Icons
One of the things in my head in my head is a narrative campaign made of as many of the Improbable Tales adventures as I can fit together, so I thought I'd do a look at the various adventures there and see what they're made of and how you might update them, along with notes on updating the characters to Icons Assembled.
Obligatory Warning
If you are spoiler-wary, be aware that this entry (and this series) is full of spoilers. (On the other hand, the first adventure is from 2013. So, y'know, if you thought you might like to read it, you've had six years.)
And we'll start at the very beginning and work out a format as we go.
Precis
Giant ants are attacking the city, and it turns out they are sent by a nobleman of an underground empire to stop a new jet engine.
Likes
The structure is very streamlined; at a guess, it's informed by Ben Robbins' blogs and his Lame Mage stuff (most notably the Dr. Null stuff). For more Ben Robbins stuff on superheroes, you have to troll through his old Ars Ludi blog for things like Revelations, Damage Rolls, The Four Types of Supervillains, Action Schticks (Part 2). (Actually, you should go read the blog.)
That very leanness works against them, too: it looks like there ain't much there.
And there isn't. But, as Spencer Tracy is reputed to have said, "What there is, is choice."
Dislikes
They aren't tricky little plot modules. They're encounters: two to four action encounters that present a situation for the characters.
Sometimes that's not enough to distinguish it. Some of them make a point of telling you what feeling they're trying to evoke, which is nice.
And for all that they're streamlined, sometimes the choices can get buried in words. If you're just skimming, you might miss something. I might have pulled them out into lists so there's an idea on each line. And for all that they're short, if you try to run them on the fly (as I have done several times) they feel flat. You have to give them time to soak in your brain-brine so they fit with your style.
A Digression On Layout
Speaking of presenting items as lists...I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the layout choice to present in two columns on a letter-size page. I realize that works very well for a printed document, but a lot of stuff isn't printed any more: we look at it on phones and tablets and computers, and maybe print it when it's time to run...but we might not if it was in an electronic-friendly format to begin with. None of this is Fainting Goats' fault (they did release it in 2013), but I'd consider a 6x9 PDF with text large enough that it's a single column but still under 40 characters a line. I actually had to learn how to produce an e-book at the same time as I was going to run Sugar Hill Invasion, so I used it as an example and produced an ePub version of Sugar Hill. I didn't run from it, but I could have. I'd worry more about navigation issues if I were going to, though.
The Adventure Itself
I have not run this one. (I have run four or five of the Improbable Tales adventures.) There are three action scenes really:
- Rescue some kids
- Fight the ants at the barricade
- Go into the surrounded plant and find out what's really going on
The first two scenes are simple but nice, with an optional bit that I would probably fill out (the guy's wife just died, he doesn't want to go on, whatever). And it falls apart in the third.
Look, there are a couple of ways for the last scene to go, at least that I can see. You get into the plant and:
- The bad guy makes a speech, and the engine is destroyed
- The bad guy doesn't manage to destroy the engine, gets captured, and makes the speech
- The bad guy does or doesn't destroy the engine (maybe he steals it) and escapes, and when the PCs follow him deep underground, he makes the speech. Maybe a big fight follows.
He's going to have to make the speech; otherwise the players have no idea what triggered this.
Plus, the first two options are buried in a discussion of the third one. The change of a stand-off in the plant is barely touched on, but he's got to be in there for his mental blast to work.
It would be nice if there were another way to get the information. Off-hand, I can't think of one: you can mind-read ants but they tend to be thinking ant-things, though use of a Determination Point might let the PCs read the psychic residue of the bad guy's mind, if your PCs have those kinds of powers.
The adventure pretty much depends on the Coopersville police department to get you into trouble. (Most of the adventures use PATRIOT, a SHIELD equivalent, to come and say, "Hey, there's trouble over here." It would be interesting to design something exists to get them into trouble, but an agency is a time-honoured mechanism: it's a reason for Delta Green, after all.
Changes and Consequences
I'd consider making the cause fracking instead of a jet engine. That makes it more of an ongoing thing than a one-off: they break the equipment, new equipment shows up, they show up again, and then the PCs discover the reason behind it all.
I might use a different location: by default it's set in Coopersville, a bedroom community for the city the PCs are in, but it might be interesting to put it in a place so remote that there are no superheroes, and our heroes are brought in. Or this is the second attack, and the first one was picked clean: the survivors talked about giant ants but there was little evidence: what there was might have pointed to the latest scheme by some supervillain instead of giant ants.
Actually, a really different location might stir things up, too: maybe they're effectively fire ants writ large, with a toxic bite. Or maybe it's a resort town up north, where it only thaws for three months and the appearance of giant ants is going to have serious repercussions on their local economy.
I'm sorry that other adventures or notes don't do more with Lyrax the underground empire (it might show up again in Stark City; I don't recall) because I think there's something interesting there...though of course, my mind drifts to the Freedom Force computer game and it's giant ant invasion. Presumably all nobles have some kind of mental powers; that's how they got to be nobles in the first place. Or, like ants, eating a particular food turns them into nobles (wait, that's bees...perhaps there's an ant equivalent to royal jelly) with mental powers. I do wonder what a society derived from Rome might look like after millennia of isolation.
Both this adventure and The Other Side use an aeronautics/astronautics company; it might be nice if they were tied together--maybe one is a contractor to the other.
Assembled Updates
The ants are easy to update...Invulnerability gets renamed to Damage Resistance, but everything else is the same. There are only two aspects, so they can be rolled together and create two Qualities.
Insector needs to have his Fast Attack changed because the way that Fast Attack works changed, but Fast Attack 5 should be sufficient: he's slightly less likely to hit with a second Mental Blast, but it's perfect for Bashing. Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance. His Aspects really need to be whittled down, though. As Qualities, I'd suggest:
- To rule is to be responsible to your subjects
- Lives in darkness (can stunt for Super-Senses but takes extra degree of effect for Dazzle attacks that affect his sight)
- “Fear me, surface dwellers! Fear the wrath of the Underground Empire!”
Okay, one more quibble: the text suggests that you play him as a subterranean equivalent of Prince Namor “rather than a cliched, hunch-backed, squint-eyed mole-man”...but the picture of him is of a cliched, hunch-backed, squint-eyed mole-man.
The All-American is presented here as an NPC or possible PC. You do have to change the Wizardry to Gadgets, and he has two devices with him as extras. Instead of making the Blinding into Dazzle (the first inclination) I would make them Sensory Resistance 4 (Extra: Burst, Limit: Only normal sight and maybe sound and the limit makes it Resistance 4 instead of 2). He throws them down, they create an area of smoke that is -4 to sight Awareness rolls, maybe -2 to sound during the first couple of panels while they're spewing out smoke. I'd trim his Qualities to become:
- Secret ID of Patrick Bay, TV Weatherman
- Brash and arrogant
- Addicted to danger
Unless the character is a PC, I wouldn't worry about the Police-Superhuman Liaison aspect at all.
Conclusion
If I had picked this up as a solo adventure instead of as part of an omnibus, I might have passed on the following ones...but I didn't, and I didn't.
This one is kind of uninspiring, I'm sorry to say. It's not bad (none of the Improbable Tales adventures are bad) but it is sort of...well, average. It's elevated a bit by structure (though it took me quite a while to understand that the leanness was a benefit). I'd grade this one a C+: it's okay, but Mike Lafferty can do better. And later, he does.
(Now, I might have missed something obvious in this. Feel free to tell me so. Heck, feel free to correct my spelling.)
