The ampersand game versus Iron and Gold

Iron & Gold

I am in the final bit of Curse of Strahd, and what is in D&D a minor nuisance is possibly going to kill the group, because of how I chose to adapt it to this system and how the game system works.

The monster? Two swarms of rats.

In D&D they are a CR 1/4 opponent, +2 to bite. Someone in plate doesn’t worry about them at all, and they do minimal damage. To characters who are level 9 or 10, they are nothing. You ignore them.

Here’s the situation: the characters are in a room in Castle Ravenloft, holding a particular portrait hostage, because they’re trying to call out the bad guy (Strahd), and the portrait is all he has left of her. (Campaign reasons…she’s out of his reach. See the writeups if you care.) They have two items that are powerful against vampires: The Sun Sword, which creates sunlight (bad for vampires) and does extra damage against vampires. (In fact, the wielder has offed two vampires by beheading, which is possible given the change in game systems.) They also have the holy symbol, which operates on charges. While the holy symbol works, it might be able to stop a vampire for a minute, whereupon the adventurers can stake them. It works on charges, so Strahd’s tactic is to send wave after wave of vampire spawn at the heroes, until the holy symbol is out for the day.

In D&D, armor makes you harder to hit. It has no effect on the amount of damage you take, and by this point in a D&D campaign, even the wimpiest of characters has more than 50 hit points and armor class 15 or better. The rat swarm has to roll more than 12 to hit, and the character can probably take bites for a couple of turns. A swarm of rats is a nuisance, but frankly, you’re more worried about the vampires and the tremendous amount of damage they’re handing out. Plus, the likelihood of being hit doesn't change much.

In Iron & Gold, the chance of a rat hitting is higher (I have the rat swarm a chance to hit on ≤6, and the heroes are all ≤9 or better on their fighting skills, which is great if they’re only dealing with rats, but their attention is on the vampires instead; in Iron & Gold the chance of hitting is better if your opponent is actually dealing with something else); armor might stop damage but only might, and you only have 5 levels of damage you can take. A rat swarm can do three levels of damage in a round, and by the end of the second round, you might be dead.^[1]

So the vampires keep the adventurers busy but the rats keep biting them, and sooner or later, they wear the characters down…

Very different situations:^[2] in D&D, the rats do damage only 20% of the time, and when they do, it’s for less than a tenth of total HP. It means that in Iron & Gold there isn’t any ignoring a threat. Everything can be dangerous.

This leads to play style changes: in D&D, you can charge forward. In Iron & Gold, you try to get things in your favour. In this case, the characters sealed all the exits to minimize enemies, but didn’t realize that (a) there was a secret door and (b) the seals they could put on the doors were not proof against strong vampires who live in the building. Vampires broke the doors down, rats flooded in, and suddenly the characters are fighting on more than three fronts.

...Geez, it’s like I’m running this in Runequest or Harnmaster...

[1] Though, to be honest, a rat swarm can kill a bog-standard commoner in D&D as well.

[2] As an example, a swarm of rats, according to Wizards of the Coast, has about 27 hit points, does 7 damage, is +2 to hit, and does 7 (2d6) damage. The human fighter that Wizards of the Coast has on DMsGuild.com has 79 hit points at Armor Class 19, with a longsword. The rats hit AC 19 only on 17-20. In Iron & Gold, Ninefingers, my sort-of-fighter, has high dueling (≤10) and scale armor (means that an individual point of damage is only 2/3 as likely to penetrate). A swarm of rats is ≤6 to bite, and does three points of damage, reduced if the swarm gets smaller. (I had to invent mechanics for swarms of rats, so this is not official.) Assuming that Ninefingers is distracted by the other threats, he's less likely to get hurt (a little over 14%) but if he gets hurt, it takes away a fifth or more of his health.

World-building flavour (SF)

So there’s this article on NPR (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293253/his-genes-forecast-alzheimers-his-brain-had-other-plans?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us but I’ll summarize it for you.

• Early-onset Alzheimers runs in his family; no one else has lived to be past 60 and they all had it by 50. The cause is a mutation in a specific gene.
• He is the only person to have lived to 75 with that mutation. (Two other people in Colombia have lived past 60, but their mutation is on a different chromosome.)
• They don’t know why. Certain mutated proteins accumulate throughout the brain in normal sufferers, but they’re concentrated in a tiny area in him.
• They suspect the fact that he has a lot of heat shock proteins in his brain might be causing it; heat shock proteins are caused by working in hot environments, like the engine room of a ship. (He was in the Navy for 20 years, and temperatures are routinely above 43 Celsius or 110 Fahrenheit.)

Wildly irresponsible world-building follows.

You have a hot planet—call it “Hades”—with a high frequency of this particular mutation. It doesn’t particularly express itself because of heat shock proteins...but when people leave the planet young, before 25, they don’t have sufficient levels of heat shock proteins.

(Insert reason for high frequency: possibly founder's effect, possibly that there’s no selective pressure against it.)

Now insert general prejudice about people from Hades, because “everybody knows” that they develop early onset Alzheimers if they are off the planet.

A story? No. But a detail you could throw into a story.

Icons

A bit of world building.

Our city — maybe yours too — has had supers since at least the 1950s, and one of them was a possibly-grim definitely-human vigilante called “MidKnight.” (I’m sure the name looked clever in 1958.) Possibly because child endangerment laws were different then, he had a sidekick, “Squire.”

Actually, he eventually had a metric butt-load of Squires.

At least one went on to become a superhero in his own right, Wild Justice; some later retired (one founded a sporting goods chain and capitalized), and one probably died in the course of superhero-ing. Teenagers made their own costumes, became vigilantes, and sometimes MidKnight picked them and they became the real official-as-it-gets Squire.

MidKnight stopped being active in 1974, which made him positively ancient by urban vigilante standards. By then, being the Squire was like being in a garage band: many tried it, and a few went on to be actual superheroes. The trend mostly died out by the 1990s but it never vanished.

The Limbo Tavern

Any

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Population

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving the Tavern

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

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

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

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

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

The Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs

M&M

In my games, we sometimes deal with the Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs, which started as the Canadian department for dealing with extraterrestrial civilizations. There is a bureaucratic arm and an investigative arm.

For this week's adventure, I have modified the BEFA for superheroes. They are a subdivision of the department of Foreign Affairs, and they deal with extra-normal political entities.

While high technology and super-science might not fall into their remit, magic almost always does. Trade something with fairyland? They deal with the excise taxes. Granted a boon by a Lovecraftian cosmic horror? They put a dollar value on it or determine if it's dangerous to the public safety. They also deal with the local equivalents of Atlantis or Themyscira. Heck, they might be responsible for extradimensional refugees, or be the department that calls your heroes when Galactus arrives. ("He has refused normal methods of communication and I am sure we don't want a repeat of the Thanos issue. The deaths and rebirths alone cause an incredible number of headaches.")

In the Dr. Why adventure, they can occasionally borrow from the Department of Defense a magic-sniffer (who is not without her own problems) to find, say, a previously-shielded magic power source of unknown provenance, which might indicate illegal trade, smuggling, or the existence of a previously-unrealized pantheon.

And just having thought about them this much makes me want to do a short BEFA adventure.

Not Tinder, but...

Worldbuilding

(Originally posted on Facebook)

It suddenly occurred to me today that a supers smartphone app would solve so many problems in contacting other supers (this is distinct from "super Tinder" which I have also talked about).

Problem 1: What's it called?

The names I come up with seem very...quotidian. SuperTalk. ParaGraph or MetaGraph. The cutest so far is "App, App, and Away".

I'm thinking of an app that does the following (or says it does; whether it really does it is left as an exercise for the GM):

• anonymizes or never gets location info
• offers the choice of really deleting exchanges or, like SnapChat, deletes them after a certain period of time
• encrypts data that's transmitted or saved, so if someone makes a copy of your phone somehow, they don't have a way to read your info. (I leave actual details to someone with expertise, but I'm thinking of a key that's stored somewhere and everything is encrypted in a new way after each look, though the transmission of the key might be vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack
• does not translate but handles multiple language code sets
• provides a list of enrolled supers, so if you've never met Fantastica you can still send him/her/it a message.

Problem 2: How are people verified?

Given that the supers population is limited, this might actually be a use for blockchain algorithms. My tentative answer is that some other user verifies you. So you can *get* the app off iTunes or the Google store or whatever the equivalent is, but you can't *use* the app until you're verified.

There might be a second app for getting in touch with heroes, but I think it would be like looking at a celebrity's Instagram: every fifth entry is "I love you so much! Please answer this!"

Thoughts on SuprTindr

SYSTEM: ANY

I saw a preview over on G+ for Green Lanterns that mentioned a dating app for superheroes. And I started thinking about an app for supervillains and superheroes. Not to date, but to have combats.

Actually, I'm not joking (though I'm sure it has been used as a joke).

Here's the thing: if you have a superhero world where there is a significant amount of celebrity to being a super, where the business of threatening the world and saving the world are objects of interest. Seanan Maquire's Velveteen stories are the kind of world involved.

Now, there probably isn't a market for such an app...but there would be a market for the generic hookup app you imagined first...and it could be a feature in the app. A dating app essentially lets you present a profile to people and it allows people to filter out candidates and choose from them. Really, the same app could be repurposed for a number of things. The pool of possible candidates is probably small.

You a hero looking for another hero to date or hook up with? Use the app. You can filter based on sexual preference. Heck, you can probably predefine whether you want someone who self-identifies as a hero, as a villain, or something else.

And if you were a person with a fixation on dating supers (or a particular super) wouldn't you really want the app so you could maybe meet your dream? Superheroes have to have groupies. Heck, supervillains probably have groupies, which might make for an interesting evening...trying to find the young man who wanted to date Ivory Toxin, the supervillain who sweats mind-altering chemicals before he succeeds and finds her).

And, just to bring us around to the idea of things you can use in your supers games, wouldn't that be exactly the kind of app you'd want to hack, so that the phone involved would always be telling you where a particular super is at any given time?

A Sketchy Background

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

Strange City background

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

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

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

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

Sidekix

Way back in the 1990s, I ran a one-off using DC Heroes that I called Sidekix. Basically, it was an adventure where the Teen Titans surrogates had grown up and most had quit adventuring, but old business drew them together. I had the material on my page on Geocities. The team was the Teen Team (I didn't know about Invincible then, if it even existed.)

Between the time that Geocities went down and now, I lost the files. Today I discovered that some sites saved Geocities stuff. So, for your amusement (and really my desire to save stuff), here is a very long post that is the player information for that. Some of the players are named in square brackets; I hope they don't mind. Looking at it again, I suspect I then added material to make it a sourcebook for GMs. It is, however, firmly rooted in the mid 1990s. (I know that Quicksilver wouldn't work as a character name for something published, but players get to name their own characters.)

I might edit this retroactively to add stats for a more recent roleplaying system. I will also fix the formatting, which is a pain to do on the iPad in Blogger.

Sidekix: Player Information

Once upon a time, a group of superhero sidekicks banded together to create the Teen Team. Though they frequently and vehemently denied it, they were basically a second-string Teen Titans. Over their history, they had a large roster of members, though only five or six were active at any given time. About five years ago, the Teen Team formally
disbanded.

Every year, members get together over Christmas for a week in a lodge in the woods. (Lot of sidekicks are orphans, without families for the holidays.) It's not a big secret — members bring their significant others. It's a chance to unwind, see old friends, etc. (The lodge is owned by one of the Team — he made a fortune off the Sidekix TV series (and the toys and the breakfast cereal and...))

This section describes the Teen Team and the guidelines for creating a new character to be part of the Teen Team. I recommend you play one of the existing members, just because it's easier for me.

The players are former members of the Teen Team but they don't have to be active supers. (Several may have given up the idea of superheroing. Frank Miller once said he always figured Dick Grayson gave up being Robin at 20 and opened a sporting goods store.) Or to get extra wonky players could play current spouses of former members.... (Kind of the adventures of Sue Dibny!)

The Teen Team

The Teen Team was a group of young heroes who banded together during the 1980s. In the early 80s, it was Kid Frost, Bullseye, and Courier du Bois, but the group went through four incarnations in its history, and the membership changed each time. Kid Frost and Bullseye have remained members in every incarnation.

Here's the one-page list of members; * indicates a currently active hero:

Core	Auxiliary
Bullseye* (Chris Kane), master of throwing things	Courier du Bois (Gabrielle Lacroix), speedster
The Fog* (Howie Kunin), a brick	Copycat (Cassady Nelson), a Mimic
Glamour Girl (Elisabet Skorzeny), psionicist	Fleur de Lis (Elise Marchand) & Wild Rose (Seana Toomey), May Queen
Ivory (Karen Lincoln), a brick (comatose)	Gorgon (Katie Lidofsky), paralyzing brick
Janet Leesk, weirdness magnet	Lifter (Naomi Glanzig), gravity control
Kid Frost (Ragnar Eisengrimm), ice powers	Nocturne (Angela Bisset), darkness powers
Quicksilver (Ken Takahiro), flying speedster	Psychopomp,* "Kid Phantom Stranger"
Red Fang (Thomas Greene), martial artist	Whirligig (Kelly Garner), a gadgeteer
Scatter (Morgan Crowe), teleporter/disintegrator with a TV show	Wonder Lad* (Kenneth Kim), "Flying Brick Lad"

Other members can be added at the discretion of the GM.

History

The history of the Teen Team falls into four main incarnations, although the team wasn't formally disbanded until five years ago. Times given are relative ("years ago" — the dates in brackets were used for the group.)

14-13 years ago (1981-1982)

Team founded by Kid Frost, Bullseye, and Courier du Bois.

13-10 years ago (1983-1985)

The group gets a Jobs Ontario grant to train young metahumans. A lot of activity: Most of the "other" members join (briefly) during this time. Despite all the activity, there's no real feeling of progress or of group cohesion.

10-6 years ago (1985-1989)

Longest continuous membership. The "core" members belong during this time. This is probably the most productive time, personally, for the members of the group.

6-5 years ago (1989-1990)

Following the last fight with Baron Drakonyn (which puts Ivory in a coma), the Team disintegrates into arguments and finally, Bullseye pulls the plug.

2 years ago-present (1993-1995)

The Sidekix TV series becomes popular.

Member Descriptions

These are the "core" members, the ones who belonged during the group's longest-lived incarnation. Of the other members, some are defined, some are not; this is to allow players and GMs some leeway in creating new members.

Stats given are the current versions of the team members. If the differences between current versions and five years ago are minor, earlier stats are given in parentheses (). In some cases (such as The Fog), the earlier statistics are radically different, and these are given in another section ("The Younger Team").

Bullseye (Chris Kane)

One of the few active crime-fighters left in the group. A master of throwing things — he has an extensive collection of grenades, bolos, throwing disks, boomerangs, and so on. (He uses them in combat, but they're not yet reflected in his character writeup.) He owns a small number of collector's items — the javelin used to set the current world record, a boomerang from Captain Boomerang, and a Batarang. All three were gifts from Bolo, his (former) patron. He's since had a falling out with Bolo, when he discovered that Bolo had feet of clay. (The nature of the failing is up to the GM and the player.)

He's got a mordant sense of humour, but without that, he's a bit of a dickweed. Very upright, very moral. He's the one who had the "true stories" clause inserted in the Sidekix releases that everyone signed. He's also something of a neat freak.

One of his hobbies is cooking; he and Ivory have had fierce discussions over the proper preparation of butter tarts (it's an East-West thing).

Chris is currently an instructor in military history at RMC (Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario). He divides his time between Kingston and Winnipeg.

Dex	5	Str	3	Body	5	Initiative	16
Int	5	Will	4	Mind	5	Hero Points	27
Infl	6	Aura	4	Spirit	4	Wealth	6

Motivation: Upholding the Good

Advantages: Sharp Eye

Skills: Medicine (First Aid) 6, Vehicles 7, Weaponry (Missiles, Exotic) 8

Drawbacks: Secret ID, Serious Irrational Attraction to strict moral code

Patron: Bolo (estranged)

Appearance: Solidly built, Chris must exercise regularly or he starts to put on weight. Light brown hair and hazel eyes.

Relations with others: Chris is probably closest to Janet. He frequently argued with the rest of the group of the "proper" way to do things. (Chris is a stickler for detail when it comes to crime fighting.) He would never call someone by a nickname while in costume.

The Fog (Howard Kunin [James Nicoll])

Born in 1968 to a single mother who then handed Howie off to a series of relatives, Howie never had a stable home life. In 1985, he discovered some Miraclo in a Tyler Industries factory an uncle was guarding. By 1986, he was fighting crime as the Fog, alongside Mr. Whisper, a super-stealthy martial artist type. In 1987, he joined the Teen Team for 18 months, and then was asked to resign since the government did not want the negative PR of having a super on the team whose powers derived from a drug.

A few years back, he fought RipTide, who cunningly dissolved all of Howie's Miraclo pills and then dropped a cliff on him. As Howie was bleeding to death, a Lord of Chaos offered him a deal — innate powers in exchange for a few favours down the line. Howie said yes.

Since then, he has been offering his services as an occult fixer, dealing with deluded minions of Chaos ("You set up a rigid hierarchy to worship a chaotic god?") and the less pleasant servants of the Lords of Order. He has an ad offering his services in the Yellow Pages. So far, his patron seems to be one of the nicer Lords of Chaos and hasn't asked for anything Howie wasn't willing to do.

Dex	5	Str	9	Body	9	Initiative	15
Int	5	Will	5	Mind	4	Hero Points	16
Infl	5	Aura	9	Spirit	5	Wealth	3

Powers: Fog* 9 (17), Truesight (mystic link) 5 (27), Regeneration* 5 (49), Magic Sense 5 (27), Awareness 10 (31)

Skills: Occultist 9 (120)

Advantages: Scholar (stage magic), Scholar (Lords of Chaos), Scholar (Occult Groups)

Bonus: His strength is considered Magical (+1 FC), so a punch from the Fog will trigger a Vulnerability to Magical attacks

Wealth: 3 (4)

Drawbacks: Serious Irrational fear of Rejection, Loss Vulnerability, Powers and Attributes in Realms of Law (0 APs range) (175-50), Public ID (5), Traumatic Flashback — Rejection (60), Serious Irrational Attraction - Untidy (25), Serious Irrational Attraction — Occult (25)

Appearance: 5 ft 10, 140 lbs (wiry, not skinny) grey eyes and hair. He keeps his hair about shoulder length. He doesn't wear a costume any more, but usually wears grey jeans and a grey shirt (easier to colour-coordinate if everything's the same colour). He has a beard off and on — currently, he has a scruffy goatee w/ no moustache. He has many small scars from regenerated near-fatal wounds and is missing the tip of his finger from a scuffle with a cultist with a very sharp knife last week. Usually he looks a bit distracted and acts a bit distant because of his second sight.

Tactics: He tries to talk things out until he gets hit, then he fogs the area (if he's working alone) and tries to subdue the person hitting him as painlessly as possible. If that doesn't work, he tries to lie very very still until his regen kicks in.

Personality: Howie has drifted apart from or been kicked out of every relationship he's ever had, and any hint that it was going to happen again would make him very depressed. He is compulsively untidy and this extends to things like saving phone numbers or remembering dates.

Relationships: Zip. Mr Whisper dumped him because he wasn't serious enough (Mr. Whisper looks like Chalky from Giles, if you dressed him in spandex and kevlar, btw). Howie likes most folks, but things never work out so that they stay in touch. The Teen Teamer he has run into most often is Janet Leesk, because their cases sometimes intersect.

In the group, the only people he dislikes are Glamour Girl and Red Fang, because he thinks they are users and that's wrong. Psychopomp keeps showing up and dumping him into situations Howie can't handle, which is annoying. He thinks Leesk is way cute.

Glamour Girl (Elisabet Skorzeny)

Product of Romanian research into psionics. She escaped before the purge. She's very vain and acquisitive about things Western. Now a mid-level fashion model, and not particularly well-liked by her peers.

Dex	3	Str	2	Body	3	Initiative:	14
Int	4	Will	7	Mind	6	Hero Points:	26
Infl	7	Aura	6	Spirit	7	Wealth:	7

Motivation: Thrill of Adventure

Powers: Flight 5, Exorcism* 7, Mind Field* 7, Mental Freeze* 7, Mind Blast* 7, Broadcast Empathy 7, True Sight* 7

Advantages: Attractive, Connoisseur

Drawbacks: Voluntary Exile, Attack vulnerability (-2 CS vs. drugs), Serious Irrational Attraction to own beauty (vanity)

Relations with others: She was jealous of Karen (Ivory), and occasionally contemptuous of Janet ("She has no powers"). She got along best with Morgan because they shared some attitudes, next with Ragnar because he's so amiable. Ragnar had a brief crush on her, but saw it was going nowhere.

Ivory (Karen Lincoln)

Karen Lincoln was at camp and got lost on an overnight hike. She nearly died, but aliens found her in the forest and fixed her. They didn't know tough and strong a human was supposed to be... She's very strong and tough, but her hair and skin are no longer black, they're coloured ivory (hence her codename).

She was the de facto team leader for years (although no one on the team would have said there was a leader). She's also the most popular member of the Team; think of her has the calm center of the storm, the heart of the group. Given this, it's understandable that the Team fell apart after she fell into a coma.

This is not to say she didn't have her problems; among other things, she received some flak for not being "black" enough. (Her parents were doctors, and she had no experience with being poor.) She empathized strongly with those who were outcast or "different" — she had been there, both as a black in a mostly-white environment, and as a black who was no longer black.

During the last battle with Baron Drakonyn, she was hit with a mystic artifact and went down. She has never awakened. Much of her medical treatment has been funded by Quicksilver Couriers (and OHIP, of course :).

Her parents received power of attorney over her in 1990. They were killed in a car crash last year, so power of attorney has devolved onto their executor, Elliot Clarke, a Halifax attorney.

Dex	6	Str	11	Body	7	Initiative:	16
Int	5	Will	5	Mind	5	Hero Points:
Infl	5	Aura	4	Spirit	4	Wealth:	5

Powers: Skin Armor* 7, Jumping 9

Advantages: Popularity, Attractive, Sharp Eye, Leadership

Skills: Charisma (Persuasion) 7, Medicine* (First Aid) 5

Drawbacks: Public ID, Uncertainty, Attack Vulnerability (-2 CS vs. magic)

Motivation: Responsibility of Power

Relations with others: She was reluctant to declare herself a leader. She got along reasonably well with everyone, although Elisabet gave her the most conflict personally. Unless she felt very strongly, she usually let Chris have his way in battle because Chris' own moral code prevented him from doing anything less than what was best for the group. She was dating Ken Takahiro (Quicksilver) when she was put in the coma.

Ivory had no nicknames; she was referred to as Karen as often as Ivory. Once, in an argument, Elisabet made fun of her by talking jive (as she had learned it from television shows) — one of the few times anyone ever saw Karen cry.

Janet Leesk

Her power, if you want to call it that, is that she's a weirdness magnet of immense degree. The synchronicity highway is a fact of life to Janet. The (contradictory) result of this is that, while she's still an innocent in many ways, the odd situations she's encountered have forced her to learn pretty much all of the skills in the rulebook.

Today she's a detective with Pinkerton's; she's lost the baby fat she had before and looks good. She's still bothered by the fact that Thomas regarded their one-night stand as a sympathy job.

Dex	4	Str	2	Body	4	Initiative	16
Int	6	Will	5	Mind	7	Hero Points	31
Infl	6	Aura	5	Spirit	7	Wealth	5

Motivation: Thrill of Adventure

Advantages: Sharp Eye, Intensive Training, Iron Nerves, Omni-Connection, Luck

Skills: Acrobatics* 5, Charisma* 6, Detective 7, Martial Artist 5, Medicine* (Forensics and First Aid) 6, Occult* 6

Drawbacks: Innocent, Unluck

Powers: Janet has one power: she's a weirdness magnet of immense degree. This is reflected by her Luck and Unluck. (In game terms, it's largely a GM function.)

Patron: None

Appearance: Now in her early twenties, she's of medium height and build. Her eyes are brown, her hair is chestnut (with a little help from her hairdresser) and currently kept in a Louise Brooks bob.

Relations with others: Janet gets along well with Bullseye and with Howie. She once had an obvious crush on Thomas, but has since gotten over it.

Nicknames: Ragnar occasionally called Janet "Weirdness Magnet Girl."

Kid Frost (Ragnar Eisengrimm)

Ragnar's anything but cool (forgive the pun). Enthusiastic, he's the one who keeps re-forming the group. He knows that he doesn't work well on his own (not motivated enough, perhaps), but he's an excellent team player.

His patron was Iceberg, who recognized Ragnar's mutant powers and schooled him so the boy wouldn't hurt anyone. Their relationship has been strained for the last few years because Ragnar hasn't moved on.

There's some opportunity for comedy, too, since Ragnar really is trying to find a new group to join, but isn't having much success. ("A form letter! The Outsiders rejected me with a form letter!")

His fiancee is Wendy Ault; her family has disinherited her because they don't approve of Ragnar. Their money troubles make Ragnar particularly anxious that no money has ever shown up from the Sidekix TV show.

Dex	5	Str	3	Body	4	Initiative	17
Int	5	Will	5	Mind	5	Hero Points	28
Infl	5	Aura	4	Spirit	4	Wealth	4

Motivation: Upholding the Good

Advantages: Scholar (Engineering)

Skills: Martial Artist 6

Powers: Ice Production 10, Icing 1

Drawbacks: Secret ID, Uncertainty, 2 column shifts vs. heat attacks

Patron: Permafrost

Appearance: Ragnar is 6'2" and lean, with blue eyes and straw-blond hair, usually cut short. He has thin lips and a tan complexion. As himself, he tends to dress in blue jeans and flannel plaid shirts or teeshirts, usually in greens and browns. As Kid Frost, he wears shaded goggles, a pale-blue and silver body suit, often with a jacket. He uses his 1 AP of Icing to disguise his face.

Relations with others: Ragnar gets along with nearly everybody. Morgan and Thomas call him Frosty. Chris Kane never calls him anything but Kid Frost while in costume.

Quicksilver (Ken Takahiro [Brian Dorion])

Flying speedster. His powers manifested at 14, after a trip to Japan with his mother, though there's no indication of what caused them to bloom. He joined the group in 1988.

He was dating Ivory when she was hurt. Afterwards, he quit with a flurry of criticism ("What's the point of all of this? Why don't we make some money from this?") and founded Quicksilver Courier. He also got married to Phoebe Chin, who's perceived as a real party girl. The business prospered (Jag and a Porsche in the garage) and specializes in couriering medical items. (Motto: "When it absolutely has to get there in ten minutes.") He has recently branched out into hiring other kinds of metahumans.

He just separated from his wife, Phoebe Chin, who figured he'd stopped being a party guy.

Dex	5	Str	3	Body	3	Initiative	24
Int	4	Will	4	Mind	5	Hero Points	105
Infl	4	Aura	4	Spirit	5	Wealth	10

Motivation: Unwanted Power

Skills: Martial Artist* 5

Powers: Flight 14 (approx. 28,000 mph), Superspeed 9

Gadget: Costume: [BODY: 7]

Advantages: Low Security Clearance (15 pts), Scholar (Business)

Drawbacks: Public ID, Guilt, Minor Irrational Attraction to Action (impatient)

Patron: None.

Appearance: Ken is about 5'10", 178 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. He's half Japanese.

Relations with others: He was dating Ivory.

Red Fang (Thomas Greene)

Thomas was your basic angry-native-martial artist. Patron was Coyote. He really hates the whole noble savage image — unless it gets him laid. Thomas had hormones and urges like very few others. He hit on everyone in the Team. He's devastatingly attractive, and knows it.

After a bad period drinking and treatment for sex addiction, he's turned himself around. Quitting drinking has given him a potbelly, though he still keeps himself limber and active. Today he works in a youth counseling center in Brantford.

Dex	7 (8)	Str	3	Body	4	Initiative	21
Int	5	Will	4	Mind	3	Hero Points	12
Infl	5	Aura	4	Spirit	4	Wealth	4

Motivation: Seeking Justice

Advantages: Scholar (Counseling), Lightning Reflexes

Skills: Martial Artist 8, Thief 6, Military Science 6

Drawbacks: Secret ID, Serious Irrational Attraction to women (later to self-control)

Appearance: Handsome, tall, Ojibway. Imagine a younger version of Grahame Greene with a potbelly.

Patron: Coyote.

Relations with others: Open to interpretation. He argued a lot with Bullseye, whom he regarded as a competitor in terms of combat ability.

Scatter (Morgan Crowe)

Could teleport items; if he didn't want the item to arrive, it didn't.

Morgan is the one who got everyone to sign the forms, and who made the fortune off the Sidekix TV show.

Dex	5	Str	3	Body	5	Initiative	15
Int	4	Will	4	Mind	5	Hero Points	27
Infl	6	Aura	4	Spirit	4	Wealth	7

Motivation: Unwanted Power

Skills: Actor 5

Powers: Teleportation 7, Disintegration 7, Force Field 7

Bonuses and Limitations: Teleportation doesn't necessarily include self (+1); Teleportation only works on objects at range of Touch (-1); Disintegration power only works on items that could be teleported (-1 FC); Force Field is self only.

Drawbacks: Public ID

Patron: None.

Appearance: Morgan is just under six feet tall and works out regularly; off-screen he looks a trifle thin and hollow-cheeked. He keeps his hair bleached blond and short. His eyes are gray.

Relations with others: He got along with anyone who wasn't strongly "superhero-ey."

Morgan hated his codename, and tried several during his time with the Team, although he kept coming back to Scatter. Janet would occasionally ask him what his "nom de boom" was today.

Other Members

Here are some of the other members of the Teen Team, over the years. They have sketchier descriptions and backgrounds, of course.

Courier du Bois (Gabrielle Lacroix)

Speedster, and one of the founding members of the group. After the little fracas with her mentor, Voyageur, she retired. Now works in the department of metahuman affairs in Ottawa.

Copycat (Cassady Nelson)

Metagene carrier with gross Mimic power. Nowadays, works as a stunt man/actor in Vancouver; has worked on the Sidekix TV show.

Fleur de Lis and Wild Rose

Just over twenty years ago, there was another attempt at a May Queen (as Poison Ivy had been an attempt), this time on an unborn child. Twins were born. Those who oppose these things arranged for the death of the girls' parents and the girls went to separate orphanages, one in Quebec
and another in Alberta. Both sisters now live in Vancouver. Seana is divorced and Elise has never married.

Elise and Seana are identical twins. Both are slim strawberry blondes with violet eyes. Elise has slightly better muscle tone than Seana does and has a somewhat haunted look about her. Seana is more open and aggressive.

Wild Rose (Seana Toomey)

Seana tends to be aggressive and forthright than her sister. She is also more set in her views; she doesn't have her sister's history of mild mental instability to create uncertainty.

Dex	5	Str	2	Body	4	Initiative	17
Int	6	Will	4	Mind	4	Hero Points	61
Infl	6	Aura	8	Spirit	7	Wealth	5

Motivation: Thrill of Adventure

Powers: Plant Control* 8, Poison Touch 5, Joined* 8, Systemic
Antidote 5

Skills: Charisma 7, Artist (Photographer) 7

Drawbacks: Secret Id, Fatal Vulnerability (range Touch: -50) to herbicides (common)

Fleur de Lis (Elise Marchand)

Elise is more cautious, and tends to be more reflective. Fleur de Lis tends to be the reflective one; although her powers are not "combat" powers, she does train in the martial arts.

Dex	5	Str	3	Body	5	Initiative	17
Int	6	Will	4	Mind	5	Hero Points	61
Infl	6	Aura	4	Spirit	4	Wealth	5

Motivation: Unwanted Power

Powers: Plant Growth* 8, Awareness 12, Magic Sense 8, Systemic Antidote 5, Speak to Plants 6

Skills: Martial Arts 7

Drawbacks: Minor Psychological Instability (blackouts), Fatal Vulnerability (range Touch: -50) to herbicides (common)

Gorgon (Katie Lidofsky)

Brick whose gaze could turn people to "stone", though it wore off.

Lifter (Naomi Glanzig)

Naomi is a mutant with the ability to siphon mass from one object and place it on another. She adventured with the Team briefly when they had a Jobs Canada grant to train young metahumans in the use of their powers. She had a teenage marriage that broke up and left her with a three-year-old son. Her stiff-necked pride has often caused her to refuse help when it's offered.

Naomi Croft discovered she was a mutant when she was in her middle teens. By then she was already pregnant and soon after, she dropped out of high school and married her boyfriend, Paul Glanzig. When their son Frankie was sixteen months old, Paul lost his job at the distillery and took off for parts unknown. Too proud to ask for help from her parents, she joined a pilot Jobs Ontario Canada program to teach mutants to handle their powers. The Teen Team were the program. When the program's funding ran out, she left the Team.

She tries to earn money using her powers on construction sites and so forth, but she's rarely needed. (Most jobs are budgeted to use cranes and similar equipment; there's also the fact that when she lifts more than 4 APs of weight, she takes damage, unless she aims at something else.)

She dotes on Frankie but can be a stern disciplinarian. If invited to the party, she would refuse to go unless she could get there under her own power. She has been to the get-together in the past, but Team members have to essentially conspire to kidnap her.

Naomi is generally considered to be tough, mentally. Naomi is uncomfortable in high society; she'd rather spend a night in a bar drinking beers (she prefers Labatt Blue).

Dex	5	Str	4	Body	7	Initiative	14
Int	4	Will	5	Mind	5	Hero Points	7
Infl	5	Aura	4	Spirit	5	Wealth	4

Motivation: Mercenary

Advantages: Iron Nerves

Skills: Charisma 6

Powers: Gravity Increase 8, Gravity Decrease 8, Density Increase 4

Limitations: Both gravity powers always go off simultaneously, transferring the mass from one object to another. If only one power is aimed, the excess mass always comes from/goes to Lifter herself. If she is receiving the Gravity Increase, she takes damage from Gravity Increase as normal. (-2 FC)

Drawbacks: Misc: Family (equivalent to Married), Minor Irrational Fear of Darkness, Serious Irrational Attraction to Independence


Appearance: A wiry, strong-jawed blonde, Naomi usually keeps her hair in a ponytail, threaded through the back of her baseball cap. She's partial to tee-shirts and jeans, though she owns one interview dress (navy blue) and one church dress (off-white).

Note: Use of the Gravity power(s) is always a Trick Shot. If both powers are aimed (on different targets, obviously), it's treated as a Trick Shot and a Multi-Attack. If one (or more) of the powers is doing a Multi-Attack, use double the largest group for the modifiers.

Mantis (Bobby Prescott) [Jim Gardner]

Ten-year-old Bobby Prescott rescued a Praying Mantis from a group of boys who were torturing it. This caught the attention of the Mantis God, who rewarded Bobby in the only way it knew how: it turned Bobby into a six-foot-tall human-mantis thing. Bobby desperately wants to be "one of the guys" but can't because of his Strange Appearance.

Since the Team broke up, he too has drifted. He moved to British Columbia because the winters were milder. He is actively involved in the ecology movement, although he is frequently shot at, since the authorities naturally mistrust a giant insect.

Dex	7	Str	7	Body	5	Initiative	14
Int	5	Will	5	Mind	5	Hero Points	105
Infl	5	Aura	5	Spirit	5	Wealth	0

Motivation: Unwanted Power

Skills: 7 Martial Arts*

Powers: 5 Cling*, 7 Extra Limb*, 7 Extra Limb* (two extra legs), 5 Skin Armor*, 7 Superspeed*, 5 Full Vision*, 5 Solar Sustenance*, 5 Speak w/Animals*, 5 Animal Summoning*, 5 Animal Control*

Limitations: Speak With Animals is Insects only; Summoning is Praying Mantises only.

Drawbacks: Physical: No real hands (25), Public ID, Strange Appearance (30),Traumatic Flashbacks (life before transformation) (60), Irrational Attraction to insects, Mistrust, Psychological Instability (25)

Appearance: Bobby is now a six-foot-tall mantis-human. He has no opposable thumbs, and speaks by vibrating a tympanum. He has four legs, wings, and large bulgy eyes that give him 360-degree vision and the ability to see in the dark.

Nocturne (Angela Bisset)

Darkness based powers, vulnerability to light. Originally belonged to the Fraternity of Darkness. Had a tremendous crush onBullseye, but nothing ever came of it.

The Psychopomp

(AKA Kid Phantom Stranger). No one ever knew his real name. He sometimes showed up, pointed to things, and then disappeared. As Robin once said re: The Phantom Stranger, Psychopomp is big on cryptic. Janet gave him the name "Psychopomp," saying that's what he was. If you need a character write-up, give him 15 APs of Awareness and Sorcery each. I don't recommend giving him to a player.

Whirligig (Kelly Garner)

Gadgeteer. Now working for STAR Labs.

White Dwarf (N'kulanpasst'k)

White Dwarf was an alien princess who had been exposed to light passing through a fragment of a white dwarf star (the same thing that shrank Ray Palmer). Wary of the fact that she might explode (as most shrunk objects did), her people exiled her for the safety of the planet. She came to Earth to talk to Ray Palmer (she'd heard about him through the JLA and the Green Lanterns), but never actually managed to meet him. She eventually gained the ability to adjust her size to between two millimeters and five centimeters. She was fantastically strong and was often used for covert operations. Unfortunately, she understood almost no Earthly technology, and her people had a taboo against eating or drinking in public (defecation and fornication were fine, however). She has not been heard from for years.

Wonder Lad (Kenneth Kim)

Kenneth Kim (AKA "Generic Flying Brick Lad"). The current Canadian Shield, after the original Shield's scandalous departure.

Creating Your Own Teen Team Member

Some players won't find an existing Team member who interests them; that's fine. Here are the guidelines for creating your own members of the Teen Team:

Create a 450-point base character. Standard 15 point bonuses for background, appearance, and personality. Character creation questionnaire would include such questions as:

• Why did you join the Teen Team?
• Why did you quit?
• Who did you argue with the most?
• Did you ever date anyone in the Teen Team?
• Would you consider yourself part of the "main" Teen Team?
  
• Why did you come to the annual get-together?
• What is your general attitude towards heroes?
• Have you kept any secrets from the other members?
• Are you a sidekick — have you a patron hero?
• If so, what's your relationship like with your patron? What's your
  history?
• Are you still an active hero? If not, why not?

Because the Teen Team is defined as having had such a large membership, the GM could control aspects of the scenario through the NPC members. For instance, a PC decides to play Carbon. The GM can create a whole history of a relationship with, oh, Glamour Girl.

That's meant to be part of the fun. Since the group broke up, you're free to make up the relationships you want. ("Bullseye? Oh, I hated him. He was such a stuffed shirt.")

Why Did You Leave The Team?

Each person left for his or her own reasons. Here are some possibilities:

Encroaching Adulthood

Only Peter Pan stays a child forever, and (as Jung suggested), we never solve the eternal problems, just accept them and move on to new ones. The Teen Team grew up, and most of them gave up crime-fighting.

With Great Power Comes Great Tragedy

Some tragedy (the death of Coyote, the Red Fang's patron; Ivory falling into a coma) sobered them and took the fun out of crime-fighting. In the same vein, perhaps the death of a team member changed their minds. ("Without Whirligig, it's not the same.")

Failure

They failed at something, something important: their last case, as it were.

Interpersonal conflicts

Maybe they were just arguing too much.

Inferiority complex

They were tired of being compared (unfavorably) to the Teen Titans.

Betrayal

They were all betrayed or blackmailed. (Maybe they all have bombs in their chests.) This one applies to the entire group, so it should be approved by the GM.

Fate

A Mystic Premonition said they would destroy the world if they stayed together as a group. (But maybe the mystic was lying. Maybe the mystic was bribed, or it was faked. Or maybe it's correct, which puts a heck of a damper on the parties.) This one applies to the entire group, so it should be approved by the GM.

Team Interaction

In combat, Bullseye generally took the lead but no one wanted to follow him out of combat. He's certainly the living member with the best tactical experience.

When they weren't actually fighting, Ivory was the de facto leader — but "de facto" means that others often disagreed and she had no way to enforce her wishes.

Team Response and Tactics

The two fastest members of the core team are Quicksilver and Kid Frost. Under normal circumstances, Ivory and Scatter were also fast, but they couldn't travel over water. The group had two cars, one on loan from Bolo and the other on loan from Permafrost.

While they had the Jobs Ontario grant, they also had use of several government vehicles for travelling to the scene of a problem, so long as it was within Ontario: a van (actually a decommissioned ambulance), an OPP cruiser, and they could request use of a helicopter.

The normal response procedure was to get Quicksilver, Ivory, Scatter, and Bullseye to the scene as quickly as possible. (Usually Quicksilver carried Bullseye and Ivory carried Scatter.) Quicksilver and Bullseye did the initial recon and assessment. Once Ivory and Scatter arrived, Bullseye would direct the rest of the team by radio while the other three took the initial action.

The Team (with the exception of Quicksilver) was notoriously unwilling to attack. Conversation with the foe was almost always the first tactic tried. Ivory especially was willing to be hit two or three times before she responded.

For the GM's convenience, here's an ordering of the core members by various attributes. The list assumes that the character is using their best power or skill for movement or attack; it doesn't include Martial Arts as a defense, though it does include Martial Arts as an offense.

Move		Attack		Defenses	P	M	S
Quicksilver	14	Ivory	11	Ivory	14	5	4
Ivory	9	Kid Frost	10	Scatter	12	5	4
Kid Frost	8	The Fog	9	Kid Frost	10	5	4
Scatter	7	Quicksilver	9	The Fog	9	4	5
Glamour Girl	5	Red Fang	8	Quicksilver	7	5	5
Janet Leesk	4	Bullseye	8	Bullseye	5	5	4
The Fog	4	Glamour Girl	7	Janet Leesk	4	7	7
Red Fang	4	Scatter	7	Red Fang	4	3	4
Bullseye	4	Janet Leesk	5	Glamour Girl	3	13	7

This was sometimes modified if they knew the type of opponent they were facing. When facing a mentalist, for exampe, Glamour Girl was often sent in first, simply because she's so much tougher mentally than the rest. Against occult foes, Janet often directed the action — because she knew more.

Supporting Cast

Too large to go into in great depth (besides, this is the sort of stuff that ought to be developed by accretion over years of stories), the following were of some importance to the group at one time or another:

Aaron Beaman

Attorney for the group, featured prominently in the Light One Matchstick story arc.

Phoebe Chin

Ken Takahiro's wife, a real party girl, most members of the team considered his marriage was a mistake, something he did as denial of Ivory's condition. She and Ken have now separated, and it's widely expected that she'll try and take him to the cleaners.

Caitlin Cioppa

Elisabet's sponsor to Canada, an historian with the University of Toronto.

Norm Crowley

Engineer/architect who worked with them. He is secretly Permafrost, Kid Frost's patron. (Only Kid Frost and his fiancee know this.)

Marlyn Deibler

Crown Attorney specializing in prosecution of metahuman cases.

Michelle Drinkwater

Was Red Fang's significant significant other. She eventually left him, precipitating a drunken period in Red Fang's life. She's now a law student at the University of Western Ontario.

Ramona Glick

Former sweetie to Morgan Crowe. See "The Unicorn's Horn."

Reuben Grant

STAR Labs contact. He was good friends with Kelly Garner (Whirligig).

Rosemary Grimaldo

The team's doctor. She's still the doctor for the members who remain in Ontario, and she keeps an eye on Ivory.

M.A. Parmenter

The pseudonym of a newspaper columnist for the Toronto Star who criticized the Teen Team. They never found out who actually wrote the columns.

Nicholas Stuart

A former boyfriend of Janet's.

Seonaid Todd

A Haligonian girlfriend of Ivory's. (It's pronounced "Shona".)

Bernice (Bernie) Truffaut

Friend of the Team, spent most of her time with Morgan.

Gregory Vadim

A Montreal associate of the Mafia who interceded on the Team's behalf once or twice. They have an uneasy truce with him; Elisabet dated him for a short period.

Jacqueline (Jackie) Wilkinson

Ragnar's girlfriend through much of his teens. After they broke up, he still had tremendous feelings for her. The Terrible Taskmaster capitalized on those once, kidnapping her (and incidentally destroying any chance they might get back together).

Foes

Over the years, the Teen Team fought a lot of people, although they were more likely to just invite the villains in for coffee and a chance to talk.

Of established foes in the DC universe, they've faced:

• Copperhead
• Dr. Light
• The Fearsome Three
• Plastique
• Poison Ivy (concerning Fleur
  de Lis and Wild Rose)
• Solomon Grundy
• Two-Face
• Weather Wizard

And, of course, they've developed their own rogues gallery over those years as well:

Baron Drakonyn

Arguably the most powerful of their foes, he was a sorcerer from another dimension who never gave up trying to generate the necromantic energy he needed to get back home. In their last battle, he had founded a career as an inspirational speaker, and was planning to kill everyone at one of his rallies in an attempt to get the energy to cross the dimensional barrier. Currently suing the Sidekix TV series over misrepresentation.

Carnivora

Human/animal gene splicing gone amok! She was primarily a pawn of other villains, but powerful enough to take on over half of the Team. Currently touring South America in a freak show (she fell in love with the manager).

The Conjure Posse

A drug-running posse who also used magic and occult ceremonies.

Lucifer Jones and Matchstick

One of their most enigmatic foes, Lucifer Jones was a pseudonym for a computer hacker who managed to frame them for murder — though there was no body, and no crime. It was done all through manipulating records. The Team eventually tracked it to a hacker named Gareth Cole, but they got to Cole after the 1000 did, and Cole had been killed. No clue as to why Cole did it, and no indication of Matchstick represented someone real.

Fraternity of Darkness

A group of darkness-based villains, mainly mercenary. It consisted of Master Midnight, Anthracite, Inkblot, Munquita Negro, Blackout, Shado, and Nocturne. Nocturne later defected from the Fraternity and joined the Team.

Ice-9

An ice-powered mutant like Kid Frost, Ice-9 was a dystopian Vonnegut fan. His crimes centered around the disruption of authority.

The Terrible Taskmaster

A mentalist, real name Rene Surer, who faced the Team at least twice, and may have been behind other apparently meaningless attacks by supervillains. He once joined with Turret (Anthony Jobes) and Basilisk (Alex Lidofsky, Gorgon's brother).

Trinity

A composite being (one human, one alien, one demon) who could switch between sets of powers, rather like Ultra Boy with power sets. That is, he could attack physically or mentally or mystically. He could target any individual member of the Team at his or her weakest point, but as a group, they could defeat him (though it often meant finding a mystically-powered hero).

Old Adventures of the Teen Team

These adventures give the players something to talk about, and give them (and the GM) a feel for the tone of the group. An adventure referred to as "no longer in continuity" is a joke; I was having a good time making up counterparts to corny old Teen Titans adventures.

The Daddy-O Rebellion

All three patrons give up fighting crime. (The reason is left for the GM, though in the grand (and slightly patronizing) tradition of the first Teen Titans, it's probably one of:

• As a ruse to draw out some powerful enemies
• As a ruse against someone trying to ferret out their
  secret IDs
• Because they're being mentally controlled
• As a way of teaching their sidekicks a lesson
  

This story is no longer considered in continuity.

At The Hop

No longer considered in continuity.

My Generation

No longer considered in continuity.

Then there's a gap. The following stories are all from late in their
career (The New Teen Team, 3rd series).

Envy is Green

Poison Ivy attacked a small town in Quebec, searching for Fleur de Lis. In a subplot, Bullseye is irritated and edgy because Ivory is ignoring his advances and paying attention to Josh Thibault, a local.

Nothing Ever Happens in Rockwood Falls

While travelling cross-country to take Fleur de Lis to her sister, the team stops in Rockwood Falls, a quiet rural community in Alberta. The Psychopomp appears to let them know there was more going on than met the eye: cattle mutilations, ritual deaths, an obscure cult where a young girl was to be killed because she couldn't be exorcised.

Curse the Darkness

Appearance of the Fraternity of Darkness.

Target Practice

After discovering his mentor in a compromising situation, Bullseye loses his aim...just as one of his old foes gets out of jail and starts hunting him down.

The Eden Agenda

The Teen Team dealt with teen-age eco-terrorists. Internal conflicts arose because the Team basically agreed with the group but not their methods.

Thirty Deaths Hath September

A serial killer/terrorist decides to commit one murder a day as a challenge to the Teen Team.

Enter Stranglehold

A new villain named Stranglehold defeats the Teen Team at every turn. In the end, Stranglehold is defeated easily by Animal Man and Ralph Dibny, who out-think the villain in seconds.

Last Refuge of the Incompetent

After failing to stop Stranglehold, the Teen Team find themselves questioning whether violent action is the correct way to deal with supervillains — and whether the Teen Team is a useful organization.

Unicorn's Horn

Ramona Glick, Morgan's great love and affiliated with the ecoterrorists of an earlier adventure, has her metagene activated. She gains the ability to purify pollutants and other toxins; while her body is processing the toxins, her skin takes on a purple hue. She sees it as a way to help the world. She's non-violent ("Oh, so that's you were involved with ecoterrorists," said Morgan). After arguments about how her powers should be used ("We can rent you out," suggested Morgan) she takes on too much, too fast, and dies.

Light One Matchstick

The arc involving Lucifer Matchstick.

And Kindly Stop for Me

Voyageur (the patron of Courier du Bois) is dying, and wants to die. Courier du Bois comes into conflict with the Team when she tries to help her patron die.

Seven Sins of Highly Effective People

The last battle with Baron Drakonyn. Ivory is knocked into a coma in the battle.

Memories of Ivory

Talk episode revolving around Ivory, who's now in a coma; members discuss their relationships with her. Quicksilver quits.

Questions for your superhero setting

The easiest thing to do in a superhero setting is make it the real world, with superheroes. That's really what the comics do, because the readers have to identify with the setting, and the more obvious changes you ring, the harder it is for them to do. But as a gamemaster, you probably want to think about your setting a bit more. Whether this stuff is exposed to the players or not (and it probably shouldn't be, unless it's relevant to the adventure), it'll affect how you do things.

I'm talking about things after you determine morality and how four-colour and gritty your campaign is, when you're doing the world-building.

These things are in no particular order. I've numbered them just so that I can easily refer to them.

1. How common are supers? You have to have enough for your campaign, unless it's usually against Team Rocket....er, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Do they concentrate in this area, like New York is apparently where 99% of Marvel supers go?
2. Where's your home base? East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, Great Lakes, elsewhere in North America, not in North America? Existing city, existing supplement (such as San Angelo or Freedom City), or made up city?
3. Who deals with the remaining evil lairs after the supervillains are cleared out? Is there a government organization, probably part of US Army or National Guard, that's dedicated to "sanitizing" abandoned evil lairs? Are there thrill-seekers (a la Base Raiders) who want to get there first, or portions of Dark Web that sell scavenged high scientist tech?
4. It's always nice to have an undertown, like Seattle or Chicago or Stark City, whether it's a place for criminals, mutants, evil lairs, or just Bad Things. 
5. When did superheroes appear or go public? Around WWII? The Roswell crash? At Kent State? Did a superhero greet Apollo 11 on the moon? That'll help determine the existing changes to history, if any.  
6. How do superheroes deal with cellphones and built-in GPS devices? Is there a company that sells hardened cellphones for supers, with a discount if you post on Twitter-Facebook-Instagram-etc. (The company also sells location info of supers to government.)
7. Are there super fabrics for costumes? How do supers get their costumes. Idea: there are super fabrics for costumes, with multiple manufacturers, though some skimp on it and there are knockoffs, so some costumes get torn easily. There are tailors/manufacturers for super suits, but that tends to fall into government/pricey or underworld manufacturers. There are non-hero reasons to buy the fabric, so you're not going to be pegged as a super just because you buy a few yards. (It's tough & fire-retardant, for starters, though it has terrible insulation properties. (Which is why you can be athletic as heck without overheating.))
8. Does Atlantis/Thule/Latveria/Bialya exist, and does it have a seat on the UN council? Idea: Atlantis is trying to get a seat at the UN but countries won't recognize it because doing so would mean that Atlantis has a say on deep sea oil drilling.
9. Do animals ever manifest powers? Is there a Legion of Super Pets, or do you have to be a hominid (ape or human) to get powers?
10. Is there a "hero gadget underground" where profs assign hero-gadget tasks to (engineering) students and if there are heroes who take them on, a commensal relationship develops. Or a subculture of "supermakers" who are trying to duplicate or improve various pieces of hero or villain equipment.
11. Traditionally, superheroes don't change the iconography much (people in our world still have to be able to read and enjoy the comics), but are there a couple of characters who are, like, revered (whether living or dead), like Superman or Captain America are in DC & Marvel? They don't have to be in the game themselves, just names as currency. 
12. Do heroes trademark their looks? Or is it automatic? How are they affected by changing costumes? Is there a law that trademarks superhero identities for them? Or is it like that clown archive, where each clown's makeup is painted on an egg--the identity can still be misused by others, but those in the know can see who owns what identity?
13. Are supers common enough that there's a place to go if you suddenly discover you have superpowers? I'm not speaking of Shady Dan's Den of Powers, which will show up no matter what, but rather a real training thing? Or do you wait to be apprenticed by an existing superhero, or make your own way, or get kidnapped by the Men in Black? Or all of them?  
14. Have superheroes been around long enough that there are retirement homes for them? Who takes care of a guy who (say) has Alzheimer's but can still level the block? Who visits? What secret information gets spilled in such a place?

Others will no doubt show up. 

Idea of the month

If you don't like world-building, set a superhero vigilante level game in the same place as the Grand Theft Auto games. That place looks lawless.

I haven't played, only overheard, because my son got GTA V for Christmas.