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.