Citizens Aiding Police

ORGANIZATION 

In a superhero world with lots of supers, there’d be citizen volunteers, and they should be vetted in some minor way. So there’s a national organization, the Citizens Aiding Police (CAP) for people with powers who want to help but don’t want to be heroes. (This is loosely modelled on both the Guardian Angels and the St. John's Ambulance Society.)

The “costume” is a dark green vest with reflective stripes and the letters “CAP” in big reflective letters on the back. The letters and logo are on the left breast as well. The vest has utility loops to hold a flashlight and a first aid kit. The organization might supply other equipment for a specific call, but members hold on to the vest, flashlight, and first aid kit.

Like St. John’s Ambulance, it’s a couple of weekend courses to be a member and a police background check. 

It’s more courses and tests to be a higher-ranking officer in the organization. 

You have to tell them who you are and what your powers are, because then they can match you to emergencies, but you're not fighting crime, for goodness' sake; you're helping out in case of wildfires, or earthquake, or breaks in the water main. Who can be mad at that?

In your game you use them as a source of supers who help but won’t take over. 

Because they have databases of members and powers, they can also be used as a source of information: the creepy guy who wanted to help so he could be near people to take their vril energy, the woman who stays young by harvesting a year off the lifespan of each injured person she helps (hey, she should be a nurse: no one would notice the extra deaths in a hospital or an old age home...wait, I'm devolving into Bubba Ho-Tep.) 

There might be a data leak and criminals who really really need a teleporter might say, "Hey, we can blackmail that person right there until they do what we want. It just takes holding a hostage."

Presenting an evil organization

SYSTEM: ANY

So I was thinking of the organization I want to replace VIPER or any actual snake-themed organization in Strange City, and I want it to have the following:

• Identifiable costumes
• A focus on some aspect of comic-book-themed villainy
• A commander with a notable name

From an adventure point of view, I want a recurring group that does things and there's some in-world explanation why they keep doing it, because really, Cobra Commander should have hung up his snake tattoo long ago.

...and this came to me.


It's an organization. For now, we'll call it SKULL, but I don't know what that stands for, so it might change. The organization's founders have a clearly-defined market:

Wannabe supervillains.

Specifically, the kind who attempt to set up organizations to overthrow the world. You know, the kind that superheroes defeat on a regular basis, because their ideas are not top-notch. Maybe even half-baked.

They've set up a franchise operation, and they will help you create your evil organization. (There might even be a multi-level marketing aspect to it, where you get to sponsor a new evil organization.) They have many, many features that you can buy for your organization, and they get a cut of your income until you reach a certain threshold.

For buying in, they provide:

• Name recognition. Everybody knows and fears SKULL.
• Standard weapons and tactics.(Uniforms and weapons for twenty are included in the initial franchise fee, and you can always buy more from them.) Tactics are written in the Skin-Bound Book (their manual of policies and procedures), but you can buy training.
• Access to someone who will sell you a base.
• Computers, a link, and encryption.
• A cool name, like Commander Dread, Commander Plague, Commander Panic, Commander Destruction, chosen when your group is founded.
• Stationery and the facilities to break into local broadcasts and interwebs. (Check on YouTube: there are over twenty-five world domination threats stored there, from the last four years. There is a SKULL channel, and part of the Dark Web is devoted to it.)
• Two jobs by an established SKULL supervillain team.

You can also buy a base, and they will build one for you. The exact mechanism depends on your local geography, but they do have an automated borer robot that will dig out one of eighteen floorplans for you and put the exterior in place for an underground base. They actually have construction teams who will come in and do the interior for you, and it only costs a bit more. Plus, you don't have to kill them afterward; they're already bound by oath.

The Skybase is popular and based on reliable blimp technology, though more expensive than it used to be (because of the helium shortage). Only a few Islebases are available, but they're quite swanky.

Escape vehicles are essential, but do cost extra.

There is also an insurance company to insure your minions. Once you're caught, of course, coverage ceases.

Depending on your interests, you might want to buy laboratories to research That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know, or to research giving minions super-powers. (If you have enough money, you can buy a supervillain team for after those first two jobs.)

Basically, they can provide at a ridiculous markup anything you need, customized and with the SKULL logo.

Energy sources

One of my hobby horses is that people have no idea how much energy it takes to do some things. They don't realize that Superman might be affected by sunlight but there just isn't enough power in sunlight to power his, uh, powers. Even if the Flash is hungry after each use of super speed, he doesn't get enough energy from the extra food to make up for it.

These things are nods to verisimilitude, not explanations. 

As such, you can't reasonably extrapolate from them and not have the whole thing collapse as an absurdist fantasy. You end up with the Flash or Superman on a hamster wheel, powering the US, or Storm putting rain in the Sahara, or Emma Frost ruling the US by taking over the Electoral College.

However, extrapolating from them is fun, so we do it anyway.

In one Flash story, he turns on every radio in the world and tunes it to the appropriate station in a matter of femtoseconds. A femtosecond is 10 to the -15 power seconds. That's a pretty small amount of time, but hey, he's the Flash, right? (Now, I'm going off hearsay with this: I haven't read the story. I recall being told it was one femtosecond, so that's where I'll start.)

I'm doing the math on my phone and in my head, so there will be errors. I'll come back later and fix them.

The speed of light is roughly 3.0 times 10 to the 9 meters per second (3E9). In a femtosecond, light travels 3E9/1E-15 meters, or 3E-6 meters. That is, three-thousandths of a millimeter. The Flash has traveled over the entire area of the Earth in that time.

I don't even know how to figure out the distance, so instead, we'll say that he traveled the equivalent of one circumference of the Earth, about 40,000 km, or 4E7 meters. So how fast was he traveling per second? Well, 4E7/1E-15 gives us 4E22 meters per second, or about about 10E13 times faster than the speed of light.

It takes infinite energy to get to that speed, but they break lightspeed all the time in comics, so clearly there's a way to do it in that cosmos. If we ignore relativity entirely and go with the old "more gas means you go faster" model, the energy is, at minimum E = mv²/2 (kinetic energy. I don't see how to insert exponents while I'm on my phone). Let's assume that the Flash weighs 80 kilograms, or 8E1 kg. That's 8E1*.5*4E22*4E22 = 4E1*16E44 = 6E46...hmm. That's kind of a big number.

Let's work backward from E=mcc rewritten as m=E/cc and figure out what equivalent mass that is to one significant digit, because this is back of the envelope stuff.

6E46/(3E9*3E9) = 6E46/9E18 = 6E28/9 = 6E27

About the mass of Saturn has to be destroyed to push the Flash that fast, even in a world without relativity. And that's just one stunt, one story. Flash has been published since the 1940s...

So my theory is that every superhero is connected to a star that powers them. Some are connected to dwarf stars, some to giants, but it's the star that powers them. And when the star goes out, the power is gone.

And if the star had an inhabited system, the hero gets the angst, too.

Flashbacks

I've been thinking about whether you can use flashbacks during a game. The answer should be "Yes" but how?

The big problem is that you don't want anything to actively contradict something in the present. 

There seem to me to be a couple of options that might work or not.

Most likely to work is the explanatory flashback. The players know what they want to explain ("Why Indy hates snakes") and they are playing it out, either because it's fun or because they want some details. The outcome is probably not in doubt (though you can set this up so the outcome determines something in the present) but we wonder about how.

In the flashback all of the players play younger versions of their characters, some do, or one do. The flashback might explain what happened when the team came together, how some of the team earned the enmity of their arch-foes, or why that regenerating character is so dangerous. (For my players: "I'm having a bad day!")

In a game with a retcon facility, this is almost a retcon.

You could make it a retcon--you might charge players if they contradict current continuity, and give them the cost back if they fix it. You'd charge them at the end of the scene, and be willing to pay them back if they fix things later. The character takes the place of the bad guys but uses a robot to replace themselves, for instance. 

If you don't know the point of the flashback, it's more likely to go wrong and contradict the current. Now, sometimes those contradictions can be useful--they give you a seed for a future story that explains the contradiction. 

Another option might be the alternate past. In this case, the scene is meant to be a cautionary tale so you want to use it in a case where you want to show a variety of options. 

The third one might be the Rasomon story. Maybe this is various characters memories or theories of how something went done--a kind of Justice League Rashomon--and the real answer is in the contradictions. You need a certain buy-in from the players so that various characters do similar things in line with the point-of-view character of the moment, but you migh be able to pull it off once. You wouldn't do it often.

Sparking the imagination

While I was looking over the ICONS material in preparation for this playtest, it occurred to me that some of the games systems I read cause a flurry of sparks, and some do not. Wild Talents does not, even though I can see where it should; Champions did. What I've heard about AMP doesn't yet, but I haven't read the book(s). Interestingly, Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition doesn't for me, but 1st did. (Second edition is sort of in the middle.)

ICONS first edition did, and second edition less so.

So I've been trying to figure out why that is, for me. Because this is a very personal thing; I know what makes one person's head light up makes another person go, "Meh."

Part of it is the specificity of the game system. The more generic the game system gets, the more flexible it might be, but the more I really have to get into it before I can say, "Oh, here's something we can exploit." In Champions, I was younger but I would also create characters based on the game system. Oh, this character uses this power, which means he can do this, or he can't do that. System mastery is, I guess, part of that appeal, but there's also the old creativity exercise--it's very hard to describe a wall in an interesting way, but it's easy to describe a brick.

Another part is the setting. Does it have nooks and crannies that I can take advantage of? There's a fine line between Freedom City's plethora of characters who probably render the PCs redundant, and the lack of a setting in ICONS or Supers! but both the latter have implied settings that you can grab onto. (Or not, depending on your tastes.)

Part must be presentation, but I'm not sure how.

Part is creativity. I'm sorry to say it, but a chunk of the problem for Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul for me is that none of the sample characters grabbed my attention. If they had, maybe I'd have looked deeper into the system and grokked it more fully. I grabbed the first villains book, hoping it would do it for me, and it didn't. Now, that might be rectified if I played a game with someone who knows, but I often have to teach myself these games out of the book.

You can combine the setting and the creativity to get some idea of the core activities, what the world is like. I know that to a large degree, the worlds are superhero worlds, and yet some of them (just like some comics) fall flat for me.

Your thoughts?

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.

 

What do you want from time travel?

SYSTEM: Any

Some thoughts that have nothing to do with actual time travel (whatever that is) and everything to do with what players actually want to see with time travel. We're emphasizing gaming here, not the actual consequences of the fact that fundamental equations don't have a time component.

In part, this is sparked by a Mutants & Masterminds session I ran where the players just expected to end up in the past. I wasn't actually planning a time travel session, but clearly that's what they expected from the setup. So we went through time, with me vamping and trying to make sure that they caused the things they suspected they would cause. (They helped, because they suspected they would cause it.)

One of the characters, immersed in the whole superhero-supervillain subculture since birth said, effectively, "You have to go back to WWII. It's on your superhero bucket list. You won't feel like you really made it until you do."

So when you're devising your time travel scenario:

• You can change the past. Maybe not a huge amount, but you can do it. 
• You can't change the big things. You still want a recognizable future to go back to.
• You want consequences. Maybe you can't kill Hitler or stop 9/11, but you can erase yourself or the person you love.
• You want to interact with yourself. If you were alive in the time period (because some characters are immortal or long-lived), you want to be there.
• You want to interact with the people you've heard about. Going into the past and being Joe Schmoe isn't nearly as interesting as discovering that you have to convince the first Golden Warrior to give up his Ring of Ares so that the third Golden Warrior can take it from a Soviet spy in 1956, and the person who's going to help you is your great grandmother, who thinks you're kind of hot.

From your point of view, you want time travel to have limitations or your life will be awful:

• You can't blip fifteen seconds into the past to change the outcome of the fight you just had. 
• Time travel is not so easy that they can readjust their arrival time every time they fail. 
• They can't stay in the past (unless you want someone to replace his grandfather).

Scattered thoughts on the economic solution versus the lawful solution

SYSTEM: Any

(I'm scattered today, so this might not get to the point.)

In the real world, when there's a demand for something, someone usually steps in to supply that demand. Not always; in a superhero world, you have to distinguish between something that you can supply and something you can't. A number of villains want world domination, but that turns out to be difficult to supply. (Most people who can get it won't give it up, although there's an interesting meta one-shot, where it turns out the whole thing is virtual reality, so that Visigoth Feral can finally take over the world...and the sequel is what happens after he discovers the ruse.)

However, in a superhero world, there are a number of things that aren't legal to sell that are still wanted. Vampires and blood, for instance. Blood is not really legally available for sale, but making it available could reduce the total amount of vampire-on-human violence. ("I managed to pay my way through college by pimping humans to be vampire blood bags!") Various radioactive materials are necessary for the life of various supervillains, who would presumably not be indulging in crime if they could just get what they need. [1]

So supply and demand says that most of the time, if there's a demand, there's going to be a supply. That trade is going to be illegal if the law doesn't recognize it. Sometimes the law is vague or fuzzy; the status of blood as a commodity is one: it falls under some health laws and it might be illegal, but it might not. Most people refuse to sell it because of that gray area. (There's also the question that can't legally enter a contract to buy something because they're not recognized as persons.) Sometimes the law is just slow...it hasn't recognized vampires, AIs, robots, zombies, uplifted animals, and extraterrestrials are legally persons, and can't legally enter into a contract to buy something. [2]

In your superhero world, there are almost certainly people working in favour of making some of these things legal (Atlantis should be recognized!) and some people against it (What happens to shipping if we recognize Atlantis? Is there a competitive trade advantage to ports that recognize Atlantis, or are the sea-dwellers too scattered or rare to make a difference? Is the threat of terrorism by Atlanteans an acceptable risk? [3])

The attempts don't have to succeed, but you can have them in the background to give verisimilitude to your superhero world. The idealistic college student who is all about how vampires are only violent because they can't get blood (and who may or may not have suspicious scabs along the femoral artery); the working man who is sure that the current set of anti-invasion laws are sure to make things better for him ("All the interdimensional guys gotta get sent back because they're taking jobs from guys like me!"); the businessman who claims that the attacks by created villains improve the economy (because they stimulate building and repair work, and a certain amount of R&D).

You could even have a presidential hopeful who offers solutions on these problems—the kinds of solutions that make trouble for the heroes.

1. And the water of the fountain of immortality is probably a fair advertising issue: Touting it is outlawed as an unprovable claim, because it takes decades before you discover that you're not going to die.

2. There's always been the question in my mind of why Bruce Wayne doesn't pay thugs to quit crime. In fact, that's part of the appeal of the Wayne Foundation: it's a tool where Bruce Wayne tries to make the world better so that Batman isn't needed. (Which brings in mind the millionaire sketch from Second City: Bruce is out of money, because he's spent it all on thugs and crimefighting equipment. What does he do now?)

3. In my recent Emerald Knights campaign, I had the Atlanteans as freshwater aliens living in the Great Lakes. They were recognized and had treaties with Canada and the USA. The fact that they regarded an area of the lake as taboo played into the game a bit. The early parts of the game are on Obsidian Portal, if you want to look at it. I think it was called something like Steel City or Steel City Blues.

Cusp versus Rise

SYSTEM: ANY

Because RPGs are hero-centric, I categorize the villains as cusp villains or rise villains in terms of how the heroes view them and how they interface with the heroes.

A cusp is a brief (usually one session) interaction. A villain group might plan its heist for weeks but if the heroes don't know about it until they enter the jewelry store, it's a cusp from the heroic viewpoint. This might be the villain-of-the-week, or the latest installment of being harried by some other villain.

A rise villain has lots of hero face time. This could be because it's a friend of the hero who has succumbed to a sudden-but-inevitable betrayal, or it's a returning villain, or a spider in the middle of a web who is pulling threads.

I thought of this while considering shows like Flash or Supergirl, where the villain of the week is usually forgettable, even if they are terribly powerful, like Weather Wizard on the Flash TV series or Jemm on Supergirl. (It might be just my viewing, but it seems to me that Alex was losing against Jemm despite all the badass weaponry until the intervention of J'onn J'onzz.)

The idea in a roleplaying sense--and I don't know if it's useful--is that villains your players respond to can become rise villains. Rise villains are usually more memorable, possibly just because they have more face time. They recur. Reverse Flash and Zoom and Astra are all rise villains because you have an ongoing sense of them, of dread and anticipation.

In general, we want our campaigns punctuated by rise villains because they're memorable. The next question is figuring out what makes them memorable.

Sex and the Single Superhero

SYSTEM: Any

This is my smut entry. I'll try to keep it fairly clean in terms of words but we'll be talking about some adult stuff, so if you want to skip this, now would be a good time.

Still here?

I was thinking about sex and superheroes this morning on the drive in. Most comics just ignore it and that's a perfectly fine genre convention to keep.

If you want to go all hardcore (so to speak), go off and read Larry Niven's famous essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. (The Wikipedia article is here, and a probably illegal copy of the text is here. No guarantees that either link will be good even a second after I post this.) I'm proposing something a little gentler.

For starters, let's ignore all the trained and gimmick-laden humans. They have no physical problems. (Maybe mental ones, but that's outside my purview right now.) We can probably not worry about lots of mutants: if your mutation is that you have wings or horns but everything else is standard equipment, you don't have a problem except maybe socially.

That leaves us the folks with powers that make things difficult or who aren't actually human: your super-strong or invulnerable types, your rapid regenerators, your superfast speedsters, or your aliens. It's not clear if Metamorpho even has genitalia any more, though he can probably produce something suitable.

The super-strong or the invulnerable might be in danger of hurting their partners or of, er, not being accessible. If regenerators happen to be capable of regenerating and there's a noticeable hymen, that might be a problem. Speedsters probably have a problem syncing up with their partners.

The obvious solution, and one that might feed nicely into any campaign that features any kind of super/non-super stratification, is that supers of that sexually-isolating kind only date other supers.

There's something terribly lonely about the woman with the permanent force field who can only date the person who nullifies force fields, whether a hero or not. The Obelisk might pine for Nancy Normal, but can only be intimate with Suzy Strength.  The Zipper might remember her old boyfriend fondly but the foreplay takes so damned long  (hours by her standards, even though he's known as Quick-Draw locally). And Quirk the being from Planet Z doesn't even find humans attractive, but dolphins work.

There's a subclass of supers who can only have relations with other supers, because they're afraid of hurting a normal partner. (I suppose there's a subsubsubclass of those that doesn't care about hurting a normal partner, but I prefer not to think about that.) So what kind of things are you going to see developing because of that?

MetaDate is the online dating service for metahumans. The customers (with exceptions, obviously) have a higher tolerance for unusual appearances. Gender categories include male, female, trans, neuter, and fluid. The profile form includes relevant powers, but they never ask which side of the law you're on.

The Underground is a dating club for metahumans. It can be classified as either a place for a date or a pickup bar, depending on what section you're in. The Underground is, well, underground: under an embassy of a country without an extradition treaty. In fact, it has an agreement with the embassy: activities on its soil are not considered to be bound by the laws of the host country, and while they might be technically illegal in the embassy's country, there is no access between the Underground and the embassy. The embassy's staff practices "don't ask, don't tell." The Underground is not a place for actual assignations; the staff is quite strong and there are other staff members who handle some of the more outre abilities. (There is a member of staff normally immune to suggestion or mind control, for instance.)

Dimension X has nothing so abstruse legally...it's just a place for aliens. It started small, and is gradually growing to fill the warehouse block where it exists. There are a number of small rooms, each of which attempts to mimic "home" for some alien species. Most of the rooms can handle a number of environments, but the number isn't infinite, and there are some things it can't handle at all. They used to have a problem with theft (supervillains kept stealing their gravity repulsor technology or their red sun filters) but a few retired heroes work there now, and that has lowered the incidence considerably. It is expensive, though the local agency that deals with and controls aliens (the Bureau of Extra Foreign Affairs) supports it.

Uplifted animals have different problems...but that's for a different post.

The Quality of your Origin

SYSTEM: ICONS

The ICONS system provides a suite of origin possibilities, each of which has a mechanical effect. You make different choices in the creation of your character and your character's backstory depending on whether the character is a birthright character, or artificial, or transformed, or trained, or a gimmick character, or unearthly.

Most characters aren't a pure strain of origin, anyway: very few trained characters have no gadgets; Superman could be considered unearthly or a birthright. In Marvel's current continuity, an Inhuman character is both transformed and has a birthright--only certain people are affected by the Terrigen chemicals. Usually the most important origin version is reflected in the character's qualities: "Feared as a mutant" or "Dedicated to being the peak of human ability" or "Curious outsider" or whatever you want.

Really, it's only important if you're translating a character from a different medium into ICONS (though really, you can just say, "Hey, she has seven specialties...deal with it") or if, like me, you have this compulsion to be "fair," by some definition of the word.

You could, for instance, say that every character gets a bonus on creation, and you don't care what kind--it's one of four extra specialties, or a +2 to a power or ability, or you can change one power without doing some kind of Extra dance.

And that would be fine.

But what if the origin were an extra quality that you could call on during play? Yes, you might still want to have "Exiled Lemurian Prince" as your quality, but you could always invoke your origin. I'm not thinking anything you can't already do with Advantages, but you can always tag your origin as a quality. My first thought is that it's just a freebie Aspect. But you could restrict it a bit more and use the Quality instead of the mechanical aspects that are currently part of the origin.

Trained: Pay an Advantage, get a +2 to your effort as if you had the appropriate Specialty. Because you do: you're Trained. You can invoke the Trained origin for that Advantage.

Transformed:  Pay an Advantage, get a +1 to any power's rank.

Birthright: Get a free recovery without spending an Advantage, but you have to take a turn..

Gimmick: Pay an Advantage and stunt any power because you just rewired the framistat.

Artificial: Pay an Advantage and treat your Life Support as rank 10 for the rest of the scene, or increase an ability by another 1 at the cost of some kind of Trouble that will later cause you to seek repair/refurbishment.

Unearthly: Stunt any power but as Trouble be vulnerable to something in the scene. (You suddenly have Martian Vision but you are vulnerable to fire.)

I have no idea if it would make play too wild; I just thought of it this morning.

Reflecting on Mirrors

Let's take the idea of a mirror that allows what it sees to come to life--the reflection steps out of the mirror and does battle. You can tell them apart because the evil duplicate is reversed left-to-right (well, technically, mirrors reverse front-to-back, but it looks like left-to-right). (I suppose if you draw a beard on the mirror, the evil duplicates have beards, but....nah, too difficult to manage.)

But what about funhouse mirrors? Could you bend and twist the mirror to make some kind of funhouse copy? Perhaps the mirror creates strong or heavy versions of people, imbuing them with strength or great girth, and creating different kinds of foes. This might be an encounter by itself: the hero is attacked by these funhouse copies, even though the original has no idea of it. It just gets worse when the hero has to go through the funhouse, and copies of himself or herself are created.

What if the mirror cracks? What happens then? A mirror that's a portal becomes two smaller portals, but one that creates copies might create smaller twins or not create twins, or create terribly flawed twins (the bizarro copy?).

From a mechanical standpoint, I find the biggest problem with evil mirrors is that they create too many copies. If you don't have a mechanism in place to limit the number of copies, you can have to deal with one or two dozen villains. (This is one problem with the house of mirrors concept.[1]) But if you have something in place...the mirror has to be hit by lightning or a magic phrase...then it's a fun idea.

Or if there's some kind of time delay. Perhaps the mirror replicates the last person who is entirely reflected in it, but the mirror has to go in the dark for some time afterward to prevent "seeing" something else. Suddenly it sounds like a kind of seance or medium scam: "Gaze into the mirror of Erised and see... Oh, sorry, got to cover it up again."

What about other mirrors around? Dressing mirrors, mirrors in clothes shops, hand mirrors, mirrors in beauty salons, hair salons, barber shops, dentist or doctor office, surgical theatres, little round mirrors used in stores to catch shoplifters, vehicle mirrors (including bus mirrors). What could you do with "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear"? Are the copies smaller? Are they superfast? Do they have growth of some kind so they can suddenly be much closer?

Presumably they've done all of this stuff with Mirror Master, but I haven't seen any Mirror Master stories (though I did see the Flash and Substance episode of JLU).

1. Possibly fruitful typo: "Hearse of Mirrors" My first thought is, evil copies of dead people. They entice living relatives into...something. Signing things away is the boring possibility.

Parts of the city... (Locations part II)

I'm sure this has been done elsewhere...perhaps in a fine supers RPG product...but I haven't found something similar for years (not that I've been looking).

Most hints on RPG adventure plotting tell you to come up with an idea or a timeline for the villains first, which is great. Even the two superhero adventure random generators that I've seen are really about coming up with a plan for the heroes to disrupt.

But the place often gets ignored. It might be because the place falls out of the combination of plot and your campaign, or it might be because place is too random. Maybe it's better suited to a random encounter generator of some kind. So here is a random list of areas and some typical settings within them for stories. I did a location list before--many of those were specific. This is more where those locations might be put. These areas might flavour those areas: a mall in the middle of a depressed slum might have a very different tone than a mall in the middle of a ritzy enclave.

1. Business district: corporate headquarters, travel agencies, office buildings with a variety of companies, mail order firms, restaurants.
2. Civic area: city hall, municipal offices, arena, park, skate park, pool, main library, community centre, adult recreation building, jail, police or fire station.
3. Disaster site: restricted access, fenced in, former supervillain fight or lair, smoking ruins, leftover cleanup equipment.
4. Educational or military: area including a college or university or a military base, so there are cheap places to eat, the actual schools or base, low-rent housing for students or military families, stores for booze and groceries.
5. Ethnic concentration: A specialized form of town, with a higher concentration of commercial establishments that deal with items unique to that ethnicity. We're talking Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy, Little Moscow, Little Portugal, Tokyo Lite, and so on. In some campaigns, that will extend to aliens of a particular stripe or all aliens.
6. Financial district: banks, stock trading houses, investment corporations, insurance companies, very high end stores, restaurants.
7. Industrial district: factories, warehouses, illegal or low-rent housing, breakfast places.
8. Hidden city: the disenfranchised, the homeless, a place to hide, large quantities of the underworld or criminal element.
9. Residential: light industry, illegal industry (such as grow-ops), middle-class houses, lower-class houses, gated communities, golf course, coffee shop, beauty salons, suburb.
10. Rural: Farming, test fields for agricultural work, clusters of houses that can't be called towns, service station-restaurants, various equipment stores, prisons, sewage or water treatment plant, power plant.
11. Slum: houses, tenements, abandoned institutions, shining lab built as an inspiration, low-tech factories, bodegas, fast food places.
12. The Strip: Some kind of entertainment area: theatres, restaurants, dance clubs, strip clubs, porn shops, head shops, cinemas.

Again, these are ideas only, not a strait-jacket. You might find one element inside another, or oddball things certainly happen. Maybe this city has a farm in the middle, because the Bauer family refuses to sell, and they own enough that  they can enforce the fact that this university campus includes an alfalfa field. Or any section might have a police station or a fire station, a water tower, construction or destruction of some kind, a power transfer station, or a public transit hub.

And I formatted this nicely as a one-pager and it's on the web: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Qcn9P_vww4lJFofIYZ_WtP7p-WGfzcB9HBOIl9giFA/edit?usp=sharing

Trap, trap, who's that tripping across my trap?

Over on the Supers RPG Facebook page, Christopher Hatty asks whether there are any supers RPGs with good advice about traps.

Alas, I don't know. From what I've read, there was some advice in the old Champions books or in Adventurer's Club, and I remember that the Mutants & Masterminds books had some as well. Mostly, I remember Aaron Allston pointing out in an article that players hate being caught in deathtraps...and yet, they're such a part of the genre that you don't want to skip them.

So thinking very briefly and superficially (that's how I do everything) about traps, it seems to me that there are really three kinds of traps in fiction:

• Traps that can be avoided
• Traps that must be endured
• Traps that must be escaped

This is a general thing; it's most common in superhero stories, but it shows up in all kinds of pulp and adventure fiction. And depending on your goals in the story/roleplaying session, traps can move from one to the other, and frankly, if a player has a brilliant idea, a trap that was supposed to be endured may well be avoided..

A trap that can be avoided

Really, this is a chance for your heroes to show off. They know which button to depress, which wire to cut, where to stand so the needle doesn't fly out, are wearing the lead suit so the argonite doesn't affect them, whatever. The trap might be subtle or it might be obvious or it might be totally inappropriate for their powers. ("I can fly...what is a pit trap supposed to do?") but it's a chance for the heroes to show off (if they get it) or an opportunity for the villain to wear down their resources before the confontation.

To this way of thinking, a puzzle is a trap that can be avoided: if they figure out the puzzle, they avoid the damage that happens if they didn't figure it out.

A trap that must be endured

This is the untraceable poison that is working through the hero's system.This is the mind gas that Mysteriman dosed them with.  This is the trap that they didn't avoid.

These traps are rarely lethal by themselves (though they may look lethal, with the time limits frequently imposed), but they are devices that even the playing field or tilt it in the villain's favour.

To some extent, this is the Iron Maiden slowly closing on Lana Lewis, girlfriend reporter, or the hit men crossing town to kill Aunt June, but those are more like traps that must be escaped: you want the hero to come up with a clever way to avoid it.

A trap that must be escaped

This is another chance to show off. The classic is the deathtrap: a device or situation so fiendish that the hero has no obvious escape, and yet we want them to escape. ("Your utility belt is gone! The room is bathed in the rays of a red sun! In three seconds I will release a pack of wolves!") Sometimes the escape is by avoiding the doom ("By looping the wire around this lamppost, I create an electromagnet that will ionize the air and pull the laser beam to one side!") or managing to escape the hungry wolves for long enough to slip into their crate; a cage that holds a wolf might not hold a prehensile person.

But, as I said earlier, this is also the doom that will be visited on the loved ones. Yes, there's an argument to be made for "realism" but in a superhero story I hold my heroes to a higher standard: they don't fail to rescue Lana Lewis or Aunt June, just as they don't get offed by the deathtrap. The cost might be high (in a game resources sense) but it should be something they can pay.

Trapping the player characters

I find it odd that a player will not object to the threat to Aunt June but will object to being put in the room with the closing walls. Yet it's true, in my experience. Perhaps it's because the deathtrap is a result of the PC's failure, something in direct contrast to the usual assumption of character supremacy. Or maybe it's just as simple as players wanting to feel that they or their characters are smarter than the characters they read about, and most deathtraps are, well, dumb. (I love them, though?)

You can bribe them by giving them hero points or the equivalent. I find that they're better about it if you defeat them in battle fair and square first...but if the villain could defeat them in battle, why not just kill them? The only answer I have is, it's comics.

But it's worth noting that of these three types of traps, only one (the trap that can be avoided) involves actual dice rolls, to notice or disable the traps. The other two are much more about the situation: managing to persevere despite the Argonian Flu or managing to escape the deadfall while still saving Aunt June.

Team resources: some thoughts about headquarters

What do you want your team to have? What are the resources that they share? What are the freebies and what should they work for?

While you could use the excellent location-building rules in Stark City for this, I wouldn't get a blog post out of it if you did. I'll also skip specifying a system on this one, though I'll use ICONS for the examples. (Later, I might come back and add examples written in other systems.) ICONS, in fact, doesn't talk much about headquarters and team resources, because they are mostly plot devices.

Which they are, but I'm going to talk about them anyway.

(If you want to build team resources because they're really extra-special, maybe you could have a "Team Resources" power: every level or rank of Team Resource gets you five points of resources. Some of the resources are levelled--the size of the headquarters can be small, medium, large, or extra-large--and some are not--communicators for everybody!.)

Almost every team needs a place to meet and some kind of communication. The other common resources are contacts and vehicles.

I have run a campaign where the heroes met in a back room at a coffee chain: the Circle Perk. (That was Wild Justice, my reaction to Dark Champions, where they fought against the excesses of the Blue Moon Killer.) Still, the heroes probably want a more private place to meet, and they might want other equipment. Here are some ideas for your standard crimefighting, beat-the-conquerors kind of team.

Size. How big is your headquarters? I think there are four useful categories:

• Small: a back room somewhere, a hidden desk when a wall turns around, a private garage
• Medium: an apartment, a hidden section of a floor in an apartment, your magical study
• Large: a floor in a building or a hidden basement, a forgotten subway station,
• Extra-large:  a building on an island in the river, a satellite orbiting the earth, a pocket dimension

Hidden/Obvious. A hidden headquarters is underground (a cave, an abandoned subway station, a warehouse basement, what used to be a speakeasy, a wide (dry) section of rain sewer, or a forgotten long distance repeater station), or disguised (a back room in a dance club), invisible (the thirteenth floor of a building, hidden by magic). Obvious is the free default. It's in the phone book. It's the penthouse of Vigilant Tower. It's the library...er, Hall of Justice.

Inaccessible/Accessible. An inaccessible headquarters is tough to get to. There are three levels.

• The first is accessible.
• The second suggests that anyone could get there if they knew what to do (knew the combination for the entrance, turned widdershins six times and said the magic phrase, pressed the buttons for twelve and fourteen on the elevator at the same time, hired a plane to get to the Fortress of Solitude). 
• The third requires special abilities (the Avengers card, the strength to move a giant key, dimensional transport magic). It's your call whether you think a satellite above the earth is the second level of accessible or the third...given how it's used in the comics, usually the third.

Accessibility is also security. A receptionist at the front is accessible, while a magical bioscanner is utterly inaccessible. I can see the virtue in separating them, but I think for the most part it's difficult. If something has loads of security, it's just a different flavour of inaccessible.

A headquarters is usually also accompanied by one or more qualities: Secret magical school, interdimensional train, teleporting street.

A headquarters can also have bonuses to skills or specialties. The description of the place serves as a source of qualities that the player can tag for +2 to the effort or to actually do something. "I'm in the library where we have lots of old information, so I get +2 to Occult" or "Here in the lab I can do mass spectroscopy, so that's a chance to do/redo Investigation."

I'd also avoid using set numbers for anyone trying to get in. Instead, I'd use the accessibility quality to create trouble for anyone trying to get in stealthily. Something that's inaccessible is a minus to their attempt; something very inaccessible is a double minus.

Weapons and durability can be modeled with powers. This is where you want an exchange rate between the advantages that the players put in and the number of points you can spend.

Senses (the TroubleAlert?) are probably best done with Qualities rather than trying to make ranges work, because the range rules in supers games are usually meant for people, not machines.

Communications are probably best described by their limitations. So what kind of information is transmitted (only voice?) and how far? Can it be overheard? Can it be blocked? In my games, communications are usually an excuse to keep everyone involved because they're going to talk anyway. Sometimes I care that character X is not there (and the players are good about it), but usually I'm fine if they communicate. Off-hand, I can think of the following:

• Radios (voice, short range, can be overheard, don't work everywhere, device complications)
• Smartphones (voice, occasionally visual, can be overheard, don't work everywhere, global range, device complications)
• Mind link (usually voice but can be enhanced, range has to be defined, can't be overheard, not so good for characters trying to hide things, usual limit is conference call size, switchboard complications)

Communications also have a security aspect which you might want to spell out.

Stuff like sign language for stealth missions is usually spoken by the players and invented by the players as necessary.

Vehicles can often veer from the pure plot device category, as the characters hide in the vehicles or use the vehicles as weapons. They are the resource that are most likely to have to be statted out.

Places to fight!

I know it sounds terribly mechanical, but one of the things I do when I'm creating an adventure is think about where the fight(s) will take place. Sometimes the location is forced on you by the crime or the confrontation, but sometimes it's open. After all, they might discover agents of FANG (Friends of Absolutely Nothing Good) almost anywhere, and after you've had thirty or forty fights outside the corner where Rosie's Bar sits¹, you want somewhere else.

So, in no particular order, here are some locations and things that make them interesting. I might go back and insert links at some future date so that you can see the inspiration for things like the underwater mansion, but I shan't do it today. I see there are twelve here, so you could use a D12 to choose among them...

• Any Place Abandoned Warehouses, Victorian mansions, amusement parks, old theme parks, ski resorts, factories...
• Hi-Rise Construction Site Some sheltered floors, some open to the elements, construction equipment, cranes, heavy mud if there's a rainstorm, good access for flying heroes, adequate for swinging ones, air ducts to hide in.
• Used Car Lot Lots of cars to throw at each other; which contains the MacGuffin you need? Pennants on wires, a garage, a repair facility including jacks, floodlights, a showroom, access for shady dealing, a forgotten entrance from when this was a hideout, a secret carjacking ring.
• High School Twisty halls, chemistry labs, a swimming pool, a big open area with a baseball diamond or football field or both, gyms, innocent bystanders galore.
• Multilevel Mall at Christmas A huge Christmas tree, Salvation Army Santas, hundreds of bystanders, open area for flyers, decorations to grab and swing off, hostages and helpers, guards, anybody's loved ones.
• Municipal swimming pool in high summer Water, the high board, nobody's wearing much of anything so no hidden weapons, a stretcher in case of spinal injury, a hook, pool cleaning equipment in a closet, change rooms.
• In storm sewer Tight spaces, darkness, unexpected depths, a catwalk, the smell, sudden rush of water, lost child, albino alligators, strong monsters hiding, wet walls you can't stick to.
• Waste treatment plant Big pools for separating waste, the smell (no, worse than that), sluices, access to the river, drying waste matter, possibly UV chambers for purifying waste, skimmers, places to put waste that won't degrade (lots of used condoms), catwalks above the pools, a control center.
• Recycling center Disassembly lines, hazardous materials, prisoners separating out trash, big vats for materials, criminals diverting stuff to sell as "new", high security if they're recycling money (which some few do), shredders for paper, acid baths, furnaces for glass and metals, skimmers to take different density of materials off, and some should have the process for making oils but probably don't.
• Teaching hospital Sick people, medical equipment, paramedics and doctors trying to be heroes, someone trapped in secret ID, unconscious targets, people under police arrest, teaching arenas for operating theatres, clumps of residents, candy-stripers, old women selling coffee, visitors, men waiting around obstetrics and maternity, senile people who can't be put in a home yet, imaging equipment with radioactive materials.
• Underground mansion Proof of an eccentric mind, strange labyrinth, collections of unusual things (art; weapons; superhero devices not quite deactivated), security systems, guards, haughty owners, a pool entirely underground, its own generator, access to solar power or its own nuclear power plant.
• Window washing platform A four-rope platform (so the window washers are not required to have separate safety lines); small space, access for those who fly or crawl walls, threatened window washers, no access to inside the building, cranes that lift and lower it, hidden under gargoyles, or an old system like the Empire State Building, where the window washer hooks his belt to the window frame, opens it, and leans out to wash the window he's just opened. (Did you know that window washing is considered the most dangerous job in the UK?²)

^1. For those who don't know, Rosie's Bar was on the map that came with Champions when it still came in a box. We had many a fight near Rosie's Bar. Someday I have to design the interior to that. Just because.

^2. Possibly because they're not counting “farmhand on a farm with a bull.” I don't know if it's true in the UK, but in Canada at one point (and possibly still today) they didn't count farmhands in workplace injury statistics because the numbers were just too high.

Team Soap Opera

SYSTEM: ANY

Once again, I'm thinking about the soap opera aspect of comics and how to represent that at the game table. I have read, and believe, that one of the great things that the 1960s Marvel brought to the genre was the soap opera aspect. While I'm not so crazy about the continuing narratives that developed, I certainly love the soap opera part, and felt when Gwen Stacy died, or that Doc Ock was dating Aunt May, or that Bruce Wayne was bereft when Dick Grayson moved out of the manor. But that's something that's hard to get across in RPGs.


See, most of that stuff happens in the solo books for a hero, and superhero RPGs rarely play that way. They emulate team books...which is totally understandable, because there are multiple players at the table, each with his or her own hero character. But team books don't have the same sort of personal dynamic.

It seems to me that team  comics come in two flavours: the anthology of characters (the Avengers or the Justice League), where popular characters from elsewhere are brought together, along with some characters who are seen only in the team book; and the collection of characters (the Fantastic Four or the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans), where the characters may have come from elsewhere but they pretty much live in that book. (I've stolen the terminology from short story books.) The lines between them aren't clear-cut; sometimes team books are places where comics companies park intellectual properties so as not to lose them ("We're using Generic Name Guy! You can't use him!") or during the period where their own titles are under revamp, so these categorizations are poles, not boxes.

An anthology book assumes that most of the characters will have their interpersonal stuff somewhere else. We don't need to talk about Bruce Wayne's relationship woes, we can just present Bat-God as someone. The stories tend to be puzzle stories, or they have personal effects only on the book-specific characters. (There are exceptions, which are usually the result of editors and writers collaborating across titles, or where the same writer does several solo books as well as the team book.) So the New Avengers during Bendis' run dealt with Victoria Hand and with the Hood and the effect of the Skrulls on Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones, none of whom had their own series at the time. Other characters moved in and out and made quips or actions that cemented their (external) characterization. Heck, they even lampshaded it with Wolverine.

A collection book generates a lot of its soap opera from interpersonal conflict between team members. The teams tend to be smaller (though they aren't always: the total collection of X-Men would sink an aircraft carrier, but they usually focus on four to eight) and there are NPCs who deal with the whole team (your Jarvises or Victoria Hands) and NPCs who are specific to individual characters. The more interteam stuff there is, the less you need NPCs outside the team.

And none of that shows up in comic book RPGs. Oh, it can: Worlds In Peril has the Bonds mechanic, which I quite like, and lots of games have the idea of qualities or complications or disadvantages that deal with specific NPCs. The latter don't require NPCs and soap opera, however. (That's good if your players don't want to get into that stuff. I'm not writing about players like that, though.)

How do you encourage soap opera? I have no sure way. However, here are some ideas:

• Don't travel. Yes, you just had a great idea that involves everyone being on an interdimensional road trip. Have you established what they have to lose, back in the home dimension? Will they care if they ever come back? Yeah, you can travel once you've established your turf, or let the NPCs travel with the heroes, or give them other-dimensional analogues of the NPCs with whom they can say the awful things, or who will act in exactly the ways that the heroes hope or fear the NPCs will.
• Throw lots of NPCs at them. Some of them will stick, even if they haven't created characters with particular DNPCs. If the PCs seem interested in the NPC, bring him or her back.
•  Encourage qualities/complications/disadvantages that use NPCs. Try to make the NPCs interesting. It's a nice idea to make the same NPC the dependent NPC of several characters, if you can. If Clara Sparrow is the wheelchair-bound sister of one hero and the boss of another hero and is dating a third hero, well, you've got three reasons to bring her in, and some opportunity for interteam conflict.

I'm happy to hear other suggestions.

Villains: Making It Personal

When you play a superhero game, there are the villains who are puzzles and villains who are personal. (Okay, there are a couple of other kinds, but they don't start with 'p'.)

Puzzle villains are the ones you have to figure out--once you know that they're secretly plants that are vulnerable to Round-Up, it's session over. They can't come back unless they have new powers because otherwise someone will just go to the hardware or garden store.

Personal villains have a stake in what they are doing. They have an emotional need to do it. Victor Fries wants his frozen wife back. Norman Osborne, at least early on, was as much about his feelings for Peter Parker as his lust for power. 

This is something that Batman: The Animated Series was brilliant at, by the way: most of their adversaries had the kind of emotional hooks you could use multiple times. Other animated series have used it since then. You can certainly have mercenary villains who will split as soon as the projected profit drops--they're a nice palate cleanser, if you will—but it's good if the villains care.

A villain can care for lots of reasons. (Movies provide a good sampler.)

• He or she is getting back at all the people who laughed at him.
• He needs the parts or money to get that operation for the sick loved one (Dog Day Afternoon with superheroes?)
• She's on a vendetta against anyone who went to her high school
• He wants to get even with the other crooks who stole his share of the money (Payback).
• She needs to be proven right about some scientific theory that they all laughed at (but where fixing the immediate danger puts the world at risk if there isn't a danger).

It's even better if the emotional hook is tied to the heroes, in hero or civilian ID:

• The villain is jealous of the hero.
• The villain is getting back at the hero because the hero refused his offer of friendship or mentorship (Spider-Man).
• The villain and the hero know each other's secret identities, and one can't reveal the other without being revealed...but their drives or Qualities keep putting them in conflict.
• The villain wanted someone the hero is dating or married...and having discovered the secret identity, is going to humiliate the hero identity.

You know your heroes. Make it personal to them.

Today's NPC: Harry Crewswater

SYSTEM: Any supers game

Harry is a commercial real estate agent, dealing for the most part in warehouses, offices, and factories. He worships Donald Trump while being critical of him, he is a Tea Party conservative, and he donates to all political parties. Harry is kind of a creep, loud and obnoxious, but Harry does have his own code of ethics and a sense of survival.

He needs them.

Harry rents property to supervillains.

Ever wonder where those bases come from, those wonderfully recondite underwater lairs, those abandoned warehouses with the Coming soon: Condos, fall 2007 signs out front? Harry rents them.

It started with his cousin, David, who's serving life in a certain maximum security prison. David made Harry's name known to certain supervillains who were passing through the prison. Now his reputation is self perpetuating. Whenever supervillains hire on thugs, someone is sure to mention Harry's name, and Harry's rules.

• Harry never meets with a client under the client's real name or known aliases
• He insists on the first month's payment up front
• He refuses to know anything about the client's real plans
• Everything has to be discussed according to the fiction. This is important, because the feds have several times gotten a warrant to bug Harry's phone and office. If a client uses a known name, Harry refuses to do business with him--the tapes are full of him saying that he cannot do business with the Subtle Squid, or Doctor Faux, or the Bomb Cats. 
• He refuses to eat or drink with the client. 
• He conducts most business by phone, except for the final signature, for which he sends his duly appointed representative, Ernesto. Or Claude, or whatever his name is. Harry's on his fifth one. (Most of them quit, not being as tough as they thought they were.)

Harry also can't be swayed by threats to his cousin David (of whom he is not that fond, anyway), nor by threats to his wife, Marissa (of whom he is definitely not that fond anymore), or by threats to his kids, who in his eyes are mostly a tool for generating tax deductions and spending his money.

A threat to one of his mistresses might slow him down, but instead he would probably call the cops. Because if these guys had resources, they wouldn't be dealing with him.

Now, one might wonder how Harry actually makes money off supervillains, because most of them stiff him for subsequent rent or get caught by superheroes. One might suspect an organized crime connection, and one would be right.

Organized crime owns the construction and demolition companies that get called in, and Harry receives a nice kickback from them by letting them know that a property has been rented, and will probably be available soon in a damaged condition. The mob does the demo job or, if the villain is caught elsewhere, cleans out any equipment left behind and sells it at a profit. Harry's kickback doesn't have to be declared on taxes, and brings Harry up to the almost-lavish lifestyle he enjoys.

How do the PCs get involved with Harry? Mostly, they don't. Harry is a reason, rather than a gaming opportunity. However, he might come to the attention of the PCs in several ways.

First of all, a PC who has an obscene streetwise ability might know about him. Certain police officers do, and they know that Harry works very hard to be clean legally. They also know that if they really, really need to find a supervillain hideout, there's a thirty per cent chance they can do it by pointing concerned citizens who are not burdened with search laws (that is, certain heroes) at Harry.

Second, a PC who likes data crunching might well notice that six of the last twelve supervillain hideouts were rented by the same company. This could lead to a visit to Harry, and a return visit from the Mob after Harry complains.

Third, a PC might actually be investigating violence against David, in prison.

Fourth, it's a reason for a mob member to know things he shouldn't, if a PC leans on him.

Here's how Harry might look, in ICONS:

Harry Crewswater, Real Estate Magnate

Prowess	2	Coordination	2	Strength	3	Determination	–
Intellect	3	Awareness	4	Willpower	4	Stamina	7
Specialties	Business Expert Law (real estate) Expert					Powers	None
Qualities	Deeply connected with the underworld Cares about the appearance of honesty Wants more stuff, more power, more leverage

Who you gonna call? Ghost, busted.

I was running (oh, that feels so nice to say) Aquazombies of the Kriegsmarine the other Sunday night, a Fainting Goat Games adventure for ICONS. The adventure has a certain mystical bent (and my descriptions were made more squamous and rugose by the fact that I've been playing a lot of Trail of Cthulhu lately), and one of the characters it offers is the Necromancer, who can be either an NPC or a PC. (There are options to keep him from taking over if he's an NPC.)

Mostly because I didn't want to have an extra character to think about during the adventure, but also inspired by a player character comment, I seriously abbreviated him and gave him a new name. If you're running an adventure where you need someone to handle the occult exposition but you don't want them to take over, this might be a useful solution.

Gramarye (Steven Lafferty)

Steven was a witch or warlock, whichever term you prefer. He was, in fact, exceptionally gifted and was in training to be the Master Mage, or Sorcerer Supreme, or whatever you call it in your campaign. He was, however, impulsive, with a tendency to solve things by learning the Cliff's Notes version of the problem and then improvising. Earth's current Master Mage is a supervillain (see the Warlock in the Villainomicon). The Midnight Syzygy, a loose confederation of magical traditions and schools, has been trying to elevate someone more...philanthropic...to the job. Steven was by lengths their best candidate.

The Midnight Syzygy had groomed him, sending him on increasingly difficult tasks, and with luck in a mission or two or three, he would be able to take on the current Master Mage. He was that close. He had got to the point where they sent him to deal with dimensional incursions before the Master Mage learned of them.

Unfortunately, when you learn the Cliff's Notes version of the problem, the opponent has abilities that you have not bothered to learn. Tyrhogon the Wick (aka Tyrhogon the Dispossessed, Tyrhogon the Conqueror, Tyrhogon the Destroyer, etc.) was the one. His/its name refers not only to the fact that he/it has used up ("burned") several dimensions, but that he/it can possess new forms and makes use of them rather rapidly. Steven met him in battle on the astral plane...

...and Tyrhogon stole his body. With his body came a host of abilities, and the battle was essentially decided. Only the interference of the supervillain Master Mage decided it.

Without a body, Steven was doomed to the realm of the dead, unless he could find something to house his spirit. He did: a grimoire, a book of hedge magic.

He still has his knowledge of magic and occult lore, and he can risk going to the astral plane (it has a two out of three chance of letting him back into the book). He might even stunt possession (with permission) to take over a body, but that would be rare (such as when a player can't make a session). Mostly he has telepathy. He acts as a voice in the head, giving occult information to the player. He also tends to go on at length about the opponent's abilities and skills (a distraction that is often good for a Determination point, in ICONS).

He might choose a single player as point of contact (I chose the PC without Mental Resistance when I used him). He might choose a player because they have some point of contiguity or similarity (they have the same great-grandmother, or both were born in the same place, or both have loved the same reincarnated spirit, or whatever).

The ICONS Writeup

In ICONS Assembled, he might look something like this:

Gramarye (Secret ID: Steven Lafferty)
Prowess	-/4	Intellect	5	Specialties	Powers
Coordination	-/4	Awareness	4	Martial Arts, Occult Master	Telepathy Extra: Detection (occult events) Extra: Rangeless	8
Strength	-/4	Willpower	8		Astral Projection Limit: Unreliable	6
Qualities	Impulsive but working on it too too hard Bound to a book Knows about everyone occult

He is ashamed and doesn't tell his name, referring to himself only as Gramarye. He will dole out the information to the PC a bit at a time (in contrast to his usual style) if he deems it necessary for the PC to know.

As a book, he doesn't have physical abilities, but they are given should he actually get his body back. In that case, the Telepathy becomes Magic. As a person, he might have Force Field, Flight, and Blast as learned stunts. He'll also probably carry deep guilt over whatever Tyrhogon did with his body in the mean time.

Adventures

Oddly enough, he immediately suggests a couple of adventures. (I know, you're shocked.)

• One voice in your head sounds pretty much like another. Someone knows about Gramarye and his special relationship with the PC(s). The villain makes mental contact with the PC, pretending to be Gramarye. The PC might well be used to doing odd things on Gramarye's request ("Why am I opening this bank vault, again?") This might set the PC up for being accused of evil or make the PC the unwitting instrument of betrayal, or might "simply" set the dimension up for horrors to invade.
• Tyrhogon still has his body (it's worked quite well for him for the past year or two) and it's effectively only in middle age from him overclocking it. And Tyrhogon returns, possibly in a long drawn-out scheme involving spies, scouts, and sentinels, or possibly Tyrhogon has been influenced by the impulsive nature of the body and just Does It. Tyrhogon comes to our world. It's easy now: the body is native, so it doesn't count as a dimensional incursion, and the current Master Mage doesn't look at it. But Steven knows, and the PCs are the only ones he can tell, even if it means revealing his past. If they win and wrest his body for Steven, lower the Magic score to 6 to represent the time spent out of his form, and gradually let it build up again.
• Assuming that Steven got his body back, interdimensional mystic bounty hunters show up to deal with him for the sins he committed as Tyrhogon. Steven needs help, and he does have this bond with the PCs....
• Everything I've just said is a lie. It's also possible that "Steven" is the former supervillain Master Mage, trapped in a book by his successor, and he has chosen this method to get the PCs to get the current powerful body of Tyrhogon the Dispossessed. Once he has it, he will regain his status as Master Mage, and probably attempt to banish or kill the PCs.