in their own ways. An NPC nudges a dog out of the way with his foot because today's just too stressful to give some ear-scratches. Maybe you've got a good idea of how they will react but I've been in too many situations where the PC suddenly says, "What? He kicked a dog? He's going down!" or the equivalent.

So, in the interest of breaking up the status quo:

• Why can't they share the super-tech? Maybe you've got a reason, maybe not — a lot of comics strive very hard to be “Our world with...” worlds, and figuring the logical extrapolations of some events would quit that, so they never figure out the logical consequences of unstable molecules. But there's no reason that you have to follow that reasoning. (In fact, Base Raiders asks you to figure out how you want to change the world.)
• If you have a mind reader in your player group, why the hell are you giving them mysteries like this? They read a mind, they know the answer. Now, maybe there are laws about mind reading (the first time somebody read a Senator's mind and it was known, legislation would be drafted right quick!), and maybe not, but why are you putting these situations in here? You might as well say, “You solve the problem if your character can step on that box!”
• Even comic book games work hard to make precognition be something a little hard to deal with, because (I totally understand) that then you have to make it come true. And frankly, I wouldn't allow it either except in the vague sense: “I see orange and green swirls...” and you have no idea until late in the session that those mean Aquaman or something. But they want it to be useful because they paid points for it or it's taking up space on their character sheet that could be used by a real power. And I can't help you because that's one that I give for free if I give it at all. Look, you can have precognition but you need an explanation why it's a crap power because I can't guarantee that I'll do it by the end of the scene, let alone the end of the campaign. But I think that's a problem with me, not necessarily the power.... My use of premonitions tend to be either vague or bad. Nobody sees good specific things when I'm running.

That's something of my response to all of these: yeah, these powers often break the first thing that comes to mind ... why are you presenting them when you know that you have a player character with one or more of these powers? If you want to say, "These are powers that will make it harder to run," you bet; you're going to have to think around them. Or maybe, "The players are smarter than I am at figuring out the consequences," well, no duh, because they have one character to think of and you have dozens, regardless of relative brain power.

Look, I ran an adventure once where the bad guy tried to fly away and at that point I looked at the character sheet and the bad guy had Flight 3. Everyone else had 6 in movement powers *at least*. So I took my lumps and instead of the session being about the return and threat of the villains, it became about the consequences of various supervillain actions (because once I started, the NPCs started talking about other things that other supervillains had done). And it was a pretty good session. It wasn't standard and it was form-fitted to my campaign like a contour sheet, but it was pretty good.

The players still laugh about the villain tooling down the street at something like 15 mph thinking he could get away.

Fiction: Deathtrap!

Icons

I thought I had posted this, but no. So here.

Deathtrap!

I ignored the knock at the door, because the guy wasn’t due to come round for rent for two weeks. Since meeting Dracula, I had practiced ignoring things.

Again a knock. Again I ignored it. I had some pretty vital cat videos to watch while my dog, Slobberkin, whined beside the bed.

The door opened and I heard a sound of disgust. I dragged my gaze from my phone and saw Shelley and Betsy there.

Betsy said, “Hey.”

Shelley said to me, “She was concerned, and you left me a key—”

I shrugged.

Shelley said, “I’ll open a window.” On his way to the window, he said, “And bring over a fan.”

Betsy came and sat on my futon. “You didn’t answer my texts.” I shrugged again. “Last time you ate?”

I went for the hat trick and shrugged a third time.

She turned to Shelley. “Any food in the fridge?”

“Nothing useful,” Shelley said.

“I’ll take her out for dinner while this funk clears out.” To me, because I hadn’t moved: “Shower. Dress.”

Shelley said, “I’ll take care of Slobberkin.”

During dinner, Betsy’s Shame-O-Vision triumphed over my baleful gaze. I tried words. I hear they’re harmless. “Money’s tight. I should go back to accountancy.”

Betsy said, “If you don’t want to talk about the real problem yet, Okay. We can do something else.”

“Something else” turned out to be an escape room. “I always wanted to try one,” said Betsy, “And you...well.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“The way these things work,” Betsy explained, “is that there’s a chain of puzzles. You unlock a box that provides a mirror that lets you see hidden numbers that unlock a second box, which contains the door key.” Betsy loves puzzles.

As last-minute joiners, we were added to a team whose fourth hadn’t shown up. As we introduced ourselves, I sized up the other three players. (Habit.) Two men and a woman, maybe old as twenty-one. Chad, a wad of muscle; Steve, a lithe mesomorph; and Kate who moved like a dancer despite being improbably top-heavy. Betsy gave Kate the hungry eye; I thought Kate might be fine (if you liked that type). What made her unattractive was she had that cop look: she wanted to arrest me right now and worry about cause later.

The three of them moved with an awareness of each other that said “team.” Betsy saw me looking at them and whispered, “Chad wants Steve, Steve wants Kate, and Kate registers on my gaydar.” Kate probably wanted Betsy.

From the way they talked, they were going to win in spite of us.

A video played the premise. Some un-named villain (shown only in silhouette) had placed nullifying lamps in the area that would take away our powers. We were a team of superheroes who had—

Yadda yadda yadda. We were going to be in a room. There was a bomb at the center of the base; we had an hour to get to it, without powers, and disable it.

“The voice. Is that—?” Kate said softly.

“A voice actor,” Chad said.

“He is on parole,” murmured Steve back.

“Why would they imitate him?” Kate asked.

Betsy looked thrilled. I probably looked sullen. The woman from the escape room — Lucy, I think — apologized for the acting in the video, then gave us a timer.

“Intercom?” asked Betsy. To me she said, “To contact the front desk, In case there’s a medical emergency.” She did not add out loud, You’re not exactly well.

“Microphone in the ceiling,” Lucy said. “We’ll hear you. Red buttons are clue help.”

Betsy was satisfied.

“Henchmen” in sweat-stained costumes came and blindfolded us and led us to another room. Somebody wore too much Old Spice.

I was peeking, and memorized the route. New room smelled of ozone and was vaguely military.

Then Lucy said, “Your time starts now," and we heard the door click shut.

Steve and Kate beat us getting blindfolds off, but Chad was just standing there. “I can't see,” he said, and then took off his blindfold.

Steve and Kate looked at each other.

I looked up. The room had that sort-of Cherenkov radiation tint of power sponges. The area kind.

I looked them up once. There are two flavours, touch and area. Touch ones are manacled to you and can handle just about any power but with limited effectiveness. Like, they make Devilboy vulnerable to a nuke but he’s still bulletproof. The area ones are used in prison cells and are tuned specifically to your powerset. Total shutdown on the powers affected, a tiny effect on other powers. Chad wasn’t wearing manacles, so if his powers were gone, then someone had tuned the power sponges for Chad.

Kate got a faraway look. Steve’s power look made him seem constipated. Then they both looked up at the ceiling and nodded.

Interesting, I thought. Three superheroes neutralized, possibly by someone who might be on parole and have a grudge. I hadn’t paid attention to news for days, so I had no idea who might be out.

Real superheroes without civilians nearby would try breaking the power sponges, but Betsy and I counted as civilians.

Oblivious to all of this, Betsy was doing inventory. Good for her. The room was sort of a barracks room, with a bathroom off to the side.

"We've got three locked boxes here: the two footlockers and the gun case on the wall there. All combination locks. Footlockers are four numbers, gun case is five. The door has an electronic combination lock with five numbers."

Kate tossed the three beds and got a magazine, a metal box purporting to be mints, and a journal. Chad caressed one of the footlocker locks as if twenty minutes ago he could have crushed it.

Steve checked the bottoms of the beds. He came up with a series of five numbers, two in blue, three in red.

I did nothing for about a minute, when Betsy’s Shame-O-Vision spurred me into the washroom. Sink, toilet stall (clearly meant for men), shower, and a poster with four steps for hand hygiene.

Normally we wet our hands first, so the steps were misnumbered. I memorized the order presented. The toilet had a tank. Inside it was a key in a sealed bag, but no water: the toilet and shower weren’t functional. (The bottoms of the toilet lid and seat had “Non-working toilet” written on them.)

I unscrewed the shower head because I could and found a wireless camera, about the size of a watch battery. I poked behind it as if I didn’t know what it was and put it in backward so it looked up the pipe instead of the room.

Somebody who wants to hide their own cameras buys in bulk because the field of view is limited, half the room or less. (Also, you buy two styles so maybe they find the one kind and overlook the other.)

I looked for the others and found it by the mirror over the sink. Different style and model number, but all I could make out was an x or cross or chi or something and a plus sign. That one went in my pocket.

I went back and found Betsy, Kate, Chad and Steve with one footlocker already open. It had a men’s grooming kit and Steve was holding another lockbox with a padlock on it.

I tossed him the key. “Try this.”

It fit. The box held an electrical multimeter—volt, ohm, ampere. That kind of thing.

“For defusing—“ Kate started.

“—The bomb,” I finished. Kate glared at me.

“We have to work together,” Betsy reminded us.

I tilted my head back in exasperation and examined the ceiling. I spotted the microphone and two cameras. One camera was like the one in my pocket.

“All right,” I said. If I was right about field of vision, there had to be another camera about... There.

“Betsy, do you have any gum?” She looked exasperated then fished some from her purse. Sugarless. I chewed it for a moment, made a face, said, “Bad flavor,” and stuck it against the wall, covering the camera.

Steve looked at me with disgust and reached for the wad of gum. “Leave it,” said Kate. “We don’t have time.” The way she looked at me told me I’d overplayed it.

“There’s always time to be neat,” he said.

“Priorities,” she said sharply and she shook her head no. He didn’t press it. Then he sized me up again. Chad was busy with the gun locker and the five numbers.

That grooming kit held a toothbrush, mirror, and a weird comb with teeth of different thicknesses. Betsy got an inspired look and grabbed the comb and magazine. When the comb was laid to match the stripes on the UPC code, it blocked out all but four numbers.

Those opened the other footlocker.

Betsy and I had now solved two puzzles and they had solved only one. Not that I was keeping score, but: boo-yah.

Footlocker number two held another locked box, with a pair of sunglasses.

Chad got the gun locker open. That gave us the key to this locked box and a date book.

Kate figured out that if you looked at the datebook with the sunglasses on, you saw instructions to subtract one from each digit of the hygiene poster.

I knew the hygiene numbers, so into the next room. Fifteen minutes down.

Next room was a mess or kitchen. I spotted the three cameras but they were up on the ceilings so I couldn’t do anything about them.

“Man, this is like the Brown Boggler in the 1960s,” I said without thinking.

“That’s a deep cut,” asked Kate. I could see gears moving in her head. The key, the camera, knowing about the Brown Boggler...

“He went to my university. They talk about him,” I said.

“She knows stuff,” said Betsy, who (bless her heart) was defending me.

“Enh,” I said. Betsy looked at me, hurt that I’d contradicted her. “You do as well as I do at trivia night, Bets.”

This was a palpable lie because we’ve never gone to a trivia night. Also I’m trivia, Betsy’s puzzles. Her expression changed like clouds passing before the sun. Sullenly, “Better, sometimes.” She still looked hurt. Secret identities suck sometimes.

#

“Betsy, tell me about rules. What are the rules of an escape room?”

She tried to erase her pout. I was, at least, paying attention. “You don’t break stuff, they told us that. You’ll get all the clues you need, like an old-time murder mystery. Some clues are red herrings and something significant might be carried through, like the electrical meter, but usually everything to solve a room is in that room. The deadline is the deadline, because it’s a business and they have to get the next people in.”

However, a supervillain did not have to stick to the rules. He probably would—most supervillains understand that sticking to the unwritten rules is all that keeps them from being turned into bisque.

I didn’t say this aloud.

Of course, I didn’t have to stick to rules either. Former supervillain, right? I didn’t think my Crappy Sonic Powers™ would be useful here, though.

Chad and Steve were going through the cupboards saying what they found. I was curious about what group these three might be from, so I said, “Kate, your fourth, the one who couldn’t make it? Who was that?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

She wasn’t going to answer but fortunately Chad answered absently. “Our boss. It was a team-building thing. He got called away.”

“For business,” Steve added.

Steve could have been anyone but you couldn’t hide Chad’s width or Kate’s need for cantilevering Add an older male as their “boss” and you still got no group I could think of. So when masked up, at least one of them looked different.

But: was this a setup to catch some kind of super group? And if so, would Betsy and I be collateral damage?

Who knew?

If I broke the rules of escape rooms, say if I popped a lock, a real escape room company would suck it up. However, a supervillain would try to get the revenge back on track.

So I popped the door lock. (None of the locks were high quality.)

Without proper tools, it took me two minutes to pop the door lock, but we were able to bypass all the puzzle stuff that Betsy likes.

I slipped the lock off and pushed the door open.

Betsy upped her Shame-O-Vision to 11. “That’s cheating.” She looked at everyone else for support, but they just hurried into the third room.

Kate was last, “How?”

I shrugged. “I was a juvenile delinquent.” When Betsy finally came, I caught her elbow. “I didn’t cheat. I just…took advantage of meta-rules.” I didn’t know what to say when I couldn’t say anything. “I’ll tell you afterward.”

Her eyes widened and I leaned in close so the cameras couldn’t see her mouth. She mouthed “Microphone?”

I nodded and then I needed an excuse for leaning over like that so I kissed her.

She kissed back, which I hadn’t expected. I’m not sure I expected anything because I had been working at not-thinking for days.

Eventually we broke apart and looked at the next room.

This room looked like a computer room, with a big cabinet in the middle. The cabinet’s readout showed the remaining time, which was 40:00.

It suddenly jumped to 10:00.

It looked like someone was responding to the way I changed the game.

Supervillain?

#

Chad and Steve anointed me with dirty looks as if I had done it, then turned and looked at Kate for instructions. Kate was busy chewing her lip. Betsy whispered in my ear, “Is it bad?”

I nodded.

The exit door was locked (in violation of fire codes, I might add).

“Inventory first. What do we have to work with?” said Betsy.

“She’s big on inventory. Paramedic,” I told them.

Betsy nodded. “The painting on the wall is unusual. What’s behind it?”

Chad had the decency to blush while he checked the painting; Steve and Becky checked the rest of the “office.” Kate started examining the maybe-a-real-bomb. She kept splaying her fingers wide. That hand gesture—you saw it with telepaths, with telekinetics, some sorcerers, and with technopaths. Most of them I could rule out.

Most people figured that Tech Next was a man from the armor, but it occurred to me at it might be a Junoesque woman.

Tech Next was an armoured technopath withthe group X+ (or Ex-Plus). Other members included an ice guy, who was about Steve’s size, and a bruiser with animal powers, Menagerie. Ex-Plus was a new ethnic rights group that mostly dealt with issues in the transformed community. Second generation; X-First disbanded when a member died in an explosion caused by “natural causes” which we normally spell F-O-E. Tech Next would normally be their bomb person.

Beyond that, I didn’t know much about them.

Not particularly useful information now that I had figured it out; if I couldn’t figure out the supervillain, I couldn’t anticipate what he’d do.

Look, there were puzzles: a drawer had spare keys for the keyboard, there were numbers written on the bottoms of the spools of tape (!) that gave a combination to the safe behind the painting once you sorted the tapes in ascending order by size, yadda yadda. But I don’t have to tell you the puzzles, even though we needed to solve them.

Did I mention? Exponentially harder locks, and me without tools. (What I said was that juvenile delinquency only teaches you so much.) Not that I was keeping score, but Betsy got five, Steve two, Chad three, and Kate two.

We had one minute left when we exposed the bomb’s electronics. Betsy gave me a hug.

Steve said, “The Doctor believes in you. I—we believe in you.” There was a little eye flicker to me like he was going to say something else.

Chad said to Kate, “The Noble Mettle won’t hesitate to kill everyone in this city.”

That was the guy who had killed X-First. Then I knew what was going on.

I stepped forward, said, “You can do it,” to her, and slipped her the wireless camera.

She looked at it and then cut a wire. I don’t remember if it was red or blue.

The countdown stopped, and we had won.

#

I begged off being in the congratulatory photo at the end. Betsy followed my lead.

Kate caught up with us at Betsy’s car. (Betsy is like flyover-country pure; of course she has a car. I take Uber.)

“Can I talk to her?” she asked Betsy.

Betsy said, “Yeah. Hands off, because we’re dating now.”

“You’d be willing—” I asked Betsy.

“Go. Talk.”

At the back of the car, I leaned against the trunk. The car thrummed with music: Betsy trying hard not to listen. It kind of defeated the purpose; we had to speak up to hear. Which was probably Betsy’s intent.

And I was dating her.

Kate paced, circling around. Finally she asked, “Juvenile delinquent?”

“Do I not look delinquent enough to you?”

“How did you know it was a test?”

“Lucky guess.” She could match Betsy for Shame-O-Vision. “Okay. Chad said it was a team-building exercise. The truth is always easier than a lie, so I figured it really was a team exercise. Power sponges tuned to you guys meant it was for you. Civilians were supposed to make you have to work in secret. We got in by accident, but I’ll bet your boss had hired one or two people who were supposed join you.” I sat down on the trunk. “Plus it was supposed to look like a revenge thing, but supervillain was wrong. Quiet isn’t the Noble Mettle brand: his videos are all purity this and his name that. If you want to commit suicide, make one of his videos a drinking game and take a shot when he says his name.”

“Civilians,” Kate said. “You’re not a civilian.”

“I’m…retired.” I hadn’t said that before, but she was in the life. I groped for words. “There are...monsters.”

Kate nodded. “We get called monsters. My people.”

“Not that kind. You can take precautions against lightning strikes or supervillains or vampires, but how do you recognize the people who want to profit from them?”

“Norms are scum and I say that knowing that every one of my people was once a norm.” We were quiet for a moment, listening to the music from the car—some cover of “Don’t Stop Believing.” Steve called over; Kate indicated she was almost done. “The Doctor tells us that all we can do is try, but we have to do that.”

“You think about telling Steve.”

“You are not as people-blind as I thought.”

“Betsy noticed.”

“Of course she did.” Kate took my hand. “Did retiring get rid of the monsters? ‘Cause I’d quit tomorrow if it does. Think about unretiring.” Steve started for us again, so Kate stood.

Kate handed me the camera. “Use that to call me.” The way she said it told me that it wasn’t strictly a camera any more.

“Tell the Doctor—” I started.

She was halfway to Steve. “What?”

“Tell him not to put your logo on things that are supposed to be hidden.”

She laughed. “But you do know our logo!”

In the car, Betsy said, “Vampires? I mean, you didn’t just pick that.”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you in the daylight. Um. We’re dating?”

“I’d like to try. Even with distance and supervillains and all of it.”

”Um. I’m not good at dating.”

“Because you can’t memorize a relationship and have it at your fingertips. It’s not trivia or trivial. It’s more an escape room, with a series of puzzles that lead you farther in to more puzzles.”

“That does not make it sound good.” I managed to grin. “But let’s try.”

Today's bizarre setting fragment

I was reading something and the author opined that the only thing that humans are good at is killing each other, and that's not gonna change.

At which point the "Well, actually" part of my brain kicked in and I thought, "Genetic engineering could fix that."

And then I thought, "But you'd have to get the world governments together to do it."

At which point I realized something: Every government would hold back a tiny subset of the “killer” humans so they could have them in reserve. Y'know. If they were needed...

So you'd be playing the bloodthirsty monsters, who (in a point that might be on the nose) are you and me.

At which point my brain flipped it sideways and realized that pacifism was a disease released on the world: a pandemic of peace, as it were, and you play one of the people with natural immunity.

Kind of adds a new meaning to “Go forth and kill no more.”

When writing genre fiction...

Any

Over on Twitter, Bryan Edward Hill made an interesting point. Basically, there should be a story before you add genre elements.

(It might seem like this goes against Sturgeon's dictum that a good science fiction story couldn't exist without the science, but I think they're talking about different things.

• Hill is pointing out that in most cases, there should be a dramatic situation that can be exploited whether or not the genre elements appear.
• Sturgeon is pointing out that the method in which that dramatic situation is exploited must be unique to the genre elements.

Does this have roleplaying implications?

Well, if it does, I'm too blind to see them.

It might for some systems. Any system where the character's goals or qualities or aspects could set up a dramatic situation or a dramatic need is fodder for this idea. So your DramaSystem for sure; maybe your FATE or Burning Wheel, but it depends on the system.

Most roleplaying games are focused on the external. They create an illusion of story (when you sift through the memories) but they're not about producing a fiction. Playing Cops & Robbers is not about generating The Wire, though that's not out of the realm of possibility.

So RPGs put their genre elements forward; it's up to the players (I include the GM if there is one) to create the dramatic situation that makes it a story.

And...Portal City

Superhero RPG

I was working on Strange City, which has its own rationale, but it is a somewhat complicated environment for someone who doesn't care about the other stuff and just wants to test out the system (I've used it for Mutants & Masterminds but I'll probably also use it for other systems.)

Anyway, I use Portal City. This is a small city on the Great Lakes (I play it as Canadian, but, hey, I'm Canadian). It had mystery men back in the 1940s and occasionally has visiting supers, but the PCs are really the first heroes who have stayed in town. (There's a certain flavour of “If you were really good, you'd go off to New York or even Toronto.”)

Here's what I've established for it so far:

• Lack of supers doesn't mean lack of superpowers. There are people with powers in town, but for various reasons they don't want to be spandex-clad supers.
• There's a certain amount of anti-mutant sentiment, so the twelve-step group dealing with “living with your mutant power” goes to a certain amount of trouble to keep the members' identities hidden, from the world and from each other.
• There is a university or college.

Idea du corporate

Any Superhero

Someone mentioned doing a list of random encounters for superheroes. This is one step up.

I wonder if there'd be any interest in a book (say, 25) sets of one- or two-page adventures?

While each adventure would have all of the essentials (setting, antagonist, etc) some of the adventures would share locations or antagonists, so that any one adventure only needs to specify a place or a character. Some of the locations would be so generic that you wouldn't provide a map, too.

There'd have to be an assumed universe or sub-universe. Let's say something on the level of a DC or Marvel universe. For sub-universes, you could do different books, but essentially you're looking at:

• Street-level or neighbourhood: Your Daredevil or X-Men young heroes kind of thing.
• Basic city level: your Spider-Man or Batman level things.
• World protectors: your Avengers or Justice League.
• Cosmic: your space stuff, typically your Guardians of the Galaxy or Legion of Super Heroes.

Don't take those levels terribly seriously: in the comics, you can find world-beaters defending a neighbourhood and your city guys stumbling on a threat to the cosmos.

Other lines of comics are really their own little sub-genre, too: I think the Claremont X-Men were really in their own little world. Solo (one player character) is different than team.

There'd be some planning to make sure that various bad guys or locations get re-used. As a first iteration, where you don't know if the product will sell, you probably want to do eight of the first three sub-genres. So you do eight little adventures involving the neighbourhood or the small town (because it might be nice to have a spin-off setting that's a little different, and that says “small town” to me).

It occurs to me that these are one step up from the adventure seeds that happen in a number of setting books. It's more than a seed but less than a full adventure.

Freethinking (2)

Mutants & Masterminds

Having thought about this for a day, I think that what I'm going to do is two arcs of four adventures. Each adventure is self-contained but (if I do it right) they build to two climactic encounters, one at four and one at eight.

To keep myself reasonably focused, the first four sessions will have the theme "Werewolf," which in this context is the two-faced thing: creatures that are not what they appear to be. I'm not talking about literal werewolves, but I want to be able to do stuff that riffs on Invasion of the Body Snatchers or on Jekyll-Hyde, or just the fact that superheroes and supervillains are often closeted and so are non-cis, non-binary folks. Then I can also deal with the idea of having characters with powers who don't want to be heroes.

The second will be focused on vampires, which again is thematic. I like the idea that in medieval mythology they were things without souls, that we can have villains who drain people of abilities, that it's a transformation for people you love, that one drainer-of-things can create more drainers-of-things.

Freethinking

Mutants & Masterminds

So a first session (even if there is a Session 0) is kind of a daunting one, at least for me.

You have to address the character(s), the game system, present the setting, and have a story. Not a big deal, right?

And I've agreed to do eight or more sessions for someone in Mutants & Masterminds.

So, here's what I know.

The player is trans, and the character is trans. That might not be the most important thing about them or about the character, but it's the biggest difference for me, so I lead with that. It might not make a difference to what I choose to run, but it will certainly make a difference to how I choose to run it.

For a first session, I want to introduce a couple of elements that we talked about in our session 0, but I want to keep the actual conflict mechanically simple. It should be difficult, but not hugely difficult: equivalent to a horde of kobods, I guess.

The PC is essentally the speaker for the dead, which in turn says serial killer to me, but I don't want to use up a serial killer on the first session. Unless I do something a bit differently.

Suppose the serial killer is training others. This is the tack that the uber-serial-killer has picked. Others have chosen to make the serial killer a spirit; I'm going to go one step further and say, not only a spirit but one that has decided to train others.

(It's a single-player game, so I can tune it to the individual. I welcome a single-player game for exactly this reason.)

And using a serial killer as our first session says that we're definitely avoiding Silver Age territory. (In fact, we'll head there eventually because I want to present a foil who doesn't care about consequences at all, but I don't think that works here.)

Okay, serial killer. I have multiple ways to get the PC involved — there are police ties, mob ties, and there are undertaker ties. The setting is a small city in Canada: I think of Thunder Bay as the model but not Thunder Bay.) So the serial killer is targeting...indigenous women? While that's a real problem I'm not sure I can present it at all realistically with less than two days to research. So we'll go with a slightly less real-world approach.

Mutants.

Kids who might be mutants, that is. One of the things in setting is that they haven't had a superhero for eighty years, and one of the reasons might be that someone is killing people with powers. So our Ur-killer, the spirit of teaching death, has been grooming people to do this. (Actually, that's a nice running plotline, so we'll stick a pin in it and it's a running plot if the PC decides to follow up on it.)

But: why this kid, why now, why the scenario? What goes on that makes it happen now?

Obviously, something has gone wrong. And because we have a newly-mint3ed superhero in the mix, that might be what's gone wrong.

How might it work? You're at a funeral home, the cops bring in a body, the spirit of the body says, "I was murdered."

Actually, that's pretty straightforward. The ghost says, "Hey, here's who killed me," but it's not like the police can do anything even if the PC says so. But would the ghost know who the killer was?

Well, if the killer was someone well-known in the community. Like a philanthropist of some kind.

And what about powers? Because this is a superhero game, not an episode of Law and Order: Batman.

Ideas:

• Go the Jack'O'Knives route. The NPC is possessed by a murder-spirit. Okay, but it seems kind of letting people off the hook, and getting it across might be difficult.
• Gadgets. There are enough specialty items there to create a gadgeteer. Okay, but at this second it seems like it cvalls for more creativity than I have.
• The bad guy is a mutant himself. (Serial killer: probably male.) He has a kind of self-hatred that builds on it.

Conversions from Mutants and Masterminds: Princess and Rook

Icons

I was going to do extensive versions of the various Mutants & Masterminds characters and never finished the first two. Well, now I've finished Princess and Rook and there's no reason why people shouldn't have them...but I shan't be doing any organized conversion.

• Princess
• Rook

Incidents or anecdotes vs adventures

All

I've never formulated this quite this way before, so it seemed significant when I backed onto saying it on Facebook. Here it is, with more waffling and watering down.

One of the things, it seems to me, that separates an incident from an adventure is that the players try something in an incident and either succeed or fail, and then go on with their lives.

A lot of random tables are like this. “On the road, you meet (rolls) 1d6 robbers who take your weapons and your gold.” Then the PCs go on, now poor and weaponless, because the real objective is to get to Riverden. Maybe the PCs later meet and trounce the robbers because they recognize a weapon or something, but it's largely kinda anecdote-ish. When they write their memoirs, the PCs will not assign it any particular significance except as a throwaway sentence: Because robbers took my money, I arrived in Riverden with nothing but the clothes on my back.

In an adventure and your commercial fiction, the incident is elevated; it becomes part of the whole try-fail cycle. The robbers take the gold the PCs need to hire the cleric to deal with the illness and yadda yadda yadda.

Part of that try-fail cycle is consequences—in one case, the theft leads them to arrive in the new city penniless; in the other, it impedes what they're trying to do. If they don't have a goal, you can't really block them on that, so how can there be a meaningful failure?

One of the ways you deal with giving something significance in improve is reincorporation. The PCs find the robbers; the villain returns. Something like that. So having something recur is a tool you can deploy (as a GM) to make something more memorable, but that doesn't really give it significance.

Now, you can give things significance even if they didn't start that way. Let's use a superhero example instead. The heroes have to rescue a cat from a tree. Even if the cat is odd—it's a leopard escaped from a zoo! It's a phase-shifting cat that resists any attempts to grab it!— that doesn't make it more significant to the evening. However, if it's part of something bigger it becomes significant. Maybe the leopard escaped from the zoo as part of microtremblors that Earthquaker is causing in the area on the way to the bank/scientific lab/alien embassy. Maybe the phase-shifting cat is a foreshadowing that the evil Empire of Ghosts is invading our dimension.

I've mentioned this sort of thing before: if they vanquish the enemy too quickly, the encounter loses significance (We've still got two hours left!) so you can give it significance back by making it part of a larger event.

This has bad personal implications for me because I suck at the continuity between sessions and picking up the threads that are left behind, so I have to think about how to record the dropped potential threads in such a way that they're easy to pick up and reincorporate in the future.

That Silver Age Feel

Any Superhero Game

Someone on Facebook asked about running a Silver Age-feeling game, and it so happens I've been thinking about it. Now, I greatly respect Dr. Christopher McGlothlin's work, but I think his Silver Age supplement for Mutants & Mutants misses the mark because it assumes you're going to set the story in the time period (about 1956–1984). Running an historical game assumes that people know about the time, which makes it a heavier lift.

So what do I think?

Less heavy continuity. Even when there were continuing plot elements—usually the soap opera elements—the event plots were one-and-done. The Ringmaster is here with his Circus of Crime! Lois thinks Clark is Superman and Metallo is out again!

A lot of the Silver Age stuff falls out of three factors: The Comics Code, the belief that the audience was kids, and the belief that the audience rolls over every four years.

• The Comics Code means there’s a lot of invention (not necessarily good invention) to get around what was forbidden by the Code. (You can find a copy of the 1954 version of the Code in a number of places, like here.) The Code had a couple of requirements that seem to be relevant to me: No horror, no crime; crimes are always punished in the story; no one can profit from a crime.
• The idea that the audience was kids streamlines the stories to (for the most part) down to: “Here is the problem or mystery; here it’s elaborated as they try to solve it; here they make a last attempt that doesn’t work; using the knowledge from that attempt, they solve the problem or puzzle.” You don't do a lot of continuing plots, even though you might have continuing elements. They tend to be more devices or tropes than plots, right. Lois Lane is a bundle of plot engine tropes: she wants to marry Superman, she is terribly jealous, she is nosy about Superman's secret identity.
• The belief that the audience rolled over lead to many versions of the same invention, because the audience wouldn’t know about the earlier stuff. Some of that was already being subverted in the “See ish 255” or whatever captions, and I was astonished at the nascent continuity in Supergirl Vol 2 trade paper. The author was clearly paying attention to the other Superman mags.

So it’s largely SF because the Code outlawed horror/magic stuff — Marvel danced around that later with “zuvembies” and Morbius, the scientific vampire. The Code also required the bad guys to get their comeuppance by the end of the story.

Now, how to translate that into a game.

1. Bad guys don’t kill the heroes and generally don't kill. Mostly they want to get the heroes out of town/the country/the planet.
2. Fun! The stakes tend to be high or miniscule: A comet will destroy the earth or help the young girl who hates superheroes without her knowing it!
3. Real world problems need not apply.
4. Sidekicks were huge, either formal (like Robin) or informal (like Jimmy Olsen). Possibly the best way to handle them in a game environment is to make them NPCs, because they function as a replacement for internal monologues (and well-meaning lectures) and as hostage-of-the-week.
5. Relatively little carry-over from session to session: a criminal’s plot is hatched, seems overwhelming, and is defeated in a single session.
6. Science fiction, not horror or fantasy. (The Code specifically forbade crime and horror comics.) It doesn’t have to be plausible, but it’s got to have an SF veneer. Even Batman spent time on alien planets (see “Robin Dies At Dawn!”)
7. Steal from classic SF for ideas. Robots. Evil twins (oh, man, there are like six ways to be an evil twin of a player character, and if I could come up with an overarching idea, I'd run an adventure with all of them, kind of the Superman Revenge Squad). Alternate dimensions. Psionic powers. Miniaturization. Aliens. Throw in some mecha, too.
8. As a trope, think about including talking gorillas, motorcycles, Atlanteans, an undiscovered forgotten land with monsters.
9. Anything can be a problem to be overcome.

   You want to do Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes? Okay. The 40 cakes were accidentally made with formitium, which looks like flour. (Miss Tessmacher was making birthday cakes for the gang.) It’s also exceedingly rare, which is why Lex needs those cakes instead of other cakes. He’s going to re-extract the formitium to build a device that will destroy Superman!

More as I think of them. I don't feel like these are actual tools to create a Silver Age feel yet, just suggestions.

The Terrifying Trio

Icons

I got sucked into re-reading Theron Bretz ’s blog discussion of the Ultimates (from the first Champions RPG villain book, Enemies) and in every one, Theron says, “And, a mentalist will destroy him.”

Now I want to create a group of three villains, have the PCs meet them (bonus if the PCs have a mentalist) and then the mentalist *they* find to make themselves into real contenders, who then turns them into meat puppets... and the heroes have to deal with both the mentalist’s plans (which are, of course, nefarious) and free the other villains from the mentalist’s control.

So here are three loser villains who could conceivably be a threat to national security but who can't get it together. The names are intentionally right and wrong.

My origin story, such as it is, is that in some earth-threatening crisis, probably an alien invasion, a spacecraft landed in the prison yard where these three yahoos were walking around, and they dared to go inside. It exploded, but Armand had been possessed by the Electrical Ghost (an alien energy spirit), and Bull and Warren got powers. There you go.

Volta (Armand Philips)

Prowess: 4 Coordination: 6 Strength: 5 Intellecct: 4 Awareness: 5 Willpower: 3 Stamina: 8

Specialties: Leadership

Powers:

• Incredible (7) Electricity Control (default power: Blast); Extras: Force Field
• Incredible (7) Interface Limit: This functions like Astral Projection in that when the Electrical Ghost leaves his body, it lies immobile and helpless. The Electrical Ghost could be considered an Alter Ego, and I might write that up instead of just calling it Interface. However, in this form, the Electrical Ghost can copy or wipe any electronic system it encounters.

Qualities:

• Possessed by the Electric Ghost
• Forceful
• Go big or don't play

Bullrush (Harold “Bull” Hardwick)

Prowess: 5 Coordination: 4 Strength: 9 Intellect: 3 Awareness: 3 Willpower: 3 Stamina: 12

Specialties: Athletics, Military

Powers:

• Incredible (7) Strike Limit: Only when running (adds +1 to STR)
• Incredible (7) Force Field
• Average (3) Super-Speed Limit: Straight-line only; Extra: Aura Limit: Only when Speed active

Qualities:

• Unstoppable Force
• Loyal to Armand
• “Right, Armand, er, Volta!”

Slipstick (Warren Dakor)

Prowess: 4 Coordination: 6 Strength: 4 Intellect: 4 Awareness: 5 Willpower: 4 Stamina: 8

Specialties: Military, Science

Powers:

• Incredible (7) Friction Control Extras: Wall-Crawling, Binding, Probability Control (Bad) (friction-related handicaps to others: fall down, can't pull gun out of holster, etc.)
• Fair (4) Damage Resistance Extra: Super-Speed

Qualities:

• Quick-Thinking
• Oh, Look Here!
• Let's Go!

Later I'll add the fourth person, a mentalist who makes them all into the meat puppets that are the Frightening Four.

Just a test of PDF page number references in URLs

PDF

Apparently you can specify a page in a PDF in a link, so I'm going to try it. If you append #page=n where n is a 1-indexed page number, it's supposed to work. So we'll try it.

First, the link without a page specification:

• Dr. Ghost 1 (ICONS and Mythic"

Now the link with a page number. I'm guessing at the placement because there's already a ? query and an endpoint for viewing (the end of the link is "0B0KkM_vAe2HXVEcxMU8xR2Z6YWs/view?usp=sharing").

• Specifying page 19

ETA: Nope, setting the link as "view#page=19?usp=sharing" doesn't work. What about inserting the '#page=19' after the specifier and before the /view endpoint?

• Specifying page 19
• No usp
• No view endpoint
• Use the export endpoint instead of view, and then with page numbers inserted in two different places:
  • In file id before endpoint
  • as ampersand to query

Nope. None of them work with Google Drive and Chrome on a Mac. There might be a way to make them work for a very specific set of circumstances.

EDIT THE LATER

So I just whipped up a tiny HTML page using a PDF that happened to be on my computer, and it was able to link with page 4 without problems. So it's not the Macintosh or the Chrome that's the problem, it's how I formed the link to the PDF in Google Drive. I haven't read about the format of the URL for this sort of thing, so I assume it's possible (unless the URL-handling stuff strips that out of the URL) but I haven't figured it out.

Anyway, if your PDF is in a known location this will work, but there are a lot of cases where it's served to the user in a way that might mangle the URL and not present it properly. Probably worth knowing.