Icons
Well, it's months later, but I've had one or two ideas.
An adventure set at a twelve-step program for supervillains who are trying to reform. I don't know what the adventure is, but there's something I like about the guy with the mechanical arms going, “Hello, my name is Otto, and I'm a supervillain.”
(I'm currently running Brindlewood Bay, thank you for asking, and I'll have comments at some point in the future.)
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.
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:
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:
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.
Any Superhero
Someone mentioned doing a list of random encounters for superheroes. This is one step up.
I wonder if there'd be any interest in a book (say, 25) sets of one- or two-page adventures?
While each adventure would have all of the essentials (setting, antagonist, etc) some of the adventures would share locations or antagonists, so that any one adventure only needs to specify a place or a character. Some of the locations would be so generic that you wouldn't provide a map, too.
There'd have to be an assumed universe or sub-universe. Let's say something on the level of a DC or Marvel universe. For sub-universes, you could do different books, but essentially you're looking at:
Don't take those levels terribly seriously: in the comics, you can find world-beaters defending a neighbourhood and your city guys stumbling on a threat to the cosmos.
Other lines of comics are really their own little sub-genre, too: I think the Claremont X-Men were really in their own little world. Solo (one player character) is different than team.
There'd be some planning to make sure that various bad guys or locations get re-used. As a first iteration, where you don't know if the product will sell, you probably want to do eight of the first three sub-genres. So you do eight little adventures involving the neighbourhood or the small town (because it might be nice to have a spin-off setting that's a little different, and that says “small town” to me).
It occurs to me that these are one step up from the adventure seeds that happen in a number of setting books. It's more than a seed but less than a full adventure.
All
I've never formulated this quite this way before, so it seemed significant when I backed onto saying it on Facebook. Here it is, with more waffling and watering down.
One of the things, it seems to me, that separates an incident from an adventure is that the players try something in an incident and either succeed or fail, and then go on with their lives.
A lot of random tables are like this. “On the road, you meet (rolls) 1d6 robbers who take your weapons and your gold.” Then the PCs go on, now poor and weaponless, because the real objective is to get to Riverden. Maybe the PCs later meet and trounce the robbers because they recognize a weapon or something, but it's largely kinda anecdote-ish. When they write their memoirs, the PCs will not assign it any particular significance except as a throwaway sentence: Because robbers took my money, I arrived in Riverden with nothing but the clothes on my back.
In an adventure and your commercial fiction, the incident is elevated; it becomes part of the whole try-fail cycle. The robbers take the gold the PCs need to hire the cleric to deal with the illness and yadda yadda yadda.
Part of that try-fail cycle is consequences—in one case, the theft leads them to arrive in the new city penniless; in the other, it impedes what they're trying to do. If they don't have a goal, you can't really block them on that, so how can there be a meaningful failure?
One of the ways you deal with giving something significance in improve is reincorporation. The PCs find the robbers; the villain returns. Something like that. So having something recur is a tool you can deploy (as a GM) to make something more memorable, but that doesn't really give it significance.
Now, you can give things significance even if they didn't start that way. Let's use a superhero example instead. The heroes have to rescue a cat from a tree. Even if the cat is odd—it's a leopard escaped from a zoo! It's a phase-shifting cat that resists any attempts to grab it!— that doesn't make it more significant to the evening. However, if it's part of something bigger it becomes significant. Maybe the leopard escaped from the zoo as part of microtremblors that Earthquaker is causing in the area on the way to the bank/scientific lab/alien embassy. Maybe the phase-shifting cat is a foreshadowing that the evil Empire of Ghosts is invading our dimension.
I've mentioned this sort of thing before: if they vanquish the enemy too quickly, the encounter loses significance (We've still got two hours left!) so you can give it significance back by making it part of a larger event.
This has bad personal implications for me because I suck at the continuity between sessions and picking up the threads that are left behind, so I have to think about how to record the dropped potential threads in such a way that they're easy to pick up and reincorporate in the future.
Icons
Based on ideas in a Facebook Mutants & Masterminds group...
The same nuclear testing that gave rise to the mighty Saguaro and Gila-Master also mutated a coyote and roadrunner. The roadrunner has speed 6 (extra: surface Movement, Phasing) and probability control 6 and the extra good luck.
The coyote is wily: he has Intellect 8, gadgets, Immortality 10 and maybe regeneration as an extra.
In his mind, the road runner is some avatar of the trickster god, who has taken from him what should be a coyote’s. However the roadrunner always wins because he has the essence of being a trickster (the probability control and the Quality); this is how he manages to make the coyote levitate until he sees that he should be falling and how he makes the gadgets misfire.
So the actual adventure is, the coyote has decided on a different tack, and is attacking other speedsters instead because they are symbolically linked to the Road Runner. By catching them he can catch the roadrunner and get back the trickster quality.
First your players laugh. And then the coyote’s gadgets work, and keep working....
| PRW | CRD | STR | INT | AWR | WIL | Stamina |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 6 | 3 | 8 | 4 | 8 | 11 |
| Specialties | Technology (+1) | |||||
| Powers |
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| Qualities |
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And his perpetual foe, who doesn't appear in this adventure except as backstory...
| PRW | CRD | STR | INT | AWR | WIL | Stamina |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 6 |
| Specialties | Stealth (+1) | |||||
| Powers |
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| Qualities |
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Edit after the fact: Actually, I'd probably get rid of Phasing and just make all occurrences of things like turning a painted tunnel into a real one or a train coming through be stunts invoked with the "Trickster" Quality.
Any superhero
A confluence of two things (needing to create background for Strange City, the four-part Friends of Jackson Elias podcast on cults, which I recommend) has me thinking about cults.
Now, from a story point of view, cults are often used to create hordes of nameless mooks who fight to the incapacitation. That's fine, but there could be other stories or other uses. For instance, in a superhero game you might want to have a significant NPC fall into the clutches of a cult, or you might want the Hunted to be a cult, or you might want the super-powered villain to be granted powers by a cult. But to do that, your cults need to be a little more nuanced.
Okay. So what do cults do, from a story point of view?
There might be more, but those are the ones that strike me immediately. Let's concentrate on that third one, because that one has the most to do with the cult.
So the first thing I think of is, “Does the cult have real access or fake access to the supernatural?”
In most superhero game environments, there really is some kind of access to evil demons, spirits, other-dimensional entities, trapped gods, and so on. So: Does the cult have access to one of those? (And you can ring changes there, like this is the aftercult after the demon was exiled, this was a fake cult until the amnesiac joined who was actually the exiled demon Nialliv, or whatever.)
(Or not defeating the evil thing or not freeing the person. But you knew that, so I'm not going to mention that sort of thing again.)
This decision affects your adventure, not the design of the cult, but since this is a tool to an adventure, we do it now.
Look, relatively few people join a cult whose avowed goal is "release the evil world-destroying demon.' Even the Rapture fans who want to bring about Armageddon are doing it because they're sure that they will be on the side of good. (This is, I suppose, the equivalent of voting for the Leopards Eating Faces party, because you're sure that your face is safe.)
Whatever the thing is, that's what people are joining for. People tend to join at a time of confusion or uncertainty, and that's your goal. The supporting character wants protection from these eeeevil mentalists? The cult is an organization teaching useful mental protection techniques.
Real world things that have been used (and this isn't all of them, by a long shot, just a sampler).
You probably want to specify this in two ways:
I mean, if you only come up with one goal, great, but if it doesn't lead to a plan by the bad guys, then the good guys can't interfere. And if it's too specific, the cult doesn't return after your heroes interrupt the summoning. Now, sometimes that's okay, but sometimes you want the cult to hang around. “Oh, the Wave of Shimmering Light...those guys are bad news.”
(It occurs to me that you can use the same general step for creating an evil villain-based multi-level marketing campaign, too, but I digress.)
So you have a vague idea of what the bad cult is doing, and you know why Feckless NPC joined. What does Feckless have to do that leads the heroes to the specific goal? Do the heroes find out about it because they're just researching the cult to find out if it's safe for Feckless? Or does Feckless have enough extradimensional energies in the body from various superhero-adjacent romps that it's specifically Feckless who has to be sacrificed for the incantation at midnight to work?
From those things, you should be able to generate a cult, have some idea of what they're doing as a recruiting tactic, and how the heroes get involved.
Any superhero RPG
So for various reasons I was thinking about evil duplicates, including an evil duplicates adventure I wrote but that never saw light. (Possibly the publisher was just being kind to buy it; I was exceedingly desperate. On the other hand, "kindness" to me tops out at fifty bucks. So probably it was shakeups and then the adventure wasn't useful. I digress.)
Evil duplicates are a lovely way to point up the differences between the characters and the bad guys: they are the characters who made different choices. So, with that in mind as an overall reason, here are as many ideas for evil duplicates that I can think of after too many beers.
(I will try to organize these so less specific terms come after more specific terms.)
A slightly different version: Now I Have The Power The bad guy can take the hero's powers (or heroes' powers) and put them in someone else. This is technically power theft but maybe it just copies the powers, through Amazo's special doubletalk.
Any Superhero
With today being my 30th wedding anniversary, I'm inspired to provide some adventure seeds (or, where there's a bit more, adventure sprouts) related to anniversaries. So, a quick d6 worth:
How do the other heroes in the party deal with or even prevent the shenanigans while helping the chauffeur, whose wedding anniversary it is, but he/she/they has to work. The shenanigans probably involve a villain who wants to profess love, because that's thematically appropriate, so maybe the heroes have to face off the bad guy who wants to confess that he's always loved the bride, or the villain coming out of the closet and he's always loved the groom, or some villain who is re-enacting another villain's plan to show the object-of-obsession that it can be done right.
"Twoo wuv..." can bring the dead back to life, if their love was pure. As zombies, I'm afraid.
A candidate for the title of Earth's Eldritchiest has brought someone back to life (because they were only mostly dead), but the knock on effect of the spell travels throughout the world: Anyone whose love was pure is dragged from death so that they can be with their loved ones.
The heroes most likely notice it because one of them is dating a widow or widower, and the zombie is noticeable.
I know, you're thinking, "Shoot'em in the head!" But disassembling the zombie doesn't work; they just put themselves back together and try again. No, the spell has to be reversed, which means finding out which candidate cast it, and convincing them to undo it...which might well kill the person they resurrected in the first place.
Icons
My wife is out of town for the night, so I was going to run a one-shot of Icons but that fell through. Still, here's the rough outline of what I would have run.
Design goals: It's a one-shot, it's simple, it uses minions for the first fight so that new players have something to try, and it uses only villains from Icons: The Assembled Edition.
Because of that, if you want to run it in another implied universe, you'll have to either create Ultra-Mind, Warbride, and Speed Demon or fill in the roles with an equivalent.
Usual caveat: I've never run this, I haven't tried it, it's never met actual players.
Ultra-Mind wants to make his life-support body also wants to include powers so that he might properly subjugate people as part of his plan to make more evolved humans. Superheroes keep stopping him, so he clearly needs more abilities. He needs to get supers in place to copy and then put the copied powers in machines. So he has set up the copying technology in banks and has arranged for bank robberies. Clues lead to a second location, where robots with copied powers are waiting.
For each player, there is a bank robbery. The robberies are simultaneous and are being committed by teams of five: four henchmen in each bank (use the Henchman archetype, pg 191), commanded by a boss (use the Soldier archetype, pg 192), wearing a bomb vest. In each case, the plan is this: two stand guard over hostages, one fetches actual money, and the Boss and a henchman take the manager into the safety deposit room, to get one particular safety deposit box’s contents.
For the henchmen, use the Minion rule (pg 42), but the boss is treated like normal.
If you have an ongoing campaign, each boss can have a personal agenda and can double-cross the mysterious stranger who hired him, but for a one-shot, that just adds time. Let each player have the confrontation with the boss, but for a one-shot, move to the investigation afterwards.
Start with the heroes on the scene. There are a couple of ways they might be there:
As a GM, rotate through each player in turn, but they’re all in different banks. When things go pear-shaped, the henchmen will first threaten the hostages, then the boss will threaten to blow up the place with the vest.
Although the bullets in the guns are real, the bomb in the vest is fake (PCs can’t easily tell; X-Ray vision won’t show it but Super-Smell might). The vest kills whomever is wearing it but probably no one else.
Players investigating can discover the following:
The address for the shell corporations and JomCross Security is the same, and it’s in town.
If the player characters lose to the henchmen and don’t see the shell corporation papers and don’t discover about the security system, the bank manager reveals to the hero involved that “it was a mistake putting in the new security system! It didn’t neutralize their guns at all!”
The office of JomCross Security is on the second-highest floor of a skyscraper. It takes up the entire floor.
(If they investigate, the top floor is owned by Evolution Investments, a private company about which little is known. It is also a front for Ultra-Mind.)
The secretary at the front desk is a gum-snapping 1940s stereotype come to life. She answers the phone, types desultorily on her keyboard, and stares at her cellphone. As if she’s waiting for something. A sign on the door behind her says M. O'Graf.
She is polite to the heroes. She knows nothing but is willing to summon Mr. O’Graf from his office. She does want to know the character names, so she can tell Mr. O’Graf who he’s going to see. She tries very hard to get names, but will eventually acquiesce if the players don’t want to give names.
Robots come out of O'Graf's office, one for each PC. The robots are dressed like the PCs, and by the time the players look back at the secretary, they see her standing outside the office, revealed as Warbride. She touches her cellphone, and metal walls slide over the glass office front.
If the players do something that makes it difficult to put her out of the office, either give a Determination point, or have her not leave: she stays in the office. Her job now is to keep the players in the fight: if they leave, they have to deal with her, and dealing with her takes long enough that the robot duplicates will catch up.
Again, the PCs will probably have to fight, but it isn't essential; for example, a power like Teleport (portal) will certainly get them out. If that happens, you'll have to wing it.
The robot duplicates have copies of their powers, including Extras and Limitations. They do not have copies of Qualities, or secret information about the heroes, or copies of specialties.
Now that he has proved the viability of his power-copying technology and its ultracells, he plans to move the cells into his life-support body and be physically evolved as well as mentally evolved.
Ultra-Mind monologues about what he was doing. Clearly (he says) the PCs have some other edge he has not taken into account&mdash/he must start again. In the meantime, Warbride will deal with them while he escapes!
Speed Demon appears. “You need to be transported?”
Warbride says, “This activates the clause where you pay me double.”
Big fight.
The PCs wake in the offices of “Evolution Investments” without powers. They are wearing “power suckers” that neutralize their powers, rather than copy them. The power suckers are locked; it’s a difficulty 10 task to unlock and remove your own power sucker but only a difficulty 8 task to unlock someone else’s power sucker. (Ultra-Mind doesn’t worry much about locks; All-Star never used locks!)
In this case, Speed Demon probably doesn’t get called, but Ultra-Mind has the powers of one PC because the ultracells have been installed. (Pick a PC or roll randomly.)
Big fight, I presume.
Any
Someone on Facebook was looking for Silver Age weirdness, like Batman and Robin on a giant typewriter or Superman going back in time and dating Marilyn Monroe on Krypton or something. (I think those are the examples he gave.)
So I put too much thought into this.
Adventures like that span both the Golden and Silver Ages, and to me it seems like they derive from a few things:
Given all of that, you had to have what Orson Scott Card calls "event" stories and what Robin Laws calls "iconic" heroes. The characters didn't change because the characters couldn't change — you couldn't guarantee that a kid was going to get next month's issue or had bought last month's issue. (I've got a collected edition of Supergirl from the 1960s that's starting to get some continuity but in no way is it necessary for the stories...sometimes Supergirl uses something from another comic, and some things happen over two or three issues, but the changes are rarely permanent or are rarely personal.
Instead, you have more of a problem, attempt to solve, complication kind of structure.
Anyway, the original poster wanted some way of recreating the goofiness, and what occurred to me eventually was random tables. So we start with our premise, which is:
"An A gets powers but has to be pursued because he/she/it B, causing conflict, and there's this complication: D.
Use the appropriate die for each one; I'm just knocking this off, so I'm not striving for 6 or 10 or 20 of any of these.
| # | This thing |
|---|---|
| 1 | Ape |
| 2 | A pet (cat, dog, something) |
| 3 | Insect |
| 4 | Robot/alien invader |
| 5 | Close friend of hero |
| 6 | Rival of the love interest |
Changes in some way (gets powers, falls sick, is mutated, arrives on earth) but the heroes have to engage because it has:
| 1 | Secret, like nuclear launch codes |
|---|---|
| 2 | Disease cure |
| 3 | Hero’s secret ID |
| 4 | Celebrity |
| 5 | Hero’s love/hate |
| 6 | Is actually a transformed friend of hero |
So there's conflict. But there's a complication, which is part of what makes the story goofy.
| 1 | Hero is shrunk |
|---|---|
| 2 | Hero is grown |
| 3 | At place that makes giant working props |
| 4 | At historical period or mythical place of interest to readers |
| 5 | At historical period of interest to hero (Krypton, Crime Alley, etc) |
| 6 | Hero is altered some way (powerless, gender-swapped, obese, has head of ant, traded with subject of problem) |
That gets you Superboy shrinking into a small engine (a Julie Schwarz joint, written by Kurt Busiek!), various Krypton adventures, probably goofy things with Atlantis, most Jimmy Olsen adventures... Get a motorcycle in there and you might be good.
Icons
The 1989 Batman is on TV tonight, and I started wondering about it as a roleplaying session.
TL;DR: Not very good except as designed: for a single hero.
But let's try and figure it out anyway.
Structurally, it revolves around several people, but alas, for roleplaying we are primarily concerned about the scenes with the player(s). That makes it much shorter.
I missed the beginning of the movie (forgive me) and came in just after Joker kills Grissom. Still, let's try to piece it together. Some of this is from memory, so forgive me if it's not right.
Then Batman disappears from the story for quite a long time as we follow Jack Napier, Alexander Knox, and Vicki Vale. Now, that might be a good opportunity if you have some kind of a plot in mind, but it's got to be player-centric.
That's not a bad number of encounters for an evening's adventure, so let's spitball for a moment.
We kinda want the villain created in the adventure. You could do a Fantastic Four or Challengers of the Unknown thing here, and have a group created.
Let's go over those encounters again, but try and make them really broad descriptions. Maybe we can pull enough out that they'd be good for a group.
Okay, that's actually not a bad structure. Of course, putting flesh on that skeleton is the tough part.
I think we really need to hold to the idea that these are the first heroes, or the first in decades. That way, we have a reason that the heroes don't immediately march to the local branch of Heroes Anonymous and demand to be let in.
The heroes can be of any type, but they got their powers at the same event: the event triggered the mutation (for Birthright), transformed, caused the need for training, and so on.
The group of villains would heavily depend on what your player characters are. For our purposes we'll make all of the villains some kind of Transformed. And a chemical plant is not a bad place for the accident, so we'll keep that.
We could combine the first two, actually: the big Ace Chemical fight is mostly against minions anyway.
Icons
(at least the character write-up is)
I have no idea if this would make an interesting scenario, but here we go...
An alien space probe lands on a remote island. Its entrance into the atmosphere does not go unnotices, and our heroes are notified.
The space probe is a Von Neumann machine: it uses the available material to create copies of itself, which it then sends out to build more copies. Theoretically, it should stop when it has analyzed sufficient resources, but the meaning of the term "sufficient" is vague. One of the "top men" involved suspects that the probe will stop after it has a probe in each environment on earth, so that's actually a lot of probes.
When not busy defending itself, it builds one new probe every fifteen minutes. When busy defending itself, it takes thirty minutes to build a new probe (it uses one of the Fast Attack movements from Extra Limbs to do so).
The density (and Density) is less while it is being built; clever players could do something then.
If the players arrive after the first one is built, then they have to get rid of two. Or four. Or...
The probe has a vast library of devices that it can make prominent on the copies: because there are no useful radioactive materials on the landing island, the initial copies are solar. If there is an enforced absence of light (a day or two), new probes will be geothermal, or wind-powered, or tidal...whatever works.
I've used Transmutation here to reflect its nanites disintegrating something nearby and reconstructing it into something else. Yes, realistically the probe should have Adaptation and Gadgets but instead I've subsumed them under the "Alien probe" quality.
It's a challenge. I just don't know if it would be an interesting challenge.
| PRW | CRD | STR | INT | AWE | WIL | STA |
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| 5 | 4 | 8 | 5 | 4 | 10 | 18 |
| Specialties |
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| Powers: |
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| Qualities: |
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"Analysis" is an extra I just made up whereby the probe can touch something as if to restructure it and discovers its chemical compound. Arguably it already has that because it does transmutation.
M&M
This is a set of very hasty notes. James' tablet died shortly into the session so he won't be posting anything; I'd rather spend my time making sure that everything's in place for the last session, but here's more or less what went down.
Alex's player was away.
Nothing had been destroyed for several weeks. Because term papers are due at the same time as the final exam, the two classes before the final are essentially research and q&a sessions, where students can quiz Dr. Why or use the library.
Before the last class before the final, Geodesic gets another visit from Beech and Hunter. Beech gets to the point. "I'm not going to ask if you have possession of one of the coins of Eris because I don't want you to have to lie to me. And, in fact, I'm going to violate several parts of official secrets policy because you're not old enough to swear an oath of secrecy.
"We think he's amassing the coins. The coins are not a product of Eris, they are Eris. And when you get enough coins together—and we don't know what that critical mass is—they fuse and re-create Eris."
Geodesic is cool and in the "interesting if true" camp.
Beech goes on. "The problem is that the coins are a power source. The Pandora technology can convert magical energy into other energy, usually electrical. One coin, split into eight pieces, powers all of the suits of the Power Corps. A pair of coins of Eris powers Mimicon."
Mimicon is the evolution of Replay: the crazed android bent on taking over the world. (It turns out that the robot does not want to destroy all life, but only destroy all non-normal life, and its view of normality excludes all superhumans, disabled people, and aliens...and a number of regular old humans. People with glasses, for instance.)
The reason that Beech is willing to violate the official secrets act is that Mimicon has copied a duplicator. It can reproduce itself, which means it reproduces the coins of Eris.
Which means that critical mass might not be far away.
Geodesic assures them that the coins are safe and not with him.
They give the same information to Tech-Head (in a coffee shop rather than Tech-Head's home).
Tech-Head examines the power source more closely when he gets home and looks at the results of his last scans. It does in fact contain two coins, embedded in something that keeps them a specific distance apart. Apparently the power generation happens in the dielectric space between the coins.
He resolves to wrap the power source in the finest aluminum foil, pop it in a styrofoam cooler, and take it to Geodesic to have it stored away.
In the meantime, Matthew Brady is served. Apparently there is some suspicion that Doctor Why is in the pockets of Big Reconstruction, causing all this damage so that it can be rebuilt. With the construction company's lawyer present, he is supposed to give information to the lawyers Alkahest and Azoth, an old boutique law firm based in Toronto.
The player characters met at class and moved to the library, where there are coves and crannies they can use unobtrusively. They get caught up on each other's lives. When Bruiser mentions the names of the lawyers to Geodesic, Geodesic is immediately concerned: both are terms for the universal solvent desired by alchemists. Tech-Head's answer is to claim that it's Nicholas Flamel screwing around again.
The characters are making good headway on their term paper (a design for a temporary containment system for supervillains, to be used in police stations) when there is the kind of hubbub that involves screaming and people rushing for the exits.
The known supervillain Mastermind has floated into the library. He homed in on the players and wanted two things:
Once Tech-Head claims the suit is with its intended recipient, Mastermind is willing to let them go. He'll deal with the coins while they take care of the army of Mimicons descending on the classroom. (The GM might have said “Luke, I am your father.” at one point but that should not be taken as canon.
And in fact, on the way to a sekrit hiding spot on a Thousand Islands,, Geodesic sees four Officer Kit Lawsons out in the parking lot, heading for the classroom.
Tech-Head gets into the classroom first. The "real" Kit Lawson drops his disguise; he's a Mimicon, from the earlier incarnation of the robot. The Mimicon robots have a slight problem with maintaining stable programming, and, well, this one is the duplicate who didn't want to study war no more nor go back and re-joing the collective. So he became a cop who only works PR stuff. Like visiting classrooms. After the Replay thing, he figured everything would be fine, but now the others have come for him.
Dr. Why is still trussed and bound at the front of the room.
Bruiser gets there just before them and blocks the doorway.
By the time the four Kit Lawsons get there, they are a Kit Lawson, an Alex, a Tech-Head, and a Geodesic. Bruiser is not fooled and knocks one down into the stairwell at the far end of the hall. That one never returns.
They switch to their Mimicon forms.
Another Mimicon shows up outside, and Tech-Head began to deal with it while Bruiser was dealing with the three outside.
Fighting and property damage happened.
In the midst of this, Geodesic returns, and ups the amount of property damage.
The Mimicons burst into the classroom.
Tech-Head warns them against the problem of collecting coins in one place. If they keep duplicating and staying in the same place, they could be in danger of being taken over by Eris.
“We already have been,
says one of them, and the floor beneath vanishes, taken apart by the one who got knocked down the stairwell.Doctor Why and all the Mimicons vanish down the kaleidoscopic tunnel that has appeared there.
The tunnel disappears, leaving only damage.
Cliffhanger.
M&M
Ages run the gamut from Geodesic (age 14) to Bruiser (age 24)
Watching the VR experiences are Dr. Maya Nayar, Priya's mother, and Technologists Hadir el Haj and Garry Mantish.
Nameless occupants of a nearby building. I think they work for Google.
For the players: I'm using the villain names as I created them, which are not the names we called them by in play: I called ersatz Kneebreaker "Fragile"; ersatz Lime Lantern is actually "Bubblewrap;" the teleporter is "Transit;" and the steampunky person is "Cargo." Or Bob, Carla, Lenny, and Sofia, respectively. And they forgot to say their names, or their group names, or explain why they really needed the suit back.
Between classes, we deal with a couple of things.
Geodesic hides the coin on a near-earth asteroid. His research in the time between classes shows him that no coins have been provably destroyed, but they are disappearing.
Hunter starts haunting Tech-Head's house. She's not hiding, but she has apparently been told that she's allowed to stand on the sidewalk but not on private property. (Clark waves to her sometimes.) Clark—Tech-head—spends a lot of time in his secret lab, deciphering the secrets of the power source.
Alex is probably amused by Priya's increasingly desperate attempts to keep the two from meeting.
Bruiser is getting a lot of flak from coworkers because they are short-handed, now that one of their members has been arrested.
And now we get to the midterm.
The midterm is to be a case study: the students are divided into teams of 4 and put into virtual reality. They get to re-enact a famous superhero battle as the heroes involved, with their own agency to change things moving from none at the beginning to full by halfway through. Afterward the students must answer questions.
Because (a) there are 16 students and not enough VR crèches and (b) something always goes wrong when superheroes go into VR, three teams of four go into the crèches at the Deja View institute downtown (at the intersection of King St. and Charles St., for locals) and the remaining four are a guard. Dr. Why isn't even there; he's at the place where they'll write the test.
Not surprisingly, Our Heroes are put on a team together. They win the draw between teams (well, rock-paper-scissors, actually) and elect to be guard rather than go into the VR crèches in the first round.
If (when) something goes wrong, note that it takes five minutes to safely bring someone out of the VR crèche.
The neurologist who is supervising at Deja View is Priya's mother. The lab is a large room on the ground floor with two exits (one fire, one hall). The crèches are arranged in a clock dial pattern around a central control dais. The room is about a storey and a half all with big tiles in a drop ceiling. (This becomes important later.) (Clearly this is a two-storey room that has been converted.) Dr. Nayar is there with two assistants. It was not clear whether she knows who Alex is.
Everything starts fine, as it usually does. Ten minutes in the exterior wall explodes inward. Standing there are four villains in non-thematic costumes, three in powered armor-ish suits and one not. The suits look like they're variants on those of known villains, like someone was paying them homage or updating them. They are:
Bubblewrap says, "We're just here for his suit. Nobody else needs to be alarmed." She points directly at Tech-Head.
Geodesic's answer is to cover the three innocent bystanders at the central control panel, along with a created tunnel that leads to the interior door.
Tech-Head's answer is to book it for the fire exit and take off. (Tech-Head has flight 6.)
Bubblewrap and Fragile follow. Bubblewrap has flight 7, and Keebreaker has flight 5. (After two rounds, Fragile cannot keep up and turns back to help the others.)
The fight is surprisingly ineffective, because Geodesic is busy maintaining his sorcerous construct, the bystanders are not interested in leaving yet because it takes five minutes to bring people out from the VR, and Transit is just watching, almost as if it was his job to bring people here but not necessarily to fight. Cargo and Bruiser miss each other for a while, but eventually Cargo connects and it becomes obvious that Cargo is stronger and tougher than Bruiser.
The innocent bystander assistants do rock-paper-scissors and the winner leaves (after getting assurances from Dr. Nayar that this won't affect his annual bonus).
Eventually Fragile returns and nothing in the fight gets better. A wild miss from Alex damages a nearby building through the hole in the wall. Geodesic notes the design flaws in Cargo's suit and comments loudly about them. Finally Transit teleports into the construct and threatens to kill the two innocent bystanders if people don't quit.
Geodesic drops the force wall and makes Cargo's helmet unusable, twisting it to one side.
Alex, now berserk, shoots.
And misses, in one of the four ones that Brian (the player) rolled in a row. Ceiling damage, and Dr. Nayar is hurt with the falling debris.
Geodesic does first aid, and Alex shoots again, missing but doing more damage to the nearby building and making it structurally unsound. (Unfortunately, Brian keeps rolling ones.)
Bubblewrap pleads with Tech-Head during the catch-and-escape cycle, saying that Mastermind is really expecting that suit tomorrow. Tech-Head radios the police that an employee of Mastermind is responsible for the property damage. Bubblewrap responds with a loudspeaker announcement that Tech-Head’s suit is stolen.
Having returned, Fragile puts the whammy on Bruiser and Cargo’s next shot dazes him.
Alex blames the villains for hurting her girlfriend’s mother and more collateral damage happens.
Tech-Head dives into a nearby lake and swims upstream, out of sight. Bubblewrap has to guess which of two feeder rivers that Tech-Head goes up but guesses right.
Tech-Head does not surface for fear that Bubblewrap is watching, as she is.
Transit tries to get Geodesic but fails, then teleports Dr. Nayar away.
Fragile falls—I think to Geodesic but I might be incorrect. Transit disappears; Cargo picks up the fallen Fragile to leave at a mind-numbing 100 kilometres per hour but Alex isn’t done yet. She flies to Cargo and damages Cargo’s collateral, then starts riding Fragile and Cargo to the ground.
Transit blips in and moves them to Bubblewrap: Transit, Cargo, Fragile...and Alex. The two unconscious ones fall into the river, Alex can fly, and Transit blips to the nearby sewage treatment plant.
Geodesic and Bruiser spend some time rescuing foolish people who thought being in a nearby building would protect them.
Alex is still angry and still cannot aim, so the water treatment plant takes a tremendous shot. Then Bubblewrap takes a shot, and we discover that Alex can aim (when Brian is not rolling a one).
Geodesic arrives. Bubblewrap deals with Geodesic while Alex is trying to deal with Transit, but she cannot find him.
The sewage treatment plant takes a lot of damage.
Bruiser arrives and they manage to calm Alex down, but Bubblewrap is out of the fight.
Tech-Head notices the three falling figures in the water and drags Cargo to shore.
Geodesic gets Bubblewrap and discovers that the green force-field is generated by a pendant, which his magic detector helpfully tells him is magic because of a coin-shaped object inside.
He spends a lot of time getting the pendant, but he succeeds.
In the meantime, Bruiser gets Fragile.
While their attention is elsewhere, Transit spirits Cargo away.
The four are excused from the mid-term if they want, but Tech-Head insists on taking it anyway because he likes to show how smart he is.
M&M
James Nicoll, one of the players, provided this summary of the session. I'll try to provide the GM's view of things, but in point form, maybe emphasizing the things I have to remember for future sessions.
| STR | STA | AGL | DEX | FGT | INT | AWR | PRE | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | 12 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||||||
| Powers | |||||||||||||||
Tough
| |||||||||||||||
| Advantages | Skills | ||||||||||||||
| Equipment 6 [he likes stuff], Great Endurance, Diehard, Fast Grab, Improvised Tools, Throwing Mastery 2, Beginner's Luck | Athletics (+11), Close Combat: Punch 1 (+5), Deception (+3), Expertise: Construction 6 (+7), Expertise: Architecture 1 (+2), Insight 2 (+4), Intimidation 4 (+7), Perception (+2), Persuasion (+3), Stealth 2 (+5), Technology 2 (+3), Vehicles 4 (+8) | ||||||||||||||
| Equipment | |||||||||||||||
| This and the equipment advantage are here mainly because the character is designed as owning things, including a car or laptop or smartphone or gaming system; filled in at the player's whim. | |||||||||||||||
| Offense | To Hit | Damage | Init +3 | ||||||||||||
| Unarmed | +5 | 11 | |||||||||||||
| Groundsrike (burst, requires contiguous surface) | – | 8 | |||||||||||||
| Thrown item | +4 | 12 | |||||||||||||
| Defense | Dodge 3 | Parry 4 | Toughness 12 | Fortitude 12 | Will 2 | ||||||||||
| Complications | |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
| Power Points | Abilities 80 + Powers 16 + Advantages 11 + Skills 13 + Defenses 0 = Total | ||||||||||||||
Replay is a mimic android, created as security. It scans individuals nearby, one per round, and copies any powers it can. This is most useful against groups: people are usually immune to their own powers, but not necessarily to the powers of their compatriot.
It does not have the self-learning capacities of the homicidal version: defeat it and it does the same thing again. However, it does have a known problem: it defends the area where it is activated and it scans individuals for an access badge; without the badge, anyone with powers is assumed to be a threat. (People without powers are not assumed to be a threat.)
Some other powers (the flight and the gravity binding field) are always there.
Because Replay's schtick is copying people (notably the PCs) I did not worry about numbers and balance. I gave it some levels so it would (fairly) be a problem even if it hadn't copied anyone's powers, and then let copying do the rest.
| STR | SA | AGL | DEX | FGT | INT | AWR | PRE | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | – | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 5 | 0 | ||||||||
| Powers | |||||||||||||||
Android
Mimic
| |||||||||||||||
| Advantages | Skills | ||||||||||||||
| Beginner's Luck, Eidetic Memory, Evasion 2, Hide in Plain Sight, Improved Initiative 3 | Expertise: Superhumans and powers +20, Perception +15, Stealth +10 | ||||||||||||||
| Offense | To Hit | Damage | Init +14 | ||||||||||||
| Unarmed | +2 | 5 | |||||||||||||
| Defense | Dodge 5 | Parry 5 | Toughness 10 (6) | Fortitude – | Will 5 | ||||||||||
| Complications | |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
SYSTEM: ICONS
Gah! Over a month! Here, have this!
Being some things that popped into my head if you wanted to, oh, slot a Halloween-themed adventure into your superhero campaign.*
*Might not be suitable for all superheroes. Might not be suitable for all campaigns.
The problem with superheroes and holidays is that superheroes imply control and power, and being frightened implies not. But I'm willing to steal the trappings for the holiday.
Death takes a holiday...and in the midst of suffering folk who cannot die the heroes discover that Death has in fact been kidnapped by an elderly sorcerer who wants to live forever. (Image: Death is trapped in a snow globe paperweight, which each of the characters suddenly seems to own...)
Of course, the early part of this adventure needs to involve a Punisher-style vigilante who is being chased by the people he's trying to kill. Because if you can't kill them, you aren't nearly as much of a threat to them...
Because Fainting Goat Games recently published a heist adventure, I've been thinking about heists and dark ops lately. These are preliminary thoughts and I reserve my right to change my mind.
Most heist movies and novels involve these stages:
But how does this translate to superhero gaming?
Most of it looks pretty self-evident, but it might not play particularly well. It's also kind of cerebral, but if you have a group that loves planning, this is great: it's essentially:
If you have an established group for this, maybe you can skip "getting the gang together" except that's usually the spot where everyone shows off their abilities, by doing something spectacular, and it's kind of nice to let the player characters shine for a moment.
"Casing the joint" is another place where you want them to shine, ideally by having some NPC fail to notice the bad thing. That might be done as a set of Awareness rolls, and as a bonus for a massive success (or any success plus the amount of someone's Leadership) they get a free reversal at the end. ("Yes, it looked like I got shot but I have this reversal, right, so it was planned the whole time. As a dead guy, I can escape from the morgue and infiltrate the security system. And this was prearranged, so they've made arrangements to pick me up after the opponents' GPS takes them to Bumlandistan.")
Or you can do it where you start in medias res and we begin with the characters in the casino/undersea headquarters/whatever. There's a certain joy to having the obstacle show up, then having the player roll the appropriate skill roll as a Preparedness kind of thing, and if they did well, they're prepared for whatever the obstacle is...but if they roll poorly, not that they didn't prepare, they didn't prepare correctly (three things are possible: What we knew has changed or was incomplete, what we knew was flat-out wrong, we've been betrayed).
A staple of the genre is the reversal, when you discover that something was actually a lie, and our heroes manage to pull it off anyway: Carl Reiner's character is still alive, Paul Newman's character is still alive (or was it Robert Redford's character in The Sting?) How do you pull those off?
Some games provide a kind of retcon mechanic that can be used for that last reversal...Leverage is particularly informative here.
However, would it be fun to know you can always get out of trouble by spending a Determination Point in ICONS? (Well, yes, for some people.) It seems a bit larger than the remit of the usual retcon in ICONS. There are a couple of ways to go, it seems to me:
But let's see how this might work.
(Here will follow an attempt to insert code into blogger. It might not work because, well, blogger is a wrapper around things.)
First, we have to figure out why this has to be a dark or deniable resource operation. You might already have a reason; if so, great!
And so on. Here's a simple list:
| Roll | We're deniable because... |
|---|---|
| 1 | They don't like us for ideological reasons, such as politics, religion, etc. |
| 2 | They don't like us for personal reasons: we're arch-foes, they've met us before and disagree with us, one of our guys killed one of their guys (or they believe that to be true), we used to be married. |
| 3 | We're not supposed to be doing that sort of thing. This suits for your supervillains, but could also work for your government wetwork teams (very Iron Age) for assassination or theft or kidnaping. |
| 4 | We're not suppposed to do that there. This is the realm of a group operating outside of its domain: this is infiltrating a prison, or the CIA performing operations on USA soil. |
| 5 | There's no time to get permission. There's some time pressure (always good) and we could get permission (or a warrant), but that permission would arrive when it's too late. So off we go. |
| 6 | We're actually a loose cannon, whether we know it or not. This mission was ordered without permission, for personal reasons. Maybe the characters know that and agree, maybe not (perhaps they're being blackmailed into it), but this is deniable because it's a rogue operation. Maybe three layers up it's actually sanctioned, but that's for a future adventure. |
Okay. You have a reason why you shouldn't get caught. It might be as simple as "you're crooks" or as complex as "the legal situation around a flying skyfortress in air above Fakeistan airspace is complex, but if we're going to stop Dr. Armageddon, we've got to act now!"
Your basic dark ops operation (and your basic heist) is:
You have to verb some noun in an in inaccessible location. Things will go wrong, and there will be an obstacle.
I know, that sounds like every story ever. I'll try to make it a little more specific to the dark ops or heist genre. This button should show you some examples...
Roll a D6 for each of these columns.
| Roll | Goal verb | Goal noun |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Extract or steal or kidnap (extract means they'll probably come willingly) | A resource, such as an agent or spy or defector or a nine-ton artificial intelligence |
| 2 | Disable or destroy | Dangerous intel, such as a plan, a secret identity, the knowledge that our political leader is actually a shape-shifting alien |
| 3 | Terrorize or discourage | Dangerous technology, like the last existing Q-bomb, the factory that pumps out Omniblast robots, the Spear of Destiny |
| 4 | Discredit | Treasury, such as, well, money, or the ceremonial crown jewels, or the gold bullion |
| 5 | Scout, observe, or investigate | Dangerous opponent, such as the mentalist who controls the country's superguy, the superguy who is vulnerable for one day a year, and so on |
| 6 | Aid | A former ally, who might have been mind-controlled or who has faked defecting or who has defected and we want to bring him/her/it back. |
Yes, "Aid." Yes, sometimes the assignment is to prop up a puppet regime because they've promised to do something that we like or giving them the K-bomb without giving them the means to make that bomb.
The location is always difficult to get in to. Why? Because if it's easy, it's not a story; it's backstory. Feel free to add reasons, but we assume that it has normal protections against powers: you can't just teleport in, grab, and go. And, whatever the obstacles, this team has a chance of beating them.
| Roll 1 | Roll 2 | Location is... |
|---|---|---|
| 1-4 | Location is physically remote | |
| 1 | Underground | |
| 2 | Undersea | |
| 3 | Airborne | |
| 4 | In space | |
| 5 | Pocket dimension | |
| 6 | In motion | |
| 5-6 | Location is difficult for other reasons. | |
| 1 | Temporally inaccessible—Only available for a short window | |
| 2 | Public—Yes, we have a window but it's while the target of the snatch is giving a speech to the UN | |
| 3 | Fortified...I mean, all places are fortified but this one really is. It's a prison or a military base or a bank vault or an asylum. | |
| 4 | No powers allowed, either because they have giant nullification machines running or it's on a world with a red sun where you have no powers or everyone, even Iron Guy, has to give up their gadgets to get in. | |
| 5 | Hostile. Some other environmental conditon is actively trying to kill or hamper the player characters, whether it's the fact that no men can go there, or the gravity is too heavy, or the radiation is too high. This is kind of like being physically remote, but with the weirdness and special circustances turned up to 11. | |
| 6 | Ideologically dangerous. This is the kind of place that changes your mind about how bad it is. Maybe it's weird mental powers or maybe you've been lied to all your life about this or maybe it amkes sense in terms of your stated goals, but there's a significant change of one or more of your characters going to that side. |
For story purposes, the location might be unknown at the beginning of the adventure, but it turns out to be someplace difficult to get to.
And there has to be at least one reversal that throws that fine plan into disarray. Rather than list them, I submit that the game-able reversals tend to fall into one of three groups:
