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.

Let's talk about Crisis at Crusader Citadel first. (This is essentially what I posted as a comment on Facebook, but here it's easier to read.)

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Crisis at Crusader Citadel is an introductory adventure for Villains & Vigilantes, and it dates all the way back to 1982. (V&V was first published in 1979, then revised in 1982.) I have the classic (that is, unrevised) version and consider it in the context of V&V 2.1. The adventure was created by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee. I know that they updated the game with The Mighty Protectors and I am told they re-imagined the adventure, but I am not discussing those, or the comic book series. There may be information elsewhere that alters something I say.

It was the first adventure for a lot of people. I never played it, I never played V&V (though I think I read someone else's version in the early 1980s). So consider this a discussion that's not informed by (best case) experience or (worst case) nostalgia.

Let's set some expectations, first. V&V was arguably the first real superhero RPG, showing up in 1979. It predated Champions (1981), Superworld (1982), Marvel Super Heroes aka FASERIP (1984), and DC Heroes (1985).

V&V is an excellent example of 1970s game design. (Calculating falling damage requires square roots, for example. Carrying capacity involves cubes.)

There's the attitude that the characters only get results if the players do the right thing. Stated baldly, that sounds self-evident, but there's a catch there: If you're playing Reed Richards, you shouldn't need to be as smart as Reed Richards. There's also a slight element of pixel-bitching: they have to ask just the right questions. Several times the adventure emphasizes that the characters only get information if the players ask the right questions. (It makes more sense if you remember that the player characters are supposed to be the players with superpowers.)

Power expenditure is important: do you want to use the attack that costs a lot but rolls a higher die, or do you want to whittle away at the bad guy? Icons does away with this, but it's a significant part of some character designs in V&V. The characters are also written to take advantage of things in the rules. For instance, the system rewards high agility, so most of the characters have a dex value that would put an Olympic gymnast to shame.

When the adventure discusses the strategies that the characters use, they are very much in line with the mechanics of the game. Good learning experience, difficult translation to another system.

None of this is bad. It's not my current tastes, but it's not bad.

Reading the adventure does have a certain "Life on Mars" quality because the past is a different country, as they say. There's smoking in offices; executives have secretaries and there's a secretarial pool; almost all the important figures are men. There are four female characters written up: one is short and named The Shrew, while one of the female heroes got her powers by being passive. (I'm not sure if I'm projecting when I see problems with the other two as well.¹) Men don't get it much better: Manta-Man's wife is fridged as part of his origin; a number of the villains are casually described as psychopathic or killers; and so on.

These characterizations might have been okay in 1982, but in hindsight I see problems. If this bothers you, don't read the adventure.

One last stylistic thing: It's wordy. Some things get over-explained while others are left out. Part of that is just that RPGs were less than a decade old, so you couldn't assume that the players knew anything. Part of that was the fashion of the times. Part of that is that it was laid out on paper, and sentences were altered to fit the space; it was very expensive to re-write something at the layout stage.

Now the adventure.

The players are applying to the city's premiere superteam. Unknown to everyone, the members of the superteam have been captured by their arch-foes, and the arch-foes are in the process of getting hardware to break into the superteam's computer system. In the first half of the adventure, they fight criminals trying to get that hardware; in the second part, they invade the team headquarters itself and fight a different set of villains plus any who escaped from the first session. There are mechanisms to ensure game balance: it assumes six PCs and there are things to do if you don't have six player characters.

Essentially, there are two big fights and a possible third fight:

Part one:

1. Meet (and possibly fight each other, because comics).
2. Recap the situation through the handy medium of an attractive reporter.
3. Go to the police and plan the ambush.
4. FIGHT! at the ambush.

Part two:

1. Plan the assault on the superhero headquarters.
2. FIGHT! at the headquarters.

It's not a bad design at all: players can try out skills (there aren't any but in an ICONS version there could be specialties), test out powers, meet the police, who are slightly above Chief O'Hara but not much, and then fight. (EDIT: And then I had more thoughts after trying to run it. See the next post.)

Then, having learned, they can plan a second attack and fight some more.

If the players take certain actions, they will skip the first half. Of course, then they'll face all the villains, but they don't know that. It's also not complicated. There are no double-crosses, twists, or sudden reversals. A good adventure for beginning GMs and for beginning players who are versed in a little bit of comics tradition.

The adventure occupies a weird space; the adventure explicitly says that it's a training adventure and if you point that out, some people are surprised. In theory, nothing that happens counts for character experience.

Some elements are really rooted in the technology of the times. The Macguffin of the adventure is the attempt to break into the heroes' supercomputer, and most of it just doesn't work now. If you run the adventure today (and you're not running the 2017 re-imagining), you're going to have to alter the Macguffin elements. The heroes have a phone to use to contact them, but nowadays that might be a website.

There are also some odd mistakes. They are very careful to make the office building as realistic as possible, including washrooms and lounges and descriptions of what's in the candy machines...but the superhero headquarters have no bathrooms. One villain is explicitly mentioned as flying...but he has no Flight. (I checked the rules in case Flight was bundled into one of his other powers but I couldn't see it.)

There are great materials put forward for you to use, and the adventure doesn't. For example, one of the villains in the first half of the adventure is a flying bird-man who can't carry much because, well, he's like a bird. He'd be *great* for an aerial battle in the adjacent warehouse, but they don't go there; it's not even listed as a possibility. No, they spend their time in rooms and corridors that are eight feet high.

There's an awful lot to like in the adventure, but for modern readers, it's best considered a toolkit. What can you use in some other adventure?

If you plan on running this, read everything three times and make notes; you cannot assume that related items are together. In the second half, it's raining (it isn't stated but it seems obvious the weather controller is causing it) but that doesn't get mentioned in setting material. It's mentioned a little later on.

I won't fault you for buying the adventure -- I did and I don't regret it -- but I also won't fault you for *not* buying the adventure, if that makes sense. There's an awful lot of material you can repurpose for other things, though if you're not playing V&V, you'll have to do a lot of conversion.

If you love the adventure for its nostalgia factor, great! If you're a new GM, there are probably better adventures that are a bit more in sync with the current zeitgeist (because I felt like using big words).

[1] The other two are Evergreen, an immortal plant-woman from beyond time whose age is given as 19, and Marionette, a spiteful vindictive foot-tall mind-controller. I get a bizarre manic pixy dreamgirl vibe off Evergreen (and the fact of her age being specified so precisely is odd, because Mocker, who is six years old, gets “Looks adult”. Marionette reads to me — and again, maybe I'm projecting on these two — like every Feminazi cliche that exist. Is she? I dunno. In some ways, all these characters are is stereotypes for you to fight. And see the earlier comment that V&V was the first complete superhero role-playing game; I cannot fault them. I wish it were otherwise, but it was 1982 and they were forging new ground.