Uncanny Justice 7: Crisis on Earth V (secretly Crisis at Crusader Citadel)

Icons

Crisis on Earth V

Being a solo play with Abraham Cadabra, Honeybee, and Demiangel. Crisis on Crusader Citadel would require more updating than I want to do to move to the modern era, so I did this instead.

Guest heroes are from Icons Origins (Rogue Thorn is the Crimefighter; Somebody is the Shapeshifter) with a couple of changes: I gave the Crimefighter an extra level in Martial Arts so she could stunt; made the shapeshifter’s Transformation into Transformation (people).

I will put Icons versions of the V&V characters on my Google Drive and in the Facebook group; the ideas belong to Jeff Dee and Jack Herman.

A note from halfway through: Oh my god this feels like a slog. So much to set up before I get to the next fight. And from later on, it is over 10000 words, once I subtract character descriptions. Maybe a bit less without footnotes. Gah.

A note from the end: If this were a story, I’d cut half of it. It’s long: about 11000 words. But done.

You might notice weird text things because I started off with different names for all the characters except the Uncanny Justice ones, and then I said, “Come on, it’s not like I’m going to publish this!” and changed them back…except I missed some. So Shocker had the alternate name Amp and when I changed it back, words like tamper suddenly became tShockerer — I think I got all of those, but maybe not.

All of the character translations I did are in the Facebook ICONS group. I should put them on the wiki as well.

• Chapter 1: Sent to Center City
• Chapter 2: Who’s who
• Chapter 3: Citadel application
• Chapter 4: Briefing
• Chapter 5: Manning Enterprises
• Chapter 6: Where They Are
• Chapter 7: Assaulting Crusher Citadel
• Chapter 8: There’s No Place Like Home

Chapter 1: Sent to Center City

Demiangel lifted the robot. While Abe was deactivating it, Demiangel said, “How long is the Society going to be away?”

Still more thoughts about Crisis at Crusader Citadel

Icons

Yeah. So I ran the first half last night, and I have more thoughts. There are tons of spoilers here for a forty-year-old adventure, so be warned.

The session had its ups and down. It dragged. One of the players even talked about the AD&D mindset: plan what you're going to do, down to the number of torches! Do it, but the dice rolls will introduce complications. I think that just kills momentum. It was fine when we had all Saturday to play, but that's not the case for me anymore.

A thing I sometimes do is map an adventure onto the time available and say, “Okay, this is the halfway point and if we’re not here by this point, I have to make adjustments on the fly.” If I had done that, I think it would have been better; I should have said, “It’s really about two fights, we have three-and-a-half hours, we need to be starting the first fight within an hour.” I didn’t do that, so we got through part one in a little over three-and-a-half hours.

(I suppose that’s a kind of railroading, but given the purpose of the session, I think that’s acceptable. In an on-going campaign, I would find some other way that’s less choo-choo.)

We'll skip the real-world stuff that I had no control over, except that sometimes uncontrollable stuff happens.

I don't feel a need to run the second part as-is. I might run the whole thing again some day to try out ideas to streamline it.

I should have realized the setups for the fights drag because I found just that such a slog in solo play. Yes, the adventure seems to be basically a premise for two big fights, but getting the pieces in place is a hassle, and there has to be a better way to do that for 2022 gamers.

Let's briefly re-cap the scenes and what I think they bring to the adventure:

1. Part One:
   • Meet at the Harmon Building. (Get a clue that TEACHER is on the fritz.)
   • Get everything recapped by the reporter in the lobby, plus a bit of additional information. (Info: the name of the detective in charge of the task force, more info about the Crushers.)

   • Maybe be interviewed by the reporter. (Possible plot twist that doesn't pay off anywhere. You could maybe make it pay off; as it is, it gets negated, so it's just a colour point that might eat up a lot of time.)
   • Get to the police station (again, in both solo play and with people, this turned out to be a problem) and meet the detective. (Essentially: “Yes, we'll let you help! Why don't you take over?”) That gets you into the next part...
   • Get maps of Manning Enterprises and plan the ambush (setup).
   • Have a longish fight in the ambush.
2. Part Two:
   • Meet Dr. Patrovich and hear what the real plan is. (Informs you of your next goal.)
   • Meet escaped Crusaders, if any, an plan assault. (More planning.)
   • Fight.

Looking at that, getting to the police station is a hang-up. Both times I've played it, it was a problem: at least one character didn't have real movement powers. In a comic, we'd skip over it (“Minutes later, at the precinct…”) but with players at the table, you have to figure it out.

In retrospect, I might put Broyko, the police detective, at the Harmon Building, being interviewed by the reporter. How do we get to the police station then? Pfft; he’s got a car.

(Okay, in a modern interpretation, I wouldn’t even be in the lobby: I’d have the Crusaders have a website that’s acting weirdly, but the PCs figure out where the next theft will be — it’s not hard — and put the SWAT teams in the mix as plants in the building, and the reporter nearby. Adding more people is not going to make the Manning Enterprises fight crowded: it's already crowded AF, and that gives heroes someone to save. Use the stock characters from the rulebook.)

In a similar way, the fight in the second half rewards a lot of planning, but do you need that with a system like Icons? Retcons can carry a lot of weight here, and I'd give them a temporary Quality like “Intensive planning session” that they can activate for a retcon. (“Ah, we covered this...”)

There are at least two ways to get into the Citadel without being detected. If they need to brute force it, they can. Once they're in the headquarters, that second fight can start.

The storm is never explained, or made evident, besides the possiblity that an escaped Crusader might be dripping wet. If the player character powersets permit, I might even dramatize the storm by having lightning strike Patrovich’s plane and the PCs have to rescue him. It would give them a chance to do something else heroic, introduce the storm, and introduce Dr. Patrovich. It's a thought.

Anyway. Give the players ten minutes to plan. Execute the plan. Anything that they would reasonably have thought of is an Intellect test or an Advantage on the way. Do you remember that or did you think of it? Leave it to chance. Do you really want it to have happened? It’s a retcon.

So maybe it becomes something like:

1. Everybody tries to contact the Crusaders website; all fail to leave a message, so they know something's wrong. You out and out tell them; maybe there's a test in there for people with an appropriate specialty that gives them more information. Everybody gets five minutes of spotlight and they can use computer skills they happen to have.
2. Everybody figures out that the Crushers are probably going to attack the Manning Enterprises that night; you can do that as an Intellect test, or guide them to the info some other way. Maybe one of the heroes is listening to the police band radio; maybe they've researched the thefts; maybe they get the information off a conspiracy website. If some character really doesn't have a way to figure it out, they meet another character who drags them along.
   • Maybe the Crushers aren't hiding that they're going to show up.
   • Heck, maybe the Crushers sent a note: “You haven't been able to stop us yet. Tonight. Manning Enterprises, midnight.” Of course, they show up at ten p.m.
3. At Manning Enterprises, the Crushers show up. You have the fight, along with SWAT teams, Jessica Anderson, and J. B. Curtis, who get to actually show up in this version.
4. Part Two starts with rescuing Dr. Patrovich from some weather-related problem. He tells the heroes the problem...and that there's a deadline: The governor is sending in the military tomorrow at dawn.
5. Ten player minutes to plan, but in story it's half a day of intensive planning. Use retcons at outlined.
6. Fight.

Anyway, it's an idea. (Now that I've started thinking about it, no doubt I'll have ideas about what the various Crushers should actually be doing when the heroes break in. And the issue of how many Crushers versus how many PCs should be addressed.)

I wouldn't necessarily do things like this if it were an adventure about a mystery or one of the characters making a life choice or something like that. But this is an adventure about two big fights.

Thoughts about Crisis at Crusader Citadel

V&V

One of the things I did early in the pandemic is ask people what the best superhero RPG adventures were. I got three answers, really (but feel free to chime in if you have a suggestion):

1. "Crisis at Crusader Citadel" for Villains & Vigilantes
2. "Day of the Octopus" for Marvel Super Heroes aka FASERIP
3. "Assault on Tanghal Tower" for Champions

Being a good sort, I went off and got them, and read them. (I was looking for commonalities in making a good adventure.)

Let me spoil this for you: You need your audience to be thirteen year-old boys who have just discovered roleplaying.

Still, I have other thoughts, and the adventures are not without merit.

Let's talk about Crisis at Crusader Citadel first. (This is essentially what I posted as a comment on Facebook, but here it's easier to read.)

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Crisis at Crusader Citadel is an introductory adventure for Villains & Vigilantes, and it dates all the way back to 1982. (V&V was first published in 1979, then revised in 1982.) I have the classic (that is, unrevised) version and consider it in the context of V&V 2.1. The adventure was created by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee. I know that they updated the game with The Mighty Protectors and I am told they re-imagined the adventure, but I am not discussing those, or the comic book series. There may be information elsewhere that alters something I say.

It was the first adventure for a lot of people. I never played it, I never played V&V (though I think I read someone else's copy in the early 1980s). So consider this a discussion that's not informed by (best case) experience or (worst case) nostalgia.

Let's set some expectations, first. V&V was arguably the first real superhero RPG, showing up in 1979. It predated Champions (1981), Superworld (1982), Marvel Super Heroes aka FASERIP (1984), and DC Heroes (1985).

V&V is an excellent example of 1970s game design. (Calculating falling damage requires square roots, for example. Carrying capacity involves cubes.)

There's the attitude that the characters only get results if the players do the right thing. Stated baldly, that sounds self-evident, but there's a catch there: If you're playing Reed Richards, you need to be as smart as Reed Richards (by the rules, anyway). There's also a slight element of pixel-bitching: they have to ask just the right questions. Several times the adventure emphasizes that the characters only get information if the players ask the right questions. (It makes more sense if you remember that the player characters are supposed to be the players with superpowers.)

Power expenditure is important: do you want to use the attack that costs a lot but rolls a higher die, or do you want to whittle away at the bad guy? Icons does away with this, but it's a significant part of some character designs in V&V. The characters are also written to take advantage of things in the rules. For instance, the system rewards high agility, so most of the characters have a dex value that would put an Olympic gymnast to shame.

When the adventure discusses the strategies that the characters use, they are very much in line with the mechanics of the game. Good learning experience, difficult translation to another system.

None of this is bad. It's not my current tastes, but it's not bad.

Reading the adventure does have a certain "Life on Mars" quality because the past is a different country, as they say. There's smoking in offices; executives have secretaries and there's a secretarial pool; almost all the important figures are men. There are four female characters written up: one is short and named The Shrew, while one of the female heroes got her powers by being passive. (I'm not sure if I'm projecting when I see problems with the other two as well.¹) Men don't get it much better: Manta-Man's wife is fridged as part of his origin; a number of the villains are casually described as psychopathic or killers; and so on.

These characterizations might have been okay in 1982, but in hindsight I see problems. If this bothers you, don't read the adventure.

One last stylistic thing: It's wordy. Some things get over-explained while others are left out. Part of that is just that RPGs were less than a decade old, so you couldn't assume that the players knew anything. Part of that was the fashion of the times. Part of that is that it was laid out on paper, and sentences were altered to fit the space; it was very expensive to re-write something at the layout stage.

Now the adventure.

The players are applying to the city's premiere superteam. Unknown to everyone, the members of the superteam have been captured by their arch-foes, and the arch-foes are in the process of getting hardware to break into the superteam's computer system. In the first half of the adventure, they fight criminals trying to get that hardware; in the second part, they invade the team headquarters itself and fight a different set of villains plus any who escaped from the first session. There are mechanisms to ensure game balance: it assumes six PCs and there are things to do if you don't have six player characters.

Essentially, there are two big fights and a possible third fight:

Part one:

1. Meet (and possibly fight each other, because comics).
2. Recap the situation through the handy medium of an attractive reporter.
3. Go to the police and plan the ambush.
4. FIGHT! at the ambush.

Part two:

1. Plan the assault on the superhero headquarters.
2. FIGHT! at the headquarters.

It's not a bad design at all: players can try out skills (there aren't any but in an ICONS version there could be specialties), test out powers, meet the police, who are slightly above Chief O'Hara but not much, and then fight. (EDIT: And then I had more thoughts after trying to run it. See the next post.)

Then, having learned, they can plan a second attack and fight some more.

If the players take certain actions, they will skip the first half. Of course, then they'll face all the villains, but they don't know that. It's also not complicated. There are no double-crosses, twists, or sudden reversals. A good adventure for beginning GMs and for beginning players who are versed in a little bit of comics tradition.

The adventure occupies a weird space; the adventure explicitly says that it's a training adventure and if you point that out, some people are surprised. In theory, nothing that happens counts for character experience. (Upon asking people, nobody I asked played it that way: it was a campaign starter for all of them.)

Some elements are really rooted in the technology of the times. The Macguffin of the adventure is the attempt to break into the heroes' supercomputer, and most of it just doesn't work now. If you run the adventure today (and you're not running the 2017 re-imagining), you're going to have to alter the Macguffin elements. The heroes have a phone to use to contact them, but nowadays that might be a website.

There are also some odd mistakes. They are very careful to make the office building as realistic as possible, including washrooms and lounges and descriptions of what's in the candy machines...but the superhero headquarters have no bathrooms. One villain is explicitly mentioned as flying...but he has no Flight. (I checked the rules in case Flight was bundled into one of his other powers but I couldn't see it.)

There are great materials put forward for you to use, and the adventure doesn't. For example, one of the villains in the first half of the adventure is a flying bird-man who can't carry much because, well, he's like a bird. He'd be great for an aerial battle in the adjacent warehouse, but they don't go there; it's not even listed as a possibility. No, they spend their time in rooms and corridors that are eight feet high.

There's an awful lot to like in the adventure, but for modern readers, it's best considered a toolkit. What can you use in some other adventure?

If you plan on running this, read everything three times and make notes; you cannot assume that related items are together. In the second half, it's raining (it isn't stated but it seems obvious the weather controller is causing it) but that doesn't get mentioned in setting material. It's mentioned a little later on.

I won't fault you for buying the adventure — I did and I don't regret it — but I also won't fault you for not buying the adventure, if that makes sense. There's an awful lot of material you can repurpose for other things, though if you're not playing V&V, you'll have to do a lot of conversion.

If you love the adventure for its nostalgia factor, great! If you're a new GM, there are probably better adventures that are a bit more in sync with the current zeitgeist (because I felt like using big words).

[1] The other two are Evergreen, an immortal plant-woman from beyond time whose age is given as 19, and Marionette, a spiteful vindictive foot-tall mind-controller. I get a bizarre manic pixy dreamgirl vibe off Evergreen (and the fact of her age being specified so precisely is odd, because Mocker, who is six years old, gets “Looks adult”. Marionette reads to me — and again, maybe I'm projecting on these two — like every Feminazi cliche that exist. Is she? I dunno. In some ways, all these characters are is stereotypes for you to fight. And see the earlier comment that V&V was the first complete superhero role-playing game; I cannot fault them. I wish it were otherwise, but it was 1982 and they were forging new ground.