A possible premise for a superhero series

Any

I'm not suggesting anything new or even different: this has been used before. But I've done a number of campaigns with a superhero history, and my brain turned to something else.

Heroes have just appeared: there was a calamity — the equivalent of the gene bomb, the white hole, or any of a number of other occurrences. Hundreds of thousands died.

Including our heroes.

I'm aware that The Elementals used the characters' deaths as a portal. In this case, however, I'm imagining that most of the victims are in fact victims and are dead. Some fraction (five per cent, maybe?) come back with super powers.

I'm not interested in a game that's “you with powers” because that turns into murderhoboes too fast. So I'd want some mechanism whereby you have to pick hero or villain. You can switch — i'm not that rigid — but there's something keeping you in the superhero/villain game.

I don't know what that is, yet, but something will occur to me.

Possible rules systems:

• ICONS
• Prowlers & Paragons UE (I don't think I own it)
• Wild Talents though I have bounced off it intellectually every time I've tried
• BASH
• Supers! RED

Games like Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, Cypher - Unmasked, could do it (one could set up a Paragons M&M campaign, for instance) but that's not where my interest lies right now.

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.

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-old boys 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.)

---

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 copy 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 need to be as smart as Reed Richards (by the rules, anyway). 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. (Upon asking people, nobody I asked played it that way: it was a campaign starter for all of them.)

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.

Setting and campaign idea

Icons

A whole campaign or set of stories occurred to me in the course of defending bad guy of the week campaigns, where there is no overarching evil bad guy...by giving me an overarching evil bad guy.

For now, let's call it Intro City. Better names are possible, but I'm scrambling to get this down before I forget (and before I have to rake the lawn). Intro City is a small city with a university and the main employer is the tech sector. The second-highest employer is probably the university itself. For some reason, I think Ithaca, New York, but that might be totally false because I know very little about Ithaca except that there's a university there.

Two heroes in mind that tie into this setting: Generic Hero and Bubblegumshoe. We'll start with Bubblegumshoe first.

She's at the university, though she's fifteen. Smart. Thinks of herself primarily as a detective because she was heavily influenced by Nancy Drew books of the 1930s (not the revised versions since then). Why did she have access to them? Her dad is high up in the city and her mom in the university. From a supers persepective, she's probably a gadgeteer of some kind. Less Adam Strange and more Tom Swift (also perferred the 1930s version of Stratemeyer Syndicate books).

Intro City has a superhero, the self-deprecatingly named Generic Hero. He's handsome, he's a flying brick, he's secretly six months old. He's a test tube child, produced by secret labs of...oh, we don't want to call them CADMUS but that's clearly the inspiration. Call it Myrmidon, Inc, a company that is transforming illegal clones into super-powered individuals. The process is not without its problems...

Now, I don't want to recapitulate the Superboy/Young Justice storyline, so we're not going to make Generic Hero a clone of somebody. (We'll call him Jason something or other, just to give us a bit more of a tie-in to Cadmus and the dragon's teeth.) No, he's his own person, but he has escaped from the secret labs of Myrmidon...or has he?

That will be one of his Qualities: that he doesn't actually know if he's doing things of his own free will or that he's been programmed to do them.

Our first adventure starts with Generic Hero already accepted by the citizens of Intro City; maybe at this point he's still working for Myrmidon, and it's his association with Bubblegumshoe (she's not particularly girly in civilian life, so she has gone all out on the pink bubblegum themes as a superhero, to divert attention) that makes him split from the organization. Maybe the first couple of adventures are him being sent out to recapture the latest mistake, and because there are superheroes, the citizens of the city take it in stride.

Bubblegumshoe's dad is actually working hard to secure benefits and bonuses for Myrmidon, because they're a major employer in town. "Do you know how many people would be out of work if they pulled up stakes?" Her mom is helping Myrmidon in another way, because they give people a place to work after graduation.

And eventually you can get into Generic Hero's liberation, and a big showdown where they have to deal with Myrmidon in a more definitive way.

So that gives you an arc that grows out of the concepts of the first adventure, and an excuse for a number of initial bad guys.

• Look, they've got to have some kind of mental-implanting thing to put the fake memories in. Let's say it's a machine—and it's essentially a telepathy/mind control machine. What if one of the techs has gotten in too deep in gambling? Convincing a bunch of bank tellers or bookies to transfer him money might seem like a way out, until Bubblegumshoe figures out what's being done and tries to stop it, with Generic Hero's help.
• At some point, they must have tried giving an adult superpowers. Did it work? Did it work but appear to fail because the powers don't actually show up until the next generation of cell replication? So someone cut loose from experimental programs at Myrmidon — maybe a student who volunteered for the “experiment” as a way of getting cash — starts to develop powers. Maybe they're good powers, maybe they're not...maybe the powers do out of control, or they have a tendency to flame out...but it's been months, so there's no obvious connection to Myrmidon.
• The current subject was in the creche with Jason; maybe they have a relationship. But the problem is that the power mimicry ability that showed up actually mimics the ability to give powers from the equipment. It's not really good to have an artificial life form that can give powers wandering around. Of course they locked her up, but something has gone wrong, and she's free....and everyone she touches gets powers briefly.

Just some ideas.

An experiment with a TiddlyWiki

Icons, M&M

As an experiment, I have started putting the Strange City background in a TiddlyWiki, at: http://jhmcmullen.tiddlyspot.com/. Feel free to look at it there, although you can't get it in a neat package.

I want to use the setting for something on-going (The Flea Family), and the PDF article just got outdated too quickly as I added things. So I'm trying this.

If that's not the correct address, it might be http://jhmcmullen.tiddlyspot.com/index.html.

TiddlySpot is not up-to-date with the latest version of TiddlyWiki, nor is it secure, but it should be adequate for a small personal wiki.

If you can't see it, or if there's a problem, let me know so that I can try to fix it or go looking for a different answer.

EDIT: Alas, the tiddlyspot.com site suffered a catastrophic failure. At this point, one cannot update any information there, so that has paused. It might disappear; these things depend of the vagaries of the software gods.

Idea du jour: Family Business

Icons

Idea du jour

Because we're all locked up, I suspect there are more one-on-one campaigns happening. This popped into my head.

The premise is that the player is playing one of the three heroes in the city. (Well, the player plays all three — one for each tier of play — but usually not concurrently.)

My current thinking is a family or pseudo-family; we're either talking three generations (or you can finesse it to two), or three siblings, something like that, one for each tier of play: Premier, Champion and Backup. For example:

• The eldest is the Premier hero. Although technically seventy years old, some doubletalk has kept this hero young, whether it was being frozen for fifty-five years, alien antagathic treatments, mutant metabolism, or a magic spell.
• The middle character is the Backup hero. He or she is rebelling against the absent parent and deliberately chose to do work at the local level instead of on the national or global stage.
• The Champion hero is the child of the Backup hero, or the grown-up sidekick. This character is ready to step out on the big stage, now.

The GM creates a supervillain for each one, but I'd produce it commercially with that setup in mind. Some of the universe creation stuff is already there (the villainous organization SKULL; the Association for Parareal Technology; the Sisters of the Sigilant; and so on) so the GM doesn't have to come up with it.

Provide character hooks galore, and the player characters are intertwined: Grandad just came out of suspended animation, Mom's taken over her husband's hero role because she thinks he's dead and has re-married, Junior is angry at Mom for betraying Dad's memory and ignoring Grandad, who seems cool, and is struggling with some romantic interest.

Provide half a dozen adventures and villains lightly sketched out, and provide twice as many seed.

Three campaign models immediately suggest themselves to me:

• You can play as the presented family or sub in your own characters for them
• Play as superhero rivals to them
• Play as their arch-foes and do a Romeo and Juliet thing

The Limbo Tavern

Any

So here's an idea I had this morning, thinking about structures for campaigns (specifically episodic campaigns).

The players have found their way into the Limbo Tavern, at a kind of nexus of dimensions. The tavern is large, with six hundred people in it, plus a number of employees. It is surrounded by the Mist (for them as likes capitalized nouns). There is day and night, but they are not equal length.

The tavern has become a kind of community. There are staff and guests, but the line is sometimes blurred; a more accurate way to say it is there are Stayers and Leavers. Those who stay have made their peace with the tavern and its stay there. Those who leave have not, but often find they have journeyed back someplace else. Those people often try to return to their home worlds.

The idea is to provide a place for player characters to congregate and to leave from, while giving them a place to return.

(Quite literally, this is "you meet in a tavern.")

To get to the tavern from a magical realm, you must be in fog and walk through a doorway. There are probably other requirements but they can be fulfilled accidentally, for that is how many people get there.

To get to the tavern from a scientific realm, you need a transdimensional portal but the power level must be set to a specific level and the destination must be set to the equivalent of "here," whatever that is.

The Population

Stayers are called "Tavvies" internally. Leavers are trans or transients or (and this is an insult among Tavvies) "customers." (If a Tavvie accedes to your request but says, "The customer is always right," you have been gravely insulted.)

The Mist is a dimensional portal, but the destination changes. You can't be sure of where or when you're going. Because some people go and come back, there has slowly developed a kind of folk wisdom about the Mist. It might or might not be true. (See Leaving the Tavern for details.)

The Limbo Tavern holds 600 people. Something enforces that rule: If there are 599 people, a pair cannot arrive, not until someone leaves. By tradition, the number of Tavvies is capped at 50.

There are good things about being in the Tavern: You don't age (though you can die by violence or wounds, but not by disease). If you don't ask what you're eating, your original payment covers it. Both magic and technology work, within limits. Time-based curses (such as lycanthropy) have no effect.

There are bad things: They take all your money. They're very good at quelling anything beyond a bar fight (the Tavern has been taken over and ruled by despots in the past).

Leaving the Tavern

Where you end up depends on when you arrived in the "day."

• Leave earlier, arrive in someplace like your past
• Leave later, arrive in someplace like your future
• Leave by the "east" exits and arrive in a place where science holds sway
• Leave by the "west" exits and arrive in a place where magic holds sway
• Leave by "north" or "south" exits and both are true

The directions are in quotation marks because anyone with a bump of direction has a constant irritation. It's like the whole north-east-west-south thing is imposed by the structure of the building.

Are these things true? Don't know. The Tavvies think they are.

More—like characters and dynamics and how do they get their food and ale?—when I think of it.

Five Campaign Premises

Five Slightly Different Superhero Campaigns

Bored with a four-colour campaign? Start with one of these ideas, guaranteed to be...well, actually, there's no guarantee.

None of these are unique, but they are seen less often.

We know we're in the Matrix All the superheroics take place in a virtual reality: the Pod...which might as well be real. That's where people earn their money and their rep. The players have super-powers in the setting; not everyone does. But something happens, and players have to investigate both in the Pod and outside it (as sort of "secret identity" stuff).

I'll catch that crook, right after a word from this sponsor Why do people do anything? For money. And corporations pay superfolk to be their representatives. Maybe there's an opening because Captain Cuddle was found with an underage leather-clad sub and a whip in his hand; maybe it's just competition between two insurance companies. Or maybe for some reason nobody wants Nerdgasm as their representative, so Nerdgasm has to struggle on its own with other misfits.

We're trying to go wrong After five years of trying to be a group of heroes, the Wonder Four have decided that crime could pay. But if you've been beating up the bad guys for half a decade, you might have trouble convincing them that your change of heart is legit. And maybe it's not...

Sharper than a serpent's tooth You're all mutants sharing the (low-rent) apartment. It doesn't help that some of you are good and some are bad, but at the end of the month, you have to have the rent money...and can you really arrest your cousin? How will you explain that to Dad and to Aunt Jennifer?

Smalltown Trouble It's tough being a country kid with city powers, even in a tourist beach town. Thank goodness you have a couple of friends who want to be heroes...much more than you do. Between dealing with the Rudnoski brothers, gym class, and prom, there's also the fact that you think you recognize the guy who just moved into the McIlvray's rented cottage. That chin, that voice: he might be Dr. Deprivation, planning his next big crime.

Five Slightly Different Short Superhero Campaigns

SYSTEM: ICONS

Bored with a four-colour campaign? Start with one of these ideas, guaranteed to be...well, actually, there's no guarantee.

None of these are unique, but they are seen less often.

1. We know we're in the Matrix All the superheroics take place in a virtual reality: the Pod...which might as well be real. That's where people earn their money and their rep. The players have super-powers in the setting; not everyone does. But something happens, and players have to investigate both in the Pod and outside it (as sort of "secret identity" stuff).
2. I'll catch that crook, right after a word from this sponsor Why do people do anything? For money. And corporations pay superfolk to be their representatives. Maybe there's an opening because Captain Cuddle was found with an underage leather-clad sub and a whip in his hand; maybe it's just competition between two insurance companies. Or maybe for some reason nobody wants Nerdgasm as their representative, so Nerdgasm has to struggle on its own with other misfits.
3. We're trying to go wrong After five years of trying to be a group of heroes, the Wonder Four have decided that crime could pay. But if you've been beating up the bad guys for half a decade, you might have trouble convincing them that your change of heart is legit. And maybe it's not...
4. Sharper than a serpent's tooth You're all mutants sharing the (low-rent) apartment. It doesn't help that some of you are good and some are bad, but at the end of the month, you have to have the rent money...and can you really arrest your cousin? How will you explain that to Dad and to Aunt Jennifer?
5. Smalltown Trouble It's tough being a country kid with city powers, even in a tourist beach town. Thank goodness you have a couple of friends who want to be heroes...much more than you do. Between dealing with the Rudnoski brothers, gym class, and prom, there's also the fact that you think you recognize the guy who just moved into the McIlvray's rented cottage. That chin, that voice: he might be Dr. Deprivation, planning his next big crime.

Various campaigns

Another reminiscence post. Skip if you want interesting.

I'm trying to remember the campaigns I've run. Some of them were short because they didn't work (the universe-hopping one seemed like a good idea, but it was flawed). Others were short because of gamer ADHD or because people got bored. Not in chronological order.

• The Concorde campaign, which I've talked about before. It was run in Champions, second printing to fourth edition.
• The Wellington campaign, which used DC Heroes 2nd edition and 3rd edition.
• The Patriot City campaign, which used 1st edition Mutants & Masterminds, and took place in Patriot City decades after the events in Freedom Force. 
• The Minotaur campaign, which used 2nd edition Mutants & Masterminds, and used both Freedom City and the city of Bedlam...though it was really more the one adventure.
• The Emerald Knights campaign, which tested out 3rd edition Mutants & Masterminds for us, and which I set in the Concorde universe's version of Detroit, Steel City.
• The Aegis campaign, which used Fantasy Hero (though later I revisited it with CORPS).
• The EABA playtest I did. It was set in the distant future of some other campaign I'd run, though I don't recall which one.
• The Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs campaign, which used Espionage and later Danger International, and took place in the far-off years of the 2130.
• The Alderson Disk campaign, which was set in the future of the BEFA campaign and ended when I painted myself into a corner.
• The various ICONS things I've run, set in Halifax, in Toronto (the Hope Prep stuff), in Vancouver, and now in Strange City.

I suspect more will come to me, but those are (I think) the biggies. I don't count the Marvel Heroic playtest or the Masks playtest or the Supers! adventures...they were never campaign-like.

A Bad Guys Campaign

SYSTEM: ICONS

I know that Steve Kenson has said that Determination is for heroes only. And in general I'm against the idea of a villains campaign. Morally ambiguous, sure, but out and out villains...? Even though there have been good villain things (like Necessary Evil), they tend to be about bad guys being forced to be good guys.

And this weekend I read the first volume of Gail Simone's Secret Six. And a bunch of more broken but still functioning individuals will be hard for you to find. I immediately thought of doing it as a roleplaying campaign, with a similar setup: All the bad guys are forming a coalition. You don't want to. That puts you in their bad books.

Trivial to do in Hero, but I haven't run Hero for a long time. You could do it in Mutants & Masterminds but there's be fluctuating power levels to contend with. You could do it in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying but my guys don't like MHR. Savage Worlds, of course, but I don't have the super powers supplement.

And then I circled back to ICONS, even though I'd dismissed it. Because Steve said that bad guys don't have Determination; he didn't say that they can't get Advantages or Trouble.

So if you were going to use ICONS for a villain campaign, you just don't give them Determination. Any time they need an Advantage, the players have to use a Maneuver or a Tactic.

I haen't thought about how that would affect a campaign, but I'm willing to accept suggestions.

It's something to think about, anyway.

So, what else to do?

SYSTEM: ICONS

As I've said repeatedly, I'm thinking of a second campaign, one that isn't on Wednesday nights and isn't on Roll20. And while probably it will be the same sort of thing, that does deserve thinking about.

For instance, if I make it an actual group and an actual campaign and think less about the casual drop-in aspect (though not abandoning that entirely), other possibilities become available.

Here are the things I've been thinking that I could do. Let me know if you have a particular interest or distaste for any of these ideas. (And forcing the campaign into a particular model might require some tweaking of ICONS, but we'll see.

• Teenage Mystic Heroes There's some kind of threat that affects anyone over 21, so Merlin (yeah, that one) has gathered some heroes to train them. He hopes they'll be ready in time. All the characters would have the Quality "Youth" in addition to their regular three, and there'd be a bit more soap opera.
• The Nexus League At the Crossroads of Dimensions, a team of heroes stands ready to right wrongs that might threaten the multiverse. Usually the threat is in our dimension, but sometimes it isn't. The heroes are more in the Justice League/Avengers model...they're not averse to calling in the local heroes, but usually they are the biggest good guys on the block.
• Better to Burn Out Street-level scope, the group are the heroes of a large cohort that suddenly got powers. This is probably not connected to Strange City. The catch is that every use of powers hastens your eventual demise. (You still don't know when you were going to die; powers mean it will be sooner.) Now, other members of the cohort don't care about the never-ending battle...they figure they're doomed, so why not have a good time until then, and those are largely your supervillains.
• Reddin Klah A sword-and-sorcery use of ICONS, rather like the Warlord's Skartaris or the Forgotten Land. This is the least superhero-y of them all, but still allows for superpowers as magic or ancient technology or mutant abilities.
• Trying To Get Out This is a nebulous idea, but it would follow some heroes who are trying to retire, the heroes who want to be their replacements, the villains who don't believe it, and the normals associated with them. Very soapy, and I'm not sure that it isn't a bunch of email exchanges instead.

As I say, the end result might be a standard sort of hero campaign, but I have been considering those other ideas and trying to figure out if I'd have enough stories.

Strange City background

SYSTEM: ANY

Assuming I have not just destroyed text while trying out an iPad app (which I have done twice now, in the vain hope of finding something useful that Blogger recognizes), here is the Strange City background information presented as a blog entry, rather than a PDF. I hope this will be easier to update than the PDF, and won't require jumping through hoops to read.

STRANGE CITY IN 10 SECONDS

• Mid-sized American city
• Highest frequency of super-powered individuals in the world
• Highest ratio of super-villains to heroes in the world
• Yesterday, the city's superhero team, the Centurions, disappeared.

OVERVIEW

Strange City was founded in 1666 by Ezekial and Hepsibah Strange, and it remained a small (almost endangered) community for hundreds of years. The discovery of high-quality pitchblende in the 1950s changed that, and the city quickly mushroomed because of its new connections to the tech sector. (Strange Village became a city in 1961.) The city has two universities. Both are well-respected, though not at the very top of their fields; Enoch Strange is a world leader in dealing with the sociology of the strange and the occult. SIT has developed some amazing new technology but critics say it exists mostly to feed the city's hungry tech sector.

Residents are "Strangers," even though the motto for a long time was "There are no Strangers in Strange City!"

DISTRICTS

The city has districts:

• The Mines is now the factory and warehouse district, although it was once the mining area. There are underground tunnels here and occasionally one will collapse.
• The Office is the business and banking district.
• The Flats is the slums and the poor housing.
• The Coast is where the rich people live.

Other districts to be named as needed (the artist district, the theatre and entertainment district, and so on).

TRANSIT

Like most North American cities, Strangers love their cars. Even if you don't have a car, you can get around, though.

Strange City has a rail system. It is mostly an elevated rail system because parts of the city are on a floodplain, but some sections are underground. There are also buses, taxis, and Karry, an electronic ride-sharing service that has disrupted the lives of taxi drivers.

Ideas:

• There is violence between taxi drivers and Karry drivers.
• A super starts “flight-sharing,” carrying people to destinations as part of Karry.

MEDIA

Strange City has two and a half television stations, a dozen radio stations, a daily newspaper, and two weekly newspapers.

Television

Two of the stations are network affiliates. The networks do local news, but most of the programming is imported.

The half station is part of the educational process at Nugget College, a private institution in town. Its programming is entirely local and changes with each semester. Some shows have a continuity because students stay with them from term to term, but all of them change once in a while.

Ideas:

• Annoying or sycophantic questions will probably come from reporters at the network affiliates; truly oddball shows and “events” will come from Nugget College as a student experiment.
• A new reporter is looking to make a name and get hired by a bigger station somewhere.

Radio

There are three big stations whose formats change occasionally. They are currently oldies, talk radio, and country & western. They are owned by syndicates, and the programming is dictated elsewhere. The rest are small radio stations that cater to specialized tastes.

Ideas:

• A talk radio hosts chooses to make vigilantes (or a vigilante) a convenient scapegoat for everything.

Newspapers

There are three newspapers.

• The Bee is the daily, and is part of a chain. Leans conservative or Republican.
  
• The Strange Times is a weekly with excellent investigative journalism. Founded in the early 1970s. Leans liberal or Democrat.
• The Citizen Weekly is best known for its ads and its personals, though the personals are mostly online now. (Still, the Weekly’s Strange Happenings column is looked at by everyone from occultists to cat-loving grandmothers.)

Ideas:

• The Bee sometimes hires someone who wants to make a name and move up. It is also an excellent adversary if someone wants to be persecuted by a paper.
• The reporters from the Strange Times are likely to uncover things that someone doesn’t want uncovered.
• The Strange Happenings column is an excellent way to spread rumours and news, and its pseudonymous author might actually be a super or occult master.

HIGHER EDUCATION

The two universities are well-regarded, but their names alone not going to get you a job, unless you're in their specialties.

Enoch Strange College

The much older of the two is the Enoch Strange College. It is a liberal arts collegis wit a reputation for turning out independent thinkers. Its specialty is the sociology of the occult, and its rare book library is the envy of universities this side of Arkham. There have been scandals — one of the professors founded a cult 5 but the place has been free of trouble for about fifteen years. (Of course, some would say that it's ripe for problems.)

State Institute of Technology

Despite the name, the SIT is no longer affiliated with the state college system, but it is a public college. (There is a move to change the name to Strange Institute of Technology.) The Institute deals with technical matters. Critics say that it exists primarily to feed the ravenous maw of the local tech scene and that it turns out drones instead of thinkers—but they are well-learned drones, for all of that. There certainly are professors whose experiments are on the cutting edge, and in fact a bequest from the Judas Strange Foundation requires experiments that are risky.

The SIT campus is on the edge of town. It has a complex maze of delivery and steam tunnels underneath it that make it well-suited for criminal lairs, but the criminals in question are usually creating or growing dope.

Ideas:

• The Judas Strange Foundation requirement justifies some of the (frankly unscientific) experimentation practices in the comics.
• SIT is where PICA and PRAT send captured supervillain devices; it's also where other proto0villains go to steal the gadgets they need.
• It turns out that a group of supervillains are taking some of the technology courses to try and understand their (stolen) technologies. After they fail the midterms, they decide that kidnapping the professor is what they need to do.

Other

There are other schools and colleges in the area. The best-known is Nugget College, a vocational college that teaches electronics and media presentation.

THE SUPER SCENE

The city has a super-group, the Centurions. Its most prominent member is Quantum Strange; his principle foe is K-Osprey (who sometimes spells it Chaos Prey). As the campaign begins, the Centurions go missing.

In the last few years, though, the Centurions have taken to fighting global or even interstellar threats, and the business of protecting the city largely falls to the Parahuman Reconnaisance and Tactics team and vigilantes. PRAT is always willing to bring out its big weapons, and Lt. Karpinski has a somewhat adversarial relationship with the local vigilantes...possibly because they tend to deal with the problems before PRAT can. (They never refer to themselves as PRAT, by the way, though everyone else does. In the police force, they're Strange City Parahuman Reconnaissance and Tactics, or SCPRT.)

There is an unusually high number of supervillains in Strange City: they outnumber heroes by between 15:1 or 20:1, depending on the definitions used. Enoch Strange's sociology professors have been working on why, but they haven't come up with a reason why there even are supervillains. The conservative press claims that having powers makes you a supervillain.

As a powered person yourself, you know:

• There is power suppression technology that works on most supervillains most of the time. (In ICONS, treat it as a Power Nullification rank 9.)
• The federal government agency that deals with superhumans is the Parahuman Investigation and Corrections Agency (PICA). (They also hate their nickname.)
• Medical care with no questions asked is available from the Abattoir, from Dr. Chimera. The Abattoir moves from time to time, but someone usually knows where it is (a difficulty 3 task for a known super). Dr. Chimera rarely has the most up-to-date equipment, but it knows its business. Dr. Chimera can handle trauma from violence and has a comprehensive knowledge of the effects of various superpowers. Some have wondered why Dr. Chimera’s has never been raided; those who wonder too loudly disappear.
• There is a supervillain prison outside the city—the Black Rock Prison. It is administered by PICA but the actual day-to-day operations are contracted out to a private company. (Black Rock will have a riot and the private company will be replaced when I come up with a cool place to have the replacement prison.)
  

There are a couple of places that are regarded as neutral ground. Generally, no one steals there (largely because there isn't anything worth stealing) and they are places to have a talk. The existence of places like this are one reason why the police force has a guarded relationship with vigilantes. One of the places is a bar; the other is a vegetarian cafe. The third place is medical.

• The bar is Free State, a country & western bar in the Mines district.
• The vegetarian cafe is Home on the Grains, over in the Offices district.
• The medical place is the Abattoir. Dr. Chimera and its staff do not allow fighting on the premises.

Almanac

Known Heroes

Characters are ones that I have come up with. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Player characters are not in this, yet.

Magnificent Centurions

The Centurions are the original superheroes who now handle mostly global or even interplanetary threats. They consist of whomever you need, but you can start with:

• Quantum Strange, a powerful wizard-like figure who controls the very power of quantum reality. Quantum Strange is the de facto leader.
• Black Aster, an environment controller who can shape things to her will. She can control the weather or shape the wall itself into a fist that grabs you.
• Heartbreak Kid, a mentalist who is best at manipulating emotions. (The “Kid” hasn’t aged in ten years.)
• Blue Streak, a speedster. (Evil twin or alternate personality called “Mean Streak.”)
• Shadowguard, a vigilante who plans for everything.

(The existence of five heroes implies the existence of about a hundred villains.)

Team Qualities

• The Premier Team (With Premier Problems)
• Been There, Done That
• “Carry the Standard!”

Adam Silverback

Intelligent gorilla. Polymath. Lives in a compound in town under PICA/military supervision. He's not a weapons or technology guy, but anything else...

Qualities:

• Polymath genius
• Under military protection
• Still a gorilla

Dr. Ghost (Dr. Andrew Wassermann)

A beginner at this hero thing. In his secret ID of Dr. Wassermann, he is an oncologist with a clinic in the city. Phasing, Density increase, healing, affliction.

Qualities:

• Doctor with Hippocratic oath
• Good Samaritan
• In love with villain

Known Villains

Agent of Chaos

A nihilist villain, named but not developed.

Blastshadows

A group of villains who got their powers from explosions.

Cruncher (Francis leTourney)

A very strong tough guy, with extra strength when he's squeezing or crunching things.

Qualities:

• To survive, give out more than you get
• Revenge for, well, everything
• Cares for crippled sister

Epiphyte

Transformed into a plant person, Epiphyte (also known as Caroline Flow, as the Lady of the Glade, as Sundew) lives in Isley Park, and has a rough deal with various criminal activities, who deliver to her people they want killed. The police tend to avoid the park, which is officially closed at night.

Qualities:

• Eats her prey
• Now a plant, not a person.
• This is her home

K-Osprey (Thabiso Lincoln)

The madman genius who has killed, but who always manages to find henchmen. Lots of Strangers know someone whose life has been touched by K-Osprey. His origin is a mystery. He might have been an experimental subject for one of the various create-a-superhuman programs; he might be born a mutant. Flight (wings), gadgets, some innate damage resistance.

Qualities:

• Stochastic mastermind
• Madness is liberating
• If all else fails, smash it

Lucky Strike (unknown)

Lucky Strike got her name from her lucky breaks. She’s a thief, and a good one. She is best known for her luck, but the gadgets she carries and improvises are also well known. Gadgets, Wall-crawling, Leaping, Gadgets, and an uncontrolled probability control.

Qualities:

• Thief with a heart of gold
• No man is good enough
• Grudging respect

Mr. Bland

A supervillain with supremely practical evil plans, some of which are legal.

Rebound (Karl Groenveld)

Reflects the attack back at the attacker; if a "good" power is used on him, like Healing, he can reflect back the harmful version of the power. (This is an extra.)

Qualities:

• Child to protect
• Hates cops & authority figures
• Hurts you because he can

Silver Prism (Brendan Li)

A fellow with "quantum silver blasts." Not a goood person, but someone who keeps bargains. Invisibility, force field, Energy Drain aura.

Qualities:

• Bully
• Show your status
• Connected in the criminal world

Twitch Kid (Owen Carmichael)

Handsome, born to wealth, built armored suit to regain family’s lost fortune by force.

Vampire Squid (Harlan Cornell)

A creepy little fellow with tongue tentacles that can wrap around a victim and suck out his or her life. The victim is stunned by the act of wrapping them up often stuns the victim. (In game terms, after a page of Binding, start draining Stamina until death.) The two tongue attacks can happen separately, but target gets Determination point if one happens without the other.)

Qualities:

• Creepy in looks and deed
• Light attacks do +1 degree of damage
• Addicted to “feeding” and “flavour” of person

KNOWN SUPERS: OTHER

Parahuman Security, Incorporated

A small security firm that hires parahumans as security guards, usually by organizations that expect to have to deal with parahuman invasions. (There isn’t money to hire PSI for the university labs, though.) Buildings are generally set with alarms, and three-person teams head out (the third person stays in the truck). Team structure depends on the powers available, but PSI doesn't like to break up a team that works.

Because powers are relatively rare, PSI has had to be quite egalitarian in its hiring. Color, creed, sex, or criminal record don’t matter as much as whether you have a useful power. It is notable as a place where ex-cons can get work, once they have a Certificate of Rehabilitation from the government.

Here’s one successful team.

• Stalker (River “Eyes” Glimpt) Fixes “third sight” on one of the team and reports back if there’s any unusual problem. Unlike the other two, Glimpt has a criminal record, arrested for being the eyes for a criminal gang for a couple of jobs. Qualities:
  • Parahuman security guard
  • Working stiff
  • Something to lose
• Padlock (Dwight Celenza) He can bind things up. The binding doesn't last long, but it usually lasts long enough to get the target into the van, which usually is proof against a lot of powers. Qualities:
  • Parahuman security guard
  • Working stiff
  • ?
• Scope (Mackenzie Ney) The one who finds things. Qualities:
  • Parahuman security guard
  • Working stiff
  • ?

Standard Supervillain Minions

There is an employment agency that makes them available. Its owner, Carmine Childress, always refuses offers of work from known supervillains, but the thinnest of excuses will work. His cousin is a real estate agent who finds these people lairs.

Qualities:

• Normal guy
• If I lose, the boss’ll kill me

Ideas in a superhero setting

There are some things that I keep coming back to in superhero settings. I don't know if they'll show up in the Strange City setting, but if one doesn't, it's because I've made a conscious effort to keep it out. You might have mental tics like this too, wells you keep returning to.

The underground complex. Whether it's mines or a forgotten city, I often have some kind of dungeon/subway complex/tunnel situation, complete with people or things living there.

Some journalists are scum. While I greatly appreciate the estate of journalism (having spent years on the school paper), I also recognize that some of the practitioners are, well, media whores. It's much easier to put this kind into a story than the good kind, though I try to have both.

The really stupid parody hero. I can't help it. I might be parodying something that's years out of date, but hell...I gotta.

Trying to justify certain superhero tropes with law or technology. A common superhero game, and one I won't stop with because I like certain superhero tropes, even if they fall apart when you think about them.

The missing heroes. I love legacy settings, but I want the players to be the important ones in the setting. Maybe not in the world of the setting, but in this area. Sometimes that means that everyone else is missing. (Or they're busy.)

The antagonistic base. An intelligent base that has an agenda different from the heroes? I'm all over that.

So I run into old Crimson Claw (he tried to kill me back in the day), and it turns out... Hey, both heroes and villains are still people. Some of them must give up and do something else.

I didn't comment because you didn't want me to. Sometimes, they know you're a superhero, but they're respecting your privacy. Kinda like when Ollie Queen was mayor, and the beard made it kinda obvious that the vigilante was the mayor.

Hey! My name is trademarked! For some reason, I just think that names should be trademarked. I don't believe there should be superhero schools or community colleges that teach heroism (though a weekend course that ended with you getting your Vigilante Certificate could be fun), but I keep going back to characters with the same names and trademarks. Villains would ignore the IP laws, though.

It's a secret ID, dammit. Look, if you want to have a secret ID, you can. I'm just gonna make it tough on you.

Hidden in plain sight. A lot of strangeness will have a perfectly ordinary appearance and be out in public, if you know where to look.

A Sketchy Background

I'm going to try to create a background for stuff I produce. A first draft of a few items is here:

Strange City background

Don't be surprised to see other ideas that I have proposed make their way into this.

For now, I purposely want to keep this short. I don't want a thousand pages that players or GMs have to read through, but I want it to provoke ideas, and it doesn't do that yet.

Eventually, I will release it under a Creative Commons license of some sort, but not now.

EDIT: I should actually release this in parts on this blog, rather than requiring you to download and read a PDF. So maybe I'll do that.

Freedom Force!

SYSTEM: ICONS

My son has fond memories of Freedom Force, an old PC game I played when he was a child, and while he's recovering from having his wisdom teeth out, he said he might like to play superheroes. So I did up a bunch of the Freedom Force characters, and might eventually talk about why I made the decisions I did. For now, you can find them here. (It's a PDF.) It's not all the characters, and I might change my mind about them.

(Updated: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0KkM_vAe2HXdnRZTWpsQWRuMzg)
(In fact, I have fond memories of Freedom Force...I did a Freedom Force campaign back in the days of Mutants & Masterminds 1st edition. You might be able to find it written up (in part) on the Green Ronin site.)

Usual caveats, plus I'm sure that my interpretations of the characters reflect my play style for the game rather than how you play the game.

In general, I used the Freedom Force Wiki to remind me of what powers they had.  Still...

• Things aren't as fine-grained in ICONS as in the game, so I distinguished Mental, Mystical, and Damage mostly. 
• There's a 9 point scale that maps fairly nicely on to the ICONS levels (3 is average), though you might move anything labelled "Extremely" into superhuman. And I didn't give anyone Coordination 1, even if they were labeled a "Klutz".
• As a real-time game, the speed of the characters was important. I checked to see whether the character might have Super-Speed and then ignored it.
• Jumper was turned into Leaping if the character Strength was less than 7.
• Lifter I just added 2 to the Strength.
• I did Eve mostly because I had a 45-pt archer hanging around. I did her beauty as Aura (Stunning). 
• Almost all melee attacks were left as functions of Strength; the characters can stunt things like Burst if the powers affect an area.
• Any Acid power usually became Affliction, Confusion became Emotion Control or Mental Control (depending on other effects)
• Some things became Telekinesis with the Limitation Up or Away (Alche-miss has two of these, Bullet does and Man O'War has Whirlpool).
• If something did stunning and a little bit of damage, it usually became just the Stunning power. 
• I ignored knockback.
• For Alche-miss' various curse abilities, I used Probability Control (Bad Luck), figuring that the altered state matched pretty well with Trouble of a Lost Panel. I did add Alteration Ray (Phasing) as an extra, but I think on consideration it's just a special effect. The target loses a panel because they've been turned into as ghost.

I strove to have the characters come in at 45-50 points, with the Extras/Limits rules. That was a rough balancing act.

And I re-discovered Homing, an extra from Great Power.

Here's your idea for today

Not superheroes today.

So there's a lawsuit against Warner Brothers that's a little different. (Here's a brief YouTube video in summary.)

According to that link, Warner has to shore up its claim that the movies are based on "historical facts" by proving that witches and ghosts are real. 

Wouldn't that be a great set-up for your PCs? And because time is short, they just have to go to the worst places. The studio stands to lose $900 million on this, so the budget for your players is &300 million (after salaries and lawyers). 

And all they need is documented evidence...

(Did someone say, "Belasco Hell House?") 

Your small-town supers setting, doncha know

For a small group, you can certainly consider a small-town setting. (Insert Brent Butt's comedy routine about the hooker in the small town.) They can go into the city sometimes and get into conflicts there, but most of it would be local. There are a couple of things to think about.

Why are your heroes grouped there? There are possibilities. Perhaps the government decided to put the paranaturally-abled students out in the country where they could damage less in case of an accident. Maybe they're all part of the same family...Mom and Dad Super moved out there to raise their children. (Heh...I just thought of a low-rent Xavier School, which is a big farmhouse where the students have to help with chores.) Maybe they've been chased out of the city. Heck, maybe they're all refugees from a particular conflict and the local church has raised money to settle them there.

What are they going to do? We presume they're going to fight someone; it's a superhero game. But who (or whom)? Well, there might be the conflicts with the locals...but that won't sustain an entire campaign, though it might make an interesting arc through it. Off the top of my head:

• Someone's after the retired superhero in town, and he can't defend himself.
• There's a government base--a kind of Area 51--nearby that can produce your freak-of-the-week.
• It's a super-student school, and the opposite group generates conflict.
• Bad guys have come to town to hide, and your players find out.
• The place was heavily affected by the gene bomb/meteors/alien invasion a bunch of years ago.

Consider it as a place to use. They can always move to the city afterward.

A supers setting of no import

Because I'm bored, here's rough notes for a setting start.

All kinds of heroes (mutants, transformed, robots, magic, aliens, etc.). If you can justify it, it can exist. Heroes have been public for a generation, starting with Galaxy in 1979. (Yes, that means that there were decades of superhero comics to draw from.) Some think that the pre-existing comics shaped what came.

North American superheroes appeared after the meltdown at Three Mile Island. Surely it wasn't the radiation; dirtier bombs had been exploded in earlier years. But if metahumans have long been with us, the incident at Three Mile Island spurred them to be public. Galaxy had just come into her powers, so she is no proof either way.

In the recent past, there has been a battle between good and bad on an unprecedented scale, though the numbers of metahumans were never so high that everyone was affected. At the end of it, the various groups were shattered. Oh, there might be a member or two left of some (even most) of them, but the : mighty battle between good and bad, has destroyed both and left power vacuums. (If we ever want to bring them back, they aren't dead, they're in the massive crossover event Clandestine Infinities.)

The person on the street in North America would recognize as good-guy teams the Liberty Union, the Justice Vanguard, the Appeal, the Shadow Cabinet, and the Golden Balance, and hero names like Exalted, Galaxy, Nimble, Spicer, Suitable, Maximan, and the Sky Clan. The same person would know about Doctor Apocalypse, about Count Infinity, and about the Darwin Association, who have all very publicly tried to destroy the world.

They are less likely to know about the other criminal organizations, such as the Benevolent Organization, the Parliament of Hunters, the Federated Autarky, and the Underworld Syndicate. Those organizations are in disarray, though they're likely to be re-built in some form or another. 

The Atlanteans have only just come out in the last fifteen years (since the disasters off the coast of Africa), though they claim to be older. There seem to be at least three types of Atlanteans, ranging from the human-looking sub-mariners through the merpeople to the Deep Ones. They are beginning to be a threat to shipping, though nominally some counrties have treaties with them. (Adventure idea: protecting a watery caravan.)

Fight club exists, and it's for supers. Imported from Thailand, the underground combat rings for metas are a place where heroes and villains have both trained.

This is a time when super villains start to appear, eager to make names for themselves and consolidate control. At the same time, non-super organized crime--the mundanes--are trying to re-grasp what has slipped from their fists.

There is no obvious government organization dedicated to metas--that function has been distributed among all the different alphabet-soup groups. There is fierce rivalry between the groups. 

But you don't start with any of this--you start with something small. A group of female villains who have all adopted code names that start with B (who call themselves the "B Hive") have decided on something flashy as their coming out crime. They expect police involvement and maybe a superhero or two, but the point is to demonstrate that they are tough and can't be stopped. 

This first crime is a pretty standard bank robbery, except that they have their escape already planned--they expect that the psionic powers of one of their team will let them leave whenever they want. 

There are more members than the ones on the job, but this caper is Brawn, Blister, Blackbird, and Bungee, with Brainz held in nearby reserve.

 

A link

What a week--from funeral to sick-as-the-canid-of-your-choice. 

But because I was talking about parasites a while ago (and because I like parasites), here is a bit of news:

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-morbid-leopards-toxoplasmosis-parasitized-chimpanzees.html

Now, there's an idea--an intelligent parasite can only breed in organisms with a certain set of characteristics. Before its mind was subsumed the host left its planet to prevent infecting others. (He was a genius on his world, a twelfth-level intellect on a planet of fifth-level intellects.)

The parasite has caused superpowers because they're a side-effect in humans of the characteristics that the parasite needs. 

That might be an interesting end-game to a supers campaign. All sorts of organisms can be infected, but only in supers (or a certain type of super--one of the player characters, perhaps?) can it breed. The PCs have to stop the infection from reaching those individuals and wipe out the infection... Or failing that, wipe out the individual.

Who, I'm sure, is beloved by enough people that it's going to be a battle.