It's a shame... (Idea du jour)

...that the Lester Dent estate probably wouldn’t let it (he died in 1959, but there are mentions of the estate in 2015, so I presume it’s a going concern), but golly, “Lester Dent Pulp RPG” would be a fine name for what it says on the tin.

Next Flight: Sewer Kings 3c The Ambush

Icons

This is from Victory RPG’s Sewer Kings.

House Rules:

• Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.
• Spend an advantage when using Regeneration and get your Regeneration level in Strength back.

• Chapter 3 The Ambush
• Next Flight
  • Flip-Flop (Henny Barker)
  • The Incredible Reach (Jason Crawford)
  • Succubus (Tara Kleine - Birthright)
• The Sewer Kings
  • Sewer King gang member
  • Lovebite (Lucy Gantz - Transformed)
• Game Mechanics (Footnotes)

The Ambush

Flip-Flop was above the buildings, using binoculars to look down at the roar. “Traffic’s heavy. Why don’t they transfer prisoners at three a.m.?”^[1]

Next Flight: Flying Solo 2d (bonus) Raiders of The Lost Torc

Icons

House Rules

• Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.
• Regeneration with an advantage gives back Strength levels.
• You can use Fast Attack with all your powers, but it costs an Advantage to switch between attacks in a panel. (That is, you can punch twice, but it’s an Advantage to punch and blast.)

• Raiders of the Lost Torc
• Cast
  • The Next Flight
    • Flip-Flop (Henny Barker)
    • The Incredible Reach (Jason Crawford)
    • Succubus (Tara Kleine)
  • Brigand
    • Highwaymen Robots
  • Charmed
  • Animator
    • Apollo (Construct)
    • Tyrannosaurus rex (Construct)
    • Giant wolf spider (Construct)
    • Stone lions from China (Construct)
  • Game Mechanics (Footnotes)

This builds off the scenes in Victory RPG’s Flying Solo, which was written by Fran Vaughan as an M&M Superlink module for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition. (When I converted characters, I used the same artwork as in the module, but I don’t see attribution on them. Anyway: no intent to infringe or take money; if it’s an issue, please contact me at jhmcmullen@gmail.com and I’ll remove the artwork.)

The adventure itself has been presented as parts a-c, but it’s more a toolkit for use in a campaign. So instead, I present a scene where I just bring almost everyone together. Because of what happens in the next part of Sewer Kings, this bonus part has to happen here; besides, I originally set it for the same day.

Raiders of the Lost Torc

Across the street, yellow police tape still marked the entrance to the museum. There were no obvious policemen, but they had seen the night watchman pass.

Next Flight: Flying Solo 2c A Day At The Museum (Succubus)

Icons

House Rules

• Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.
• Regeneration with an advantage gives back Strength levels.
• You can use Fast Attack with all your powers, though it costs an Advantage to switch between modes. (That is, you can punch twice, but it’s an Advantage to punch and blast.)

• A Day At The Museum
• Cast
  • Succubus (Tara Kleine)
  • Animator
  • Apollo (Construct)
  • Tyrannosaurus rex (Construct)
  • Soldiers/Warriors (Constructs)
• Game Mechanics

Credit for the story goes to Victory RPG’s Flying Solo, which I presume is written by Fran Vaughan as an M&M Superlink module for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition. When I converted characters, I used the same artwork as in the module, but I don’t see attribution on them. Anyway: no intent to infringe or take money; if it’s an issue, please contact me at jhmcmullen@gmail.com and I’ll remove the artwork.

A Day At The Museum

At work at the museum, Emily Morgan invited Tara Kleine to lunch. Tara’s first inclination was to refuse—and then she remembered that both Flip-Flop and The Reach had told her that she needed to get out more, and needed to meet more people.

Next Flight: Sewer Kings 3b Cleaning The Sewers

Icons

This is from Victory RPG’s Sewer Kings.

House Rules

• Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Cleaning The Sewers

The Reach was humming while he worked in the headquarters. He was humming because it had been a good dinner and evening, and he was working because the headquarters always needed something. Silkworm, the original owner, had jury-rigged everything; jury-rigs eventually fail. In about three years, he figured, he would have replaced everything with real fixes and it would be the HQ of Theseus. Today he was fixing the combat simulator. Last week the Trouncy Castle had knocked Flip-Flop into a wall and left a dent, misaligning one of the projectors. (At some point alien friends of Silkworm had given her hard light technologies and the combat simulator’s mechanisms were—pardon the expression—utterly opaque to anyone not familiar.)

Next Flight: Flying Solo 2b Damsel In Distress (The Reach)

Icons

This is the second adventure from Victory RPG’s Flying Solo, which was written by Fran Vaughan as an M&M Superlink module for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition.

When I converted characters, I used the same artwork as in the module, but I don’t see attribution on them. Anyway: no intent to infringe or take money; if it’s an issue, please contact me at jhmcmullen@gmail.com and I’ll remove the artwork.

The portrait of The Reach is by Ade Smith for the character Flux in the excellent campaign setting Stark City. It is used here entirely without permission, and again, if there’s an issue, contact me, and I’ll remove the artwork or provide better formal attribution, or something.

House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Damsel In Distress

The Reach liked riding the subway in his secret identity, Jason Crawford. Yeah, the subway was sometimes crowded, frequently disgusting, and prone to breakdowns.

But it was real, full of people who wore no costumes and didn’t try to take over the world or steal arcane relics. For instance, on today’s ride, there had been one kid who had never heard of earphones for his phone but had a complete discography of AC/DC, three university kids about Flip-Flop’s age celebrating the end of term, and one old man who really wanted to talk gargoyles and rain spouts to anyone near him. He’d seen one, the old man said. “Wasn’t a gargoyle yesterday, but was this morning.”

Next Flight: Sewer Kings 3a Fundraiser

Icons

This is the first scene or chapter Victory RPG’s Sewer Kings, being interleaved with their Flying Solo. Art and story are copyright by Victory RPG.

• House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Fundraiser

Down the street from the bank, The Reach got the situation from the officer on the scene. It wasn’t even dark at this point in the summer: all of the businesses in this part of town were closed but hadn’t been closed long. “The explosion happened after most of the employees had gone home,” said the officer who talked to The Reach. “We figure that was when the wall went up.” The wall was debris at both ends of the alley beside the bank, piled about twenty feet high. The wall was made of cars, garbage cans, a dumpster, parts of a billboard…^[1] The Reach noted that all were ferro-magnetic. Magnetic guy.

Next Flight Flying Solo 2a Corporate Raider (Flip-Flop)

Icons

This is from Victory RPG’s Flying Solo. There are three solo adventures and my intent is to use the three characters of Next Flight as characters from the solo adventures. Will that work? I dunno. I also intend to interleave those solo bits with the scenes from the same publisher's Sewer Kings. I have no idea if that will be successful.

Anyway, the first one will be Flip-Flop, then The Reach, then Succubus.

• House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Credit for the story in the first three scenes goes to Victory RPG’s Flying Solo, which I presume is written by Fran Vaughan as an M&M Superlink module for Mutants & Masterminds  2nd edition. When I converted characters, I used the same artwork as in the module, but I don’t see attribution on them. Anyway: no intent to infringe or take money; if it’s an issue, please contact me at jhmcmullen@gmail.com  and I’ll remove the artwork.

• Corporate Raider
• Flip-Flop (Henny Barker)
• Brigand
• Game Mechanics

Corporate Raider

Henny (as herself, not as Flip-Flop) was passing time until Dr. Kittner appeared by checking out an automated CRISPR tool on the Expo floor. Dr. Kittner had said that he was going to unveil something that (he said) would “revolutionize computing.”

Next Flight: A tale of two modules

Icons

I was thinking that I haven’t published any solo plays for a while (I know, you’re heartbroken), but honestly, I haven’t done many. However, I have the Flying Solo and Sewer Kings both done or nearly done, but looking at them, they’re both sort of piecemeal things, with chunks to be dropped in sessions and then later picked up.

So I figured what I would do is take the three chapters of Flying Solo (and the fourth that I added) and the four chapters of Sewer Kings and see what they’d look like if you interleaved them. Will it be interesting? Well, at least as interesting as these things ever are.

For convenience’s sake, I'll be numbering them Flying Solo a, b, c, and d, and Sewer Kings a, b, c, and d. We’ll see if they end up being interesting.

As an addendum, I should point out that all of these solo play things have both the tags “Actual Play” and “Fiction” on them. I play them out, and then I do a half-revision, where I turn things like “She tried to hit him and succeeded!” into “She hit him hard.” I don’t remove any results or change things that are unpleasant, but I try to make it read easier and eliminate some of the redundancies. So it’s like fiction in that way.

Actual roleplaying can take a meandering path, while fiction tries to support the story. My current opinion is that actual roleplaying doesn’t really have a story, but we create one in the retelling. So I’m turning it into a story.

Villains - a taxonomy

Image from Fainting Goat's Deluxe Super Villain Handbook

Right now I'm thinking about villains.

Coming up with an adventure means (for me) coming up with villains. And a villain group is more likely to give a player group a decent run for its money than a single big bad. (Not always true, but mostly.) So while a single big bad is easier for me to conceptualize, it's also easier for the players to win because of a lucky shot.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you don't want that all the time.

Wait, let's back up a minute.

Let's make up some terminology. For bad folk facing a group of heroes, you have:

• Big Bad is a single monolithic force who just overwhelms the heroes. Your Galactus, your Kang, your Dr. Doom, your Dormammu, your Amazo, your Starro, your Prometheus, and so on. The intent is that taking on this force directly is going to be tough. Sometimes the Big Bad can be defeated by a trick (“simple garden lime!”) and sometimes you gotta think outside the box. Sometimes it's just overwhelming force (I'm thinking Doomsday here, who defeated the whole Justice League to show how tough he was), but that concentration of force will come at a cost. Depending on the story, the Big Bad might have other resources, which could include any of the other types of bad folk.
• Puppeteer is a weird hybrid: a single opponent but usually a set of punchables in front of the heroes. He can be treated as one of the other groups; we say no more about him today.
• Villain Group is a group of opponents. Usually they have better teamwork than your heroes, at least in the beginning. This is your Masters of Evil, your Hyperclan, your Injustice League, your Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. I feel like there are more memorable Big Bads than Villain Groups, but comics have been around a long time, so I'm probably wrong. If the evil cult has a small group of super-powered leaders (vampires, demons, aliens, whatever) then it's an Agency headed by Villain Group.
• Horde is a special category I made up for “overwhelming numbers but no individual distinction” such as the Brood. They have a goal, but you're not working against an individual, you're working against all of them. A sudden uprising of zombies, for instance, might be a horde. Hordes are often subservient to a big bad (because it's more satisfying to cut off the head of something) but they don't have to be. (If they're not subservient, then all of them have to be exterminated, which might not be what you want for your campaign.) A Horde feels to me like it often engenders horror, whether it's aliens taking over bodies or the dead rising.
• Agency is a group of non-powered opponents, probably with some kind of tech support (really good weapons, for instance). Like a Horde, they have to be disabled in some way, usually by getting the government to pull their funding. Examples might be AIM or Hydra or SHIELD or maybe the Church of Blood.

(Individual heroes can also have equal antagonists, but that also is outside my remit today.)

You can mix and match: perhaps the Agency hires or creates a Villain Group. Perhaps the Puppeteer tries to make use of a Horde. Maybe the Villain Group hires the Big Bad, and then there's a personality conflict that involves violence and property damage.

Now, it's fun once in a while to have the Big Bad show up, trash everything, and then be vulnerable to one of the heroes' attacks. Can't be the point of the session, it seems to me (having run more than my share of pointless sessions). You want some kind of equivalence.

I don't have a deeper thought at this point. My tentative conclusions are:

• Memorable characters of any kind usually repeat.
• A Big Bad who is simply defeated by a trick is usually not memorable.
• A Horde can be frightening but usually isn't particularly noteworthy.

About that campaign...

Icons

First of all, I’m running it. Setting it in our version of Stark City, so it’s current day but otherwise the same as in the book from Fainting Goat Games. We go three Thursdays a month (other Thursday is book club for me) and Thursday is ideal because during the game my spouse is at choir practice.

Everybody’s on the more powerful side. Nobody turned out to be the doughty two-fisted adventurer with a mask and a grappling gun. We have ranged transmutation, mental blast, amazing strength, several element/energy control and alternate form characters, and a speedster. Powerful mix.

We’ve missed one session because I finally caught COVID and wasn’t up to it, so we've had a session 0 and two more...which brings me to my topic.

I was a bit too rigid in the first session and didn't let the players win enough. I disliked that I did that, so I resolved to say “yes” more.

Single paragraph context: Plan was, meet the mercenary group and trash them, and then discover a vast conspiracy behind the mercenary group. Well, various plots got planted, they met the bad guys (a party of five situation with three kids: sixteen, twelve, and eight, but the twelve year old has duplication). The speedster sixteen-year-old got away with the eight-year-old, but the tween stayed behind and defected to our heroes. The session still has ten or fifteen minutes to go.

And then the improvisation started. The players found some earpieces belonging to the vast conspiracy and we had fifteen minutes left in the session. Surely they could find the source...so I said “yes.” They found the Poseidon Building in Tesla Industrial Park. One of the players theorized this was a mental control thing, imprinting personalities on host bodies, so he examined the building for a mind shield. (When you have Amazing Telepathy, you just look through windows, try to check minds, and look for when you can't. Not that he described it for me; it might have been a stunt, too: Detect Mind Shield. We weren't in combat time, so I didn't care.)

Say “yes,” right? There was a mind shield over the basement.

Fortunately, time ran out just before they decided to infiltrate the building.

Originally, the conspiracy was relatively normal people trying to create superpowers reliably. We know that this can be done, because most of the characters have Transformed as their origin, and at least one went looking for the change. With the new facts in play (I like the idea that it's personality superimposition), I have to re-think this. Maybe this is the Great Race of Yith, transformed for comics?

I have to meet at least half the players' expectations as they make their way in; the other half I can leave as dangling plot threads, I think.

And I have to have a map: secret basement base.

Game Quotation: “Hiding your base with a mind shield is as unobtrusive as trying to hide things from Superman with lead.”

GMing note: There are several powers that can wear off at a particular rate, such as Nullification and Stunning. Both got used last session, and I now know that the GM has to keep track of pages as they pass. One power is easy (but should be tracked; as powers come back, they get stronger) but the Stunning that got used last time was power nine...and nine pages is a loooong time. So I'll add a pair of clocks to my GM sheet.

New Campaign Prep: My thoughts so far

Icons

I'm missing me some superhero gaming. So I'm going to run something online. Here's what I know so far:

• It will be either Roll20 or Roll20+Discord for voice.
• My current plan is Thursday nights, 7:00 Eastern, except for the one night a month I have book club also on Thursdays. (This Thursday as I write this.)
• The setting will be Stark City in the present. When necessary, we'll introduce sliding timescale, but I think it will go fine. When in doubt, we'll use Chicago as the model, so there will be (for example) a Morgan Park Zoo.
• The focus of the campaign will be the city. While there will be stuff that focuses on specific neighbourhoods (for example, if a player wants to focus on his or her attempts to improve the neighbourhood), or some
• Characters will be rolled. Oh, someone can build on 45 points if they want, but the bonuses that come with a particular origin only come with a rolled character. Of course, the emphasis on rolled characters means that I have to be adjacent in some way so people don't “accidentally” roll twenty 12s in a row. I might re-think that because if you don't trust folks, why are you gaming with them? However, being able to talk through the Qualities is a big deal. Qualities inform the focus of the game, really.
• I'm not a big fan of Knacks but I'm going to allow them, with the known thing that having a knack can reduce your starting determination pool to 0; if you don't have a knack, you can't have a starting Determination less than 1.
• Pretty standard superhero thing. I'm not throwing in any twists.

Because I was listening to an interview with George MacDonald this week, the first adventure will be a bank robbery with some time-travel shenanigans mixed in. (No, the robbers themselves won't have time powers, but they'll be pointers to a time-travel thing that's probably not accessible to the PCs, and which might be an overarching big bad of the first arc...if the players are interested.

To a large extent, I don't want to plan anything without knowing who the players are.

Idea du jour: Elves

fantasy

What if the elves we see are obsessed with nature because they are urban. I mean seriously urban. They're long-lived and population pressures long ago forced them to use up their world. What we see are campers and hikers and even eco-terrorists.

Elves in Faery actually look more like punk rockers and salarymen.

This is why elves are all, “We will not help,” and against industrialization: they’re trying to preserve our world. The elves we see are the upper class, the ones who can afford to take a sojourn of a few centuries in our world.

So when your characters take a trip to Faery, they might get the technological/magical help they need, but they're traveling to the ultimate urbanized area, full of industrialization and concrete and mazes.

City names

Icons

This is a general thing, but it's for an Icons game I’m planning.

It seems to me that for a city-based superhero game you can go real or fictional. Real has the advantage that all the maps are available and the stuff is right there. Fictional has the advantage that you can include new stuff as needed and mould the city to fit your needs, your themes. And, of course, you can do both, starting with a real city and modifying it to your needs.

I am inclined to a fictional city in this case. I might change my mind; I won't be asking for players for a few days, so there's a chance for me to change. But right now, I'm thinking that I want to be able to shape it. I might use a real city as the basis but I plan on changing enough stuff that it might as well be a fictional city.

Here's what I want:

• A four-colour mood. Not necessarily Silver Age, but some goofiness might sneak in.
• A zoo (got an adventure idea that requires a zoo)
• Waterfront in case somebody comes up with an aquatic hero
• Some kind of university or lab, because we'll need some experiments.

Actually, Chicago is a good fit for what I want, although it's entirely possible to get too grim.

So I've talked myself into using Chicago.

Weird Idea O’ The Day

So driving all day does things to the brain.

I present this concept:

James Bond: The Musical

Numbers include:

• Most Famous Secret Agent (sung by Moneypenny and the chorus)
• Lethal Sidekick Even Stephen
• I'm Limestone Scaramanga (But You Can Call Me Spectre)
• Suggestive Name, I'll Turn You (On)
• I Expect You To Die
• Base Ain't So Secret On Fire

I haven't figured out what Felix's role in all of this, though.

ICONS: Being Nausated...an alternate technique

Icons

As you know, I do solo plays converting adventures from other systems, and that means sometimes coming up with Icons-appropriate things to do instead of the original. So here's another post about a situation and what an Icons-appropriate solution might be.

An "Icons-appropriate thing" might be a pyramid test, creating an Advantage or Disadvantage, or a succeeding at a test scaled by results rather than a series of tests. That is, instead of saying:

Interrogate thugs

DC	Result
DC 10	The gang is recruiting
DC 15	The gang has superhumans recruited
DC 20	This robbery was to get money to fund the next part of the scheme

It becomes:

Interrogate thugs, Willpower test, Difficulty 3

Result	Information
Failure or marginal success	No info
Moderate success	"The gang is recruiting"
Major sucess	"Our gang is recruiting and we've already got supervillains, so you better watch out"
Massive success	"We're recruited people, even supervillains, and this robbery will pay for the next stuff to come!"

When converting M&M stuff, it's generally fast enough to say DC 10 = Difficulty 3, DC 15 = Diff 4, and so on, adding 1 for every 5 or so (and always adjusting based on what they're actually trying to do; this isn't a blind process).

In Sewer Kings, by Victory Games, I ran across an option to have the heroes nauseated by suddenly going into a sewer (and presumably not a storm sewer, though that can smell bad, too). I don't have my copy of M&M2E handy, so I can't look up the effects of Nauseate rank 4 or rank 8, but I'm guessing that it paralyses them with the smell unless they make a CON roll.

(This analysis is based on that concept. If that's not what Nauseate power did, well, it's wrong for this situation, but the idea might be useful for something you're running.)

In that case, the intent is to have them lose actions until they make the roll, but I looked at it and said, "So what?" They're not meeting the villains until later, and if they can't move, well, they can't meet the villains; at this point there's no time constraint. So blindly substituting Stunning doesn't mean anything.

But creating Trouble — a -2 to any action other than trying to fight the smell — that might be useful.

Plus, Icons has mechanisms for eliminating Trouble. An awful smell might be dealt with by creating a nose covering, by putting on the rebreather the character carries for underwater adventures, by activating the sealed life support systems that aren't normally on, and so on....all of which can be dealt with by a Maneuver or spending a Determination Point.

Instead, my solution was that all players get Trouble (and a Determination Point), manifested as a -2 to any action other than trying to fight the smell. They can use the normal techniques for getting rid of Trouble. (Characters who can't smell or are androids or whatever just bypass this: no Trouble, no DP.)

And, because people get used to terrible smells (even normal people) whether the character does something or not, the Trouble goes away once the character has succeeded at a Pyramid Test, strength tests against difficulty 3 by default but player suggestions encouraged.

This idea can be used for any kind of physical inconvenience that people eventually get used to, like sea sickness or terrible smells. You might adapt it to something like emotional hardening to the unearthly if you were going to run a horror sword-and-sorcery game with Icons.

Hope that's a useful idea for people. I'm sure that's in one of the published adventures, but I seem doomed to re-invent the wheel, so here it is.

Next Flight #1: Lair of the Wrathmaster

Icons

Lair of the Wrathmaster

I was going to do a solo play with Uncanny Justice, but I’ve got myself into a situation with them, and until I can figure out exactly why Abe got called to the realm of Faerie, I can’t go forward with that.

Instead, here is a solo play with other new characters, based on Fainting Goat Games’ “Lair of the Wrathmaster,” and using the new characters Flip-Flop, The Incredible Reach, and Succubus. All are 45-point characters (I rolled them up but started fiddling so I said the hell with it and changed them to 45 points).

House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

• Scene 1: The Crepes of Wrath
• Scene 2: The Lair
• Scene 3: A Confrontation
• Cast
  • Next Flight
    • The Incredible Reach
    • Flip-Flop (Henny Barker)
    • Succubus (Tara Kleine)
  • The Lair

Scene 1: The Crepes of Wrath

Flip-Flop got to this Crepes of Wrath restaurant first but stayed up above the buildings until The Reach arrived, then swooped down. The crowd beyond the police tape cheered and someone yelled, “Get’em, Reach!” He waved casually until he found the officer in charge. At the building itself, Succubus appeared in a shadowed doorway and walked out to Flip-Flop. Both male and female police stopped and looked at her. There were cat calls from the crowd, but Succubus paid them no mind; they were a distraction.

Thoughts on Day of the Octopus

Marvel Super Heroes

Another in my series of looks at classic (or at least fondly-remembered) superhero adventures. This time, I look at "Day of the Octopus", the introductory adventure that was in the Marvel Super Heroes basic set.

Marvel Super Heroes, or FASERIP, was published by TSR in 1984. The adventure was written by Bruce Nesmith. It came as part of the basic set, and you can get it online for free, apparently free of charge. (I am not giving the URL because I am not convinced of this, given how litigious Disney is, but it’s easy enough to find if you search.

Uncanny Justice 9 (secretly Viper's Nest)

Icons

Uncanny Justice 9: SKULL & Double-crossbones aka Viper’s Nest

A solo play, featuring Abe Cadabra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. Once again, I am trying (with some trepidation) a famous beginning module; in this case, “Viper’s Nest,” from first and second edition Champions, written by George MacDonald. I say trepidation because I have fond memories of playing this way back when, and I am afraid that the suck or sexism fairies will have gotten to it.

Still, we press on. Nothing on first glance strikes me as horrendously time-bound, so we’ll bring it into the present and use some substitute for Viper that fits this campaign. I realize that the characters aren’t beginners, but the difference in experience might mean they’re considered beginners. (In fact, I generated Champions version of the characters and they stayed within the 275 point limit, though I did have to bring forward variable pool for Abe.)

I’m substituting SKULL for VIPER, “Slab” for Brick,  “Greyjay” for Bluejay, and “Fading Fox” for Cheshire Cat. Tanghal Tower stays the same, but Christopher Park becomes Sacrifice Glen Park, in partial tribute to Glenn Thain.

Also, we have some minor achievements built up, so I want to use one for each character, but I made the decision after two engagements, so it doesn’t take effect until the last part of the adventure:

• Abe’s magic now has the extra “Instant,” and I’ll lower his determination by 1. I don’t think “Addicted to Applause” is correct but I haven’t come up with a correct one yet.
• Demiangel spends a lot of time punching, so he should have Martial Arts as well.
• Honeybee should up her ability to hit with the sonic blast: she now has the Specialty Power (scream).

Scene 1: Prelude^[1]

“They’re tearing down the Tanghal Tower,” said Lauren.

Warning: Shoals of Boredom

Icons

Warning

I'm bored, and that usually means I'm going to start up some new project that will be abandoned.

Still, you should be warned, so this is your warning.

I don't get to play or run a superhero campaign right now, except for the solo play things I'm doing, and I have a yearning to do just that.

And I've got a powerful sense of nostalgia for the days when all we had to do was give the players a problem and watch them flail around trying to solve it.

So I'm going create a campaign here. I think that a couple of things are going to be true in this campaign (though I'm not certain):

• More villains than heroes. The heroes are going to have someone to fight rather than internecine combat.
• Multiple origins. You can do some powerful things with single origins, like all-mutants, but I don't particularly want to go down that path.
• I'm willing to steal from everywhere.
• Secret identities are important, though I don't know why yet.
• I'm going to try to (a) keep the legacy stuff of the past and (b) drag some of superhero schtick into the 21st century.
• I will be happy to provide some kind of explanation for things, but I'm not of a mind to provide an explanation for everything. Some things will be genre conventions; we just live with them.

Will this work? Will I keep at it? Who knows?

Uncanny Justice 8: Pirates Beyond Time!

Icons

Uncanny Justice 8: Pirates Beyond Time!

A solo play, featuring Abe Cadabra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. The adventure is Fainting Goat Games’ “Pirates Beyond Time!”, written by Chuck Rice.

• Scene 1: (New) Home At Last
• Scene 2: Attack of the Robo-Buccaneers
• Scene 3: Enter the Devolved
• Scene 4: It Gets Personal
• Scene 5: This Should Be Simple
• Scene 6: Quaking In My Boots
• Chapter 7: The Gorgon’s Eye
• The Cast
  • Uncanny Justice
    • Abraham Cadabra
    • Honeybee (Lauren Twilt)
    • Demiangel (William Halvorsen)
    • Team Qualities (Uncanny Justice)
  • Pirates
    • Robo-Buccaneers
    • The Devolved aka the Alt-Humans
    • Aftershock
    • First Matrix
    • Captain Aetherblade
  • Other
    • Olivia Franklin
    • Kimberly Yang
• Game Mechanics

Scene 1: (New) Home At Last^[1]

In the new headquarters Lauren tightened the last screw on the dresser. It wasn’t a huge dresser, but she didn’t plan to live here; she had her own place about twenty minutes away. This place just needed a change of clothes and toiletries. When you can fly as fast as a jetliner, the commutable distance is large. The whole business with Steve last fall had convinced her not to date in the same city she worked in.

Thoughts about Viper’s Nest

Champions

Thinking about the 1982 adventure Viper's Nest for 1st edition Champions.

I've been looking at old adventures, trying to figure out what makes a good superhero adventure. Part of the answer seems to be that you play it at the right age. However, in looking at these old adventures I can't help but think about the difference in games between then and now.

For this adventure, "then" is 1982, the first edition of Champions. I had a certain amount of trepidation looking at this, because I played it, wayyyy back in 1983. It was one of the first (if not the first) superhero games I played and so I was worried that looking at the adventure would spoil old memories.

But, frankly, they can still be good memories, even if we'd do things differently now. And I'll try to judge this without the rose-coloured glasses, but please be understanding if I end up being kinder to the adventure than it deserves; I'm trying not to, but I also don't want to be needlessly cruel.

Some historical context. Champions wasn't the first RPG with superhero elements (that was probably Superhero 2044) or the first full superhero RPG (that was probably Villains and Vigilantes). But it was the first to use an effect-based system, and the first to use point-buy rather than random roll. (That was a big thing for me back then: I wanted to play the character I designed, rather than designing the character based on what the dice threw up.) Some of those innovations are still with us.

The adventure "Crisis at Crusader Citadel" was intended as a tutorial; "Viper's Nest" is intended as a campaign introduction. The conceit of "Crisis" is thin, but the whole thing is intended to get you into two big fights.

"Viper's Nest" has loftier ambitions. It's a higher target and it's not quite as successful. It achieves its goal, but a higher target has higher standards.

(Brief digression already: Like "Crisis," this adventure contains at least one casual death meant to show you how eeeevil the villains are. I honestly don't remember comics in the late 1970s well enough to know if this was a thing. The character giving you information in the introduction gets offed by, it's implied, VIPER.)

There are three interlinked engagements that introduce you to the dastardly villainous society VIPER. Later editions expanded on VIPER, but in first edition, this is what there was. Possibly in a callback to the wargaming roots of RPGs, all three parts are called "engagements" here. They are connected only in that VIPER commits all three. You can either be disappointed that the various parts don't connect, or you can look at them as opportunities that a GM can grasp.

I'm trying to do both, here.

In my brain, engagement one would give the pretext for engagement two, which would provide the information for engagement three. It doesn't.

On the other hand, it gives us three supervillains, a hero agent group (UNTIL), and a villain agent group (VIPER), and a tremendously detailed map, plus an exhortation to make the adventure your own, which is nice.

While "Crisis" gave us notes on the tactical approach of each supervillain in the adventure, "Viper's Nest" talks about the tactics for the group VIPER. This...is more complicated than I cared about; in running it, even though I was running it for myself, I found it necessary to pre-figure how many VIPER agents and who they were in each group (a quarter skirmishers, a quarter overwatch, and half attackers). Very war-game-y.

The VIPER agents are designed so that a powerhouse or paragon character can take them out in one blow. A single punch from a normal human cannot penetrate their force fields. Really, the whole setup says "Minion" to me, so I'd use the minion rule after the first encounter. (In the first, I wouldn't use the minion rule because you want to build up VIPER.)

Incidentally, the adventure provides three villains to use (though there's an option to use some of the villains from the main rulebook). The villains are Brick, a, uh, brick, Bluejay, a flying energy projector, and Cheshire Cat, a teleporting martial artist. What's interesting to me is that although I played the game with Brick in the first engagement (and that's how I ran it for myself...the strong guy can get into the cornerstone if necessary), the villain Bluejay would probably not be used in the second encounter and wouldn't have room to maneuver in the third...so really, Bluejay is the villain to use in the first encounter. The rules never say that, though. If I were thinking about the different engagements instead of rolling villain forces on tables, I'd go Bluejay in the first adventure, Cheshire Cat in the second, and Brick in the third.

The Macguffin for engagement one is a room-temperature superconductor developed before World War II. (As is typical for comic books, no scientists keep notes.) The samples and notes are in the cornerstone of a building which is being torn down. This leads to a big fight with VIPER and possibly one supervillain.

Your trained heroes can also do well here; there's a bulldozer and a crane with a wrecking ball by the partially-demolished building. Even if the bad guy is someone they can't themselves hurt, the wrecking ball will probably hurt them.

Engagement two is an encounter in a park: VIPER is there to capture or kill a defector. (It's the "kill" part that makes Bluejay a bad choice here.) The engagement really lives according to the bystanders that the GM puts in. In this engagement, your obvious heroes, the ones who can't be disguised as normal people, are at a significant disadvantage.

Engagement three is a dungeon crawl. If you loved the detailed maps in "Crisis" you'll love the detailed maps here. I presume that with D&D being the reference point, every adventure had to have a dungeon crawl. That was, essentially, the model. (Also no bathrooms. That was also the model.)

I know you're surprised, but I haven't run out of thoughts yet. I want to talk about sexism and racism.

In one sense, this adventure avoids some of the casual sexism of "Crisis," but that's because it mentions sex almost not at all. All but one of the characters are men, even when it's implied that there are women around (the VIPER base has women's change rooms). There is one woman villain. Her motivation is rather...vague (she wants to fly the suit they've built, and having stolen it, she has no way of turning back). On the other hand, Brick's motivation is "I have amnesia and VIPER was nice to me," which is also kind of vague. Cheshire Cat might have a bit more: "A VIPER accident gave me superpowers and I have a wife to feed. VIPER pays me."

And I don't expect it from something written in 1981, nobody's sexuality is touched on. That's easy to change if you're running it, because there's just this void of assumption. Put something concrete in and it changes. For example, make Brick trans: before the accident, he was AFAB but the accident brought forth his brick persona a manifestation of his inner toughness. The adventure doesn't support that reading, but it doesn't not support it; that sort of thing doesn't enter into the adventure at all.

Race is even worse: there are no known characters of color. They could be: In a modern setting, there's no reason not to have Brick or Bluejay or Cheshire Cat or any of the VIPER or UNTIL agents as people of color. It's very cis-het, very white, very male. All of that can be changed, but you have to decide to put that in.

I lied: one possible NPC is named Vasquez, so some microdiversity there. But (my opinion here) when you have only one character of a gender or type, that character becomes an avatar for everyone of that type. All Latinx characters are by-the-book law enforcement sorts who hate supers. (To be honest, that was a trope in comics.)

Two of a type at least means you can have a good gay and a bad gay, a neat black woman and a messy black woman, a deferential trans Asian man and an outspoken cis Asian woman. It seems to me that’s closer to what we think of as diversity today.

It is a product of its time, but it can be reshaped to fit 2022. And it does a fine job at putting toys in the sandbox, as comics writers have said: it gives you VIPER and UNTIL and supervillains, and a reason for them to be there; it gives you a superconductor of unknown provenance.

It has its flaws, but that's pretty good.

Brought over from Dreamwidth: Icons Assembled Villains

Icons

In the old days (2015) I did a post for every villain in Icons Assembled. I thought I'd bring those over here and possibly update them a bit, it being a different decade.

First up: ConfederApe.

ConfederApe

The official bio says:

An accident in brainwave syncing led to an experimental ape absorbing the intellect of scientist Dwight Givens, along with Givens’s obsession with Civil War history and re-enactments. To the "ConfederApe" the "Lost Cause" became synonymous with the overthrow of human domination. With the power to broadcast mental commands to his fellow apes, he staged a breakout of the research facility and plots rebellion against all humankind.

Text quoted with the permission of Steve Kenson and Ad Infinitum Games, and is not intended to challenge the copyright.

It's easy to treat the ConfederApe as a joke or a one-off villain, so let's not. Let's consider ConfederApe as a credible threat in a comic book universe. (This is tough for me, as I've said elsewhere. As a Canadian, I have no resonance with the Lost Cause fable, and tend to the simplistic idea that people who want to overthrow the government and maintain human slavery are wrong. But I'll try to give ConfederApe a fair treatment...because human treatment of apes is horrendous.)

In some ways, he's the perfect comic book villain: his plans do not involve grubby cash (except as a means to an end), non-lethal (he doesn't want to kill all humans, just subjugate them) and his knowledge of strategy and tactics means that the PCs can never assume his actions are "just random," even if they are.

But what does he want?

A Brief Aside: A GM's Decision

Technically, apes are any of the tailless anthropoid catarrhine primates (look it up on Wikipedia). The group includes gibbons, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans. But "ape" also gets used to mean any tailless monkey, such as the Barbary ape, while excluding humans.

So you have to decide when using the ConfederApe on his usual behaviour: does he control apes in the technical sense, or apes in the casual sense (in which case you can probably throw in all New World and Old World monkeys as well, but exclude humans).

He can do either, but you should pick one. It determines his choices. A ConfederApe who can control human minds is a different opponent than one who controls the monkeys of organ grinders.

(Remember to throw your PCs a Determination Point any time he violates his usual protocol.)

Here, I'm going to assume that he can control the mind of any non-human primate. (I'm also going to risk the wrath of primate researchers by declaring that for my purposes, intelligence or sapience means human intelligence.)

His Goals

Look at his Qualities. They're meant to constrain and define him. Yes, he wants the apes to rise; no, he can't do it dishonourably, because he's a Southern gentleman. If the ConfederApe has given his word, he will not betray you. (Obviously, he doesn't give his word often.) If you're careful, you can strike some sort of deal with him. But he can't just give up: he's a rebel primate.

Really, he wants to create the Planet of the Apes, but he'll settle for founding Gorilla City. This is perhaps the best way to think of him: as a long-range planner who combines both King Solovar and Gorilla Grodd.

Because he's not a genius, you can make the plans stupid, but why bother? A squad of policemen and three officers from Animal Control would be able to catch him if the plans were stupid.

ConfederApe: The Mini Series

Put yourself in his place at his origin: you're a gorilla that has suddenly achieved sapience, you understand how you've been oppressed by humans, and you need to organize to put down the humans. Let's say the facility was in or near Atlanta, Georgia.

Going Ape

ConfederApe broke out of the facility with as many apes as he could bring—capuchins, rhesus monkeys, and other gorillas, including his mate, Nabila. Maybe the best thing to do would have been to hide his intelligence, find out what was going on, but the ConfederApe was overwhelmed by rage when he suddenly understood what they were doing. He was also afraid that they would take away this new knowledge, this new self-awareness. He doesn't know what happened to Dwight Givens; Givens didn't go home that night. (ConfederApe checked: he knows where Givens lives.)

The first thing to do was put distance between his group and the research station. They hopped a freight train heading east and south, to wilderness. He liked the idea of hiding on the Fort Stewart grounds (Givens had fond memories of hunting there), but he also knew there were lethal items on the ground. Instead, he headed to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.

There they hid.

ConfederApe had several needs in the early days: He had to hide his people; he had to increase the size of his army; he had to make his apes smart. (Smart apes weren't unknown in the Iconsverse, but they had never bred true.) He stole food, to make their presence less obvious. Several times they were spotted, leading to Bigfoot rumours, but he managed to keep everyone safe.

He started breaking into the Refuge administration center at night, and using their computers. Under pseudonyms, he contacted animal rights groups. Eventually he found one that was radical enough that it wouldn't question the legality of breaking apes from research facilities and jails.

And he discovered superheroes.

Superheroes might not be against the idea of ape self-rule, but they would be against the subjugation of humanity.

After thinking about this for weeks, ConfederApe came to a couple of conclusions.

• He had to keep freeing apes wherever possible. But until he could make the apes smarter, he couldn't hide with them. Superheroes would find him, which means they would find the others, who couldn't escape on their own.
• He had to foment discontent among the humans. He had seen even in the research facility that the humans weren't monolithic in their feelings toward apes and ape captivity. That was something he could use.
• He needed to be a symbol. Even if only a small fraction of humans agreed with him, a small fraction of seven billion would be many humans. They would have to rally around him.

That was the origin of ConfederApe. That's the reason for the vest and the hat and the name.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Ape

Again using the freight trains, ConfederApe returned to Atlanta. In Atlanta, he was going to make his first appearance as ConfederApe.

He planned to be on camera and distract attention from his animal rights associates...and the surest way to find cameras and people was to go to a baseball game.

He attacked during the seventh inning break. He was mistaken for a zoo mascot.

In anger, he tore up the field, broke the scoreboard, and smashed the box office. When Animal Control officers showed up, he tricked them into shooting each other with tranquilizer darts.

The crowd loved it. The home team had been losing, so the distraction was welcome. They paid no attention to the plight of the apes.

Defeated, ConfederApe went into hiding. He was a supervillain whom no one recognized as a supervillain. He needed to refine his plan. To get the attention he needed, he had to attack superheroes directly.

But not in Georgia. Instead, wherever your heroes are located.

His Tactics

Remember his goals: money, awareness, and make apes smarter so they can be free.

First, he needs money. He has a community that must be hidden and paid for; he has habitats that must be saved so that some day there can be a place for apes to live. Any untraceable high-value item is a good bet for ConfederApe. He steals diamonds and other gems or bearer bonds when he can.

Second, he needs to raise awareness. An assault on superheroes at a known location (with cameras) does that.

Third, he needs to raise the intelligence of his apes. ConfederApe is interested in any technological or magical system for increasing intelligence or any hero or villain who has become intelligent.

His normal technique is to find a location with captive apes, break them out, and use them to help him with whatever job he has in mind. He makes it quite clear that he is controlling the apes, and it is not their fault. (If it comes down to it, he would rather they were re-captured so he can rescue them again.)

ConfederApe travels, in the hopes of keeping the authorities away from his people. He does make trips back there, whenever his females are in rut, because he is hoping his transformation will breed true.

His Relationships with Other Villains

This part is even more “just a suggestion” than the rest, but here's my take on how ConfederApe relates to the rest of the provided villains:

Count Malocchio

“I dislike him, but I find him useful. Warbride tells me he feels the same way about me. I'll work with him, sure, but I see the wrong kind of Old World colonialism and oppression in what the Count does to really feel comfortable with him. That being said, if the Count offered some way to uplift the apes, I'd take it.”

The Creeper

“I like the idea of him more than I like him. When the apes rise up, we will need someone to re-establish the plant world, and the Creeper can do that. On the other hand, Carl is a bit full of himself; he just assumes that plants are better. Look, they're necessary but not better than apes. He has no appreciation for alcohol—he calls it 'yeast piss.' Also, he scorns cotillions, a social construct that I find fascinating.”

The Gila-Master

“He's a fellow animal man. I suppose I should like him. I work with him, but you know that everything is is eventually going to go wrong. First there's that whole 'Chosen One' thing—I find that offensive. Yes, I'm trying to save the apes but that's not Christ-like, that's more Moses. Second, it always seems to come back to Saguaro. There is a time and a place, and he does not understand that. No, things eventually go wrong with Gila-Master, but they can be quite good at the beginning. The trick is getting out before he causes the end.”

Grudge

“He's a loose cannon. He's fine if he's kept on a short leash (so to speak), but you don't ask him to plan anything.”

Speed Demon

“He's a nice human. I like him. He can have all the human women he wants. He likes wine, which I find a bit odd. I like his taste in music.”

The Troll

“You know he's shot apes? In the Congo. He bragged about it once. Also, he's a beer man, which I find vulgar.”

Ultra-Mind

“We don't have a lot of common ground, but I think there's someone interesting there. For instance, he doesn't care if all the humans get destroyed. I like that. I just don't know how to communicate with him. Still, he's useful, and I'll generally do what he asks, because when I call in those favors, I think they'll be quite important.”

Warbride

“I like her. She appreciates a fine bourbon, and she's not nearly as fragile as she looks. She brings me Blue-Rays sometimes (streaming can be spotty at the hideout) and we try to figure out human civilization. I had an idea once that would have used her, Speed Demon, and Ultra-Mind, but I couldn't find the right level to approach Ultra.”

Story ideas

• ConfederApe hears about the Creeper, and he is curious. Granted, Carl had only a qualitative leap in self-awareness and not a quantitative one, but apes are so close that it might be enough. He breaks the Creeper out of jail, and agrees to commit a series of crimes in return for the Creeper's secret. The Creeper has no real secret (and many apes are mostly vegetarians, which Carl is dubious about).
• The Ultra-Mind has increased his intelligence, and finds the ConfederApe's little crusade amusing. The Ultra-Mind's genetic accelerator could be used to give apes intelligence, with a few modifications. Or the Ultra-Mind would like to build a device that will turn all humans into apes (except for the ones he deems suitable for evolving). They might strike a deal, where the ConfederApe steals a few parts he needs. The ConfederApe is initially unaware that the Ultra-Mind has no interest in honouring any bargain. (The Ultra-Mind is not a gentleman.)
• The ConfederApe needs to sway public opinion more, so he embarks on a scheme to make the heroes look bad. Whomever they are fighting, the ConfederApe and his cohort of apes make sure that there is collateral damage, that people are going to get hurt, and that someone (if necessary, a hired someone) is there to catch the footage on their cell phone.
• ConfederApe has freed apes from a secret military base. The base was being used to test biological weapons, and there were about two dozen rhesus monkeys and a dozen apes (chimpanzees and gibbons). The base has extensive security, but it's designed to keep an infected ape from getting out, not a human-intelligence ape from getting in. The virus stocks are safe, but two of the apes are in the incubation period and may be infected. This strain has been modified to weaponize it: heroes have about twelve hours before the apes are contagious. (If they get that way: the virus was still being tested.)
• ConfederApe commits a series of robberies in the American South, in Georgia. The robberies indicate he is tracing Sherman's March backward, Savannah to Atlanta. Sherman burned Atlanta; what will ConfederApe do? Savvy players note that the Atlanta zoo has the largest collection of gorillas in North America: over twenty, and that the robberies could finance someone to take that many gorillas back to Africa. He doesn't intend to be at the zoo; he'll be causing a ruckus at a Civil War site. However, using materials he has purchased from Professor Hominid (or stolen, while he had him controlled), a hired flier for an animal rights organization is going to steal the entire gorilla enclosure and transport it back to Africa.
• You know that animal rights organization I just mentioned? Turns out they were lying. They're just crooks. They are now holding the gorillas for ransom, and they're sending the demands to ConfederApe. He commits robberies, sends them money, and when it totals ten (or a hundred) million dollars, they will set the apes free. (Probably.) This outrages ConfederApe's Southern honor enough that he is even willing to ask the players for help. The players discover that the crooks are planning to keep ConfederApe paying money while they resell the apes to various shady agencies, zoos, and research institutions.
• Where does ConfederApe live if you don't want to use the Refuge? You'd think an intelligent gorilla and his monkey minions would be hard to hide, but no: he lives in a traveling zoo. Well, it claims to be a traveling zoo, and perhaps before he showed up, it was. A combination of circus sideshow and zoo, Tribe of Greystoke has reasons to buy ape food and paperwork to travel. Oddly, they don't seem to get many performances (that business strategy of showing up and then looking for gigs doesn't work well), but that's okay: they're understaffed. Goodness knows, they're never lacking for cash. ConfederApe's only rule is to avoid committing crimes in the same city as Tribe of Greystoke. Except it's in the players' town, and so is a trade between zoos, letting a number of orangutans be shown at the local zoo. Will ConfederApe break his long-standing rule, or does he have a clever plan that will disguise his troupe and free the orangs? He doesn't have much time: the apes are due to be shipped back to their home zoo at the end of the week.
• The ConfederApe has less a fondness for Dwight's vegetative body and more a fear that if Dwight ever returns, ConfederApe's intelligence will slip away. Something happens to Dwight's body—it's stolen by organleggers, or Sock Puppet decides to use it, or X takes it away because no one will miss it, or Dwight's widow's boyfriend decides it's standing in the way of their marriage—and ConfederApe goes mad with worry. He and his minions descend upon the city and begin to track the body...incidentally stealing while they're there to support themselves. Can the players discover the connection between a missing man in a coma and the ConfederApe's crimes?

Original posted on DreamWidth at http://doc-lemming.dreamwidth.org/206884.html.

Uncanny Justice 7: Crisis on Earth V

Icons

Crisis on Earth V

Being a solo play with Abraham Cadabra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. Crisis on Crusader Citadel would require more updating than I want to do to move to the modern era, so I did this instead.

Guest heroes are from Icons Origins (Rogue Thorn is the Crimefighter; Somebody is the Shapeshifter) with a couple of changes: I gave the Crimefighter an extra level in Martial Arts so she could stunt; made the shapeshifter’s Transformation into Transformation (people).

I will put Icons versions of the V&V characters on my Google Drive and in the Facebook group; the ideas belong to Jeff Dee and Jack Herman.

A note from halfway through: Oh my god this feels like a slog. So much to set up before I get to the next fight. And from later on, it is over 10000 words, once I subtract character descriptions. Maybe a bit less without footnotes. Gah.

A note from the end: If this were a story, I’d cut half of it. It’s long: about 11000 words. But done.

You might notice weird text things because I started off with different names for all the characters except the Uncanny Justice ones, and then I said, “Come on, it’s not like I’m going to publish this!” and changed them back…except I missed some. So Shocker had the alternate name Amp and when I changed it back, words like tamper suddenly became tShockerer — I think I got all of those, but maybe not.

All of the character translations I did are in the Facebook ICONS group. I should put them on the wiki as well.

• Chapter 1: Sent to Center City
• Chapter 2: Who’s who
• Chapter 3: Citadel application
• Chapter 4: Briefing
• Chapter 5: Manning Enterprises
• Chapter 6: Where They Are
• Chapter 7: Assaulting Crusher Citadel
• Chapter 8: There’s No Place Like Home

Chapter 1: Sent to Center City

Demiangel lifted the robot. While Abe was deactivating it, Demiangel said, “How long is the Society going to be away?”

Uncanny Justice 6: Family of Fear

Icons

Family of Fear

The next holiday isn’t until Valentine’s Day, so for January they get this adventure, Fainting Goat Games’ “Festival of Fear” but without a holiday connection.

Still more thoughts about Crisis at Crusader Citadel

Icons

Yeah. So I ran the first half last night, and I have more thoughts. There are tons of spoilers here for a forty-year-old adventure, so be warned.

The session had its ups and down. It dragged. One of the players even talked about the AD&D mindset: plan what you're going to do, down to the number of torches! Do it, but the dice rolls will introduce complications. I think that just kills momentum. It was fine when we had all Saturday to play, but that's not the case for me anymore.

A thing I sometimes do is map an adventure onto the time available and say, “Okay, this is the halfway point and if we’re not here by this point, I have to make adjustments on the fly.” If I had done that, I think it would have been better; I should have said, “It’s really about two fights, we have three-and-a-half hours, we need to be starting the first fight within an hour.” I didn’t do that, so we got through part one in a little over three-and-a-half hours.

(I suppose that’s a kind of railroading, but given the purpose of the session, I think that’s acceptable. In an on-going campaign, I would find some other way that’s less choo-choo.)

We'll skip the real-world stuff that I had no control over, except that sometimes uncontrollable stuff happens.

I don't feel a need to run the second part as-is. I might run the whole thing again some day to try out ideas to streamline it.

I should have realized the setups for the fights drag because I found just that such a slog in solo play. Yes, the adventure seems to be basically a premise for two big fights, but getting the pieces in place is a hassle, and there has to be a better way to do that for 2022 gamers.

Let's briefly re-cap the scenes and what I think they bring to the adventure:

1. Part One:
   • Meet at the Harmon Building. (Get a clue that TEACHER is on the fritz.)
   • Get everything recapped by the reporter in the lobby, plus a bit of additional information. (Info: the name of the detective in charge of the task force, more info about the Crushers.)

   • Maybe be interviewed by the reporter. (Possible plot twist that doesn't pay off anywhere. You could maybe make it pay off; as it is, it gets negated, so it's just a colour point that might eat up a lot of time.)
   • Get to the police station (again, in both solo play and with people, this turned out to be a problem) and meet the detective. (Essentially: “Yes, we'll let you help! Why don't you take over?”) That gets you into the next part...
   • Get maps of Manning Enterprises and plan the ambush (setup).
   • Have a longish fight in the ambush.
2. Part Two:
   • Meet Dr. Patrovich and hear what the real plan is. (Informs you of your next goal.)
   • Meet escaped Crusaders, if any, an plan assault. (More planning.)
   • Fight.

Looking at that, getting to the police station is a hang-up. Both times I've played it, it was a problem: at least one character didn't have real movement powers. In a comic, we'd skip over it (“Minutes later, at the precinct…”) but with players at the table, you have to figure it out.

In retrospect, I might put Broyko, the police detective, at the Harmon Building, being interviewed by the reporter. How do we get to the police station then? Pfft; he’s got a car.

(Okay, in a modern interpretation, I wouldn’t even be in the lobby: I’d have the Crusaders have a website that’s acting weirdly, but the PCs figure out where the next theft will be — it’s not hard — and put the SWAT teams in the mix as plants in the building, and the reporter nearby. Adding more people is not going to make the Manning Enterprises fight crowded: it's already crowded AF, and that gives heroes someone to save. Use the stock characters from the rulebook.)

In a similar way, the fight in the second half rewards a lot of planning, but do you need that with a system like Icons? Retcons can carry a lot of weight here, and I'd give them a temporary Quality like “Intensive planning session” that they can activate for a retcon. (“Ah, we covered this...”)

There are at least two ways to get into the Citadel without being detected. If they need to brute force it, they can. Once they're in the headquarters, that second fight can start.

The storm is never explained, or made evident, besides the possiblity that an escaped Crusader might be dripping wet. If the player character powersets permit, I might even dramatize the storm by having lightning strike Patrovich’s plane and the PCs have to rescue him. It would give them a chance to do something else heroic, introduce the storm, and introduce Dr. Patrovich. It's a thought.

Anyway. Give the players ten minutes to plan. Execute the plan. Anything that they would reasonably have thought of is an Intellect test or an Advantage on the way. Do you remember that or did you think of it? Leave it to chance. Do you really want it to have happened? It’s a retcon.

So maybe it becomes something like:

1. Everybody tries to contact the Crusaders website; all fail to leave a message, so they know something's wrong. You out and out tell them; maybe there's a test in there for people with an appropriate specialty that gives them more information. Everybody gets five minutes of spotlight and they can use computer skills they happen to have.
2. Everybody figures out that the Crushers are probably going to attack the Manning Enterprises that night; you can do that as an Intellect test, or guide them to the info some other way. Maybe one of the heroes is listening to the police band radio; maybe they've researched the thefts; maybe they get the information off a conspiracy website. If some character really doesn't have a way to figure it out, they meet another character who drags them along.
   • Maybe the Crushers aren't hiding that they're going to show up.
   • Heck, maybe the Crushers sent a note: “You haven't been able to stop us yet. Tonight. Manning Enterprises, midnight.” Of course, they show up at ten p.m.
3. At Manning Enterprises, the Crushers show up. You have the fight, along with SWAT teams, Jessica Anderson, and J. B. Curtis, who get to actually show up in this version.
4. Part Two starts with rescuing Dr. Patrovich from some weather-related problem. He tells the heroes the problem...and that there's a deadline: The governor is sending in the military tomorrow at dawn.
5. Ten player minutes to plan, but in story it's half a day of intensive planning. Use retcons at outlined.
6. Fight.

Anyway, it's an idea. (Now that I've started thinking about it, no doubt I'll have ideas about what the various Crushers should actually be doing when the heroes break in. And the issue of how many Crushers versus how many PCs should be addressed.)

I wouldn't necessarily do things like this if it were an adventure about a mystery or one of the characters making a life choice or something like that. But this is an adventure about two big fights.

Thoughts about Crisis at Crusader Citadel

V&V

One of the things I did early in the pandemic is ask people what the best superhero RPG adventures were. I got three answers, really (but feel free to chime in if you have a suggestion):

1. "Crisis at Crusader Citadel" for Villains & Vigilantes
2. "Day of the Octopus" for Marvel Super Heroes aka FASERIP
3. "Assault on Tanghal Tower" for Champions

Being a good sort, I went off and got them, and read them. (I was looking for commonalities in making a good adventure.)

Let me spoil this for you: You need your audience to be thirteen year olds who have just discovered roleplaying.

Still, I have other thoughts, and the adventures are not without merit.

Uncanny Justice 5: Sign of the New Year

Icons

Sidereal Signs of the New Year

Continuing the terrible holidays of Uncanny Justice…

Being a solo play with Abraham Cadavra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. The adventure is Ad Infinitum’s “The Sidereal Schemes of Dr. Zodiac”.

Uncanny Justice 4: What Rough Beast

Icons

What Rough Beast

Slouches From Our Past

Continuing the terrible holidays of Uncanny Justice…

Being a solo play with Abraham Cadavra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. I’m having trouble figuring out a New Year’s adventure, so this is an old Champions adventure slotted into the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The (reasonably original) HERO version of the adventure is available at http://www.patric.net/morpheus/hero/beast.

Uncanny Justice 3: Panic! At The Museum

Icons

Panic! At The Museum

A Host of Christmas Past

Being a solo play with Abraham Cadavra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. While Devil’s Night took place on Halloween, and A Mastermind Affair happened early in the Christmas season, the events of A Host of Christmas Past take place almost at Christmas. The structure and events come from Fainting Goat Games’ Panic! At The Museum by Chuck Rice. Because I’m interpolating and changing a lot, expect more rambling than usual.

Chapter 1: The Past Is Present

“Why would a place called Plains View give us an award?” asked Bill. “The town doesn’t even have a website. Only found ones for the churches and something called the Plains View Public Museum. I can’t even believe a place called Plains View has a museum.” Bill — Demiangel — took off his sunglasses and scanned the airport crowd. “Abe, I thought you said there’d be a ride.”

Uncanny Justice 2: The Mastermind Affair

Icons

Being a solo play with Abraham Cadabra, Honeybee, and new character Dciteiangel, based on the Icons adventure module, “The Mastermind Affair” by Morgan Davie. This will contain spoilers for the adventure and probably places where I deviate entirely.

As is my wont, I updated all the characters for the Assembled Edition but have removed them from this post. Usually Mr. Kenson also updates them but after I've run things, so our updated might be different.

This begins the last run of solo plays (there are six with Uncanny Justice) and I've received no commentary on them.

(Since I rarely get commentary here, I don't really expect it, but I love it if it shows up.)

Anyway, expect this blog to lie fallow after these solo/actual play pieces are done.

House Rules:

• When using Magic or Gadgets, an Extra adds +2 to the difficulty, a Limit subtracts 2 from the difficulty.
• Superspeed can always be used in place of Coordination for Initiative.
• To make things easier, I roll dice using the 1d6-1d6 method, and compare it to the opposing stat, so Prowess 4 plus Martial Arts versus Prowess 3 becomes 4+1+(dice roll)>/=/<3.

Capsule Review: I ran this with othes when it came out and apparently I was drunk or on medication at the time, because I missed so much. It's a nice adventure, gives you some good pieces to play with later, but can be a stand-alone.

Chapter 1: Trouble on Main Street

Uncanny Justice got there as the police were starting to cordon off the area around the post office and asking the people to stand back. They were unspooling yellow tape to mark the area. People were spilling out of buildings because it was the end of the workday; a few dolts were trying to get into the post office anyway to mail Christmas presents.

Mutants & Masterminds Character Sheets

M&M

Years ago, I did form-fillable versions of the Mutants and Masterminds character sheets, and I made them freely available in this folder. I posted it on one or two Mutants & Masterminds and DC Adventures forums (fora?) and forgot about it.

With the demise of the Atomic Think Tank, a couple of people a week try to get those files (or any of the others in that folder). Thing is, because Google has changed their security setup, the link to those files is obsolete, and it results in a message to me that so-and-so is trying to access the files. On my phone, it's a pain to try and figure out their address and send them the correct current link.

So this post, which I hope has enough terms littered in it for the search engines.

Don't believe for a second that I designed these; I just took versions of what was in the books. Credit for the design goes to Green Ronin.

Because I have permission to change this file, I can go ahead and correct the link if Google changes things again.

• DC Adventures character sheet in black and white, form-fillable
• DC Adventures character sheet in colour (or color), form-fillable
• Mutants & Masterminds character sheet in black and white, form-fillable
• Mutants & Masterminds character sheet in color (or colour), form-fillable

There is other stuff there, but not a huge amount for Mutants & Masterminds. I should probably clean it out, some day.

Uncanny Justice 1: Devil's Night

Icons

“I haven’t forgotten you,” I said. Right before forgetting you.

Here, have a solo play.

Being the first adventure with Abe Cadabra and Honeybee. This was my second attempt at a magic character: I gave him support this time. It worked better, but really they still needed a bit more.

In the next adventure, they get a teammate who is doing community service with a superhero team to work off his fraud charges. I don’t think I ever explain that, but that’s how he joins.

I haven't forgotten you

Heck, there are still five more actual plays to bring us up to date, this time featuring the group Uncanny Justice, which has fewer members so is easier to play. And I'm side tracked on converting some characters from V&V (namely Crisis at Crusader Citadel) while work demands more and more of my time, plus various vehicles and appliances breaking down. (Because intense cold is fun, folks!)

So I will be back. Maybe no one will be interested, but I'll still be throwing these things out into the void.

Another thing I should do is post new links to my form-fillable Mutants & Masterminds character sheet. I posted the old link on a defunct forum, where I can't post the new security-approved link, and I get a request or two every week for access, so I have to dig up the correct link and send it. That's short, so I'll post that link tomorrow.

League One loose ends

Icons

League One exists primarily for adventures that require a heavy-hitting group. Though the members aren't the Justice League or the Avengers, they are close, even though the uniting theme seems to be "Something to prove or atone for." There are a limited number of adventures that absolutely require that kind of power level. Not none: there are still some I can play, and will.

But the things I want to address in the group — like, we never get into Menagerie and Palimpsest's relationship at all, and I think that would be interesting — are mostly soap opera things, and for that I'd need to create new adventures or heavily customize existing ones.

As a for instance, looking at these three adventures for the first time in a couple of months:

• As mentioned, Menagerie and Palimpsest's relationship.
• What the heck is Doc Golem atoning for?
• What about Skyblaze's mysterious past? We know that “Deanna Sult” is not her birth name, and “Mysterious past” is right in her qualities.
• How is Penultimate adapting to this world? What the heck is the backstory that gives us “From another dimension”? I mean, she's probably adapting well, because she excels at nearly everything, but how?

What I find interesting is that this is something that comics do as part and parcel of what they are in the last fifty years, but RPGs don't really address it yet. Qualities is the best I've seen at summarizing them, and DC Heroes had Subplots, which gave them some impetus, but I don't really see it features yet. (I'm sure there's a game somewhere that does it, and perhaps you'll point it out to me.)

League One 3: Vampires of Red Square

A League One solo play

I have updated the adventure’s characters to the Assembled Edition. Of course, you won't see that in this blog entry; I've outlined the changes to make in another entry. Night Hunter is renamed Dusk Hunter here; I forget why.

League One: Jailbreak!

Icons

Continuing the various solo plays I have done in the last year.

Jailbreak!

A League One solo play

I have updated the adventure’s characters to the Assembled edition. I did this before there was a version for the Assembled edition, so if you see differences in the NPC abilities, it’s because the character updates are not identical.

League One: Whiteout!

Icons

Whiteout!

A League One solo play

Several adventures call for a group of heroes and aren't easily adjusted to solo heroes. Because I didn't have to get other players together, I decided to create a team: League One, a mid-tier team that gets called up to sub in for the top-tier Guardian Society while the Guardian Society is off-planet. I did three adventures with them, and they were cool, but I never figured out how to incorporate the story parts of the characters. I would probably have to create a separate adventure, because it's not like an adventure really spells out things like "Palimpsest is the ghost of a girl that Menagerie murdered by accident, so she's haunting him, but she's fallen in love with him." Tough to squeeze in.

Titles of Books I Will Never Write

A Princess Bride of Mars

The Found and the Furry

The Maltese Beagle

A Sea Otter And The Philosopher's Stone

The Fall of the Weapon Shops of Usher

Quickstep 4: Gangbusters!

Icons

The last Quickstep adventure. Next comes League One.

A lesson learned: Magic and Gadgets

Icons

So that adventure with Professor Destiny taught me that without extras the powers of Gadgets and Magic are very versatile but only useful as a backup. A solo hero is usually busy in the middle of the fight, so it's tough to adjust the spells or gadgets on the fly.

So if you're planning to use a primarily Gadget- or Magic-based hero solo, then consider adding an extra like “Instant” so that they still have the Performance aspect but can get the spells off or the gadgets out in time.

That doesn't apply if there are two magical or gadget-based heroes; Batman can always say, “Robin, run interference while I check the utility belt for the Bat-mind-control-protection device!”

I tried the magic character again with the Uncanny Justice solo plays, but in this case, the magic character is part of a team, and that seems to work better.

Today's odd idea...fantasy, this time, though I could put a superhero spin on it.

Something fantasy-ish

In reaction to some other post, it occurred to me that turning the hereditary ruler into some short-lived mammal like a mouse or mole would not actually kill him/her but would leave them very likely to be killed, thereby skirting a possible geas against killing the rule.

But at that point I suddenly flashed forward to the part where the heros have found the ruler and transformed them back but too late: the ruler expires of old age, despite the fact that it has only been a few months! So the ruler dies without issue.

Or maybe not...

Suppose that the ruler went ahead and did traditional vole/mouse/hummingbird/whatever things, and bred. This sets the stage for the kind of silliness that can only happen in a fantasy milieu, which is the war of succession between the usurping Duke or whatever, and a family of field mice that the heroes can prove are descended from the ruler.

You have some NPC off trying to turn them into humans, you have a vet of sorts trying to figure out who is the oldest, you have people who quite rightly say, “I'm not going to be ruled by a mouse!” and off we go.

Oddball Quickstep/Professor Destiny: Danger in Dunsmouth

Icons

This one is an oddball. I thought, oh, let's try a magic character, but you'll notice that the Magic description says you have to take a page, and I suspected that might be a problem. It was, so I had said to myself it was okay if Quickstep showed up at the last minute (or sooner).

It was the last minute. So this adventure is mostly about Professor Destiny.

Quickstep 3: The Day of the Swarm

Icons

Here we go, the third one. The fourth one is kind of odd, because I played it mostly with a different character and then brought in Quickstep when an emergency developed.

Quickstep 2: The Tomb of ICONS

Icons

The Tomb of Icons (Icons solo)

Contents

• Commentary
• Overture
• Outside the Tomb
• Entrance to the Dungeon
• Characters
• Icons Conversions
• Character Conversions
• Traps

Commentary

I originally started writing this as a kind of “up yours” to the idea of the killer dungeon. That’s not my play style and it’s not what I like, so I figured that, kinda like dropping Superman into Hamlet, I’d mix it up. It was pointed out to me, quite correctly, that this doesn’t actually prove anything: the setting is based on such different assumptions for the player characters that there’s really no congruence.

A comparison of Oracles (Quickstep 1)

Icons

Quickstep: Comparison of solo systems

It's worth mentioning that I did not correctly understand stunting powers until surprisingly recently. I had the roll-for-Gadgets-or-Magic thing associated with regular stunts. So that misunderstanding continues for the first five or six solo adventures.

Fiction/actual plays

Icons

Nothing's been happening here, and really I've been doing solo actual plays: originally of adventures that just happened through the oracle and lately of actual published adventures (in ICONS but not necessarily ICONS adventures.

I've settled on the convention of endnoting/footnoting the actual game mechanics and trying to make the rest of it story-like. That pleases the part of me that once wanted to be a writer but feels honest enough about the mechanics.

So, starting with the next post, there will be, oh, ten actual plays? I started with an adventure that was a superhero and a setup and then two different oracles (Heroic Icons and Mythic). I used the same character to run through the D&D module "Tomb of Horrors" and then did Fainting Goat Games' "Day of the Swarm," Ad Infinitum's "Danger in Dunsmouth" and "Gangbusters!" "Danger in Dunsmouth" actually started with another character, and that was where I discovered that Magic is a versatile power but heavily disadvantaged for a solo character.

Then I had a couple of adventures that, really, called for a group. So I generated a group, League One, and did Ad Infinitum's "Whiteout!" and "Jailbreak" and Fainting Goat Games' "Vampires of Red Square."

Then I took a break for a while and came back with Ad Infinitum's "Devil's Night" with a pair of new heroes, decided I liked them but they needed some muscle added, and now I've done three more adventures with Uncanny Justice: "The Mastermind Affair," Fainting Goat Games' "Panic! At The Museum," and "The Sidereal Schemes of Dr. Zodiac."

So I'll start converting those to HTML and seeing what they look like here.

It should be self-evident, but hey: spoilers for the modules abound, along with areas where I don't go along with the written adventure.

The adventures go into a campaign world, I guess, with a Superhero Relocation program for people who get powers, and an organization called UNLES, and things stolen from all over. A mish-mosh, like superhero comics.

So I hope you like the adventures of Quickstep and Abraham Cadabra and Penultimate and all the rest.