Endurance

In one of his blog posts (https://adeptpress.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/a-hero-gets-tired/#more-871), Ron Edwards talks about have fighting is tiring, and how he doesn't see that in comic books after 1980. (Read the post. I found it interesting.)

Champions used to emulate that by having powers and Strength cost END, 1 END per 5 points of power or strength used. A normal person (hah!) had enough endurance to punch ten times, more when you counted recovery in. As a Champions player, I used to find ways to work around END cost, even if I couldn't buy it to zero, I had lots of things on charges or whatever.

Edwards' main argument seems to be that END is realistic--fighting is fatiguing, which I remember from Days of Yore, when I practiced karate. But while comic RPGs don't need to deal with realism (Hello? Flying guys and telekinetic women?), they do need to deal with verisimilitude.

Comics as they are today mostly ignore endurance. ICONS ignores endurance.

But...

If you would find the game more interesting if there were an Endurance kind of stat that made you tired in a linear way, rather than as an arbitrary "He gets away because you're exhausted, have a Determination Point" way--maybe you're playing an all martial artist game--here are some ideas. (This scenario is interesting to me only in an abstract way, so I can't guarantee that the ideas are good.)

Tiring by Default

All powers (including Strength) have the limitation "Tiring." Using a power costs two stamina. If you can fly with chi powers and punch, that's four stamina right there,

It's not linear, but it has the advantage of being right within the rules as written. It also means that fights are going to be short, unless everyone's going to be saving their determination to refresh stamina (or buying Healing or Stamina, if you allow that).

New Stat

The easiest way is to go for a new derived stat. ICONS has two, Stamina and Determination. We add Endurance to that, and make it five times your Stamina. So Dim Mak has a strength of 5 and a will of 6, he has a Stamina of 11 and an Endurance of 55. But the cost for a power has to switch. Instead, the cost is the point cost for that ability. So if Dim Mak is just punching (strength 5), that's 5 points of endurance. But if he's clearing out the room of mooks (strength with the Burst extra, to get all of them), that's 10 I points of endurance: 5 of strength, 5 of Burst. (Limitations would take away, but the minimum cost for using a power is 1.)

The extra "Zero End" might exist in this version of the system.

New Limitation

This combines them, and lets you roll dice, as well. It is not as linear as the new stat--I haven't worked out the math yet--but can be considerably more punishing than the "Tiring" limitation. You put a limitation--call it "Uncontrollably Tiring"--on the power. Whenever you use the power, roll 2D6 versus the number of ranks of power. If you roll over the number of ranks, you're fine. If you roll under, you lose that many ranks of Stamina, double that many ranks on an 11 or 12.

It behooves the GM not to allow this limitation for powers that have only 1-5 ranks, or to change it to 1d6 in that case.

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.

The Antaeus League

The heroes are opposed by a mysterious organization that seeks to nullify and capture the powers of each super-powered individual, and do with them...what? Create a super-powered army? Grant powers to their own members? Infiltrate governments?

Or save the world?

(Idea brought on by late night watching of The Librarians; name from The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.)

Not that the agents don't have powers: they do. The powers are oddly restricted, often earth-style powers: great strength, invulnerability, turning people to stone, growth, and more, but nothing that involves leaving contact with the ground: no flight, gliding, or teleport. They can stretch, but not throw.

Some very rare members know a little bit of magic (so they say) but that's always kept a low level, and those agents can be recognized by the chains hanging from their boots.

With luck, they'll stay in the background enough that the heroes won't have an opportunity to learn that the members of the League have no powers when not in contact with the earth, either through a chain or by standing directly on it. Asphalt is okay, but up in a building is not. (That means that their attacks always happen in open areas: on the field of a stadium, in a parking lot, a park, a nature reserve.

The heroes first come across them when they steal the powers of a fellow hero, rendering him normal, even though he didn't have the kind of powers you'd think of as removable: tech skills, perhaps, or something inborn. The next time, they might help, depowering one of their foes during a climactic battle that the heroes would have otherwise lost. The powers are imprisoned in a small urn with Egyptian hieroglyphics, most like a canopic jar.

Then the Antaeus League (still unnamed) comes after the heroes. (If you have a player who is going to be absent for a while, depower that character, but otherwise don't; it's not fun to be the unpowered hero in a superhero game.) There are close calls. Maybe the heroes manage to capture one of the League.

Why are they doing this? To save the world.

They have been responsible for thousands of years for keeping magic in check. Superpowers are nothing more than magic given a particular expression. If there is a clearly-defined start to the superpower age, someone got into their hideout and broke a thousand of the magic jars. (If there isn't, then the Antaeus League has its own enemies, who sometimes manage to free some of the magic.)

They are certain that if all the magic were freed, it wouldn't be superheroes any more; it would be a full-on Tolkienesque post-apocalyptic fantasy world.

And the Antaeus League member pleads with them to give up their powers.

Now, in your campaign, they might be deluded, or they might be right.

So try throwing that into your next superhero campaign.

A Brief Personal Note

Just quickly, and to practice saying it:

So about four weeks ago, they removed chunks of my stomach, small intestine, pancreas, and gall bladder in an operation called the Whipple procedure. Examination of the removed tissue showed cancer in the common bile duct. Today I went to see another oncologist--not the surgeon--to see what was next.

Well, what's next might or might not be chemo. Yes, the surgeon thinks he got it all, and the single clinical study shows that for people with my indicators chemo might not affect the five year survival rate. Except it wasn't described to me that clearly, so I need to see how they did the math, and what the sample size was (because I'm annoyingly fact-based). I was told simply that the lifespan of chemo patients was longer, but applying chemo to my particular situation had no statistical significance. So I want to compare the average lifespans of chemo patients with my indicators to the average lifespans of non-chemo patients with my indicators. That seems straightforward enough and will guide my decision.

So that's why I've been absent or flakey this last little while.

John

Idea of the month

Here's a weird thought that would make the relationships between the characters more flawed. (If the players want that.) If you don't want to play it in my original concept, there's easily a Comics Code Authority version.

About each other character on the team, decide on one bad thing that's a secret. It could be something very heroic and comic-book-y ("I saw you passing information to the government about our activities!"), it could be something that's only about the team relationships ("I've noticed you always give in to Silver Antenna even though you always start opposing her"), or totally non-sequitur ("I, uh, kinda slept with your fiance. After she became your fiance.").

The thing is, you can use it as a quality once, by making it public. In essence, it lets you take a Determination Point from that other person's supply (which is a nice way of thinking about it, but that's not how things work now).

You can control how accurate the statements are by how complete they are. Two of the examples I gave would be perfect examples for a later retcon ("Not in the field, not now.") The more precise they are, like the one about the affair...that might have to bring in shape-shifting aliens to fix.

(In fact, it occurs to me that you can do this right now with the Trouble mechanism; this is just a way of formalizing it and making the players come up with relationship bits about each other. The fact that I thought it might be different shows that I am loopy from drugs and that the Trouble mechanism is much more varied than I thought.)

Updated ICONS basics for your phone

I took the Basics chapter of ICONS: The Assembled Edition, reformatted it for your phone, and created a PDF that you can give to your players. I took out actual product identity (which really meant changing names in examples).

Here it is: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0KkM_vAe2HXU2t4MG56OFdlamc

Qualities and the Grizzled Gamer

While I lay here with Mystery Illness...

I've been thinking about Qualities lately, Advantages, and Maneuvers. It seems to me—and I hope I'm not repeating myself too often here—that the whole business of putting Qualities on things can just be a framework for interpreting what our group always did, back in the early days of Champions.

Again, if you're comfortable with the "I create the Choked and Can't Recover Quality with a Prowess maneuver and immediately pass the extra Activation to my teammate," then don't bother to read this. You don't need it. But among my group of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, we had trouble figuring out how to frame it in terms of things we know.

So I figured that I'd present a situation or two, how we would have handled it in the olden days, and how it might be handled in ICONS.

Situation: You want to create a patch of ice that's slippery, so the villain skids allong the floor and falls down.

Olden Days: Fine, you do that (the hex is DCV 3, remember). The villain will have to make a DEX roll to stay upright, modified by--how much Ice Blast do you have? 8d6? Sure, -5." (For stuff like that, I used to use -1 per 10 active points. House rule, I think, but few game systems that I used really handled that nicely until Champions got into the territory where it was so fiddly that I didn't want to touch it.)

ICONS: You have an Advantage? No? Okay, use a Maneuver to lay down a patch of ice. It's fine motor control to make it Treacherously Slippery, so make a Coordination roll against, oh, this isn't hard, 2 plus...I rolled a 3. Five, then. You have Coordination 3 and rolled a 5, so you have 8, so it's immediately activated. Sure, I'll call it Trouble that delays them for a page.

Essentially the same physical action (somebody rolls against Dex or Coordination), different explanation.

Situation: The jury-rigged electrical panel throws off a spark that sets the area ablaze.

Olden Days: Well, you just made the roll to re-wire that electrical panel to feed all the electricity to the Chronosyntastic Infundibulator, so I'm going to say that a spark leaps free from your jury-rigged wiring and sets the cheap indoor-outdoor carpet on fire. You try to put it out with your foot while aiming the Infundibulator, but you have to stand essentially still.

ICONS: You're out of Determination? A maneuver might..oh. Right. Your Intellect sucks. How about tactics? I'll give you the rewiring if you accept some Trouble. Fine. One more thing to deal with...a spark leaps off the rewiring job and sets the cheap carpet on fire.

So the big difference here is that in the old way, I just imposed the fire as a fun consequence (for some value of "fun"...I know there are nights when the players just joke about making their "Catch Villains" roll). Here it's actually a trade, where I suggest it, and the player gets to choose whether they want the advantage, want to roll the maneuver, or just want to take a different route.

Situation: You want to impress everyone in the room and get all the normals out.

Olden Days: Okay, you make a Presence Attack. Oooh. Sorry, man. The normals pause for a phase. Oh, Storm King, you're going to try, too? (or) Good roll on the Presence Attack, and the normals walk out in an orderly fashion.

ICONS: Impressing people is Willpower. You want to impose a Quality on them so they leave...call it Orderly Dismissal. We'll do will versus Will as a maneuver. You have a 5, they have a 3, but I rolled a 5 for them, so versus 8. You have to have a Moderate success for the Quality to be Activated, unless— Oh. A 3 is just a Marginal success. The Quality is there, but it isn't Activated. Oh, Storm King, you're doing to spend a Determination point and Activate it. Well, you're next, so you bark, "Now, people!" and they start filing out.

Yes, using the whole Qualities/Advantages thing means claiming a little extra number fiddling, but the end result is pretty much the same. The difference is that if the original player's attempt is Marginal, then some later player can spend a DP and activate this new Quality on the same page. We used to use cumulative Presence attacks in the same way.

Just looking at it now, it seems to me that in the old way, we accepted the rolls and made the narrative conform to the rolls without hiding anything ("His presence attack sucked, so we had to fight with the waitstaff in the kitchen") or consequences were imposed by the GM. In the ICONS way, there's more of an effort to create narrative as it's going on, and to barter about consequences.

Doesn't mean I'm any better at it. Old habits are, you know, old.

Adventure Aids from Dungeontown

So much of the adventure writing advice out there is for dungeons. Some people love dungeons. I get a GM advice thing and really, it’s a D&D/Pathfinder thing. It’s three-quarters full of “this is how to construct a dungeon fast” and “twenty-seven encounter types for the wilderness” and “six enchanted items.”

I prefer superheroes. But almost nobody is going to make a subsistence wage from selling to superhero GMs.

So let’s look at the dungeon advice and see how we can port things over. At worst, what can we steal?

But before I even start that, I gotta ask: why are you playing superheroes?

Because…

While there are many reasons to play any genre of roleplaying game, games with dungeons tend to be focused on different satisfactions than games with superheroes. If the itch you’re scratching is largely the same, hey, this might work for you. If it’s not, you’re going to be unsatisfied.

So if you want to satisfy your tactical ambitions, dungeon advice is going to work. If your interest is the encounters and you’re going to sift story out of it, dungeon advice is going to work. If you’re playing because friends are playing, dungeon advice is going to work. If you want to be fundamentally awesome from minute one in a way that the zero-to-hero fantasy progression doesn’t provide, then porting over dungeon advice might not work, but it might. If you want to tell morality tales with modern dressing, dungeon advice might not work. If you want soap opera with a genre dressing, dungeon advice will definitely not work.

Understand, I’m not saying that games with dungeons can’t satisfy these urges. They can. But what I’m saying is that the five-room dungeon and lists of encounters and drawing a dungeon map before any other planning, all of them presuppose a kind of narrative that isn't the superhero narrative.

But maybe it can satisfy you. Maybe the various dungeon things can help or inspire, though.

Dungeons

I forget who pointed it out, but dungeons are a kind of plot. Each room is a scene, and doors are a way to get from one scene to another. Things start off easy and get harder. Sometimes they just get harder relative to the characters’ current abilities, sometimes they expect the characters to get better as the dungeon progresses, but there is a kind of progression.

A five-room dungeon is an adventure. I don’t know if it was the original 5-room dungeon model, but this article over at strolen.com  suggests five rooms that map darned well to five stages of a story and different player satisfactions:

1. Room 1: Entrance and Guardian
2. Room 2: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
3. Room 3: Trick or Setback
4. Room 4: Climax or Big Battle
5. Room 5: Reward or Revelation

If you allow the fact that superhero games don’t have “reward” in a treasure sense, the first four rooms fit with some wiggling into the four stages that Steve Kenson suggests in ICONS: Threat, Investigation, Challenge, Comeback.

In that sense, great. And in fact, if you’re coming from a fantasy or F20 background, maybe that’s a useful way for you to think of superhero adventures. You grab a theme or central concept, have the players encounter the concept somehow, do a thematically-related puzzle or roleplaying challenge, plan a setback, and then have a fight. Here, let’s compare two. In a dungeon, the Entrance needs to explain why no one else has ever looted this dungeon before, while in a superhero story, “it’s new” is usually the reason.

Stage	5 Room Dungeon	Superheroes
Entrance The Threat	A giant spiderweb that hid a particular cave is now torn away and loathsome spiders are spilling out into the countryside. But don't worry: there are still plenty of spiders in the cave to fight, even in this room.	We'll assume (because the season opener of Supergirl is on my mind) one of the characters is vulnerable to Neonite. The players intercept the latest in a series of drone attacks on scientific R&D locations
Puzzle / The Investigation	The entrance to the next chamber is blocked by the dead body of a horrendous giant wasp. Gotta move it to find out.	Investigation shows that from this site, unlike all others, something was stolen: a solar power device unique in its range of radiations to absorb, and the more radiation it absorbs, the better. (It might turn out that the other attacks got rid of other places that might produce it with the plans.)
Setback / The Challenge	Inside the next chamber is a big mother of a spider, and after a battle that was tough but not as tough as they thought it would be, they win...	The next attack is easily stopped...but turns out to be a diversion because the bad guys have stolen a fist-sized sample of Neonite, the dangerously radioactive mineral that totally doesn't affect normals. The cyborg powered by the Neonite shows up on cue and kicks their butts by first defeating the character vulnerable to Neonite
The Big Battle / The Comeback	Which is when they discover that the giant wasp planted its young in the spider, and by killing the spider, they've hurried the hatching process. The big battle is against some number of newly-hatched deadly giant wasps.	With a daring plan, the heroes fight the cyborg again, this time winning
Reward	The spider has gold, gems and scrolls from the travellers it brought back to feed its children.	Technically, superheroes don't get rewards, but maybe they learn more about the creators of the cyborg

Now, aside from the fact that neither of these adventures is particularly good, they do have the same high points. The puzzle in the case of the supers adventure is a bit more investigation than figuring out how to move a dead bug, but I was making this up in both cases and we’re all just lucky that I managed not to make the supers one about cloning or the food of the gods, and therefore essentially the same adventure.

But articles like “How to make your next dungeon a Hallowe'en experience!” might be useful as a source of inspiration, rather than things you can take directly.

Encounters

Something I see often in my perambulation around the web is the list of encounters or ways to make encounters interesting. Something like “12 Tavern Encounters” or “Six Slippery Traveling Salemen” generally.

Tough to make them relevant. Again, there’s certainly nothing you can take directly, because the idea of the F20 encounter is baked right in, but sometimes you can steal attitudes or motivations. Heck, if you really want to, you can put these stolen attitudes in your own table. A table can certainly help when your players back you into a corner and you have no ideas.

Eleven Reasons to Pick a Fight With the Hero

Roll (2d6)	Reason
2	If I can get him to beat me up, then I'm in no shape to answer questions from him/the police/my spouse/go to work tomorrow.
3	Keep your attention on me, okay, so we can lift something—anything—from the only member of the Super Six with pockets.
4	If I can get video of him throwing just one punch I can sell it and pay for the operation that the kid needs.
5	My significant other just broke up with me, and it'll just show them if I get beaten to a bloody pulp.
6	Everyone knows that hero name doesn't randomly attack innocents, so I won't get hurt, and I'll look cool in front of that person I want to impress over there.
7	I am sooo drunk that I don't realize he's obviously more powerful, and he's blocking my way to the pinball machine. He's not so tough.
8	This hero always talks people down, right? I'll gain serious cred and not get hurt. Or am I thinking about the other guy?
9	I've been paid to do this, and I'm willing to do it because I am in desperate financial straits. (You as GM will have to figure out what the plan is for paying. Humiliation? Fact gathering?)
10	Hit me. Tricia at the nail place/the psychic/Dr. Seven says that will give me powers/cure my leukaemia/cancer.
11	Go ahead. Kill me. I can't do it myself.
12	Pain is kinda thrilling.

And you notice that for one of them, I had to pretty much say, “Hey, here’s a hook but you gotta figure out the rest.”

Sometimes the random encounter table is locations. You can make that work by transferring the attributes of the place to a modern or comic book location. Still, it’s one of those things where you should probably do it yourself ahead of time and have a handy table yourself.

Six Ways to Describe the Warehouse (Instead of Abandoned or Deserted) (roll 1d6)

Roll (1d6)	Description
1	Dilapidated, run-down, untended, rat-infested, broken skylights
2	Clean but stained, smelling heavily of bleach, windowless, industrial, many forklifts
3	Wooden, surprisingly large, sheet-metal-clad, double-sashed windows high up
4	New, concrete, equipped with floor drains, access to sewers, security system
5	Future tech, roboticized, computerized, automated, not obeying shutdown instructions
6	Dirty, busy, well-used, crowded, with a sign that says 4 Days Since An Accident and the 0 right beside it and numbers past 5 are missing.

And here, have one more:

Themes for a themed super (probably villain)

Roll (2d6)	Theme group	Specific examples
	Holidays	President's Day, Memorial Day, Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Labor Day
	Emotions or states of mind	Love, Hate, Fear, Madness, Ennui, Like, Prejudice, Greed, Jingoism, Lust, Unrequited love, Duty, Paranoia, Shock, Awe
	Elements, modern or classical	Earth, air, fire, water, wood, metal, diamond, gold, silver, platinum, uranium, phosphorus, sodium, neon, radium
	Elemental concepts or forces	fire, light, heat, shadow, magnetism, sleep, darkness, gravity, electricity, nuclear force, transmutation, cosmic radiation, X-rays
	Classic monsters or old monster names	Vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster or golem, ghost, cannibal spirit, Springheel Jack, revenant, Djinn or genie, kraken, ogre, giant, medusa, sphinx, cyclops
	Animals, usually hunters	Lion, puma, jaguar, wolf, wolverine, honey badger, weasel, myrmidon, ant lion, termite, cricket, grasshopper, wasp, hornet, stinger, crab, shark, hammerhead, mako, grizzly, cheetah
	Evocative things	Blood, sand, bone, hair, blob, rust, grass-roots, thunderstrike
	Things or acts of power	Genocide, slaughter, sniper, wrecking crew, demolition, groundswell, blitzkrieg
	Games or game pieces	Chess, Gammon, pawn, knight, rook, castle, king, queen, bishop, quarterback, draughtsman

No, Seriously, Like Dungeons

You can make the adventure take place in a dungeon-like environment. (I mean a place with restricted movement, not some BDSM club.)

Most superhero adventures are a bit more like a wilderness hexcrawl thing, but there are a couple of superhero tropes that can be treated like a dungeon.

The most common is the base. Most comics with a base have done an us-against-the-base issue. The Danger Room (Wreck Room, The Kitchen, whatever you want to call it) is a limited version of it. Another is the enemy base, often combined with the heroes-have-lost-their powers idea.

Dimension-hopping can provide something similar: each dimension is an encounter.

Something I’ve never tried is using some other fantasy system to represent the dream dimension and run an adventure on two parallel tracks.

The Supergirl TV show...characters in ICONS Part II

Note as of October 7, 2017: I just realized I double posted part 1 instead of posting both parts. I'm editing this to include the other characters, but won't change the title to say "Part 2" until I'm done.

• Previous caveats apply.
• I leave Maxwell Lord as an exercise for the reader
• Changes from the second season won't be here, though I might do a second season post that includes some of those characters.
• Characters get listed Determination only if they're heroes and player characters.

Catherine "Cat" Grant

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
3	3	3	4	4	4	7	6
Specialties						Qualities
Business: Expert (+1), Martial Arts (+1), Arts (Journalism) Expert (+2)						Queen of All Media Loves her boys Adores Clark, rivals with Lois
Powers
None

Okay, I snuck in one Season 2 thing in the Qualities, but feel free to replace it with Wealthy. At the end of Season 2, it's revealed that she does know Supergirl's secret identity.

Winslow "Winn" Schott, Jr.

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
3	3	3	5	3	3	6	6
Specialties						Qualities
Science Expert (+2), Technology Master (+3)						Self-taught in almost everything Bad name by association, and craves love Is this awkward?
Equipment
Cellphone, laptop, vintage toys. In the second season, the DEO sometimes makes him wear a tactical vest in the field.

Winn has a specific character arc in season one, which involves becoming not infatuated with Kara. In the second season, he became the go-to technobabble guy, but he also got a girlfriend and showed tremendous loyalty there.

James Bartholomew Olsen

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
4	4	4	3	4	4	8	6
Specialties				Qualities
Art (Journalism) (+2), Art (Photography) Master (+3)				Connected to Superman and Supergirl Make justice and the system better Infatuation has always made me do strange things
Equipment
Signal watch.
Cameras.

It's reasonable to assume that he actually has lots of specialties and obscure knowledge by virtue of having been Superman's pal and being shoved into things a lot. We don't see much evidence of it in the show.

In the second season, he gets an upgrade in specialties and powers (and probably a point of Coordination) through the Guardian identity.

Bizarro

Heat Breath (Blast) 7

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
4	4	9	2	5	2	11	–
Specialties				Qualities
None				Pliable and Unformed The Opposite of Supergirl Forming
Powers
Flight 7 Invulnerable (Damage Resistance) 7 Ice Vision (Blast) 8

You can justify higher levels for the powers to make her truly a mirror of Supergirl, but I figured she was in the ballpark but not quite the same.

Lobo

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
7	4	8	4	5	6	14	1
Specialties				Qualities
Power (Binding), Stealth, Wrestling				The Last Czarnian The Main Man, a Mostly Honorable Mercenary If There's No Collateral Damage, You're Not Doing It Right
Powers
Super-Sense 1 (Can track someone anywhere) Hook and Chain (Binding) 10 Bolter Gun (Blast) 7 Extra: Frag Grenades (Burst) Tough (Damage Resistance) 5 Regeneration 5 Extra: Immortality 5

We heard him alluded to on the show, so I did my version of Lobo for ICONS and for this setting. Though Lobo can clone himself (the Duplication power), it's not under his control, and it's best used as a GM fiat thing. If it happens while fighting the players, they get a Determination point.

Lobotomized Non

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	5	10	2	6	2	12	–
Specialties				Qualities
Martial Arts, Technology Expert (+2)				Last Son of Krypton Lobotomized Some Feelings Remain
Powers
Flight 8 Damage Resistance 7 Limit: Not vs. Magical Effects Heat Vision 8 Super Senses 4 (X-Ray, ultrasonic hearing, +1 range hearing, +1 rng sight) Freeze breath (Strike) 7 Extra: Burst

This Non is more like the Donner Non. Totally non-canon, but I started a Supergirl adventure, and he features in it. So does Lobo, for that matter.

Second season characters should probably include Miss Martian, Mon-El, Lena Luthor, Lillian Luthor, the Parasite, and more. Superman you can probably do by subbing Specialties and Qualities into the Supergirl writeup.

The Supergirl TV show...characters in ICONS

I did these a while ago...these are characters from the first season of the TV show. A couple of things to note...

• Supergirl is not as powerful as she is in the comics. Yes, she can lift a tremendous amount, but lightning and electricity (for example) can hurt her. 
• The quality "Last child of <planet>" encapsulates pretty much everything about their species strengths and weaknesses, so the quality would be used for extra powers or weaknesses to, say, Kryptonite.
• These characters traditionally have many many powers. Stunt like crazy if using.
• I have to admit that I made the Martian Manhunter's strength a 9 just because we're claiming that Kryptonians are at the top of the charts. Things like Supergirl flying faster than Superman might be a result of a quality or it might be an actual ranking thing. (Look at Non and Supergirl if you want to do any other Kryptonian.)

Supergirl

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
4	4	10	4	6	4	14	1
Specialties						Qualities
Business: Specialist (+1)						Last daughter of Krypton
Powers
Flight 8						A Mission to Accomplish
Damage Resistance 7 Limit: Not vs. Magical Effects
Heat Vision 8
Super Senses 4 (X-Ray, ultrasonic hearing, +1 range hearing, +1 rng sight)						Stronger Together
Freeze breath (Strike) 7 Extra: Burst

I just defined "Freeze Breath" as a Burst Strike, but the default use seems to be to freeze things, which might be Energy Control (cold) or Stunning (paralyzing a person) or telekinesis (as when she sucks in poison gas or could have saved Kelly, James, and Winn). Choose your base effect and stunt the rest.

Her powers grow over the season, or the writers are confused; in the encounter with the Toyman, quicksand holds her, but by the end she's lifting a hundred million tons.

By the end of the second season, she might have a specialty related to journalism.

Martian Manhunter

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	4	9	4	4	6	15	1
Specialties						Qualities
Athletics, Leadership, Mental Resistance Master (+3), Military, Stealth						Last son of Mars
Powers
Mental Awareness 1						Fire! My only weakness!
Telepathy 7 Extra: Rangeless Limit: not Kryptonians
Transformation (Humanoids) Extra: Effect Flight Limit: One or the other 7
Phasing 4						Moral compass for the DEO

He almost always flies as J'onn, but he does fly as Supergirl once. I choose to regard that once as a stunt that cost him an Advantage.

Alex Danvers

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
5	4	4	4	4	3	7	4
Specialties						Qualities
Athletics Expert (+2), Investigation, Martial Arts Expert (+2), Mental Resistance, Military, Stealth, Science Expert (+2), Technology Expert (+2), Vehicles						Agent Danvers of the DEO
Powers
Pistol (Blast 4)						Badass Sister of Supergirl (aka "She'd be the hero on any other show")
Body Armor (Damage Resistance) 3
						Loyal to Those Who Saved Her from Herself

She has lots of determination points to try and do cool things. By the rules, stunts off skills have to be based off a skill you're expert or better in, so she's an expert in lots of stuff. The downside to the "Badass Sister of Supergirl" quality is that she is protective and jealous, and you can bribe the player to do stupid things.

The funky ID card is part of being a DEO agent and is covered in the Quality.

Stuff like the kryptonite sword or the kryptonite battlesuit is a plot device, not a power or equipment.

White Martian

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	5	8	4	6	7	14	–
Specialties						Qualities
Power (Transformation), Stealth, Wrestling						Hates green Martians
Powers
Transformation (humanoids) 7 Limit: Concentration						Deceptive by nature
Wall-Crawling 4 Extra: Leaping
Super Senses 1 (Mental Awareness)
Telepathy 7 Extra: Rangeless Limit: not Kryptonians

In my imagination, every Martian has a suite of powers, and the ones represented on their character sheets are the ones they use most often. The Mental Awareness covers both the use of Martian abilities (both J'onn and the white martian track each other with it), and a general awareness of psychic abilities. We don't see the latter much, so a Limit might be reasonable...but it is reasonable. The Leaping might be Flight: it gets used as Leaping (mostly) in fights in enclosed spaces, but as Flight in open spaces. Either might be a stunt; Super-speed gets used twice, but I chose to regard that as a stunt. I also regard the weird breath thing and the mucous strands of binding as stunts or plot devices.

Indigo

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	5	7	7	6	8	15	1
Specialties						Qualities
Martial Arts, Technology Expert (+2)						Computer Program Made Flesh
Powers
Life Support 10						Revenge is a Dish Best Served
Computer Control Extra: Effect ESP (medium computers) 7
Teleport 7 Extra: Rangeless Limit: Medium of computers Extra: Phasing Extra: Selective						The Most Dangerous Prisoner in Fort Rozz
Malleable body: Shapeshift 4
Often stunts Slash (sharp nails) or Stretching or Regeneration

The Teleport is properly a part of Computer Control, but I added so many extras trying to get the one-handed choking thing that I kept it a separate line. I suppose "Dimensional Travel (Computers) Extra: Selective Extra: Choose where you come out 1" might have done as well: the Selective means part of her can come out and the Choose where you come out lets you emulate a slower Teleport.

Master Jailer

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
5	4	6	4	5	3	9	1
Specialties						Qualities
Athletics Expert (+2), Investigation, Martial Arts, Military, Stealth, Technology						Former Guard at Fort Rozz
Powers
Energy blast or thrown stick (Blast 6)						Finish Alura's mission with execution
Body Armor (Damage Resistance) 6
Binding (chains) 7
Stretching (chains) 3						Idolizes Alura
Gadgets 5

Okay, Supergirl is held with chains and she burns through them with heat vision instead of just breaking free. Instead of making the chains. I choose to treat the situation as four chains acting like +2 (four opponents), so she was effectively bound by Binding 9, and her first roll didn't succeed as a Strength maneuver. It being early in the game, she didn't want to spend Determination to beat the Bound Quality, so she used the easier heat vision.

In the same way, his body armor clearly handles DEO weapons, which are as good as rifles. I called the whole thing Damage Resistance 6, but you could be justified in saying Damage Resistance 7.

I threw the Gadgets in to cover things like the energy guillotine and the red sun light, but they could arguably be called plot devices. I suspect if he showed up again, though, he'd still have some kind of gadget. Military specialty could go, but I assumed that the guards were a paramilitary organization.

Lady Beast

(I just liked her, but I had to make up a lot.)

Prowess	Coordination	Strength	Intellect	Awareness	Willpower	Stamina	Determination
6	4	7	4	4	3	10	–
Specialties						Qualities
Vehicles						Former prisoner of Fort Rozz
Powers
Super-senses 3 (ultraviolet vision, enhanced smell, location sense)						Star pilot and smuggler
Tough Hide (Damage Resistance) 3						Big ugly monster