Uncanny Justice 9 (secretly Viper's Nest)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scene 1: Prelude^[1]

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

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.

Uncanny Justice 4: What Rough Beast

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What Rough Beast

Slouches From Our Past

Continuing the terrible holidays of Uncanny Justice…

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

The Fenwick Story

Champions

This is a Champions story from long ago, but I figured I'd set down what I remember of it, so I could point to it. I've referred to this several times over the years, and I want to again.

Preface: I regard combat as integral to superhero roleplaying games. At the point where this story happened, I tried for combat in every session, even if it was "You see a mugger, so you deal with him." In Champions, however, combat can take a long time to play out. (That's why I eventually dumped Champions though I find that combat with my gang often takes a long time to play out, regardless of the system.) The other thing you need to know is that the players are much brighter than I am, so by necessity I evolved to a gamemastering system where I set up a premise and let them go. Though I tried to be railroad-y and present the story, I had to let it go because I couldn't out-think them. This was an important step in that process.

As I recall the setting for the adventure, one or more people were held captive in a RAVEN headquarters. At that time, the concept was that RAVEN funded any number of take-over-the-world schemes, and each one became a RAVEN operation. The intent was, I think, to model spy and superhero stories where there's no consistency between schemes.

Knowing this, the players decided to infiltrate the base as auditors. They made up fake IDs, got clipboards, put on suits, and showed up at the front door of the base. (I believe James Nicoll's character was drafted to play the head auditor, and I'm pretty sure he came up with the name Fenwick.)

“This is Fenwick. From Accounting.”

This tickled me.

“Right. Just a sec while we get the locks and you can come in.”

Sound of muffled, worried consultation. The doors eventually open, and the supreme base leader is there, nervously.

“We'll start at the top and work down. Head office is concerned about how you're spending their money. I'd like a tour of the entire facility.”

At this point, the players have asked them to reveal that everything is on the up-and-up, so the obvious response is that it isn't. I improvise various details, like the laundry room being full because all the sheets are being washed (to hide that they're silk) or that someone had faultily changed the menu in the cafeteria from "TODAY'S SPECIAL: LOBSTER BISQUE" to "TODAY'S SPECIAL: CAMPBELL'S SOUP." The warning “It's Fenwick! From Accounting!” being passed down the corridors.

Frankly, I was having too much fun improvising ways in which this group of bad guys had been ripping off the RAVEN Supreme Command to find a way to shoe-horn combat in there.

Eventually, they found the hostages, and there might maybe have been a bit of combat in getting the hostages out, but I don't think so; I think the players came up with a plan and executed it and the hostages were freed.

Aftermath: Well, someone (I don't remember if it was me or James or maybe someone else) played Fenwick in an adventure later. In Hero games, that means you put all your points into Presence. The line, “It's Fenwick! From Accounting!” happened in our group for a while.

Anyway, that was a session without combat, and it was a ton of fun.

Even though it was a superhero game.

Thoughts on Champions, after umpteen years

Champions

I've just joined a Champions campaign and tonight we had our first session. Please don't take what I'm about to write as critical of the GM or the other players; this is what I felt throughout the session. I mention these things here because I'm pretty sure that I have inflicted all of these on players at one time or another, and I think they're specific to the game system, or encouraged by the game. They are part of the reason why I stopped running Champions years ago.

A Brief Digression

I just want to say that I think that Champions and the Hero System have many virtues. For the simulation of the physics of a particular fictional reality or specifying a power, there is nothing better, I think. If you want a left-handed werewolf with cybernetic implants who fights with a katana and a taser, and who has spells that only work on the Thursday after a full moon, there is nothing better.

The only thing I've ever tried to play that comes near it in terms of that specificity is Wild Talents because it added the utility category for custom powers.

So if what you want is the ability to say exactly what your power is, Hero System is your jam. If you want to be able to build the world in game terms and have it be consistent, Hero System is the way to go. Hero System ought to be the first step in simulating any fictional reality; its fingerprints are all over Jim Gardner's Spark Vs. Dark books, even though I've tried to convert them to ICONS.

There are some things, good things, that Hero System does that no other game does.

End digression.

Back to My Point

That ability to create very specific worlds? Often means you do.

Which in turn creates really lengthy histories and games that are in media res except the media is a history lesson. That's not the fault of the game system (which has nothing to do with the history of your campaign world) but I think it's a symptom.

And combat is slow.

Look, tonight we had one—onemdash;combat. It was, admittedly, a difficult one: six players and something like twenty (maybe thirty) GM characters. A lot. We had less time than usual, mostly because I arrived late. (Last in, first out: maybe that's my mantra. I didn't mean for it to happen that way, but I had stuff before and after the session.) My character is speed six. I acted twice.

Now, to some extent, roleplaying is about the journey and not the destination. Fun with the gang, references to Firefly, D&D, previous games/campaigns/whatever. But in combat, in Champions, when combat is happening, you are not doing anything when it's not your turn. If you whiff (as I did, rolling a 17 on one to-hit roll), you do nothing.

In previous campaigns, I was speed 6 and I acted more often than anyone else (usually). Another PC is speed 8, and the villains are as bad. Is that a fault of the GM or the game system? I dunno; I go back to Theron Bretz's contention that SPD in Champions is spotlight time. The higher your speed, the more likely you are to get time in the spotlight. IOne character, a GM character, was speed 4 (I presume; he acted in segment 3). Since he had been mind-controlled to untie me (yes, I was tied up with wire at the start of the combat), I was rather interested in him acting, but he did not, not for most of the combat (and someone else had moved e out of range by the time he acted).

Right now, that's really the thing that I put at the system: the combat. Slow. That's kinda my overwhelming impression of Champions combat right now. And I've been trying to figure out why that bothers me so much. Am I that glory-hungry?

<;p>Wheel, maybe I am. I like to GM, after all. But I also saw a lot of stuff tonight that was, well, me as a GM, and that's what makes me think that maybe the game system encourages them.

Anyway, somewhere along the line I got the idea that fights have a point.

• The heroes are outclassed by the villains in this city.
• The Heroes are bad-asses who put down regular thugs.
• This particular villain is difficult to deal with.

The point varies depending on where we are in the adventure or who is involved. (I originally wrote "in the story" but that's wrong: I have grown to believe that RPG adventures are situations and the story grows out of what they do. Still, beginning/middle/end are useful emarcations in terms what the point is.)

But: Slow. Slow. Slow.

There's also the fantabulous point inflation. I have on my character sheet that I know the supervillain population. Villains also have reputations. We rolled on reputations; I suspect that I could have rolled on my skill roll (whichever as higher), on the theory that "reputations" are meant for the general populace, not somebody who really cares about this stuff. Sorry, distracted: the point is, that I have a knowledge skill for the rituals of the cult I used to belong to, and one for its members, and one for ... Actually, I have four knowledge skills that relate to that particular cult and parts of it. I have a separate k=skill for analyzing the behaviour of cults.

On the one hand, I totally see that those are separate things. On the other hand, I think, "Are those the pointof the game?"

End of Rambling

Look, I'll be back for the next game, when we play some more of the combat. I had a good enough time that I don't want to quit. However, by the same token, I'm not blind to the flaws of my childhood crush.

No game does everything perfectly. The best you can hope for is a good fit for you and not to be sucky when it doesn't fit someone else as well.

Champions Now Kickstarter

SYSTEM: CHAMPIONS

If you're interested, there are only three days left to get in on this Kickstarter: Champions Now, by Ron Edwards (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/herogames/champions-now?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=champions%20now)

I think Ron has interesting ideas, but I don't think I'll be supporting it. First, money is still tight. Second, it feels like it's just a tightened-up version of third edition Champions. I don't see enough of a difference to back it: I left Champions behind, and this isn't enough to bring me back. (I suspect that will be the case for a lot of people: those who loved Champions as it was still have the books and can play it as it was, and those who have moved on won't see it as different enough from Champions as it is.)

However, you might decide to back this. So with three days left, I encourage you to go look at the Kickstarter and make your own choice.

I have many, many fond memories of Champions...so even though it doesn't quite tickle my fancy, I encourage you guys to look at it.

And who knows? I might be wrong, and maybe I'll be wishing that I had backed it.

Conversion: "What Rough Beast" Champions to ICONS

Icons

This is the conversion notes, not the adventure itself. While you might be able to deduce things about the adventure from this, I urge you to go and read "What Rough Beast" yourself.

Non-Conversion Changes I Made

If you read my account of it, you'll see that I made a number of changes, mostly names (Genocide became PURITY88, UNTIL became APRIL, MINUTEMAN became VIGILANT, Project Omega became Project Mu, and so on). Instead of using a one-level base, I made it several stories (though then I had to figure out out the titular beast made it between levels).

General Base Construction

• Outside exterior walls are Material 8 (thick stone)
• Interior walls are Material 6
• Interior doors are of hard wood, Material 4
• Ceilings—the rooms are 4 metres tall, except reactor rooms & robot room (10 metres tall)

The Shack

I had the shack as a hunting shack.

• Walls & roof are Material 4.
• Blast 5 or better tears away topsoils to reveal elevator.
• Floor is Material 7.
• Entrance: Pyramid test [4; Awareness, Intellect, Technology] or a Phased character in elevator succeeds at a single Intellect test [3]. Actual mechanism I used was studs in two fake knotholes could be pressed to create a binary 8 in each knot.

Elevator

Outside the elevator takes a successful Intellect test [4; Technology (Security Systems)]. It takes six seconds (roughly a page) to go all the way up or down.

Guard Post(s)

• UNTIL armor & equipment here (Damage Resistance 4)
• Blast door is Material 10 (Unobtainium). To bypass code is Intellect test (difficulty 5), though list of proper door codes is in room 5 (Awareness test, difficulty 3).

Head Technician's Office

Search is Awareness test (difficulty 3):

• Automatic (just by saying you’ll search): find a memo from Dr. MacBeth, asking Dr. Ward to look into the Bypass System in the Reactor Pile, as it could accidentally withdraw the rods (which is exactly what happened).
• Marginal or moderate success: Previous, plus a torn page, apparently from a journal: "I have deep reservations about Project Omega. The DNA seems to mutate even more when agitated with high energy fields. This is due to—"
• Major success or better: Previous, plus schematics to a MINUTEMAN. Schematics are labelled, so recognizing it isn’t an issue. However, Intellect test (difficult 4) reveals that this is a new type of MINUTEMAN, possibly not as vulnerable to electrical attacks as a standard. (Though I didn't have stats for an existing MINUTEMAN, say that cold and energy damage automatically did one extra level of damage.)

Dr. MacBeth's Office

Pyramid test [4; Intellect, Tech (Computers)] to bypass security on computer terminal. The trick is not to think of it as "outwitting the security so you get in cleanly" but rather as "going in so the system delays the Virus Clean Wipe for as long as possible."

• Success gives rundown on Project Omega.
• Failure of any roll in test initiates the Virus Clean Wipe. At one failure, system is wiped in four hours. At two failures, two hours. Every failure halves the time (one hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 7 minutes, etc.)
• Once the pyramid test is successful, character knows (as result of hacking) that further attempts will wipe the system immediately.

Head Security Office

• On wall is Blaster Rifle (Blast 5, Fast Attack 4).
• Search is Awareness test, difficulty 3. Marginal success reveals personnel list; moderate success or better reveals personnel list and door codes.
• Any character who has seen the revised schematics in the Head Technician's Office (room 3) can try an Intellect test [3] to detect that the plans are different.

Guard Post/Armory

• Glass window hardened (Material 4) and Radiation Resistant
• Room contains:
  • 15 Genocide Blasters (Blast 5, Fast Attack 2)
  • 10 helmets with Radio Hearing (to understand what’s said, Hearing Awareness [3])

Machine Shop

• Three other suits of UNTIL armor
• Three UNTIL Autoblasters (Blast 6, Fast Attack 3)

Storage

• Radiation suits cut radiation damage in half and lower Coordination by 1. It takes 1 panel to put on one of these suits on completely (to cut the radiation in half) or to take one off.

Laboratories

Intellect test [4; Science (Biology)]:

• Marginal success: what general use these labs were put to.
• Moderate success or the appropriate specialty: also that mutated animals were bred here.
• Major success or better: also the early file on Project Omega.

Radiation Pile Reactor

• Dotted line shows Faraday Aerolithium transparent wall (Material 6).
• To reinsert control rods using control panel, Intellect test (difficulty 4). Failure means that mechanism gets stuck. Takes four pages if it works; "in radiation only" abilities of Beast disappear, but MINUTEMAN wakes then unless they do something.
• Second Intellect test [4] reveals that a sufficiently strong (Strength 6) character could physically push the rods back in to place.

The Beast

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
6	4	8	2	5	5	13
Specialties			Qualities
Athletics (+1)	Intense radiation feeds body but angers mind People hate me, so I hate them I’m a radioactive animal! Large
Powers
Aura (Energy Drain) 4 Extras: Burst, Slow Recovery, Drain Str (when touched) Limit: Constant Growth 6 (Damage Resistance 6, 24 ft long, -2 to hide) Limit: Constant Density 1 3 arms (extra limbs: Fast Attack 8) Sensory Resistance 3 Extra: Super-Senses: UV Vision, Tracking Scent, IR vision Claws (Slashing) 6 Life Support 10 Extra: Regeneration 10 Limit: Only in high radiation fields (both Life Support & Regeneration)

APRIL Agents

I don't claim these are what you'd get converting UNTIL agents; I don't have statistics for UNTIL Agents or for MINUTEMAN robots, not any more. But if you want agents, here's a generic assault agent...

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
4	3	3	3	3	3	6
Specialties			Qualities
Military (+1)	Part of a large organization Doing what's right
Powers
Equipment: As issued, but often including Armor (Damage Resistance 4) Carbine (Blast 6 Extra: Fast Attack 6) Billy Club (Strike 4)

And below are my feeble attempts to re-create the base with multiple floors. If you do that, though, you need to figure out how the beast moves between floors and what evidence there is of it.

ICONS Drop-In (Strange City) Session 4: "What Rough Beast"

SYSTEM: ICONS

I started by making this a complete write up and ran out of time toward the end, so it gets sketchy. If you weren't actually there, this is probably a good thing.

This is still long, but is not essential for playing in the setting, unless you want to know about (a) relations between APRIL, PICA, and the heroes; (b) the PURITY88 anti-mutant organization; or (c) mutant porn.

In terms of gameplay, it's sort of odd, because it was my attempt to convert a Champions adventure ("What Rough Beast") to ICONS. I did okay, but certain powers, like the extra limbs (Fast Attack) I never used. I'll put the conversion-specific material up next.

The Set-up

The UN organization that deals with superhumans, APRIL, is not allowed to operate within US borders, and their relationship with the American organization, PICA, is rocky at best. So in the USA, they work informally, through local superheroes.

Lt. Commander Fawkes arrived from New York and contacted a group of you, because the local hero team is missing (though this isn't generally known yet). APRIL has information about a base for PURITY88, the anti-mutant organization which created the VIGILANT robots, which hunt and capture or kill mutants. Fawkes is normally someone who works in the UN building, but Lieutenant who was watching the PURITY88 base has not reported in for three days.

APRIL knew where the base is. They had it under surveillance for the last two months. They knew that nothing has gone in or come out for a month. Three days ago, the ranking APRIL officer in the area, Lt. Aruja, decided to go in with a totally illegal task force of 6 people. (APRIL had 11 people in the country; the other five, including Lt. Commander Fawkes, are in New York and Washington.)

Lt. Commander Fawkes doesn't know how the team got in. She doesn't know what's in there...but if it's a biological agent, they don't want to risk it getting free. And per PICA doctrine, PICA's first act will be a "can-opener" bomb. If it is a biological agent (and she doesn't know if it is), that will contaminate the countryside.

She wanted the heroes—Spectre and Gold Tiger—to go in, find out what was happening, and stop it.

She had personnel records for the APRIL agents. She knew that they had taken in a device that checked the air for contaminants and toxins (the only one that APRIL had in the country, though the CDC undoubtedly has more). Without official status in the country, APRIL has very little extra equipment. APRIL has associates at the CDC and they can pass the word that something might happen, but they can't do anything else officially.

APRIL knows that the area has a slightly higher radiation level, and they know that radio signals are seriously attenuated from inside the base. Before everything went silent, they got a message from inside. Lt. Aruja saying, "It's hideous—gigantic—glowing poison—it's..."

The Adventure

Gold Tiger has some communications equipment that uses frequency modulation of ultrasonics, which works well enough through interior construction and avoids the whole radios-not-working problem.

Fawkes puts them in the rental car and the hired driver takes them to the site of the base. It's on a hill in a forested area; the nearest people were at a service station a few miles down the road. The shack is large, as shacks go, about twenty feet by fifteen. It looks like a hunting shack.

Spectre went inside to search. There was a woodburning stove in the corner, and castoff chairs and mismatched chairs shoved against one wall. Spectre tried the obvious things (is inside the proper dimensions according to outside; are there obvious buttons, and so forth). Eventually he noticed that two of the boards on the wall were identical, with knotholes in them. He stuck his fingers in the knotholes, and found regularly spaced bumps that could be pressed down. They experimented. Gold Tiger gave him the ASCII code for 88, and that summoned the elevator.

The elevator had two buttons: up and down. They entered. It opened to show a blast door, which was held open just a bit by a piece of APRIL armor. The armor wasn't good any more, but in being splintered and deformed it held the door open enough that a person could squeeze under it. Spectre could get in, but Gold Tiger couldn't. Spectre got in and opened the blast door.

The entire place was dark and lit only by red emergency lights. There was a whiff of some kind of decay but the temperature was a controlled slightly cool room temperature. The floor was littered with ashes and suits of armor—the remainder of the suit of APRIL armor was there. Ashes spilled out of it.

Except for the tile floor and the lighting, the place looked like a hotel or an office building. On this floor, the pictures were innocuous—pictures of flowers.

To either side of the blast door were clearly niches that normally had guards. There were a few blaster pistols discarded there, empty. The blaster pistols were of a different make than the APRIL carbine, so the assumption is that they were PURITY88 issue.

A little farther down the corridor was the analyzer that APRIL had brought in. It was out of power. Gold Tiger boosted it and downloaded the data. He also checked the radio frequencies: they were staticky and probably unusable. His Geiger counter showed a higher-than-usual level of radiation (not tau radiation, though). The ashes were high in secondary radiation: they had been hit by something radioactive, and that contact had made them radioactive.

From nameplates on the doors, this level had three offices and a boardroom; it ended in another elevator. They searched all three offices, which had nameplates, and the 7 three offices (one was a converted boardroom) were:

Mr. Henry LeDuc, head of security

A rich site: a personnel list;yielded a PURITY88 carbine, fully charged (5D6 Blast, Fast Attack 4); a map of (most of) the installation; a list of security codes for locked doors.

Dr. Rosalinda Ward, Chief Technician

Dr. Ward had technical texts, pass codes and operating systems manuals for the nuclear reactor, an operating system manual for the GaiaTouch thermal power system; and, hidden in a drawer, what appeared to be a personal project: the schematics for a VIGILANT robot; a memo from Dr. MacBeth pointing out a flaw in the reactor system and requesting Dr. Ward have it fixed before it accidentally withdrew all the control rods; a torn page, apparently from a journal: "I have deep reservations about Project Omega. The DNA seems to mutate even more when agitated with high energy fields. This is due to—"

Dr. Morris MacBeth, director of the site

Dr. MacBeth's office was a converted boardroom, so it was larger than the other two. The decorations were photos of the VIGILANT robots, the experimental models and the Mark I, II, and III models. The office had texts and journals with titles like, "An Analysis of Genome Markers to Distinguish Mutations from Epigenetic Transformations." There is a computer terminal here (other executives presumably used tablets). Gold Tiger managed to get a description of Project Mu and then a warning about system cleansing.

Meeting room

A board room; this is clearly where the guest chairs came from.

The elevator at the end of the hall had three smears of ash—something had trampled them. Maybe later people escaping by elevator? Combat armor seemed unaffected, but regular clothes was nowhere to be seen, presumably destroyed by the same mechanics that turned the bodies to ash.

Something sticky had been smeared over the elevator control panel, and then dried, like a giant had licked it.

The next level was the living level. They found a sound system playing in the security lounge. The vaguely decaying smell was from the kitchens. It looked like something caused an alert, they scrambled to action, and then the something killed them all.

Posters in the dorms made fun of certain celebrities who were supposedly mutants of some kind (Angelina Jolie took a.lot of flak). Dr. MacBeth's living quarters gave up a small stash of mutant porn (like regular porn, but at least one of the participants has good-looking mutations, like wings). Dr. Ward liked romance novels and movies. Mr. LeDuc did not read, but had a large collection of gun manuals.

They also noticed the burns and scratches on the walls, which normally stayed about three-quarters of the way up but might occur at any height. They checked the stairwells, which had crash bars so that you could get into the stairwells at the lower levels but only out at the top floor. The burns and scratches were in one of the stairwells; they didn't check the other.

Information in the tech dorms let them know that the plans they had for a VIGILANT robot weren't the standard plans: this version of the robot was not vulnerable to cold and heat, as the usual VIGILANT Mark III robots are, but was vulnerable to radiation. With a sufficient background field, the robot would be essentially comatose until the radiation was lifted. (In game terms, it had switched from taking an extra degree of damage from cold and heat attacks to total shutdown in a certain environmental condition.)

The third level contained fabrication and machine shops, and labs. This is clearly where the fighting was the most extreme—there were blaster bolt char marks everywhere and abandoned blaster carbines. The armoury was also on this level, but it contained nothing but armour and pistols.

Near the elevator, they found the armor of all but one of the remaining April agents. Something got them at this level.

The labs yielded a picture of a mutant bear cub...something with three extra limbs. One set of labs was for preparing and applying mutagens like radiation and the other set was for keeping the test animals alive and examining them.

As reconstructed by the heroes, Project Mu was kept in the lab. A reactor problem caused the area to be flooded by radiation, which set off the Project Mu animal. Probably enraged, it broke free of the lab and killed its handlers. It killed everyone in the other lab, then broke into one of the fabrication shops. There was a fierce battle, which the PURITY88 people lost.

According to LeDuc's map, there was only one other floor, the one where the reactor was. Presumably the "something" was still there.

The antechamber between the reactor control room and the elevator was actually the place with the lowest radiation count in the base, and there the heroes found the last APRIL agent, unconscious and hurt. They made sure he was stable, and went into the control room. This storey was twice as tall as the others, about thirty feet tall.

It seemed fine. The control rods were in fact out, as Dr. MacBeth's memo had presaged, so the reactor had gone bad. Gold Tiger set about getting the system to put them back in. In the meantime, Spectre scouted the room. One side had an access panel to the reactor proper and windows of radiation-proof glass.

There was something big in the reactor room. With the movement of the control rods, it was stirred to action.

It squeezed through the access panel, twenty-four feet of mutant grizzly, making Gold Tiger's Geiger counter shoot through the roof. Gold Tiger fired at it, and that seemed to hurt it a bit, but it went after him. One hit from it disabled part of his armor.

As Project Mu moved, it hit some kind of pressure sensor that caused the far wall to open up. That revealed the VIGILANT Mark III variant that Dr. Ward had been having them build in their spare time....the one what was held comatose by the extra radiation, but once the control rods were fully in, would awake.

Spectre managed to lift the thing up (and noticed it was much heavier than it should be...perhaps a level of Density?) which gave Gold Tiger a chance to move away, but it was still so large that it could move by catching its claws on the floor and ceiling...though it moved slowly.

The extra time that Spectre gave him let Gold Tiger put it down. They called the CDC, got the APRIL agent to a hospital, and shut down the VIGILANT robot through the simple expedient of plopping the radioactive animal right at its feet to keep it unconscious.

Spectre kept the blaster carbine.

Converting Champions adventures, part II

SYSTEM: ICONS, Champions

I had this as an edit on the previous post, but it got long, so I moved it here. Also: these are my thoughts, and some of them haven't hit the wall of reality yet. So nothing here is necessarily concrete. It's my ideas. We'll see how it works out.

So: checks in Champions versus tests in ICONS.

Difficulties

Now that I've looked at the math, I see that the difficulties on rolls should be done a little differently.

Assuming the average roll is 11-, and in ICONS the average difficulty is 3 (figuring on an average "effect" value of 3), here are some rough equivalencies.

Champions Difficulty	Roll based on 11-	ICONS Difficulty	Probabilities
–8	3-; 0.46%	8	+5; 2.7%
–7	4-; 1.85%	8
–6	5-; 4.6%	7	+4; 7.7%
–5	6-; 9.3%	7
–4	7-; 16.2%	6	+3; 16.7%
–3	8-; 25.9%	5	+2; 27.8%
–2	9-; 37.5%	4	+1; 41.7%
–1	10-; 50.0%	3	0; 58.4%
–	11-; 62.5%	3	0; 58.4%
+1	12-; 62.5%	2	–1; 72.2%
+2	13-; 83.8%	1	–2; 83.3%
+3	14-; 90.7%	0	–3; 92.7%
+4	15-; 95.4%	-1	–4; 97.3%
+5	16-; 98.2%	-2	–5; 100%

Degrees of Success

Frequently in the adventure, there's stuff about "a Perception roll finds" followed by "an INT roll finds" followed by... I shortened them. If there were several things, I made the results of the search based on the number of degrees of the result:

Results of the Intellect search (difficulty 4, Investigation helps)
Failure	Things will be derailed if they don't find this out, so they get this information anyway; or, they find nothing if it won't hurt not to discover anything.
Marginal success	If they have an appropriate specialty, I'll probably reveal the basic stuff here. I might even if they don't have the specialty.
Moderate success	Basic stuff for succeeding, usually the first information presented in the original adventure.
Major success	Next information. But in the original spirit, a second test with only a moderate success will probably get this, unless the original adventure claims it is much harder information to find.
Massive success	All of this type of information.

Champions checks were very binary, but by juggling the difficulty, they had degrees of success. This is just extending the idea. (The difficulty adjustments I remember were -1, -2, -3 (as 8 or less), and -4. Sometimes there were adventures where things were easier, but why not just give it to the players?)

And frankly, if someone gets, say, a moderate success and wants to try again, I will probably let them, and what's in the table there as information from a major success will be available if they get a moderate success this second time. I rationalize this by claiming that they're spending more time...but really it's because that's how I played Champions.

Pyramid Tests

Pyramid tests are better for multiple tests of the same type to accomplish one end. So, for instance, at one point there's a series roll to bypass security on a computer terminal and then another roll to get the information. A third roll has a result that essentially says, "You know you've triggered the security protocols and if you keep going, the damage will be irreparable." That sounds like a pyramid test. Make it, and you've bypassed the security and got the information, stopping just short. Have a certain number of failures (maybe it's opposed; each failure counts as a "success" for the other side, amount of failure gives the degree of "anti-success"), and you go straight to knowing that further tampering could cause damage.

But that's very much a case-by-case thing. I have to read the adventure and say, "Well, there's really a series of rolls there. What's the effect of multiple rolls here, versus one really good roll giving the same information?"

There is also a place where an obstacle is randomly there (on a 1-3 on a D6, it's there). My version is a little different. "If the characters have a way of getting around the obstacle from the outside, it's there. If not, it happens after they enter, probably as a result of some other action they take."

A Convention If You're Reading My Notes

I've adopted this convention when writing down ICONS tests: the name of the ability, and the difficulty in square brackets, followed by a specialty that will help (if there is one). So a difficulty 3 Awareness test that could use Investigation is "Awareness test [3; Investigation]". If there's no particular specialty, I don't write one down: "Intellect test [3]". And if the specialty is what makes it all possible, then it's not an Intellect test (or whatever), it's a Technology test.

If I were writing the adventure for publication, I wouldn't do this, I'd write it out, but since these are my notes, and saving time is important...

Quick-and-dirty Champions conversions to ICONS

SYSTEM: ICONS, Champions

As should be evident from other posts I have made, I'm running the old Champions adventure from Adventurers Club 2, "What Rough Beast," but I'm converting it for ICONS. I'm converting it, of course. My first cut at conversion guidelines is below, and might be useful to anyone converting old Hero Games material. These values will probably change—they're my first attempt, and I'll be testing them with a couple of solo encounters to make sure the numbers have the effect I want.

Champions	ICONS
Perception check	Awareness test, base difficulty 3
INT check	Intellect test, base difficulty 3
Presence attack	Willpower test, base difficulty the other character's Willpower
Computer Programming	Intellect test, aided by Technology specialty, represented in my notes as Tech (Computers) in case there's ambiguity about what the Technology specialty does for that character. Because the test is about a particular kind of tech, the base difficulty is 4, not 3.
Security Systems	Intellect test, represented in my notes as Tech (Security System) in case there's ambiguity about what the Technology specialty does for that character. Because the test is about a particular kind of tech, the base difficulty is 4, not 3.
Modifications to a check, such as -1, -2, -4	Half the modification, round down, and subtract from base difficulty (usually 3)
-1	Conversion: -1/2; rounds to 0; 3-0 = Difficulty 3
-2 or -3	Conversion: -2/2 or -3/2, rounds to -1; 3-(-1) = Difficulty 4
-4 or -5	Conversion: -4/2 or -5/2; rounds to -2; 3-(-2) = Difficulty 5
Questionite	Unobtainium, Material 10 (though I do miss the Jonny Quest reference)
Plas-Steel	Faraday Aerolithium, Material 7 (yes, equally made up)
Hard wood doors, etc.	Wood, Material 4
Standard interior construction	Drywall and stick construction, Material 2

The adventure is essentially a dungeon crawl, exploring an abandoned Genocide base because something has killed everyone there and then the good guy agents who were sent in to investigate. Though I could use UNTIL, Viper, Genocide, and so forth (it's for personal use; I don't think the legal entities involved have a leg to stand on if they sue me, and it's not like they can get anything from me but debt even if they won), I choose not to, because they have baggage associated with them. So I'll be changing the names of the organizations as well.

Champions	Strange City/ICONS
UNTIL	APRIL (yes, this continues my ongoing streak of terrible names that everyone in-universe acknowledges as a terrible name)
Genocide	PURITY88 (referencing the claim I just made up that there are 88 gene sites that distinguish humans from mutants; in reality, because 88 has an association with white supremacy and I don't mind making my metaphors extra obvious)
MINUTEMAN robots	Undecided; I want some kind of enforcement mechanism, but I don't think I want a big-ass robot. This and the source material play off the sentry or vigilance wordplay, so whatever the device is, it will be called VIGILANT Mark I, II, III, and so on.
PRIMUS & SAT	PICA (and I'll just use an intra-agency rivalry, if I need to)
VIPER	Undefined at this point. I'll have something that is the Evil Organization with Costumed Cannon Fodder, but I haven't decided exactly what it is, yet. It's probably a franchise.

I'll post the revised conversion notes on Thursday.

Champions talk

SYSTEM: HERO (Champions)

Because Champions 4th edition is Sean's pick of the day over at RPGNow/One Bookshelf, and because the news over the weekend makes me sad and angry, I speak today about Champions.

I had roleplayed before being introduced to Champions, but I hadn't really taken to it. A friend (Jim Gardner; you probably know him, if you do, as the award-winning and award-nominated author James Alan Gardner) had gotten a copy of Champions (probably second edition, and while we were on a weekend away with a theatre group we were both in, we played it. Totally misunderstood some rules, but that's always the way.

It changed me from being meh about roleplaying games to loving them. Most important: I could create the character I wanted instead of being at the mercy of the dice. Nowadays, I'm okay with random character generation, but you'll note that even in ICONS, there's an awful lot of player input. There is a limit that lets you add a power as an extra and then ignore the power you rolled (Extra only). (Of course, as a GM, I get to design almost all of my characters.)

If I had a story in my head, I could build a part of it, the character part. And I could describe some of the disadvantages.

Since I wanted to be a writer, yes, I usually had a story in my head.

There were bad habits, too, ones that I developed and that Champions didn't curb...that same story-telling urge made me a terrible railroader, for instance. I made up disadvantages that were just a different flavour of the other three disadvantages, and tried really hard to come up with limitations that didn't really limit me. If your hunted came up in the session, by Good they were going to appear somehow, even if it was just a postcard from the local supermax prison.

Hero Games was pretty much my sole system for a decade or more. I played Espionage!, Fantasy Hero, Danger International, Star Hero, and weird things that had no actual game attached to them but we knew Hero so well that we knew how to twist it to what we wanted.

I loved Aaron Allston's work. I ran the vampire adventure out of...was it The Circle and METE? I swiped and renamed Dr. McQuark. I think I even used Affrighter, but I'm not sure. I ran some flavour of The Coriolis Effect.

I ate up second and third editions, and loved them despite their flaws. We house-ruled various things.

At first I was pleased with the changes that came in fourth edition to make it a generic system, because we used it as a generic system. (Okay, we had tried other systems.) But I started to get dissatisfied because the loose feeling that had been in the first couple of editions was gone. At first I was pleased that everything had been put into order, but to have sixteen skills, you had to up the point value of the characters, and that inflation kept going. Much though I loved much of Dark Champions, it was also the one where I started to go, "What?" Blue Moon Killer seemed more like a gun-toting Batman of an infinite number of points. (Jim actually played a heroic Joker as his foe in the Hudson City campaign I ran.)

So I was ripe for something else. That didn't come along, but another friend (hi, Vik) was much more into the wider world of gaming than I was, and introduced me to DC Heroes and CORPS and Mutants and Masterminds, and Jim wanted to try Capes at one point, and James Nicoll ran a playtest for Silver Age Sentinels...

I didn't really enjoy the brief campaign of fifth edition Hero we played, and I never saw sixth edition, though Rod Currie assures me it's out there.

I've grown to like games such as ICONS and Supers! and BASH, and I've read through Prowlers and Paragons and others. I guess in a way I'm more into superhero or comic book RPGs than I am Hero, these days.

And I've made my peace with Hero...I'd play fourth edition if someone wanted to.

So it's not really a dead game to me; it's one that I associate with hours of fun and my attitude that games should be toolkits, rather than spoon-feeders of splatbooks. I've just taken a few decades off playing it.

Some updates

I updated the Freedom Force characters and the conversions I did of Hero Games characters; appropriate links in those entries.

It's a long weekend here, so you may or may not see more of me. Hope the Canadians are having a good long weekend, and hope the American 4th of July goes well. (And for those who think that the USA has passed on its mantle of world leadership, that might be so, but the Romans endured for centuries after they stopped being a democracy. Just a bleak thought to speed you on your way.)


For gaming, I thought yesterday of doing a form-fillable PDF that would be printed on one of the Avery business card sheets, and each card would be a condition or quality that you know you're going to use, so there would be "Controlled" and "Off-balance" or "Tied up" or whatever. Then you could just hand them out. In practice, would it be as handy as a sticky pad and pens? Maybe not, but I notice that since the brain operation I feel like I write very slowly, and having a set I could pre-print and hand out would be useful to me.

I just have to figure out what conditions I want to represent (though making them form-fillable eases that somewhat). Off the top of my head, there's In Alternate Form (stone, ice, swarm of bees, light, etc.), Controlled, Big, Small, Immobilized (I suppose you could print both sides so there's Restrained and an Immobilized to represent different degrees without handing two different cards), Off-Balance, Prone, Phased, and Stunned. (Slammed moves you somewhere; it's harder to represent with a condition card.) If you have someone with Element Control, you might have On Fire or Encased in Ice. Heck, if the cards are form-fillable, the right design lets you also represent Determination Points, Advantages, or Troubles.

Have some Champions

Hmm. I did not do all the characters in the Big Blue Book. Probably me shooting off my mouth before doing the work.

Still, I did do some of them, so they're all here in one document. I'm unlikely to be touching any more Champions stuff, but it's not impossible.

Some Hero Games Conversions to ICONS Assembled

An updated version in PDF (Updated because of (1) math errors and (2) my understanding of powers always evolves.)

It occurs to me that you can use whatever kind of conversion method you want. As long as you're consistent, at least the characters will be scaled to each other.

Converting from Champions

Okay, let's get this out of the way first: I think the best way to convert a Champions character to ICONS Assembled is to start with a couple of notes about the character (strong; generates ice and shapes it; berserker hatred of killers) and build the character from the ground up. You'll get something that works in the context of the game you're actually playing, and you won't sweat about how big you should buy that 0 END 6D6 NND (not vs. people in knitwear or slogan T-Shirts).

Nonetheless, +Fabrício César Franco asked how it might be done, and I gave some ideas, and then I had another idea, and I have now spent several days converting characters from the Big Blue Book. I haven't done but one combat to test them, but after I have (if I ever do), I'll come back and change this text.

Some caveats:

• This method assumes point-buy because it's clearly not random. That's fine if you're the GM and you're converting stuff, because you can just do whatever: there's no real point limit on you. If you're a player, well, then you have to think about the point limit that the GM has set. That might mean shaving all sorts of things, or buying extra things because the character turns out to be mind-bogglingly cheap. It's your life. 
• This method produces a ballpark kind of character that you're still going to have to tweak. For instance, if you look at a character with resistant defenses in Champions, an assault rifle does about 2d6+1 killing, so 12 rPD is going to make your character immune to guns. It will take Resistant Damage 5 to do the same in ICONS and maybe you don't want to spend the points there.
• Make liberal use of the benchmarks in both games. If a character has 60 TK, is that equivalent to ICONS Telekinesis 8? I don't think so. If something has 15 rPD in Champions, it will stop a bullet from an assault rifle, but a straight numeric conversion to ICONS won't give you that result. Look at what the power is supposed to be able to achieve, and benchmarks are one way of doing it.
• There are pretty obvious breakpoints in character stats in Champions. Lots of characters tend to be DEX 21, 23, or 26. They're all going to end up as Coordination 5. You might have to adjust that.
• There are lots of details in Champions that aren't in ICONS, so things get left on the floor.
• This method calls for square roots. Everything gets rounded, and you played Hero System, for goodness' sake, so you shouldn't be afraid. You can manage just by remembering the squares from one to ten   (1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100). Maybe I'll put a convenient chart below to help.

Now that's out of the way, let's get into the method. I'll do Spidermonkey from the Asesinos at the end of each part and we'll end up with a conversion.

Converting Champions to ICONS Assembled

 What's the character's basic concept? That will be your touchstone, and you'd start with it anyway if you were doing this conversion in my preferred way.

Spidermonkey is an intelligent mentalist spider monkey who hates humans. What else is there to say?

Characteristics to Abilities

Champions has fourteen characteristics; ICONS has six abilities. How to convert them?

With square roots, of course. Take the square root of each characteristic and use that as your starting point. ICONS doesn't do any "this is more useful so it costs more" stuff, so just use the final characteristic. We'll do Prowess last, so don't rush into it.

Strength is pretty straightforward. Unless Ability Boost fits the concept, Strength converts to Strength.

Spidermonkey is Strength 13, which is pretty close to 16. She'll be Strength 4. That's pretty strong for a spider monkey. (A baboon or a chimp, I could see it.)

Coordination is the square root of Dexterity.

Spidermonkey's Dexterity is 23, so she'll be Coordination 5. Because I know that Shrinking grants a certain difficulty to be hit, I will keep in mind that I might want to drop Coordination to 4 or even 3 during the Tweaking stage.

Intellect is the square root of Intelligence.

Spidermonkey is a smart monkey, but is she a genius monkey? We'll just convert straight. The square root of 20 is 4.47, so we'll round it down to Int 4.

Awareness is usually the same as the square root of Intelligence unless the character has lots and lots of levels dedicated to noticing things.

Willpower is the square root of the better of Ego or Presence, because Willpower in ICONS determines your ability to impress people. If you have to choose (you have a high EGO low PRE schlub), use that concept and keep in mind that you might have to add something like "Unimpressive" to a quality.

This problem does not come up with Spidermonkey: her EGO is 20, her PRE is 10. Now, the square root of 20 is 4, as we showed above, but she is a mentalist monkey, so I'll bump that to Willpower 5.

Prowess is handled by looking at levels and comparing the character's OCV to what you think it should be relative to a similar character in ICONS. Remember that a trained soldier is only Prowess 4.

Spidermonkey's OCV is 8, so her Prowess could be the same as her converted DEX (5), but despite that the picture shows her with a knife, she has no hand-to-hand levels. Plus she's going to get something added from the Shrinking. Let's call her Prowess 3, and let whatever bonuses she gets from Shrinking be the rest. When we're done, I hope she'll be Prowess 5 with bonuses, but I wouldn't be unhappy with 4.

So our tentative abilities for Spidermonkey are: Prowess 3, Coordination 5, Strength 4, Intellect 4, Awareness 4, Willpower 5. 26 points. If we have to shave a bit, we can knock a bit off Coordination and Strength.

Skills to Specialties

Champions has far more skills than ICONS has specialties. Take a look down the list. Ignore anything with a skill roll of 12-; it's just an application of the ability, and they already have it (unless the ability governing it is terrible).

A higher skill might call for a specialty (unless the ability governing it is wonderful). Mentally group the remainder and see how many you can compress into a few ICONS specialties.

Here's a rough and partial guide for translating those really high skills. Use the concept as your touchstone, and don't include the specialty if you don't have to.

• Acrobatics, Breakfall, Climbing, and Contortionist are all covered by the Athletics specialty.
• Background skills often turn into the appropriate kind of specialty (Business, Medicine, Law, Art, et cetera).
• Combat Driving is covered by the Driving specialty.
• Combat Pilot is covered by the Pilot specialty.
• Interrogation, Persuasion, and Seduction might be the Psychiatry specialty.
• Criminology, Deduction, and Conversation or Interrogation I would cover with the Investigation specialty.
• Computer programming, Cryptography, Demolitions, Electronics, Mechanics, Security Systems, and Systems Operation, are all covered by the Technology specialty. I'd probably include Weaponsmith here too if the character is good at fixing and maintaining every type of weapon.
• If the character knows fewer languages than his or her Intellect, make a note about the languages somewhere and move on. If the character knows more languages, well, consider buying the Linguistics specialty. Frankly, unless the character is about languages and not being able to talk to someone is going to be a plot point, I wouldn't worry at all.
• Lockpicking and Sleight of Hand are covered under Sleight of Hand.
• Disguise, Mimicry, Ventriloquist, Oratory and maybe High Society are different types of Performance.
• Paramedic and Forensic Medicine are under the Medicine specialty (along with PS: Doctor).
• Science skills turn into Science specialty.
• Stealth and Concealment are the Stealth specialty.
• Streetwise is something I often ignore: it might turn into a general criminal quality or it might be the Law specialty.
• Tactics is probably represented best by the Military specialty.
• Weaponsmith is a weapons specialty if the character specializes in a type of weapon.

Martial Arts in Champions is more about doing damage; I use the Strike power to represent a +1 to damage. Out of an obscure sense of fairness, I usually buy it to one level less than Strength, though I suppose it could be rank 1 if you needed the points.

Levels to Specialties or whatever

Different levels turn into different things. Levels with a specific power or powers turn into Power (name it) specialty.

Hand-to-hand levels turns into Prowess or maybe the Martial Arts or Wrestling specialties.

Thank goodness that Spidermonkey doesn't have many skills. I see that she has Acrobatics and Breakfall; that's enough for an Athletics specialty. There are three languages, but someone with Intellect 4 can speak that many, so I make a note of them ("Speaks English, Spanish, Spider Monkey") and move on.

Perks and Talents

Mostly I ignore them. They are usually there to fill out the concept. Maybe they can be subsumed into a quality. Maybe not.

Powers to Powers

For your rough approximation, you want the square root of the number of active points in the power. Ignore any active points that are just there for reduced or eliminated END.

I'm not going to do a power-by-power comparison.

Most of the powers in a Multipower or Elemental Control can be stunted, so pick one or two that you think will be used a lot and stunt the rest. If there are a lot of powers in the multipower (such as a utility belt), consider one of the powers that is meant to simulate other powers: Gadgets, Magic, and Cosmic Power.

One of the tricks that shows up a lot in Champions is a character with both Density Increase and Growth. My thought is, do you need them both? Compare them to your concept. Remember that Density Increase and Growth each add 1 to your character's strength if put in; maybe that will change your character's strength level. They each give additional Damage Resistance.

A character whose schtick is speed (has a SPD of 6 or better) should probably have Fast Attack.

When you need to think about an NND, look at Affliction, Energy Drain, or Stunning to model a similar effect. Stunning and Energy Drain both offer your choice of being opposed by Strength or Willpower when you take the power.

Power Drain in Champions  might be Energy Drain with an ability extra, or Nullify. Champions Power Transfer is what used to be ICONS Power Theft:  Power Mimicry with an Extra.

For both Shrinking and Growth, figure out what the character's actual size is, and buy ICONS Shrinking or Growth based on that.

Spidermonkey has this shrinking thing going. She's got enough shrinking to be about a foot tall. In ICONS that's Shrinking 4. It's permanent. If it were only a short guy, I'd think about making it Quality, but she's pretty small, so let's say Shrinking 4, Limit: Constant. She gets +2 to hit and avoid being hit, an automatic "Small" quality. That ups her Prowess a bit. I don't think she needs more than 4 Prowess in total, so I'll adjust the ability down a bit so it totals 4.

She has these mental powers: TK, 6d6 Ego Attack, and 12d6 Telepathy. I have no idea which powers really get used in play, so I'll say that TK and Ego Attack are the two main powers she uses and the Telepathy will be a stunt. They each cost 60 points, which is level 8, so she's a very impressive mentalist. Like, among the best in the world is what it says to me. Hmmm. That's not really my concept. I want her good but still needing a team. Let's look at the benchmarks. Her TK can lift 6400 kg in Champions: more than a truck, less than a tank. A straight point conversion would be Strength 8, but looking at the benchmarks in both games leads me to a level of 6 or 7. We'll say 7 for both of them, and possibly change it later if it's not suitable for the game. She now has Mental Blast 7, Telekinesis 7, and she'll stunt Telepathy when she needs it.

As a spidermonkey, she has tracking scent (Super Senses 1) and a prehensile tail. Are they going to get used much? Probably the tail, but the tracking scent? Extra Body Parts (tail) gives her Fast Attack at her Extra Body Parts power level. She's not a particularly fast physical fighter, and you're rarely going to run into something where she feints with her hands and then pow the tail hits them. (Someone like the Lizard sometimes does that, so it's not out of order.) I'm inclined to say Extra Body Parts 1 and call it done. I might take it off entirely if the character is too expensive, and just stunt it, pointing to the Spidermonkey quality she's sure to have. I'll tentatively write in Super Senses 1, as well, but can stunt it if necessary. How often do you track someone for more than one scene? It's usually a bridge to the next scene.  (As a gamemaster, I'd probably make finding someone a pyramid test, and Spidermonkey's player can activate the Spidermonkey quality for +2 on tests. No need for a power at all.)

So for powers, she looks like Telekinesis 7, Mental Blast 7, Extra Body Parts (tail) 1, Super Senses (tracking scent) 1.

Disadvantages to Qualities

Look at the disadvantages and see if you can create a Quality that includes them but also has some upside. If you're converting a villain, you want to make sure that there are some Qualities that the heroes can use against the character.

In Champions, characters often have several disadvantages which are all reflections of the same underlying trait: "Always prefers to fight blondes; berserk if injured by a blonde, 8-; 3d6 susceptibility to hydrogen peroxide and hair bleach." 

Read through the flavour text, too, if this is a published character. In the roleplaying notes, you'll often find something useful.

You know she's got the quality "Mentalist Spidermonkey". So that's one.

She hates humans to the point of being vicious to them. Is it better to be vicious to humans or to hate humans? Either could encompass the "Enraged when captured" disadvantage, but how are they for the advantage side of Qualities? I run through some in my mind, but I'm fuzzy-headed right now. We'll make it "Hates living humans" and move on.

There are several disadvantages about superiority; that could be useful. I don't think the weakness to Ego Attacks is particularly useful, but if the GM has read the Champions version of the character sheet, he or she knows that I'll play it that way. I'm going to add "Uplifted" to the "Mentalist Spidermonkey" quality and tell the GM that the "Uplifted" can be used for good or ill.

Back to superiority and always being in charge. Maybe I'll go with "Wants to be the alpha female" and add Leadership to the list of Specialties up above (assuming that the nominal leader has bothered to put Leadership on his or her list of specialties).

Whew.

The Sample, Ready For Tweaking

A bit of tweaking has already been done.

Spidermonkey, a conversion

Prowess 4/6 Coordination 4/6 Strength 3 Intellect 4 Awareness 4 Willpower 5
(second number is to hit and to be hit, with Shrinking figured in)
Determination 4  Stamina 8 

Specialties: Athletics, Leadership

Powers: Shrinking 4, Limit: Constant; Telekinesis 7; Mental Blast 7
(Used the Limit to counteract the Determination cost of the Shrinking power.)

Qualities: Uplifted Mentalist Spidermonkey; Hates living humans; Wants to be the alpha female

Cost: 44 points

Not bad. With the remaining point, I'll probably increase the Willpower to 6, so Spidermonkey is a better mentalist.

Sampling That Conversion

So I did run a test fight, and discovered that my conversion of Drain to Nullify was a bit too effective. In Champions, drains affect active points, so it's common to see strength or will drain, because characteristic drains are a place where you get bang for your point buck. Still, they take a while: you whittle folks down instead of "turning them off." In bog-standard ICONS, though, you turn things off. 

I think that's just Drains, though...still, I will go ahead and modify the conversion of Leech to match what I've discovered.

Clearly, somebody has to test the various powers to see that they're roughly effective.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LvdYB3xrwnvs_vEOfzc3RECsV344EUAXTr_F_JnlvA/edit?usp=docslist_api

Clearly I need to convert everyone in the BBB and see how it works....

Sample Champions Conversion: Obsidian

 And here's Obsidian, who is a surprisingly cheap character. I haven't played him for decades, so I don't remember if I've missed anything vital.

Maybe Steve Kenson can tell us whether he intends for the additional Strength +1 from Growth to combine with the +1 from Density to give +2 to Strength. I suspect he does; with a random roll system, this sort of thing can happen. (Subject to the usual limit of 10.)

(Mathematically, they don't necessarily.)

Duh: Forgot the link:

Here's Obsidian.

Sample Champions Conversion: Leech

SYSTEM: ICONS

I was curious about how my suggestion to Fabricio   might work, so I tried a Champions conversion or two from fourth edition, I think. (Whatever Classic Enemies was.)

This might not be a fair test, because right off the bat, I chose a character with a power that's not easily represented in ICONS. However, if you're willing to accept the more wargaming side of gaming, then Champions characters fit right in. I have Obsidian kicking around here, and I'll do a sample fight of Leech against him. With luck, I'll remember to post it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dz--oE3sTobsc2dkJHloDZlpK-IlR0-Zvsy5lh32Rws/edit?usp=sharing

Update much much later... So apparently my brain doesn't work. Drain in Champions is essentially Nullification or Power Nullification in ICONS. Power Mimicry has an advantage to do attributes only; it sounds to me like you could have an advantage to apply your Nullification to abilities under 7. (Or did I already say that?)

The Foxbat

For Theron Bretz--

An attempt at reproducing the Champions character Foxbat as an ICONS character.